The Gold Diggers (8 page)

“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.

Except with Rita. He had laid out his rags-to-riches theory last night at dinner, the difference between his and Peter's expectations, and she filled in the narrowest pauses with “Go on. I'm listening.” He talked about money, and she talked in her turn about sex, and it didn't take Freud to let them know they were parallel lines, sex and money, that defied the laws of geometry by meeting all over the place. Grown-ups talked about one or the other, Rita knew from experience, and more and more was what was usually wanted. But Nick and Rita seemed to share a sense of missed connections between the progress of desire and the daily life of the self. Nick was half-ready to say he was through with money, to make the same point that Rita made about men. He didn't really mean he wanted to give it all up, and he told Rita she didn't, either. If she went too long without a man, he said, she'd take up pride and make the world atone for her illusions. Nick intended to have it both ways, money
and
no illusions. The very juggler's act he'd decided on with Sam, as well, though he was careful to let on nothing of that to Rita. Rita had enough on her mind without it. She tried to see the probabilities for an equation of her own, about a
man
and no illusions. It sounded wonderful when Nick described it. That was the problem.

What had she said about sex? She tried to remember as she went back to the bathroom to get a towel. When she got there, she found she was all dry. It must be late. More than anything, she remembered, as she rifled through her string bag among the five-and-dime cosmetics, the way they'd given each other their invitations. Nick came home and got dressed up and sat in the garden to wait for Peter. She came home and got undressed and wandered out to walk by the pool in her flimsy summer robe, expecting to be alone. While they talked about the weather, Hey called out through the dining room window, “Peter can't get away. He says to tell you not to wait for dinner. What dinner?”

“No dinner,” Nick said to reassure him. “Peter made a mistake.” And the mistake, Nick told Rita after a moment when they couldn't seem to get back to the weather, was forgetting a reservation for two at Chasen's. “There's no point in letting it go to waste,” Nick said brightly, rubbing his head through his curls like a sheepish boy about a date. “Why don't
you
come?”

“To
Chasen's
?” Rita asked from the edge of the pool. “Sorry. I'd have to spend the whole day getting ready. I'm going to eat salad and an unwashed apple. For calories, I'll drink Scotch.”