The Gold Diggers (11 page)

So he got them moving as if the only thing on his mind was getting them home in time for lunch. He stood and hiked his pants to his waist again, then reached for his shirt on the rocking chair and put it on. Sam was sitting up now, his arms around his knees and his head in his arms. Nick weighed the issue of going back to LA in one car and retrieving the MG another day. But that would leave Sam stranded for the intervening time, so was it all right to ride in caravan? Nick asked him solicitously. Could he drive? Of course he could. Put that way, as if Sam needed special handling, it dared him to be the weaker of the two. He got up and zipped himself and strode out the door to the porch. Sullen as hell but self-contained. The accusation phase had ended, but his mood was still tricky, as though the slightest thing would have had him all over Nick with his fists. No need, he said, for them to ride bumper to bumper. He knew the way to Bel-Air. Let them just meet when they got there. Well see, the implication was, who gets there first. Nick told him how to find Crook House up in the hills, the last leg of the journey, and then they split up, each to his own car, like racing men in shiny silver jackets. The other five beers were on the bed still, getting warm.

Because the Mercedes was parked further away, Sam seemed to wait, motor idling, until Nick was ready. Nick pulled alongside the MG as if there were a starting line drawn in the dust.

“Maybe you ought to tell the man at the gate about the snake,” Sam said.

“What man at the gate?”

“Someone's there painting a sign.”

“Oh.” The sign that said “SOLD.” Nick almost forgot that his bid had been accepted and this was all his. He'd clinched it at an early breakfast with the agent, at Schwab's on Sunset. Because they were both in real estate, they talked about the ranch as if no land went with it. It had to do with making an investment. Nick didn't talk cowboys at Schwab's.

“I'll check it out,” he said.

As Nick pulled onto the road and led the way up the hill, he remembered that he'd planned all morning to tell Sam he'd bought the ranch. Now he planned not to. He looked in the rearview mirror at the MG. You're only as good as your last trick, Sam had said to him the day they met, untroubled about whether or not he was being original. It's too much the truth, Nick thought now, not to be the motto of all good whores or gamblers. Poor Sam. Today's trick was such a bucket of ice water that it might have been arranged by the Puritan God who lived in more seasonal fields than Southern California. Nick had a picture of the run of seamy endings Sam must have gone through—coupling interrupted by who knew what vigilantes, the wives and the toilet police. People didn't pay what they owed after they got what they bought. People got depressed, or they took out knives or locked themselves in the bathroom. Having survived it, Nick thought, Sam had earned a better deal. He wanted to make up for the snake, and a hundred ways sprang to his mind. Still, he wasn't going to say he bought the ranch.

The Mercedes took the lift over the hill without a bump, but he was going a little too fast to feel nothing at all. He had a moment when he went weightless, and it drew his eyes out of the mirror and back to the dusty, rutted road. At the gate, about a half-mile down the long hill, he saw a pickup truck parked broadside to him. He knew it right away, before he could even see the shop's name on the door, tan on gray: Peter's. Peter himself, standing a little way off in the fields, painting the sign, might have been anyone, might have been the cowboy who had eluded Nick and Sam all morning. After the snake, Peter wasn't the least bit extraordinary. He seemed to have work to do there, a little way off the road, and his light hair was blown about so that one would never know he had it barbered in Beverly Hills. If he was lettering a sign, it didn't spell anything yet. It was just colors. But no doubt it would say what it meant. Was Peter like the cowboy in his dreams, Nick thought as he narrowed his eyes, wondering how it could be that Peter looked as if he'd lived here all along.

Peter—because he was dazzling when he dressed to kill, because he was as serene as a yachting sailor when he went out for cocktails or walked into an opening—was too crown-prince for the Wild West. Peter walked through the weather of LA as if it were a shelf of olive trees above Cannes. But here he was. Nick was so spellbound by him, the figure in the miles of desert space, that he didn't stop to imagine how Peter got here, and why now. And he didn't think of Sam from the time he saw the truck till, cruising down the hill with the crunch in his ears of the tires on gravel, he braked forty feet from the gate.

Peter heard a noise like runaway horses. He turned and saw Nick and Sam when they were too close for him to think about. He walked back toward the road, and Nick only needed to roll his window down as he came to a stop. When he looked up, Peter's face was a foot away.

“I didn't think you'd come till later,” Peter said, putting out his hands to lean against the roofline of the car. When he ducked his head forward, the usual world, about ten cubic feet, righted itself between them, deaf to everything but the truth. “I was all ready for four o'clock,” he went on. “You would have found me sitting on the gate with a piece of grass in my mouth. But I was just guessing when you liked to come here. And I didn't dare go
that
way without you.” He pointed up the hill and into the land without turning his head.

“How did you get here?” Nick asked wonderingly, beginning to see how odd it was. As if fate had dropped Peter in the path in much the same way as it had unrolled the snake.

“You mean, how did I find you?” he said with a smile. They couldn't ignore the MG much longer, but they could as long as they spoke in shorthand. “Your office told me. They even sent a map over to the shop.”

“Is this the day you want to see the place?” Nick asked. Although he was asking out of it for now, he was still shot through with gratitude to have Peter here at last. And doubled up with guilt not to be staying on all day. “I would have planned it.”

“It doesn't matter, Nick. I came up here to be alone and paint, too. I don't need
you
until four o'clock. I'll find you.”

Just then they heard the MG growl. It backed up, as if to ready for attack, then screeched around Nick's car and sped out the gate. Nick and Peter watched it down the road as if they'd wound it up and set it going themselves.

“That's Sam.”

“Very pretty. Or should I say he looks the part?” he asked with a smile. He spoke with less irony, Nick decided, than with the wish to pin it down precisely. “I'm sorry, you know. I wouldn't be so tacky as to follow you around. I have my price for practically everything else. But not that.”

“Don't make me feel worse than I do, Peter. I'm the one who's being tacky.” He hadn't mentioned Sam yet. This wasn't how he'd planned it. He felt a storm of sorrow start at the line where the roll of the hills cut the sky. “And I have to go right now, so I can't even explain. What do I do?”

“You do what you have to,” Peter said mildly. “There's nothing to worry about. It's just a morning in the middle of the week.”

It wasn't a choice, Nick thought. Between Peter and Sam, here was his real life, materializing in the spare winter green of the scrub and running weeds. Peter stood away from the car to let him go. There was irony in the smile now, as if he could appreciate the turn of events, even when they turned like a cat going after its tail. He's tougher than I am, Nick thought. Nick wanted to get it straight that he wasn't going to tamper for a minute with
this
, whatever he did with
that
. He said it all the time to himself. The two things were separate by nature, like earth and water. Of course, that was the quarter from which the fantasy came that he was frittering away his life on the beach, and it wasn't his favorite view of himself. Sam didn't matter to Peter and him, he was sure, but the other thing, the split in his head between what really happened day to day and what he imagined, he thought he had to hide. Mainly because it was tacky. Peter had no moral code to speak of, having lost it before he was born, in the revolution. Good taste was virtue enough. He fled bad taste like a virus, like the spots on the lung that his family used to favor for the last illness.

“Is that a painting over there?”

“Yes,” Peter said, folding his arms and turning to eye it in the distance. An easel and a tackle box of paints beneath. “I'm painting it.”

“Why?”

“Well, you ought to ask
it
. I'm just a medium, I assure you.”

“You never did a painting before.”

“That's true. This is my first one. Did you ever have a kid in an MG before?”

Peter wasn't going to leave it at an art lesson, no matter how pressed Nick was for time. There was a brief pause while the lighting changed. The noon sun had no character. It was indistinguishable today from the glare of midsummer.

“You know I'm not faithful to you,” Nick said tensely. Not angry. Upset.

“Is that what I'm asking?” Peter was taken aback, as if he'd wounded Nick in play and wondered now what else he thought would happen if he juggled with grenades. When he went on talking, he found himself trying to describe wittily a thing he thought so sad it made him tremble. But even Nick didn't notice. The wit did its sparkle act and drew them back to safety. “I didn't mean sex. It was more to do with the stories I used to like. The old sort of romance. Two people in love who change their clothes a lot. If it was a movie, they had a lot of MG's in them. And drinks outdoors to catch the view. Very fifties. They don't do them anymore.”

“It's worse than you think,” Nick said wryly. “Sam works the street.”

“Oh,” Peter said slowly, getting it in focus at last. “Well, that's probably the story they're doing now, instead. I guess he's not as young as he looks.”

“They never are.”

“Younger than we are, though.” He looked at the backs of his hands and then began to scratch out a stroke of yellow paint on his thumbnail. “Didn't you always assume we would stay the youngest of anyone? I did.”

“I don't think that ever happens, even in stories, does it?”

“I think it used to,” Peter said, but as if he couldn't explain how. “I made a reservation at Chasen's.”

“So did I.” They looked at each other then, and for a moment their faces were free of expression. It would have seemed nothing to anybody else. “Eight-thirty.”

“Nine. Split the difference?”

“Sure,” Nick said.

Then there was nothing to do but go. They'd done about as well as they could. Peter watched Nick's car out of sight and walked back to the easel. He didn't have a stroke left in him today. And he could see that he wasn't leaving it in the most opportune state, because it looked all pale and muddy. He needed to learn, he told himself, how to let it go along on its own. He'd let the idea get ahead of the paint while he was with Nick, half his mind still riveted to the canvas. He even felt the moment pass, as he and Nick talked on, when he knew it was no longer possible to get what he thought in the painting. It didn't signify a thing, he realized, capping tubes of acrylic that lay open on the easel tray. He hadn't expected art yet. In just two hours he'd already learned that he couldn't tell yet when the least square inch was done and ought to be left alone. And he'd watched himself mess it up time and again when the brush stayed too long in one place.

But the fact was, he couldn't keep it up because things were going crazy. When I have enough money, he'd always said, I'm going to do something hard. Enough was never enough, of course—he'd seen through that. It was harder to admit there was no point to going on today because of Nick. He'd never thought to think that way. The whole thing had literally ambushed him from behind. He had had it all planned, a finished painting before the sun set and a drink with Nick while they sat on the back end of the pickup. Now he packed the tin box and swirled the brushes around in a cup of water. He carried the canvas over to the truck and propped it on the passenger's seat, as if it might get inspired by the view. When he turned and stared back at the empty easel and the box of paints, ripe with possibility in the basin of the hills, he was afraid. It was the first time that he faced the worst: He could end up alone.

Peter didn't suffer from the human condition. Except for Nick and Rita, he had no patience for those who did, because they always overdid it. He chalked up his own bad years to the luck of being young, and that was all over. Since he'd gotten to where he was, there hadn't
been
a human condition. Hell might well be a cocktail party in Brentwood, but it didn't singe his hair or scorch his heart with a vision of his sins. He liked what he did. He hadn't gotten it right if Rita thought, the night in the howdah, that he had to paint because he didn't have the strength to throw another petit point pillow on a sofa. He never minded going on about meaningless things, and he wouldn't have called them that. Wallet-headed women and fancy old queers who wore a lot of turquoise jewelry huddled with him on terraces and told him everything. He paid no attention to what they said, which they appreciated, but he loved to be confided in. And his opinion in matters of gossip, which he never gave, became more and more sought-after. It was madness, but so comical and innocent, Peter could have said, it fell outside the shadow of man's fate. This wasn't the same as saying any of them would escape it. It simply didn't come up unless someone died, and no one did that in LA until he ran out of deals.

Peter spent a good deal of his time out of the office playing with the stars—at pools, in saunas, of course in cars, passing a joint back and forth like an opera glass. Mutual success was the only thing they shared, but that one lucky circumstance gave off a certain glow in these encounters. Peter knew that Nick had a sweet tooth for anonymous and indiscriminate sex, and over the years he had come to see it as no more self-indulgent or significant than his own delight in butter-and cream confections. Nick preferred to skip lunch and get sucked in the steam at his regular baths on Melrose, and Peter was more often than not a few blocks away at Ma Maison, eating a plate of avocado and lobster tails. They didn't push each other's faces in it. And Peter knew there was a precipice along one border for both of them. For Nick, it was letting it go too far and get too personal, so that he ended up involved with one of his tricks. For Peter, it was losing track of time, getting so caught up in power and glamor that he played more chess than he lived life.