Belinda (3 page)

I felt my heart shut down rather abruptly. Then a painful warmth in my face, and a change of gears from man to animal. I wondered if she had the slightest idea what that shift was like, if any young girl could be expected to. I thought of Arbuckle again. What had he done? Grabbed the doomed starlet Virginia Rappe and shredded her clothes-something like that. Shredded his career in something less than fifteen minutes probably—

Her face was so earnest, yet so innocent. Wetness on her lips from the Scotch.

I said,

"Don't do this, honey."

"Don't you want to?" she asked.

My God. I had thought she'd pretend not to understand me.

"This just isn't very smart," I said.

"Why isn't it?" she asked. Nothing flippant, artificial.

I knew absolutely and positively I wasn't going to lay a hand on her. Cigarette or no cigarette, Scotch or no Scotch, she was no street kid. The doomed don't look like this, no, never. And I had only helped myself to those sad lost little girls just a few times in my life, just a few times, when desire and opportunity collided with more heat than I'd expected. The shame never went away. The shame of this would be unbearable.

"Come on, honey, open the door," I said.

She didn't do anything. I couldn't imagine what was going through her mind. Mine was sort of letting me down. I was looking at her breasts again, at her socks so tight on her legs. I wanted to peel them off. Strip them off, I think the word is, actually. Forget about Fatty Arbuckle. This isn't murder, it's just sex. And she's what, sixteen? No, just another part of the criminal code, that's all.

She put her drink down on the table. And she came towards me slowly. She lifted her arms and put them around my neck, and the soft babycheek was against my face, her breasts against my chest, her candy mouth opening.

"Oh, Goldilocks," I said.

"Belinda," she whispered.

"Hmmmmm ... Belinda." I kissed her. I lifted her pleated skirt and slid my hands up her thighs and they were as soft as her face. Her bottom was so tight and smooth under her cotton panties.

"Come on," she said in my ear. "Don't you want to do it before they come and ruin everything?"

"Honey-"

"I like you so much."

I WOKE up when I heard the door click shut. The digital clock on the bedside table told me I'd slept for maybe half an hour. She was gone.

I found my wallet lying neatly on top of my pants, and all my money was still in the silver money clip in the front pants pocket.

Either she hadn't found it or she had not been trying to rob me in the first place. I didn't think too much about it. I was too busy getting dressed, combing my hair, straightening up the bed and getting out into the party to find her. I was also pretty busy feeling guilty. Of course, she wasn't there.

I was halfway down to the first floor when I realized this was futile. She had too big a head start. Yet I searched the entire maze of dim carpeted hallways, went in and out of the swanky dress shops, the restaurants.

I checked with the doorman out front. Had he seen her, gotten her a cab?

She was just gone again. And I was standing there in the late afternoon thinking, well, I'd done it with her and she was probably sixteen and somebody's daughter. No consolation that it had been simply terrific.

TIHE dinner was particularly awful. And no amount of Pinot Chardonnay could make it any better. Strictly big bucks, contracts, agents, TV and movie talk. And Alex Clementine had not been there to lend any charm to it. They were holding him back for his own dinner later on this week.

When the subject of the new book came up, I heard myself say: "Look, it was what my audience wanted." And after that I shut up.

A serious writer, artist, whatever the hell I was, has to be smart enough not to say things like that. And the funny thing was the remark surprised me. Maybe I had begun to believe my own hype, or begun to believe that my hype was hype. In any case, by the time the dinner was over, I felt rotten.

I was thinking of her. How tender and fragile she had seemed, and yet so sure of herself. It was not new to her, making love, no matter how new she was. And yet she'd been so delicate, so purely romantic in the way that she'd kissed, touched, let me touch her.

No hint of guilt or old-fashioned shame or the defiance they can produce. No, none of that.

I was going mad over it. I couldn't figure it out.

Too fast it had all been. And then the short sleep afterwards with my arm around her. I had never figured on her slipping away. I hated myself and I was angry with her.

Some rich kid she was, probably, skipping school; and now safe in her mansion in Pacific Heights telling some other brat on the phone about what she'd done. No, that didn't fit. She was too sweet for all that.

I picked up a pack of Gauloises before I left downtown. Very strong, no filter, too short. just the kind of thing a kid would think was romantic. In my Beat Generation days we had smoked Camels. So with her it was Gauloises.

I smoked the Gauloises in the cab on the way home, my eyes searching every downtown block for her.

Iv was still hot after dark, truly unusual for San Francisco. But the big high-ceiling rooms of my old Victorian house were cool as always.

I made some coffee and sat for a while, smoking another one of those miserable cigarettes, and I just looked around me at the shadowy living room, thinking about her.

Toys everywhere. Dust and disarray of an antique shop on the worn oriental carpets. I was rather sick of it. Had the urge to sweep it all into the street, just clean the place to the bare walls. But I knew I'd regret it.

It had taken me twenty-five years to collect these things, and I did love them. They were props in those early days. When I did Bettina's World, I bought the first of the antique dolls, and the first old standard-gauge railroad train, and the big fancy Victorian doll house because these were Bettina's things, and I needed to have them before me when I painted the pictures.

I'd photograph them in black and white from every angle, in every combination. Then take the photographs up to my studio and work in oil on canvas from the flat patterns that had been created in these photographs.

But I began to like the toys for their own sake. When I found a rare French doll, a porcelain beauty with almond eyes and withered lace clothes, I built the book Angelica's Dreams around her. And as the years passed, it continued to work that way, toys generating books, and books swallowing toys, and so on.

The big old carousel horse, fixed on its brass pole between ceiling and floor, had generated The Celestial Carnival. The mechanical clown, the old leather rocking horse with the glass eyes-these had sparked the series called Charlotte in the Attic. Charlotte at the Seaside had followed, and I'd bought the rusted bucket and pail for that, and the antique wagon. Then a string of books called Charlotte in a Glass Darkly had involved almost everything I owned, recycled in new color and juxtaposition.

Charlotte was my biggest success to date, with her own Saturday morning cartoon show. And the toys were always accurately rendered in the background. My grandfather clock was in the background, too, as it was in all the books, along with the antique furniture scattered through this house. I lived inside my pictures. Always had, I suppose, even before I ever painted any.

There were plastic replicas of Charlotte here too in the dust somewhere, drugstore dolls that sold briskly along with packages of tacky little period clothes. But this stiff little creation couldn't compare with the nineteenth century beauties piled in the wicker baby carriage or lining the top of the square grand in the dining room.

I didn't like to look in on the Saturday morning show. The animation was excellent, the detailing rich-my agents had seen to all that-but I didn't like the voices.

Nobody on that show had a voice like Belinda, a low buttery voice that made its own soothing music. And it was sad. Charlotte ought to have a good voice, because Charlotte was the one who had really made me famous with just a little help from Bettina and Angelica and all my other girls.

Many another children's book artist had redone fairy tales as I had done with Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin. Many another had created lavish illustrations, suspenseful stories, amusing adventures. But my singular gift was for inventing young heroines and shaping every illustrated page around their personalities and emotions.

In the early days my publishers had urged me to put little boys in the books, to broaden the audience, as they said, but I had never yielded to that temptation. When I was with could give it the full passion. I kept critics who now and then ridiculed my girls, I knew where I was, and I the focus tight. And to hell with the me for it.

When Charlotte stepped into the picture, things began to happen that surprised me completely. Charlotte actually grew older in the books. She went from a tender waif of seven years old to adolescence. That never happened with the others. My best work was Charlotte, even though she too finally stopped at age thirteen or so about the time I signed that television contract.

I could never paint her after she went on the air, no matter how great the demand for books with her. She was gone. She was plastic now. And Angelica might go that way too if this animated movie deal went through. I might never finish the Angelica book I had started a couple of weeks ago.

Tonight I did not care much about it. Bettina, Angelica-I was tired of them. I was tired of it all, and this booksellers convention was only making me face it. The exhaustion went way back. Looking for Bettina, what did that mean? I couldn't find her myself anymore?

I SMOKED another one of the Gauloises. I relaxed all over.

The party, the dinner, the noise and bustle were losing their hold at last. And the dingy stillness of the room was comforting, as it was meant to be. I let my eyes drift over the faded wallpaper, the dusty crystal baubles of the chandelier, the fragments of light caught in the darkened mirrors.

No, nor ready to throw it all in the street. Not this lifetime anyway. Need it after hotels and bookstores and reporters—

I pictured Belinda on the carousel horse, or sitting cross-legged beside the oval of the toy train track, her hand on the old rusted locomotive. I pictured her slumped on the sofa amid all the dolls. Damn, why did I let her get away like that?

In my head I took her clothes off again. Saw the lattice of marks on her tanned calves left by the ribbed socks. She had shivered with pleasure when I ran my nails lightly over those marks, grabbed the soft mid part of each naked foot. The light hadn't mattered to her. I was the one who had turned it off when I started unbuttoning my shirt. The hell with it!

You'll be lucky you don't end up in jail someday for this kind of thing, and you're mad at her for skipping out on you. And with the street brats you kid yourself that it's OK because afterwards you give them so much money. "Here, use this for a bus ticket home. Here, this will even make plane fare." What do they buy with it, pot cocaine, booze? It's their problem, isn't it?

Look, you got away with it again, that's all.

THE grandfather clock chimed ten. The painted plates along the dining room mantel gave a faint musical rattle. Time to try to paint her.

I poured another cup of coffee and went upstairs to the attic studio. Wonderful the familiar smells, the linseed oil, the paints, the turpentine. The smells that meant home, safe in the studio.

Before I turned on the lights, I sipped the coffee and looked out the big uncovered windows in all four directions. No fog tonight, though there would be tomorrow. It had to follow the heat. I'd wake up cold in the back bedroom. But for now, the city was shining with an eerie, spectacular visibility. It was no mere map of lights. There was a muted color to the thick rectangular towers of downtown, to the peaked-roof Queen Anne houses spilling down the Noe Street hill into the Castro. The canvases stacked all about seemed faded, shabby.

I changed that by turning on the lights. And I rolled up my sleeves and I put a small canvas on the easel and started sketching her.

I don't often sketch. When I do, it means I don't know where I'm going. And I don't do it with a pencil. I do it with a fine brush and just a little oil paint squeezed out on the plate, usually raw umber or burnt sienna. Sometimes I do it when I'm tired and don't really want to get going. Sometimes I do it when I'm afraid.

This was an example of the latter. I couldn't remember the details of her.

I just couldn't see the features of her rice. I could not get the "there there" that had made me do it with her. It wasn't just her availability. I am not that morally rotten, that stupid, no, not that contemptible. I mean

I'm a grown man, I could have fought my way out of there. Cotton panties, lipstick, and sugar. Hmm.

No good. I had the pyramid of hair all right, thick soft nest of hair. I had the clothes of course. But not Belinda.

I decided to go back to the big canvas I was doing for my next book a jungle garden in which Angelica roamed searching for a lost cat. Back to the fat glossy green leaves, the bulging branches of the oaks, the moss hanging in streaks to the high grass through which the cat came to reveal its hateful grin-beware Angelica-like Blake's tyger.

It all looked like clichés to me, my clichés. To fill in the background, the ominous sky, the overhanging trees-it was like setting myself on high-speed automatic pilot.

When the doorbell rang around midnight, I almost didn't answer. After all, it could have been any one of half a dozen drunken friends, and more than likely a failed artist who wanted to borrow fifty dollars. I wished now I had just left fifty dollars in the mailbox. He would have found it. He was used to finding it.

The bell rang again, but not hard and long, the way he always did it. So it could be Sheila, my next door neighbor come to tell me her gay roommate was having a fight with his lover and they needed me to come over at once.

"For what?" I would say. But I'd wind up going if I answered. Or, worse yet, having them in. Getting drunk, listening to them argue. Then Sheila and I would wind up in bed together out of habit, loneliness, compulsion. No, not this time, not after Belinda, out of the question, don't answer.