The Gold Diggers (48 page)

“It's amazing, isn't it,” Peter said, “how people get all their power together?You'd never know how far Varda got from the shit he left behind. A juggler's gear, for Christ's sake, and a crate of second-rate silents—it all seems so puny.” He didn't see that both of the others were somewhere else, overwhelmed by the shaking image on the bedroom wall. The fragmentary evidence of Varda's life struck him with how little a man ended up with. Not a typical feeling at all for someone who measured the world by clutter. But somehow it called up his deepest image, of Czarist Russia stripped of estates. It was as if someone had started to play the balalaika. “If we'd never found the room in the hill,” he said, floored by the irony, “there would have been nothing to him. Nothing at all.”

Rita and Nick nodded agreement. They didn't want to say how jarred they felt, since each believed he was the only one knocked over. They'd worked hard at not seeming extreme for weeks. It was a point of pride that things had gone back to being the same as ever. And acting so had made it so. They're looking right at it, but they don't see it, Nick told himself. And Rita thought, Even Peter doesn't know me well enough to know that's who I always wanted to be, without ever knowing
exactly
who. If she could only have looked like that, Rita thought, she would never have had to waste a minute on herself. She would have been through the wall before she was twenty.

Frances Dean had about her a gaunt sort of flapper look—smoldering, weary, surrendered. And whether it was the dope or just an attitude she was born with, she seemed to maintain complete indifference toward her bruised and sullen beauty. She wouldn't have known what a mirror was for. She might with a tilt of her head have acknowledged a kindred spirit, but women like her didn't talk to women like her. She waited in the garden for the man who looked like Sam. The furtive glances she gave the camera seemed to imply that it caused her pain, just to be watched like that. It was the strangest play for stardom Rita had ever witnessed. As if she'd engaged the camera's power to hurt, and it sent out a beam like a laser that burned her skin. The boy was no match for her. They strolled in a circle, and she did a long speech about the flowers of her country. She touched a rose with one long finger and shook her head because there wasn't any way to say it. Every couple of seconds, every four or five, an idiot title flashed on. He was telling her he'd fallen for her madly. He didn't look it at all.

Peter had had enough. “Hey's right about one thing,” he said. “Rusty Varda is dead and buried.” He turned on one of the great terra-cotta lamps next to the bed, got up, and started to leaf through the mail on the bedside table. “She would have made a fabulous fashion model, don't you think, Rita? She's ahead of her time. That look is pure Art Deco.”

“You know,” she said, “I just realized I don't know the start of the story. Where Varda found her. You don't meet
that
type on a stool at Schwab's.” The film on the wall was paler now. The faces were nearly whited out.

“He was probably fucking her, pardon me,” Peter said, and he walked to the bathroom door, breaking the light of the film so it rippled across him. “He probably met her on the street.”

“No,” said Nick and Rita, one on top of the other, but you couldn't say which was the echo. Peter shrugged his shoulders, aware he was being outvoted two to one. He closed the bathroom door behind him, and Rita said to Nick, “Turn off the light, why don't you?”

They watched for a while in silence. It was clearly becoming a situation where nothing was going to happen. Frances kept her distance and told him they had to be true to what they'd got. She groped for the words in her strange new language. No, no, Sam cried, they had to run away. When he reached to take her in his arms, Nick and Rita could almost hear Varda talking through his megaphone, trying to pump in some feeling. Frances skipped away and put a border of rosebushes between them. She spoke a last passionate speech, flinging her arms about and calling him to honor. In the course of it, Nick and Rita found they'd developed the skill of not reading the titles at all. They might not have agreed at what point it happened, but Frances Dean had started to act up a storm.

It was hard to say what became of the language barrier. It looked as if the film had stopped pretending she couldn't speak English, and the shift could have come out comical, but she
acted
as if she'd found the words because she
had
to. When the brothers and cousins fell out of the bushes, expecting to find her in Sam's arms, she
saw
what they'd tried to do to her. She shot a single strangled look at Sam as she took the old man's arm and went away. Her eyes were full, poised at the peak like the roses. And as she turned to go, they swept across the eye of the camera, hovered there, and seemed to accuse it of the same betrayal. The final shot was Sam wringing his hands, his own life now in ruins, except he looked like he hadn't felt a thing. Frances Dean had pulled off a three-act ballet while the boy was stepping all over his feet.

“Oh, my,” Rita said, forgetting for the moment how they'd all agreed it was silly. “Couldn't you tell she loved him, too? For a minute she almost ran.”

“That boy is as bad as the kids I went to high school with,” he said, dissatisfied and edgy. “I don't understand these movies, Rita. They're all too short to have a story, so they just set up these comic-strip plots, like a Punch and Judy show. But then they try to act them as if they're
Hamlet
. They can't have it both ways.”

“Wasn't that a story?” she asked impatiently. “The story was what she was feeling, wasn't it?” Why was she defending Varda's work? She was only going to get melancholy if she started to care in such detail. She'd be holding back tears by the time the press was seated. “It isn't in
words
. It's all states of mind.”

“They were never lovers, were they?”

“Who?”

“Varda and Frances Dean.”

“No,” she said, remembering back when Hey first told her, how instead they were just like brother and sister, as if that were a better arrangement all the way around. The next film had already started, meanwhile. A fancy Park Avenue apartment. Swells in evening clothes. Rita didn't catch the title, and she paid no attention to the setup. She just waited for Frances Dean. And as no Sam had yet appeared, Nick was as free as she was to go on talking. They looked straight ahead at the sepia glow on the wall, each of them primed for a single entrance, and they lounged against the hill of pillows Peter stacked on every bed he put his hand to.

“One thing I don't understand,” she said. “Why did you come home early that afternoon?” Please don't say, “What afternoon?” she thought, though she hadn't mentioned it in weeks, and though anyone might have been excused for thinking they were in the middle of something else just now. But he caught on right away. And he didn't seem to mind.

“It was about the car,” he said, and it crossed her mind that back in New York nothing would
ever
be about a car. “I thought you might have had second thoughts, getting a gift that big.”

“Should I have? You mean, it makes me something of a kept woman. A man slips me the key to a sports car, and who knows where it might lead?” It struck her funny, and she rocked in the pillows and laughed so lightly that all sorts of things they might have talked out no longer required it. Just then, meanwhile, Frances Dean took her entrance down a staircase, stopping to light a cigarette halfway down, and Rita suddenly felt terrific, as if she and Frances both were traveling first cabin for once, at least for the course of an evening. It was as if they'd have the most wonderful things to tell each other later, when at last they'd get back to the room they shared. I ought to wear silk more often, Rita decided. And incidentally, she hadn't been to a single movie in all this time in LA, not until now, and she thought she ought to go more. “To be honest, Nick, I never gave it a thought. It was just an MG that dropped out of the sky. But I'm awfully glad you started to worry. You were our last chance.”

It was a Noel Coward play up on the screen, twenty years before its time, except it was silent, and this one Rusty Varda wrote. To miss the setup, Rita thought, you had to want to miss it. Frances Dean was a famous something—actress, probably—and she expected to be center-stage from the moment she came on. Sam was her opposite number, a famous something else, and they saw each other across the room, did double takes, and got ready for battle. It was a comedy of the old school, where the people fell in love while under fire. And if Frances Dean in
A Test of Faith
had seemed suited only to heavy drama, the maid of sorrows, she cavorted here and told a hundred visual jokes just walking about, with quicksilver timing, one right after the other. Garbo laughs, Rita thought.

“While we're at it,” Nick said airily, making his move with his eyes closed, “you can tell me how you found us.” In the mine was what he meant. It was a tribute to how well they'd gotten over everything that she hadn't even found it odd that he'd never asked. She hadn't really done much, after all. She'd been the least tested by physical pain, so she wasn't a hero, or by loss, so she wasn't alone. She'd picked up Peter, naked on the ranch road, and driven back down to the mine and gone in and after a while come out with Nick. All she'd done was drive home two naked men.

“Peter showed me,” she said, but totally uninterested.

“How did you know to come to the ranch?”

Varda's movie had altogether too much talk, which made it a mess to watch because it had to have too many titles. Sam and Frances were dancing with partners chosen to make each other jealous. They showed off their fancy footwork and then made as if to get carnal, but all the while keeping the beat to a fox-trot. She's a hell of a hoofer, too, Rita thought, vindicated somehow by the fact that the tragedy of Frances Dean was total. It was one thing if she fell apart and was just another pretty face, but it was too terrible to bear if she could have been great. She and Sam found themselves at last on the terrace to have it out, and it was strange to watch them flirting just ten minutes after the scene among the roses. Rita didn't catch it that the man with Sam's face wasn't the same as his counterpart in the other film. She thought the two actors must be a kind of team, like the Lunts. Frances strutted around Sam in a circle and laid out an ultimatum. Then it was his turn, and he poked and poked his finger at her till he backed her up against the wall. He did a better job of being in love, Rita thought, than he'd done in the old man's garden.

“Well,” she said a bit sheepishly, turning to Nick, “I sort of went through all your things.”

“What things?”

“Your desk, your dresser, your pockets—everything in the house,” she admitted with a shrug, trying to simplify it some. “I'm very good at it, really, because I have this basically sneaky nature. It only took me twenty minutes, and I'd had a look at everything you own. You'd never have guessed. I always put things back the way they were as I go along.” She seemed to feel better with it out on the table. She may have come across as less of a hero than she was in fact, but that was all to the good. She was keeping both feet on the ground in this. And then Nick started to laugh. Then they both did. It took care of much of the rest of what was too hard to put into words.

“So what was the clue?You found the deed to the ranch?”

She shook her head. “I came up against a dead end. I could feel it in my fingers, like they were almost going numb. So I sat on the floor of your closet and started to cry. Hard.” She could see back to two things at once, down on the floor in two closets—the night she tripped and hit the hollow door and the day she almost lost the trail. It was as if she had to do everything twice before she could see herself plain. “See, I
knew
it was a mine. But nothing seemed to lead me to one, so I gave up. Which sometimes is just what you have to do,” she said, so gently she seemed to forgive herself all manner of sins, “because it wasn't till right then that I saw.”

“Saw what?”

“Peter's paintings. That's just where they got put away—on the floor against the wall, behind the clothes. I could see maybe three or four at once. All these pictures of the hills around the bunkhouse. So then I knew. All had to do was call your office and find out where it was.” She held up her palms as if to say there was nothing else up her sleeves. It might not be much of a story, but there it was. She wasn't expecting a medal.

“Does Peter know that?” Nick asked. It delighted him, he realized, just to hear the details of how the day turned out for someone else. There must be millions of things he didn't know yet, and now he wanted them all.

“I don't miss much, you can be damned sure of that,” Peter said as he opened the door and came back into the bedroom. “I can't believe you're still doing this grim little retrospective. You know, they'll be here in an hour. What'd I miss?”

“Among other things,” Rita said teasingly, “the resolution of
A Test of Faith
. She passes the test, you'll be glad to know. And just now I was telling Nick what a great painter you turned out to be. But you probably know that already, after last night.”

“Is that what last night was trying to tell me? I could have sworn it was saying enough is enough.”

“We were really talking about the day it all happened,” Nick said simply.

“I know. I listened.” He looked from one to the other, disarmingly open and full of contrition. “What can I tell you? I have this basically sneaky nature.”

When they all began to laugh at once, they each drank in the faces of the others. Though they looked to the naked eye as glad as they did in the picture snapped on their very first evening together, it was better than back to normal now. It's a happy ending, Rita thought, and then she thought, Of course, it's only temporary. But she didn't like it any less for being so. They didn't need more than a moment's rest, at least for now, and besides, there must be more where that one came from. For now they laughed till they'd forgotten why, till they laughed at so much laughing. Peter dropped to his knees at the foot of the bed, weak with it. Nick buried his head in the pillows and shrieked. When Rita's eyes, brimming with tears, alighted by chance on the film, the penthouse and cocktails had vanished, bumped by a western. The good guys chased the bad guys and threw up a lot of dust. So the kiss at the end of the comedy went right by them, but it didn't matter. Rita knew now that Frances Dean was like a mirror, and Rita would have to look into it more, to see how she looked, but not right now. She looked all right.