The Gold Diggers (24 page)

What would he have done, Nick wondered now. How far would he have gone with Sam? He drove down Robertson Boulevard sixteen days later, on the lookout for a sound store where money would talk, still numb from the turn things had taken as time went on. Simply this: He had gotten over Sam. He hadn't meant to—on the contrary, he'd intended to keep a candle lit in his head night and day. He thought it would persist all by itself. The first weekend, when the telephone calls to Sam were rotten with apologies and he left the seven hundred at the Beau-Numero, he imagined there must be a black cloud just behind and to the left of him, hurling down thunderbolts. If it had only held off a little longer, he might have made it. He'd wanted to have it both ways—the cowboy and the Black Sea prince—and in the process he'd thrown the switches too soon, put the tracks crisscross, and brought about a crash. The first few days, the empty place ate into him like a grave being dug in his belly. He expected nothing left by the time he got back to Sam, but Sam was to blame for that. He blamed him in advance for a foregone conclusion, and by the end of the first week he was pelting the place himself with small arms fire, in a rage at Sam's little faith. Two superhuman fucks was all it amounted to. The third was a draw on account of the snake. But Nick was the only one who could hold onto what little there was and so protect it. He locked it up like Rusty Varda. He had to protect it even from Sam. And still it paled until it was as thin as mist, until the slightest movement through it blew it out of shape.

So he hated him after a while. It didn't feel especially odd at first to have his feelings change, and if he couldn't pinpoint when it happened, it was because it was hidden deep in the nature of things. As if the eye of the hurricane had passed over Crook House sometime in the night when he wasn't looking. While he sat on the bed with Peter and Rita, reading aloud the personals out of a New York paper. And before he had really stopped to notice, the trees were bending the other way. Suddenly, he hated Sam for having no fantasies of his own, because it meant he had no past that had gone wrong. He hated him for sticking to himself. He'd got to be terrific at fucking so as not to have to see how people really were. Didn't have to be bored by their husbands, bury their mothers, wait with them dazed for the bad results of their biopsies.

Can it be that I hate him, though? he had to ask. After all, it may have been himself he meant to hate, for squandering too much on men who added up to nothing. He was going on about it still, all day long, as much as when he loved him and suffered and loved that, too. But now it only made him think his life wasn't in order, which always sent him back to Peter. He had to hold Peter in a bearhug, first things first, and look over Peter's shoulder to see what he could do without, cut loose, give away. And it was Sam. He and Rita may have snapped at Peter now and then in his convalescence, putting down their foot like Hey and saying it was all
Camille
. But it was the most time they'd spent together without a program in a couple of years. Once he got up, noon or after, Peter painted the ranch from memory, canvas after canvas, one a day, and Nick took lunch hours half a day long. He spread the whole of their finances out on the bedroom floor and lectured, speculated, profited, and lost. The days of the second week went by, and he didn't hate Sam. He'd just outgrown him.

“What you really ought to do is read to me,” Peter said at the easel. Toward the end of the second week, the bunkhouse began to appear in the paintings, first at the edges of the canvas, then bigger and bigger, as if Peter were focusing a zoom. “Why don't you read me poems? In Italian.”

“I don't speak it, for one thing,” he said. “And neither do you.”

“Oh, that doesn't matter, does it?” he asked, brush in the air.

“Don't be fruity, Peter.” Nick held up a pen and a power-of-attorney for him to sign. Peter put the brush between his teeth, the paper on Nick's shoulder where he sat on the floor at the foot of the easel, the pen to the dotted line. They were mostly quiet, absorbed, and meticulous, and it looked on those afternoons as if they could have changed places and gone on without a pause, as if they were two monks gilding the facing pages of a prayer book. They weren't restricted by separate energies, weren't tied to artist and banker. They were playing, after a fashion. Not play like cowboys and Indians for once, toys and reckless outdoor games. Play like the play in a rope—elastic, room to maneuver, the line going out and coming in. They were so undriven and so afloat they were half-asleep, their heads like globes of brandy. They could have been lying in bed after making love.

All told, then, Nick thought as he pushed through the doors of the warehouse and the music jammed his circuits, he'd had a five-week thing with Sam, maybe six. Now it was up to him to call up Sam and break it off. He wasn't as sure as he'd been a couple of weeks before that Sam had given it the finger all on his own and leapt in the saddle and gone. Nick wanted to just forget it, but he didn't dare. Sam knew where to come back to. In the meantime, he couldn't successfully divert his attention to stereo components, because he had a tin ear and his mind went blank in front of machines. Peter hadn't sent him on this errand for his expertise. It was because he could handle—and Peter couldn't, not for an instant—bleak and noisy stores where they banked the TVs row upon row and turned them all on to the bowling matches. So he put on a pleading look and collared a salesman and nodded a lot for the next half hour, full of encouragement, nicely tuned out. He spent twenty-one hundred dollars gladly, grateful to get it over with. And not including a hundred to the salesman and another to the trucker, to see that they had it blaring disco to shake the walls by 5:00 P.M. on Sunday.

Driving home, he let Sam go, convinced he couldn't do much till Monday, and tried to think straight about Peter and Rita.
They
were what he was going to do about Sam, and the rest was just a phone call, another packet of hundreds, and—what the hell—maybe a new MG and
really
end it. Funny, though. He could feel his cock shift with a will of its own from first to second at the thought of Sam. There hadn't been a peep out of it for anyone but Peter in well over a week. He didn't still want a piece, did he? Let go, he thought, let go. He'd come too far, he told himself, letting the fantasy go on for a bit but turning the lights out on it, to make it faceless. Nobody else would ever be quite so right for the cowboy's ride as Sam, but he'd make do. He knew now what the problem was. Allowing himself to get too well-known, he'd begun to see in Sam's eyes, instead of a wild idea, a zeroing in on who Nick really was. As if Sam couldn't sustain the fantasy. Not his fault—a lot of static and interference from God knew where, like men who couldn't keep it hard. Maybe because he was a hustler and had to be bookkeeping all the time. But it was a dead end for Nick. Peter was the only one he wanted to look at him for real. And now Rita. Sam was nobody compared with them, and Nick understood for the first time who was riding away from whom. Sam wasn't the cowboy stud at all. He was.

Peter and Rita and I are just three friends, he thought, and yet, since none of us has ever gone in much for friends, that's more than we're used to. And I'm the luckiest, he had to admit, with a lover among them and someone old and someone new. Peter and Rita had had each other so long, they were already well-connected when Rita arrived—
were
each other in certain moods and certain seasons, certain public places. They could take it for granted. Peter, of course, had Nick the way Nick had Peter, but not really, for the field that drew Nick like a magnet to ripe naked men left a space like a blank in a film that Peter had to grapple with. Rita had old and new, but she was the one without a lover in the group, which made her more alone, even if she wanted it that way. No, he thought as he went under the arch of the East Gate and into Bel-Air, they don't have it as easy as I do. We all have the three of us, but I have more. As with the money, of course, the pots of gold at the end of every arc he traveled, having so much was the very thing that threw him. It made him lose track of what it was for. In the end, it sent him scavenging for men with nothing, men like Sam.

He took the curves and wound his way among the islands and half-acre kingdoms of people doing well. The midday air at the end of winter was as clean as they were going to get in LA, and the noon sun, he saw, had brought the Bel-Air villagers out to their pools and paddle tennis courts to go through another round of staying alive. Everyone meant to survive who made it here, which is why they put tomato juice in their Saturday drinks—a vitamin is a vitamin, no matter what company it keeps. The houses, Rusty Varda's and some few others excepted, weren't there fifty years ago and wouldn't be, what with the fires and the Palmdale bulge, fifty years hence. So no one survived by monuments. It was your body or nothing, three-score-and-ten with a shot at a century. And if it means I'm cynical to think so, he thought, then cynics are not as black as they're painted. He loved his checkered neighbors in the hills, for all their ironies and lunacies, not in spite of the gimlets gulped before and after the perfunctory swim but because of it. Consenting adults wherever he looked. And we can be just three friends, he decided, without a lot of scrutiny and fitting in boxes. No big deal.

Rita's car wasn't there, and Peter's car wasn't back. I'm first, he thought contentedly, leaping down the steps as if to get things ready and surprise them. Set them a gingham picnic by the pool, perhaps. He put the key in the lock, but the door gave only a couple of inches when he pushed, because the chain was up. “What the …,” he said. He poked at the doorbell till it rang like chimes. He could hear Hey apologize from several rooms away. But he got more and more incoherent the closer he got, running through the living room and up the spiral stair. He squinted out and saw Nick pressed against the door like an invading soldier.

“Oh, what are we going to do!” he cried. “The parrot's gone.”

“Let me in first,” Nick said with deliberate calm. He stood back while Hey closed the door and then opened it wide. He was stricken.

“It doesn't matter,” he said, his voice all ashes, though a moment before he was shrieking. He was like two different characters, now up, now down. “You can open all the doors and windows now. I thought he was just loose in the house. But he's out
there
.” And he looked over Nick's shoulder at the outside world as if it trembled with death like a jungle.

“Tell me what happened,” Nick said quietly, summoning up the proper attitude. He and Peter hated the parrot, gritting their teeth whenever they thought of him on his nightly spin in the kitchen. He wasn't pretty to look at, and his jaundiced eye and his weathered beak appeared to be spotted with tropical fevers. But he and Hey went together as if they captained a sailing ship between them. They had been housemates during the lonely years of litigation after Varda's death, and the parrot was a fixture by the time Nick and Peter came.

“I was cleaning the cage,” Hey said. Nick guided him into the elevator and kept his arm around Hey's shoulder as they started down. “I never bother to close the door to the dining room, because he
knows
it's just for a few minutes. He always waits on the towel rack. But I turned around, and he was gone. I ran all over and closed the house up, but I knew it was no use.” Then he raised his voice again, in a tone of lament he must have carried in his genes. “Oh,
Christ
!. Why does it have to happen
now
?” He could take it, he seemed to say, but he had his hands full just lately, with Linda swooping in out of the blue to put him on like a coat.

“He'll come back,” Nick said, and they stepped out into the living room. He could tell the house was sealed. It seemed under pressure and somehow far too still, as if they'd been away on a long trip. “As soon as he's hungry. Besides, he knows he can't do without you. He's just like us.”

“That's very sweet of you to say, Nick. But if I were him, I'd be halfway to San Diego by now. Compared to flying,” he said, looking about distractedly, “all of this is shit.” He started to cry, with tears welling out of his eyes and a gathering heave in his shoulders. It was the sound of someone homeless.

“You go lie down and take an aspirin,” Nick said. It was on the tip of his tongue to say they'd get another one, but he saw it would be insensitive. Besides, he didn't want another one. He wanted a dog.

“I don't know how I'm going to get through this fucking party,” Hey said brokenly, and Nick led him through to the kitchen and told him not to think about it. Hey's room had a separate entrance off the kitchen garden, so they had to pass by the empty cage, its barred door ajar and the floor all freshly papered and covered with gravel. Hey went into a full sob. Nick put him to bed, gave him a Valium, and said it was aspirin. He sat on the bed until Hey stopped crying and closed his eyes. Then he went around and opened things up. All the sliding doors to the garden and, one after another, the casements, locking them open at different angles to catch the slightest breezes. It was his imagination, but he seemed to smell bird shit in every room, and he aired them all out, once and for all. Good riddance, he thought. Now maybe they could get a Lab or a collie, both of which Peter thought mawkish, too dog-like. Peter wanted something nobody else had, a Rolls-Royce of a dog, he didn't care what. Hey wouldn't hear of it, either way. He said he had his hands full with the bird. And listen to you, Nick berated himself, it's all you think about, what you want. Like a saint keeping points on his out-of-church acts, he dropped the dog and thought kind thoughts about Hey, who'd lost his other half.

When he got to Rita's room, he realized he'd been saving it till last so as not to compromise her privacy. He half hoped she'd come home while he was at the upstairs windows, and then she could open up her own. But at last he propelled himself over the threshold, if only because he didn't want to be making exceptions and getting too courtly. It was hot as a sauna. She had the whole row of casements along the garden side, and when they caught the high point of the sun in spring and summer, the light lit it up like a stage in the middle of the day. There were clothes thrown over everything as if they'd all floated down out of the sky, as if she had to have them all in plain sight to know where to start. New things still in their boxes, tumbling out of the tissue. A storm of magazines all around the bed. Nick felt giddy with affection. There ought to be at least
one
room in Crook House, he thought, set aside for chaos. He had been hanging his own clothes up the minute he took them off for as long as he could recall, as a hedge against the letting go that went with being broke. The terminal house he grew up in was full of things that fell where they may as if they'd given up. He disentangled a scarf from the clump on the end of the bed and threw it like a streamer, and it lilted in the air and settled slowly in a splash of red and gold. Nick laughed out loud. It rang in the cluttered room like a cheer or a whoop as he turned to go.