The Gold Diggers Page 6

  “Anytime,” Nick said. “You really want to see it?”

  “Sure.” Peter let Nick go and sat back on his heels. “I have all that land in my genes, so I’ll be able to tell you if you’re getting a good deal. My family is supposed to have an eye for horses, too, in case you want to price livestock. Should I wear chaps and a rhinestone shirt?”

  Hands behind his head, Nick watched Peter go into a pose, one hip thrown out and his hands in his hair. Then he arched way back and let out an easy laugh. Where Sam was a runner, Nick thought, Peter was a dancer. Both so lean that the flesh on their stomach muscles stretched like a drum skin.

  “And a Stetson and a dusty kerchief? No,” Nick said, aroused in spite of himself, and only three hours gone since Sam. “Pretend you’re getting dressed to get picked up in a bar.”

  “Well, I’ll wear my silk jersey number, then,” Peter said. He fell down on his side next to Nick and pulled Nick over on top of him as easily as if he had been pulling up a blanket. “Net stockings. Patent leather pumps.”

  “No, you won’t. T-shirt and Levi’s. I’ll get you some boots.”

  “I have boots.”

  “I’ll get you some new ones.”

  “You want to fuck?” Peter said. It felt like they had just unpacked a trunk in a ship’s cabin, and clothes were everywhere about the room.

  “I guess so,” Nick said, wrapping Peter in his arms and thinking he was just about to touch down again on earth. “I didn’t think I wanted to.”

  “Well, your problem is you think too much,” Peter said, willing to be unoriginal himself. “You forget what you already know.”

  “What’s that?” Nick asked. He needed just a hint, and now, because in a moment he was going to be somewhere else, just he and Peter together, and he wanted a thread of reason to bring him out the other side. He’d spent the whole afternoon in a story, and he couldn’t close the book as carelessly as he thought.

  “Just stop thinking,” Peter said sweetly, as if he would love him no matter what, “and it’ll come back to you.”

  Rita, she said to herself long-windedly, if you want to get ahead, you’ve got to figure out why it is some people can’t leave you alone and the rest look through you as if you weren’t there. It had been happening forever. She thought it was about time to start using it. Here was a good example: In Rusty Varda’s house, she was thrice blessed because all of them—Nick, Peter, and Hey—delighted in her and sought out chances to feed her and drive her and do her errands. But it could have gone the other way, she knew, and then where would she be? Besides, Hey was the type who made it a mixed blessing, coming on so strong he seemed about to faint whenever they met. She inspired reactions that were too extreme; and, consequently, daily life, the merest ordinary commerce, wore her out. And she never knew from one hour to the next whether it would be sticks and stones or a ring of kisses waiting around the corner. People tore up her magazines in subways. They passed her joints in airplanes. She made a blip in difficult people’s radar, and they did their most difficult thing as they thundered by.

  It crossed her mind again late Friday afternoon because Hey came in and fired a few rounds just as she was pulling herself together. She’d spent the day in the showrooms getting fabric samples for a list of upholstered pieces Peter had jotted down. She was fussy, and everything was ugly. Finally, she’d curled up in the back seat of Peter’s Jaguar and doodled out a crewel design that really looked like a Rhode Island wing chair. She knew she couldn’t spend her afternoons in parking lots. She had to make do with what was on the market. But she couldn’t get out of her mind how everything ought to look, and four days of decorating let her know she wasn’t going to be famous for sprightly solutions like red checked tablecloths done up as draperies. What kept her going was that, among Peter’s clients, money was no object. So if the marketplace was barren, they could always farm it out with their own design to a custom-maker and wait a year and a half. Peter was always getting custom orders finally coming in when the clients were halfway through a divorce or, in one case, dead, leaving him with twenty-two rolls of wallpaper covered with bats and Japanese fans.

  Rita was in no mood. She’d drawn a hot bath, and she was doing a perfunctory bit of yoga while it cooled to a simmer. She twirled her neck in an arc and then got down naked on the white fur rug and did her best to be a cobra. As she rose to her feet, she felt a first glimmer of calm. Float, she told herself, feeling as if she’d come at last to a place where people took care of themselves the whole day long. She executed a slow tango across the room to the bathroom, a sweeping walk somewhere between Isadora Duncan and Groucho, when suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was Hey.

  “I’m doing a hand wash,” he said, somehow getting by her and into the room. “Do you have anything you want done?”

  “Oh, Hey, I’m not that organized yet. Everything I own is dirty,” she said, pulling the seedy pink terry robe closer around her that she’d grabbed off the floor at the last minute. “I’ll just throw it all in the machine before the weekend’s over.”

  “I did some things already for you that I found in the closet,” he said, and she felt a small chill creep across the back of her neck. “I separated out the delicate things for later. I can do the green shawl if you want.”

  “Please don’t bother, Hey. I’m used to getting things done on the run.”

  “It isn’t good for the clothes,” he said, as if the clothes had some rights in the matter, too, whatever her penchant for barely making do. She knew he was offering her his services so he could fall in step with the rhythm of a woman, and she resisted them, but not because she was squeamish about his reasons. She supposed he was all charm and innocence when he gathered up her nightgowns and tights, and she wasn’t innocent herself about the other ways in which a man could go about it. Rather, she was afraid she would start to pose for him, to pay in kind for all his small attentions to her. He wants to be my lady-in-waiting, she thought. Yet she couldn’t help but envy his enthusiasm. He wanted so hard to hear the sea in the core of the shell that he brought it up out of the coursing of his own blood. The moves of a woman were a siren song to Hey; and Rita, just come from dancing in her room, was humming a few bars of it under her breath. No wonder people told her their life stories. She came across as if she’d lived them all herself. One on one, she flashed like a mirror.

  “You know about Linda,” he said, when it seemed to her the pause had gone on too long, and she heard his voice drop to the level of confidences.

  “Linda who?” Was Linda the parrot’s name? She’d kept her distance from the perch in the kitchen garden because the bird looked bloodthirsty.

  “My previous life,” he said, quite formal about it, and patient with others who weren’t so lucky.

  “Oh. Well, I did hear something,” she said, and thought: Shut up now before you embarrass him. But she was too nervous to wait out the pauses while he picked his way over his English grammar. She tumbled on. “But you know who it is exactly, do you? I thought it was just a feeling. I mean, I didn’t know you’d got an actual person.”

  He looked off rapturously and sat down on the bed. “My spiritual adviser tracked her down,” he said. “It was a great breakthrough for him.”Then, while she inwardly sighed for the flattening bubbles in her bath, he got quite moody. He began to get very interested in the crease of his trousers; and Rita noticed that, as he pinched it between his fingers to sharpen it, he affected a dressy lady’s delicacy. He retreated into solitude as he sat and put his thoughts in order. There, like a widowed or banished lover who, without warning, still registers the most intimate expressions in his face, he seemed to be side by side exchanging knowing looks with Linda. Rita was a third party.

  “I’d love to talk about it,” she said, “except I have to take my bath.”

  “Yes, you’d better go ahead,” Hey said, turning a placid smile in her direction. “They get out of here as soon as they’re ready. You know, you can’t waste a minute on
Friday night. I’ll get your things out.”

  You can’t let that one go, she said to herself as she put the bathroom door ajar between them and hung the terry robe behind. She felt like such a coward sinking down into the bath. If she didn’t draw the line now, she supposed, she would find him one day making up at her vanity table and dressed to kill. But she hadn’t planned on being touched by Hey. She slopped the facecloth across her eyes as she lay back, because her throat had knotted and the tears were coming down. Unexpectedly, as if she were at a movie. She appreciated real commitment to such a degree that she’d gladly spend the better part of a year searching out a committed dry cleaner or drugstore. She could hold Hey back from laying out her party clothes on a Friday night, but at the risk of taking from him the chance to know a little further who he was. He might be crazy, she thought, but he had an idea inside him as pure as a fairy godmother.

  “Linda revealed herself in the cards,” Hey called out as he went about the room. For all Rita knew, it might have been a hand of poker. Softhearted though she was about the hands-across-the-sea between Linda and Hey, she took good care not to get involved in the method. She didn’t want so much as a word of spiritual advice. “She ran a traveling Bible school near Sutter’s Mill. Up in the mountains. It was during the Gold Rush, so Holy Brother and I think it must have been a cat-house, but we let Linda have it her way.” He paused, as if to hold two blouses out at arm’s length and pick a Friday color. “Which isn’t to say she wasn’t a lady,” he went on, almost to himself. “Her card is the queen of diamonds.”

  “How does it feel?” Rita asked, not sure what she meant, but it had to do with being two people at the same time. She was floating after all, limp from the squall of tears and half-asleep. She knew from the sound of his voice that it must feel wonderful, so she gave him the cue to tell her so. Also, she guessed she’d be able to follow the story better if she encouraged him to talk girl-to-girl, so to speak, and underplayed the business of Linda’s telegrams from the beyond.

  “Oh, you know,” Hey said through the door. “Men, men, men.”

  Rita blushed under the facecloth. She saw what a double outcast Hey had come to be. There wasn’t a woman she knew who wouldn’t have scored him for his dimwit, one-word, definition-of-a-woman feeling. But at the same time he wasn’t precisely gay. He didn’t say what he wanted. She bet he used the woman who lived like an echo in him to pretty up his longing for a man of his own. She suddenly knew he’d had no sex at all, none to speak of, anyway, none that kept on happening. He had the strained, slightly hysterical up-and-down in his voice that she associated with aging virgins. His gestures had lost their dancer’s logic. What, she wondered, had she expected? That he was as gay as Nick and Peter, probably. And that the Linda complication was another dimension still that connected him up all around. She’d wanted him exotic and wise like a hermaphrodite. A moment ago, when she was brimful of tears, she had turned him into a good-luck household god whose belly she could pat. Now he seemed instead just another out-of-touch and frazzled man cheated of love gratuitously. And she didn’t want to know that much about him.

  “You need shoes,” he said in some dismay. “It’s like trying to play tennis without a ball.”

  “Let me dance barefoot just this once,” she said, standing up and taking stock of herself agreeably in the mirror, “and I’ll buy them in every color come Monday.”

  “You can laugh if you want,” he scolded her, “but shoes are invisible only when they’re fabulous. You watch. Everyone’s going to stare at your feet. I’ve got to go now. Hurry!”And she heard the door shut behind him. He went away, she thought, like a crone in a folktale who’s done all the warning she can.

  She mustn’t let him get her overwrought, she told herself as she came back naked into the bedroom, letting the water drip where it may. Then she saw her things set out on the bed, an eggplant purple skirt and champagne blouse, a bra and panty hose, her least offensive shoes, a string of amber beads. She’d got it all wrong about the casting of the fairy tale. As to fairy godmothers, he appeared to be hers. That’s when it struck her about the two sorts of people she fell among. Why didn’t she know how to use it? She didn’t mind Hey shadowing her half so much as she minded her own tailspin theories of who they both really were, deep down. Doubtless Hey was both the virgin in the maze and the double-sexed dream of life after life. The problem was Rita. Overinvolved again.

  Which reminded her of Nick. She sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed and cranked the casement wide open to the garden. Rita was on the ground floor in the west wing, just a stone’s throw from the silken, high-roofed living room. Nick and Peter were upstairs in the east wing; and it happened that, as her head began to clear around the chaos of Nick, she glanced up automatically, as if to measure the distance—the number of stones to throw—between her and them. And glimpsed him from the stomach up as he stood at the armoire lost in thought. The setting sun cast a pale banana light all along that wall of the house. In a moment he had turned toward Peter and walked away out of her field of vision. But she’d had time to catch sight of him peering inconsolably out at LA. She was just getting ready to tick off the meetings between them, all coincidence and coming-and-going. She went ahead with it—Tuesday noon at the pool, Wednesday breakfast, 5:00 P.M. in Peter’s shop twice. The last, because it was the end of the day for all of them, had them driving away to play like children after school, Rita leaning forward from the back seat so that their three heads chattered in a row. And then, the most curious, last night over dinner. But the list went by without really getting her attention. She had too much to take in about his eyes.

  She was in perfect control, or under it, at any rate. She’d thought so all week. She toyed with the charade that they were all set for the serenade scene, and all Rita needed to start a song was a guitar tacked up with mother-of-pearl. She laughed at herself for watching out windows like a schoolgirl, and the laughter convinced her she wasn’t going to act like a fool. Nick, she supposed, was who she’d been waiting for all these years, but she knew she’d thought so half a dozen times before, and, besides, he was off limits. Not by being gay—which hadn’t in the past been an impediment to a month of longing and a trampled heart—but by being Peter’s. So it came to the same thing, that she had to use this, too. Maybe she couldn’t help loving him, but she could do something with it that would rescue them all or set them free. It was a curious way to be through with men. It was dead-center certain to boot: She was going to get caught between two selfless courses of action, with Nick and Peter both, leaving her minus one self instead of the usual zero. She said as much herself. This was the girl who at fifteen closed Jane Eyre and for the next year wore her hair in a bun, sucked in her cheeks to look more like an orphan, and prayed for bad weather, preferably rain so fine it wet her to the bone.

  But she was harder on herself than anyone, and so she didn’t mince words when she told herself to stop it. None of the three of them needed Rita turning intrigues. To put her house in order, it was about time, too, that she stopped falling for men who were nice to her. She’d always said she was a woman waiting for a project in a world that did such things by committee. Things fell apart in her life in a sort of way, as if on schedule—about the middle of February, for example, every year, which was why she put on speed to be here fast, as soon as the last Christmas trees were put out on the snowbanks. In the general disarray, she tended to have her finest hour, tidying up. “I’m putting my house in order,” she’d say over the phone when the March winds roared across the Hudson, confident she was quoting from the Bible, or at least the Gettysburg Address. It killed her to admit it, but she did: Cleaning up after her own messes was the project she could always count on. A committee would have tabled it.

  It was simpler just to say she wasn’t exactly in love with Nick, so that is what she said. She knew she could will it so, if nothing else. There wouldn’t be any falling apart, and she wasn’t going to let her good intentions go down like
dominoes. She didn’t think it illogical to care all the same about what Nick was going through and how life hit him. She knew how he felt.

  She stared up at their room, through the empty upstairs window, at the corner of the armoire. Peter was a prince in LA, she thought, and the difference between being one here and being one in Russia was a trick of culture. Peter wielded the same kind of power his grandfather had as a boy, and did so as effortlessly as he wore a tuxedo, because Prince Alexander Kirkov raised him to expect it as his birthright. The straitened circumstances of Brooklyn Heights had nothing to do with Peter’s sight on the world. But Nick, Rita knew, had had it drummed into his head that everyone he would ever know was bound to fail. His father lapsed into the bitterness and suspicion that go with keeping doomed accounts. Nick had had to dream up the American dream all by himself, which hadn’t been so hard as it might have been, with Paramount two blocks away and the ringing of hammers in Beverly Hills, where the family went for Sunday drives. But Nick acted now as if he had had no say in his own elevation to the rank of prince, as if there must be some mistake, some error in addition that would be spotted in time by a bitten-down accountant who looked like his father. It flew in the face of his own hard work and gambler’s timing to see it that way, but he would have said that he didn’t work hard anymore, and still the money poured in. He would have protested that it wasn’t fair, and it scared him, except it was such a conversation stopper.