The Gold Diggers (46 page)

It wasn't just one explosion, in fact, but one right after another, as if the mine and the mountain had only needed a push to pull the world to bits on their own. Nick and Rita, side by side on the floor, were sprayed with pebbles and then with stones. The light was gone. But Nick was as stubborn as ever. He thought of Sam until the roof was coming down in boulders. He wouldn't go back down, but he stared in the direction of the tunnel opening, waiting for Sam to be safe. He
couldn't
be dead, or else what was the point of the pain Nick had given him? Dying wasn't required.

Rita had to take his hand and drag him up and lead him away through the thickening dust and acid smoke. They came out on the ledge at the mouth of the mine, where the dark was light compared with the dark inside. Then the ledge broke off. They slid down with it as if it were an elevator, fifteen or twenty feet. Then even the noise and dust were behind them. The only thing left was the cold night air, and it stung all over, as if he'd landed on a planet where the air could kill. And he knew as he slumped against Rita, blacking out into a third dark deeper than the mine and the night, that everything else would be good as new, but he'd never be warm again.

10

Oh, you look all right, Rita said to herself, peering around at all the Ritas in the three-way mirror. She could hardly help but look all right, since if she squinted she could check out in the flesh page 191 of the April
Vogue
. The little nothing of a peach silk dress was two hundred eighty dollars at Magnin's and she hadn't even been able to wear it the night before to Peter's opening, which was far too fancy for afternoon clothes. And anyway, since two-eighty wouldn't have bought the sleeves of the things that turned up at a show on Rodeo Drive, Rita had sensibly given up any thought of trying to compete. She'd thrown on her old faithful, white over green. She steered clear of mirrors and faded neatly into the woodwork. But she didn't really mind. It was Peter's night last night, though he hadn't wanted a bit of it. They'd practically had to tie him into his tux to get him to go. Rita would have begged off herself, but Nick couldn't go because he couldn't stand up for more than half an hour at a time, even now. Rita went so Peter would have a body to leave with. She was glad to do it. She stood apart while they clustered about him. She toted up the “SOLD” stickers every time they were slapped on a frame. In two hours, eight paintings came to forty-four thousand. She took the littlest sips of champagne and thought about today and the peach silk dress. Because today was all hers.

Well, of course it was their day, too, Peter's and Nick's and Hey's. They'd all be right there with her. But somebody had to do the talking, and Rita was whom they chose, four to nothing. She slipped on a pair of pumps and balled up the clothes she'd just taken off. Then she took a look around, to make sure there were no stray slippers or panty hose lying about. But there were only pots and pots of orchids—everywhere. Hanging off the walls and tiered on a couple of stone benches Peter brought up from the shop. She wondered when she'd agreed to orchids in the closet. Lighted by a row of pin spots in the ceiling, they were a perfect fragment of inaccessible forest, dusky and foreign, just as Peter promised. But this morning they also seemed a trifle overdone to Rita. Peter said if you didn't give the art press a little swank at every turn, they'd be bored before you got them where you wanted them. That, and keep their drinks full to the brim. This was the Old Masters division of the art press. They were used to dealing with the sort of rich who made the simply rich crazy with envy.

So her bedroom, because it was the pressroom, was also the bar. She agreed with Peter that it made it more of a drama to bring them in here right away. Brief them first in Frances Dean's room. Shut them in and lock the windows while they sat and wondered what came next. And then the orchids and then the treasure. Before they were done, they wouldn't settle for anything short of headlines. Rita gave it the once-over, counting the ashtrays as she passed on through, shuffling the highball glasses around as if she were racking billiard balls. Peter had done it up like a VIP lounge at the UN. Beige and wool upholstery and Audubon prints. Only the bed was tarted up some—French linen sheets, Star of Bethlehem quilt, as if who would ever want to get up—because Rita would start with the story of Frances Dean, the sleeping beauty, to put them all in the mood. She'd spent the last few nights herself on the opium bed in the living room, to keep out of Peter's way. Now that they were going public, she couldn't any longer cling to a notion as individual as her own room. She was only an overnight guest again. She realized without any rancor, in fact, that after today she'd have to be finding a place to move to. Crook House was finished with her.

She heard a noise like a body falling and ducked her head out into the hall to see. It was Hey. He'd dropped the ice bucket, and now he was on his hands and knees, furiously picking up cubes of ice like a farmer pulling weeds. But with only one hand—the other arm was still in a sling. “They'll never know,” he sang out gaily, as if he'd planned it this way all along. “You know they'll never know. It's part of the peck of dirt they have to eat, like anybody else.”

“I think this crowd eats dirt like peanuts,” Rita said. She stooped to help, glad to have something to do as the morning inched along. She was the only one used to Hey's new mood. Nick and Peter thought he was having hysterics. He broke most things he put his hand to. The socks were all mismatched, and the shirts unironed. The food arrived at the table, Peter said, looking as if it had weathered a 7.0 on the Richter scale between the kitchen and the dining room. And nobody could ever
find
anything, once Hey put it away. But they let it pass. They'd all gone out of their way with one another in the month since the Monday in March. In time, they told each other, Hey would be back on his feet. Time was the key all around.

“Nick wants you.”

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs,” he said, blowing on his fingers to warm them up. “I swear to God, he's been locked in his closet since right after breakfast. I think he thinks he's back in the mine.” He meant to be darkly funny, as if Nick were a combat soldier who still woke up years later in the middle of a bloody battle.

Could they really start to laugh about it now? Rita wondered. What if one of them got offended? “You think it's ghosts?” she asked him lightly. “Maybe something tripped you.” And she liked the feel of it. Why not funny? Survivors told the roughest jokes to other survivors, not to the world at large. They talked cripple to cripple sometimes, and the jokes were the sort an outsider couldn't handle. It was better than talking around it. Or acting as if it were over.

“Not anymore. They've all gone back to their graves,” he said. They stood up and took the handle of the bucket between them like Jack and Jill. He was so excited about telling her the rest that he almost let it slip again, getting it up on the bar. He was giddy, Rita thought, but not upset. The only one among them overjoyed that Sam was dead. It seemed to set him free. “I didn't tell you,” he said, “but Linda went away the minute I was shot. I could
feel
it, Rita. She pulled up her skirts and parted the curtain and let it fall.”

“Did the bullet hit her, too?” She realized Hey had been waiting all along for a sign that he could talk. She and Peter had followed Nick's lead in not revealing what they'd felt when Sam laid siege to Crook House. They'd discussed it, of course, all four, and finally decided, three to one, not to report it to anyone. They'd been over the course of the day with Sam a hundred times—that is, the plot of it. They needed to know what it all meant before they could close off the access routes. But no feelings, please.

“Of course not,” he said. “But you see, when a lost soul comes back, it gets inside people who don't have anything going. Somebody
boring
is what they like. And a well-kept house, because they're trying to relax.” Then he paused abruptly as if to listen, in case the souls in Limbo thought he was misrepresenting the fix they were in. He may have gotten free of the spell he was under, but the superstition had a long way yet to go. “Being shot was just what I needed. But I bet it set Linda back ten years.”

“I thought you liked having her around,” Rita said. “I thought it was part of your religion.”

Hey shrugged. “It was all right for a while, I guess. It was
different
,” he said, putting out his free hand to rearrange the highball glasses. Two of them clicked together and cracked, and he picked them up to take away. “I wasn't much good at it, though. And I always thought I would be.”

“Good at what?”

“Being a
woman
,” he said crossly, as if to say why didn't she pay attention. “I thought it would be like being a ballerina. But it got so I thought about men all the time. Now that must sound
awful
. I don't mean I wanted to get
laid
all the time, or fall in love. That's not something that happens to me.” He smiled at his own remark. He seemed to count himself lucky. “But I felt—superior—you know? Men drove me crazy.”

“Women aren't so different,” she said absently. Best to keep clear, she thought, of Hey's quack theory of gender. It didn't seem any less appalling now than it did when he used too much mascara and walked around as if on tiptoe. Besides, she just caught sight of something in the carpet. She stooped to look closely, but she lost it again.

“The other ghost who's dead and buried now is Varda,” he announced portentously. He knew she'd lost all interest, but he plunged on anyway, addressing the back of her neck. “With the kid out of the way, I don't have obligations to the past anymore. The present is all the time I've got. And it's for us. You understand?”

“Us who?”

“Us
four
.”

“Oh.” Thank God for little favors. She thought he might have taken a sudden fancy to her. She was just about to stand up when she sported it. She snatched it up fast, intrigued by any treasure that went without a map. It was a little cameo done up as a dangle earring. Pretty—but whose? No woman had slept in here but Rita in all the time Peter and Nick had lived in the house. She rose and held it close to Hey, swinging it just in front of his eyes like a hypnotist. “This isn't yours, is it?” she asked. In return, he shot her his most unamused look, turned on his heel, fled the room, and marched away down the hall. “I didn't
really
think it was,” she called apologetically, but he was gone. In fact, she decided, it served him right, trying to fence them in like a gang of thieves and counterfeiters. She understood the mood he was in, all right, but she guessed she'd liked him better when he used to wince and sigh a lot. Before he got to be a hero.

She came out onto the terrace and crossed the garden to the dining room side. She looked at herself in all the French windows as she drifted by. He was a genuine hero, she had to admit, even if he'd only gotten in the way of a loaded gun. It had to do, somehow, with acting the same as ever in the face of great pain. And he meant well, of course, to think the four of them in Crook House were as clean and interlocked as astronauts. She clipped the earring on her left ear because there were no pockets in the peach dress. Her reflection in the living room windows was very faint and very real, and she didn't so much as glance at the view of the city behind her. She would never have admitted it to Hey, but she felt a little betrayed herself sometimes by so much outside world so readily in evidence. It kept calling into question the self-contained oasis they'd inhabited here for the last month. They'd all been recovering nicely, like a solicitous group of people on the down side of a bad cold. Not really bedridden. Cozy in robe and slippers and boiling up pots of herbal tea. Kind of enjoying it.

“Are you practicing what to say?”

She looked up, bewildered, to Nick's and Peter's room, where Nick was standing at the window grinning. She hadn't even noticed, but she'd stopped to stare into the glass doors to the dining room. Stood there maybe half a minute, eyes glued to her own eyes. But she didn't blush to find herself discovered, so long as it was Nick or Peter. They all bumped into each other so regularly now that it came to be something of a need, as if the spells of solitude could be risked, after all, as long as there were others about to set limits. Nick was hanging something up—a blanket, it looked like—to cover the casement. The other window was already dark. Perhaps he was feeling a bit assaulted by the view himself.

“I haven't really thought about it,” she said. “I just don't want Varda to sound like a gangster.”

Nick shook his head vigorously. “‘Gangster' is all wrong. You want him more of an outlaw.
Western
, like Jesse James. With maybe a hint of the Vanderbilts thrown in, just for class.”

“Well,” she said, dubious and vague, but committed all the same to clichés of her own, “I want him to come off as a man with a lonely vision. I have to play it by ear. Shall I come up?”

“Not yet. I'm not ready,” he said, disappearing behind the blanket as he thumbed in the last tack. “Five minutes,” he called.

What are you doing? she almost said, but decided she didn't mind waiting to see. She walked on over to the pool and, in order not to look at the whole of LA, looked at herself again in the water. Nick ought to be at work. He and Peter planned to be home just before the press arrived at one, and they'd had to promise Hey they'd have eaten lunch first. Hey had to get all the servants' work done beforehand, because the apron came off on the stroke of one, when he would be properly introduced as “Mr. Varda's longtime companion.” Hey's own phrase. “Let them make of it what they want,” he said with endless satisfaction, and Nick and Peter and Rita shrugged and let it go. As for Nick, Rita didn't need Crook House all to herself all morning. What was stranger still, she warned herself, was the notion that she should always know what Nick was about. Why
shouldn't
he spend the morning in his closet?