The Gold Diggers (2 page)

At least Sam was waiting at the café. He hadn't wanted to come, and he'd warned Nick that he didn't see anyone three times. It was forty dollars the first time and went up to sixty the second, but more and more money didn't make the third time worth it. Sam said he wouldn't need anything steady until he was twenty-eight or nine, and he was willing to make less now to stay unattached. He sat at an outdoor table, leaning back in his chair against the low stone wall, denim shirt open all the way to his waist and his face turned up to the feeble winter sun. His hair was black like Nick's, and his body was slim and taut, no bulk to his muscles because he moved like a runner. He always seemed about to leap away, even now, balanced on the chair's back legs and lost in the stars. It was as if he had enemies that preyed on more than him, that preyed on all his kind starting back in the caves, and they wanted him removed, but not for personal reasons. It was as if he didn't know who they were until they sprang. He was twenty-five, so twenty-eight was still far off, at an impossible remove.

Nick didn't know where to start. Until he got there, he hadn't really believed Sam was going to show up. Then he was afraid he'd waste the whole time convincing Sam to see him again. Why am I doing this, he thought as he walked up to the table, and he realized the question came up only when they were together. The rest of the time in the last two weeks, all he thought about was being in bed with Sam. He felt the knot in his stomach lift as he let go and pulled away from the shore. He knew he wouldn't have a moment to think until it was over. And he wished he weren't wearing a suit. He was afraid it made him look like a fool.

“They say this beach is littered with kids who want to be stars,” he said, and sat down. “I wonder where they are today.”

“Hey, coach,” Sam said, stretching his arms in a yawn and rocking forward to face Nick at the table. “Maybe they all went home to Iowa. Besides, this isn't the beach anymore. The beach is up in Santa Monica.”

Nick looked over Sam's shoulder at the wide lawn fronting the beach, where someone was flying a kite and a woman walked her dogs. There was not enough sun for much else, and the ocean was hidden in haze. Sam meant State, the gay beach. But the beach at Venice, because he had known it all his life, was for Nick the true point where the city met the Pacific. From the café terrace on a clear day, he could see north to the range of the Malibu highlands, blue above the blue water. And the odd stucco houses and cast-iron arcades of Venice still moved him with their waterfront gentility and foreign airs. Rust streaked the peeling pastel walls, and the new Bohemians had painted some houses burgundy red and electric green. But something had lasted here. All up and down the front, the wooden, parasol-roofed pavilions marked the course of the promenade. On nice days, it was still the perfect place to walk. Nick used to coax Peter to come in the middle of a workday, but Peter didn't want any part of Venice. Down on its luck. No money.

“My mother and father rented a place here every summer. For just two weeks. I used to think about it all year.”

“That was in the forties, right?” Sam asked a bit tightly, as if Nick were in his forties, too.

“I was eight in 1950. It was more in the fifties.”

Sam nodded. He wasn't very interested. Because the café wasn't open, they had nothing like coffee to turn to and no one other than themselves to watch. It was too late now to move somewhere else. Irrationally, though he knew Sam was going to care less and less, Nick felt he had to keep defending the old Venice. It had been years since he'd thrown in his lot with someone who always made him say the wrong thing. He knew he was going to ruin everything, and he went right ahead.

“My first love was a lifeguard in Venice. I must have been ten, and he was about your age. He had hunky shoulders and a hairy chest, and I'd sit for hours and watch him. He'd be high up in his chair, putting on oil and rubbing it in. It was a one-way thing—he didn't know—but I was so happy I could hardly breathe. Otherwise, I didn't do anything but go in the water. I was in the water all day.”

“Do you live with someone?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” Nick said, as if he hadn't been interrupted. Perhaps he hadn't been.

“I thought so. Is he older?”

“No. We're both thirty-five. Why?”

“You're like hustlers I've met who've settled down with someone,” he said, then shrugged because Nick didn't prove the point. “Usually they pick some old queen.”

Nick, and it was not like him, had to pretend not to be wounded. Sam talked about hustling the way everyone else in LA talked about work, as if the queer course of life and all the human ironies were just like the ones that went through the office. It wasn't that Nick questioned the notion that hustling was an image of life at large. Of course it was. But he didn't, like Sam, get all cozy inside about the noble solitary work that whores pursued. Sam seemed to think he was something like Thoreau, except he did it in bed. Well, all right, but Nick didn't want to be compared. He'd known the ones who ended up in silvery Ferraris too. They lived in Beverly Hills, the summer in Laguna, with gin-and-ice set designers, kept like human poodles. But he also saw others on the street, crow's-feet and too much tan, a thousand days of T-shirts and baby blue Levi's, who'd done it too long. Nick didn't think it was pretty either way. So he knew how little time Sam had.

“Have you ever been to the real Venice?”

“No,” Sam said, still an edge on his voice—he would have gone there if he'd wanted to. “I'm not into Europe. I want to see Hawaii first.”

“The reason I ask,” Nick went on, but storing the remark about Hawaii, glad to have a thing they might do someday, “is when
I
went there, I'd had twenty-five years of seeing
this
as the real one. I fell in love with Venice, but the name never fit.”

“I don't want to go to bed with you today, Nick.”

“That's okay,” he said, a second's glance into the boy's gray eyes. “Don't be so tense.”

“Well, I don't know why we're here. I ought to be working now, or else I'll have to work all night. I don't like to just talk.”

Nick suspected as much. They couldn't talk yet. He saw what he kept wishing for in men like Sam. Nick begged to be listened to in a particular way, because he was the only one he knew who was so enchanted by the destiny of things. Where other men were scared, or just confused, he noticed the course of things—the price drift from a hundred and fifteen to a hundred and ninety, the routing of the roads to plug into the freeways, the state of the royal palms along the street by his office. He felt an arc in almost everything he met, could tell where it would lead in the end, whether he saw a Caterpillar earth machine poised in a field or a wedding party milling at the door of a church. He'd never thought he could say it well because everyone else seemed dashed by the
meanness
of fate. Nick thrilled to the world in flux. His mind ran to pattern and process. If he really talked about it, he didn't know where it might lead. What he needed, he'd always thought, was the right man to say it to.

“You know, I'm not trying to play with you,” Sam went on. “I think you're terrific, and you turn me on. But so do a lot of people.”

It didn't matter. Nick hadn't risked much on an aimless talk at an outdoor café. He had a better plan ready, just in case.

“You have the craziest idea of who you are,” he said. He could feel Sam begin to freeze up, as if the muscles were about to take over and the feelings die away. He was ready to leave. The heart was best served if you treated it as just another muscle. “I exasperate you, Sam, but you must want to hear what I have to say. Because here you are.”

“I came to tell you I'm not coming anymore.”

“I have an option on some land in the hills above Malibu. A ranch.” He spoke as if Sam hadn't; and as he did, he picked out on the lawn the figure of a woman gymnast stretching. She swung from one end of her body to the other, without a hitch. “They've just shut it down, and I want to take a ride up and look it over. You want to come?”

“Now?”

“Later in the week. Friday.” It was Monday. “It's real. They used to board horses for westerns. Some guys from Texas ran it, trail men, so it feels like a cowboy's place. Nobody's messed it up yet and made it pretty.”

“Are you a cowboy, Nick?” Sam asked him. He was gentler now, and he'd calculated in an instant that they were onto more uncharted matters. Nick, he seemed to understand, was more than a free man with money and a taste for infatuation.

“Put it this way. I've gotten more western since I've gotten gay.”

“We could poke around the bunkhouse,” Sam said. He put one hand in his shirt and massaged a muscle in his chest. “I'd need a new pair of boots.”

“Of course. How much would they set you back?”

“Two hundred. Two-fifty, maybe.”

Nick took a fold of bills out of his pocket and peeled off three hundreds and laid them on the table. He thought: I'm not like this at all. And then wasn't sure which role he was disavowing. It wasn't the money. The act of making payment caused him no dislocation, because he'd had it for free ninety-nine times out of a hundred; and besides, he used to be poor and so saw money as a windfall, no matter how much work he did to make it. It was more the singlemindedness of the pursuit that had him shaking his head in wonder. He'd kept his word for four years now, that nothing would get in the way of him and Peter, and he'd kept it with special care because Peter wouldn't promise. He'd never gone out of his way to go to bed with kids. They trusted sex too much, and they had a one-track mind about getting attention.

Somehow, Sam proved that Nick was never going to get over being poor and young, either one. It was nothing but the pursuit of pleasure that threw the last two weeks off kilter. It was not like love at all. The three bills lay on the table, fanned like a hand of cards; and the sun went in and out of the haze, as pale as a white-skinned melon. Nick felt the sweat in the fit of his suit. He'd be more himself, he thought, when they got to the ranch.

“I've died and gone to heaven,” Rita said, breaking into his reverie.

This was what kept happening to time. Traveling back to Sam again and again was beginning to seem like a series of seizures, amnesiac episodes in which real life gave up. Twenty minutes here, an hour there, Nick thought as he turned from the pool to face her across the terrace, and no wonder he got nothing done. In the pearl light of late afternoon, she looked, tented in her green cape and brown pants, like a stray spirit of the woods of another country. The garden around the pool didn't seem various enough for such a wildfire pair of eyes. She was a gypsy, but that was only the beginning.

“Welcome to Crook House,” Nick said. He sounded to Rita like the governess in a Gothic novel.

“What a name. Does it mean you stole it?”

“There are people in Bel-Air who'd call it stealing, but no. It's tucked into the fold between two hills. Built right in. That's why you enter down the stairs from the roof, and why you can't see it from the road. The road is above us.”

“I know. It's like coming down the rabbit hole. And then
this
,” she exclaimed as she spread her arms wide and capered up to the pool. She might have been about to burst into song, but in fact the moment struck her dumb. “This” was the whole of Los Angeles. They could see the reach of it through the trees of the dark green garden, miles of a plain with no borders but the haze. There wasn't an inch of it that didn't appear peopled and built, yet what held her immediately was the brute fact of the land. Rita's only previous fling at geography involved her perception at age four that Central Park had two sides, East and West. Yet already she knew the hills from the basin plain in LA, and she sensed that the contrasts were such that she could never go back to not knowing. Her head cleared.

“Where's the Pacific?”

“Straight out,” he said, pointing west. “You'll see it one of these days. We have it almost all the time in the winter. How's New York?”

“The same. Too damn cold.” She was sure that it was dangerous to criticize New York. New York ought to be protected. In New York, she used to protect Europe. She cooked French and bought Italian shoes and read Jane Austen. She was sure, since Europe was double the distance away now, she had no skills for this city. That is why she worried about not being beautiful. It would have been something to fall back on.

“Tell me about the house,” she said, turning things to real estate because she'd heard it was what they talked about here instead of the weather. She was standing next to Nick, and when she looked up at him, they caught each other's eye. Being who they were, they learned a great deal from the gesture. He looks too beautiful to look so sad, she thought. His hair was dark and covered his head with light, thick curls. He had a wide mustache and great, rocky features. He didn't look gay in the least, she thought, mentally slapping her hand.

“It's Spanish, sort of. It was built for Rusty Varda in 1920.” Then, because she didn't make the connection, he started at the beginning. “He was a Hollywood producer in the teens and twenties. Silents. You've never seen any of them. They were lousy. He got bought out by better people. But in his heyday, every time he finished a movie he acquired another hundred acres in Los Angeles County. This was the desert up here when he came. So we live in a monument, if you can have a monument to just plain money.”

“If there's enough of it, you can,” she said. “J.P. Morgan's house in New York is kept like a cathedral. I think it even has nuns.”

“Do you want to change for the party?”

“You mean my clothes? No. This is what I'd wear if I didn't think about it, and I don't want to think about everything. So what happened to Rusty Varda?”