The Gold Diggers (14 page)

Calling it a day, she started back toward the dressing room door, determined to open things up again and sleep off her tension in the breezes off the pool. And at the last moment noticed a button in the center of the doorknob. It had never occurred to her to look. Wasn't it against the law for closets to lock on the inside? She pressed it in, click, and heard a sound behind her like a sigh of relief—no, sharper—like a gulp of breath at the end of an underwater swim. No sound of a lock at all.

The door was ajar, opening into the dark. She noticed it threw off the angle of the mirrors and, as she approached, that her own reflection registered crazily in the center, as if she were forever walking away. She stood on the threshold, pushed open the mirrored door, and couldn't see a thing. Saw an attic's worth of unfamiliar forms, oversize and many-cornered, shrouded in sheets. But the room was even bigger than she'd imagined. It seemed to tunnel deep into the hill. She had no candles, not even a match. But she did have the good grace to pay attention to the moment of crossing the threshold. She knew from her reading that you got only one threshold per expedition.

She peered in, her head held forward like a deer, stock-still. Curiously, she didn't plan on the horror she felt about the door going closed and shutting her in. Sometimes, she knew, the equipment didn't know the order of the story as well as the people did and, in its vast indifference, knocked the “off” button and brought things to a halt. She had to bring in a chair or something to prop open the door. She didn't even want to lean forward and grab the nearest sheeted object, for fear of slipping. She got so she could see a little in the dark. Under the sheet, she saw the corner of a heavy gilt frame, and she even took a guess at the patch of painting, a green and brown body of water and trees like broccoli. Dutch, she decided.

But for all that the first glimpse told her she'd found the very thing she wanted—though she hadn't, ever since Friday, been able to say exactly what it was—she was glad to pull the door toward her and save it for tomorrow, when she was better equipped. Anyone would have told her she had just failed the test of passion. What was she
doing
, restraining herself when all those boggling riches ached to gleam again in the light, whatever light they could get? But you could tell, in the languid slope of Rita's shoulders when she moved to withdraw, that the last people weeded out of the adventure were the ones who fell upon the treasure as if starved or high on a drug. Rita planned to do some thinking before she went on. About ownership, for one thing.

Then, in the final sliver of light that fell through the closing door, she saw a page of writing on the floor. And since it required her only to dart her hand a foot or two inside and pick it up, she did so, holding it between finger and thumb as she pulled the door tight. She didn't look at it until she was all unlocked again. She let the paper float down on the bed and then went in to bathe, taking her time. She thought about Hey in the tub, in fact, and shook the other business from her mind. Finally, she put a towel around her head and then lay down. Under the tiny light on her bedside table, she took the paper up and read it through. She was as cool as a scholar faced with something he'd never heard of, when he knew he'd heard of everything.

It was from Rusty Varda. To Frances Dean. All this part was guesswork, since the paper bore no names. Just a date, the numbers written big, with slashes in between—4/20/65.The brief text was in the high style, full of violins and the water sound of silk:

We live in time, my darling, though I am betting it lives in us, too. If our ghosts come back, then let them meet here, if they still care to be together. I've provisioned them with all the beauty they may need. All I ask them is this one thing:
Remember us
.

The moment she got to “darling,” she thought: Oh no, not this, on top of everything else. She was all braced for the mummy's curse. She'd mustered up some charity in case it was a futile cry of power Rusty Varda had set down: See how real I was, how far I got, how much I cost. Ozymandias, king of kings. But it was a bloody Shakespeare sonnet, instead. She didn't want a bit of it. If they couldn't work it out in flesh and blood, then let it go till doomsday. And if there must be ghosts, then let them be mean little spooks with tempers and tricks, and not the sighing kind. The dead could take care of themselves, Rita thought. Staying alive was a full-time job.

And yet, she sighed, and yet—notice how touching the present was in other people's lives. They wrestled with it and told you who they were. They had plans drawn up to collapse the past and put it in their pockets, at the same time saddling the future with carrying their baggage. Rita couldn't help it. She took a fix on 4/20/65 and slotted it in place in Rusty Varda's life. A couple of years
before
he died, so he either stopped coming here to his treasure room at the end, or he liked the symbol of the letter on the floor so much that he dropped by to watch it and arrange it. And otherwise he just juggled and felt this single-minded thought about Frances Dean. Wherever
she
was.

Meanwhile, Rita remembered, in the middle of the same chilly April, she herself had had it out with a man named Hank who couldn't do a thing until his mother died, and the mother had the genes of an Asian monk who lived forever on curdled milk. She couldn't imagine now that she could have cared, though she recalled exactly the feel of the tears that fell day after day. For Rita, the present had either turned out like the time with Hank, and she'd been sunk in herself from dawn to dark, or it didn't register at all. Most of the time, the present was just a way station. Rita appreciated people like Rusty Varda, who made the moment at hand a cause for gestures and manifestos. And they got what they wanted, she'd always observed, because they drew away the attention of others from things that didn't matter much.

She folded the paper into thirds like a business letter, just to show she wasn't going to treat it like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then she tucked it in to mark her place in
The Ambassadors
. Letting
it
get stuck on page eighteen instead of her. Rita could see it was inevitable that she didn't read the way she used to, straight through from beginning to end, with incidental breaks for chores and errands, sandwiches and sleep. She'd read a tenth as much in the last few years. But just lately she could barely hold a book open in her hand. They weighed too much. They all sounded the same. They didn't
do
anything. She had to give Rusty Varda's ghostly letter credit—it had held her attention all the way through. It was just a conjurer's trick, of course, like a hundred books she'd read, in love with a world grown perfect. But at least, she thought as she sank into sleep, her head halfway to the lamp switch, at least Rusty Varda put his money where his mouth was.

The next night, she came in armed with a twelve-dollar flashlight, a Thermos of coffee, and a twenty-pound bag of sand. As she'd run into three different stores to buy these things, she liked the mystery gathering around her packages. No one would have been able to guess, opening her bags, what these three things were for. She cherished the feel of a secret life. Whatever people thought of her, they couldn't think the truth. It was too improbable. And she didn't experience the need to tell anyone about it, either. A switch from the old days, when the door would hardly close on Hank or his heartless equivalent—she'd be on the phone to Peter, to her cousin Marge in Gramercy Park, to anyone who'd still listen.

She sandbagged the mirrored door and walked right up to the broccoli picture. It was Dutch, all right, but there wasn't enough
to
it to call it treasure. Somebody minor. She didn't even bother to kneel down and check the signature. Rita had thrown away every chance she had for a normal career by studying art history in college, and if she couldn't judge the Dutch with a flashlight in a dark room, then she might as well heave her Phi Beta Kappa key. Too bad, she thought. She'd hoped all day for a Rembrandt. But the Rembrandt didn't come until a few minutes later, after she'd thrown back the great canvas cover and gone through two stacks of paintings, propped upright one behind another like prints in a bin, except here they were all ornately framed.

She held in her arms the minor landscape, crouched to it, and held it like a loved one. Then saw behind it a Van Gogh oil of a bowl of red peppers on a yellow windowsill. And after that a nothing still life, and after that a phony Vermeer, a woman making lace in an autumn-lighted room while a small girl recited her lessons. Please don't let this be real, Rita thought, because there are only forty of his paintings in all the world. Or thirty-nine maybe, because one was lost in Dresden or something. But not a Vermeer
here
, for no one ever to see. Rita played the flashlight along the bottom, looking for a name, and a brass plate caught her eye. “Collection Galantine, Antwerp.” A little museum too out of the way? So poor it sold a Vermeer? But why didn't it take the label off?

Well, so much for the Dutch. The neighboring stack was Italian—fourteenth, fifteenth century, two-paneled altar-pieces and saints on boats, a red and gold curtain painted around the Virgin. Each of these was fixed behind glass, and they were less bulky. She went through them like files in a cabinet, letting them click against each other. She'd gotten B's in anything Italian, and it had proven to be the estranging issue between Rita and art history. She thought the professionals got too extreme about the Italian primitives. In fact, she was leaving the group without going through to the end when she flipped to the Rembrandt.

Himself at twenty-five in a brandy-colored velvet hat. The eyes so direct they made you look away, toward the fur collar and the brocade vest. If Rita had a favorite way for art to go, it was here in this man's head, and she did a flip and didn't feel so badly about it being here unseen, because she wanted it protected. She clamped the flashlight under her chin so as to free her hands to pull the painting out, and the light splashed everywhere. She put the portrait in place in front, on top of the rest, and stared at it. This one, too, she thought, must be in catalogues. It even seemed familiar.
Someone
must know it's out of circulation. She wondered how anyone could have parted with it.

In a way, she'd seen too much already. She was glutted the way she was in museums. Without even lighting her way, she lurched from thing to thing and threw off the sheets. She just couldn't let it unfold anymore at a meditative pace. Where was it all going? In her heart's heart, it had never been Rembrandts
really
in the room. They were in another dimension altogether, where she played it like a game. She suddenly understood that a juggler was a man of concepts. She'd expected memorabilia, a stack of film cans, and a folded-up canvas chair with his name in script and a megaphone. Perhaps a blizzard of stock certificates as well, and municipal bonds a decade past redeeming. Money of some kind. And money in any form would have to go to the state, which had already reaped the twelve million and split it with the lawyers and then poured the rest away, Rita supposed, on a ten-mile stretch of freeway rehab.

But if you told a juggler those were balls in the air, and if he really heard you, they'd have dropped all over the room. Luckily for him, he wouldn't know what you were talking about because, to him, the balls were just a medium for a rhythm out of outer space. The dumb and stationary world going round and round in the air, thrown to the winds—it was a toy-maker's notion of making the rule of laws less absolute. And Rita was beginning to see the room of Rusty Varda's dream as just as brazen, just as unconcerned with the way things had to be. Plundering and bartering were one thing. The goods mounted up, and the greed got fed, and the lust for more was a curious way of self-control. In a reckless man with power, money satisfied the lust to murder and make slaves. But this was a shy boy's valentine. Rembrandt and Van Gogh were no more actual to him than a cigar band gravely slipped on Frances Dean's ring finger. It was an old-school romance, and it could have been satisfied for images with ice cream and seashells. Varda just happened to have enough bucks to cast his juggler's balls in jade and agate.

Rita was sure he'd never set foot in a museum, that he hadn't had a clue to what he'd got. She played the light around her and found she was standing between two pedestals. On one was a Roman torso, cut off at the thighs and shoulders, the head thrown back and the mouth open. A javelin thrower, Rita thought. But now, without the gesture that defined him, he was focused somewhere else. His washboard belly and chiseled pecs were a shade too geometric, but the curve of his neck sent up a flow of something individual in his face. He looked as if the sculptor had caught him at the pitch of love. Rita turned around. The other statue was a woman who must have been made in Paris a hundred years ago. Rather, it was a woman's head and pretty arms coming out of a white marble statue of a dress, pleated in a hundred folds. It wasn't awful, but it was garden party art that ought to be surrounded by ferns, whereas the Roman athlete sent a chill up Rita's back. She knew already how the booty was going to divide up all through the room: sentimental junk on the one hand, the holy stuff on the other. About fifty-fifty. And Varda probably paid about the same for either kind.

She could see now boxes and crates and cabinets, a bookcase lined in leather-bound editions, and even a trunk ample enough for a body. The room itself was about fourteen-by-twenty. Rita had lived for years in a studio apartment that was roughly the same shape, with roughly the same amount of natural light. As she steered through to the back, she lit up along the farthest wall a little impromptu sitting area. A pair of tall, priestly Italian chairs and a twenties silk divan on a fabulous Persian carpet. An ivory-inlaid table covered with trinkets and costly playthings. And a cherry desk and chair where they might have signed the Declaration. Rita picked up from the desk top a book like a diary, but it was nothing personal. It proved to be a catalogue of every piece and every price in the collection. Then a column for the date it was acquired. And the final column gave the name of the museum. Rita looked up to think it over and stared into the middle of a thousand-flowers tapestry hanging on the wall. There was only one explanation, she thought, and she saw it dance across a page in an inch-high headline.