The Gold Diggers (51 page)

“Because she'd rather look through it for Frances Dean. Isn't that right?” he prodded her, but she wasn't about to take the bait. She seemed to have nothing more on her mind than cream of sorrel soup. “I don't honestly think you'd know what to do with her if you found her, but you're the sleuth. A detective always does the legwork for its own sake, doesn't he?—unlike a decorator, for instance.”

“Frances Dean is dead,” Nick said.

“So is Rusty Varda, but that doesn't seem to prevent us living out his life. And Rita wants to get to a very particular Frances Dean. Fresh out of Indiana. Eating her first avocado and taking a trolley out to the beach. Before she went on the needle. Aren't I right?”

“It's all some kind of an underworld, you know.” She wasn't contradicting Peter's rough analysis. It was because she agreed that she had other things to add. “Wherever you look in all of this, it's closets and boxes and caves. Like a world behind a door that no one opens, because it's in a room that looks like all the world there is. I didn't expect,” she said, “that I'd end up with something to take away with me.”

“Are you going somewhere?” Hey asked suspiciously.

“Be quiet, Hey,” said Peter. “Rita's got her own life to live. We don't own her.”

“Don't worry,” Nick said. “She'll still come and visit us.”

She took a sharp breath, intending to go on with it, but her mouth dropped open and then puckered up in a little o. She held the air in as if it were a gasp, because she saw two steps ahead to her own conclusion. Peter and Nick sat straight in their chairs and very still, full spoons frozen in midair. Hey saw his chance. The arm in the sling loomed across the table, and he snatched up all three soups before they knew what hit them. He set down a big bowl of salad in the center. They didn't move a muscle, even when he plucked the spoons one by one out of their hands. By the time he was done, Rita was ready to speak again.

“What I've been afraid of all this month—you see, I thought everything had stopped. Didn't you? All this winding down and settling of accounts,” she said, abruptly going into another pause. But they didn't appear to mind the broken train of thought. She picked an artichoke heart from the salad, and in a moment it was as if she'd started a fashion. Nick went in after the mushrooms, and Peter picked off the croutons. Not able to bear it, Hey hurried off. “Ever since that day,” she said at last, “I could tell the ground rules wouldn't be in force anymore. No more secrets. From now on, the rooms I was in would have to have windows and hundred-watt bulbs. There are only so many things that are lost. I thought they'd all been found. And then today—,” but she let it trail off before the remark was half begun. After all, they'd been through today as much as she had.

“That's what I thought, too,” Nick said, nodding slowly, “that it was over.”

Peter insisted, “But it is.”

“
It
is, if you want,” Rita was quick to agree, “but only because the stars of it are gone. The story still belongs to us.”

“But you're not Frances Dean,” he said fiercely, “no matter how much the idea appeals to you.”

“Of course not,” she scoffed. He was on the wrong track, but she was happy to risk the rest of what she'd figured out. It had only just dawned on
her
as well, so it didn't count as wisdom won at high cost. Like everything else today, it was free for the taking. “Nobody's anybody, as far as that goes. You think I mean like Hey and Linda. But don't you see, most people spend their whole lives trying to find a story that's all theirs—and they never get it. They go to the movies week after week. They read all the shit in the paperback racks. But nothing takes.” Just now, she saw, Peter was the key to it. They needed a resident skeptic terribly, and she didn't want to drive him off by seeming wacky. She'd live alone and like it if she had to, but not here. If they stuck with Crook House, they stuck together.

“Most of the regular stories,” she went on, “are simply unavailable. To people like us.
Romeo and Juliet
is not about my first time.”

“Or
Sleeping Beauty
, either,” Nick suggested. Not by way of insulting Rita, though. He finally understood the degree to which he and Rita had kept the same door unlocked—willing to leave some part of themselves unattached, till the right thing came along to tell them just how their sort ended up. Cowboys were only the barest approximation. So were Rita's Gothic girls in country houses, calling out the family curse. This whole affair, he thought, amounted to a drama he'd made a false start on a hundred times, whenever he fell into bed with a man he'd never met before. Nothing in his life had played itself all the way out before.

“I see what you mean,” Peter said, rocking back on the legs of his chair, the little box in the palm of one hand. He tapped it with a finger and got it to make a clicking sound like billiard balls. “We're aliens and spooks, and the stories they tell around the fire don't include us. Or at least not you two. I still have Rasputin and Catherine the Great and all of that in my back pocket. But anyway, I'll give you the fact that now you've got a story of your own. What do you
do
with it? Start buying art on the black market? Maybe you ought to become a junkie, Rita.”

“Or a hustler?” Nick added sarcastically, to let him know they could tell their own jokes, thank you.

“I just want to live with it a little while,” she said, dropping her napkin across her plate to signal lunch was done. Nick did the same. Then Peter. “At least until the aftershocks are over. It's like Crook House has these scraps of extra footage, all disconnected, all out of order. We're the only ones who can put them together.”

“How?” Peter asked, and not quite so suspiciously. A moment ago he would have asked why. Now he could see how richly the other two shared it, and it made him happy. And not jealous, which he'd had a turn at when Nick and Rita went too far for a week. It was the three of them she was talking about. The turmoil that blew up over Varda, Sam, and Frances Dean had paralleled the subtler lines developing between them, one with another, almost like blood ties. They'd finished up distributed into interlocking couples—Peter and Rita, Rita and Nick, Nick and Peter.

“You don't mind if I stay?” she said, glancing over the pool as if to ask it of the city. So Peter's question as to how remained unanswered. Nobody really knew.

“No, no,” they protested, both at once.

And in the silence that followed on that, they looked across the table, each of them darting his eyes back and forth between the other two, as if to gauge the relationship each was not a part of. There were no rules from here on in. As best they could, they had to live in a house whose story was over—at least as far as the world was concerned. They began to smile at the same time, but so slowly they hardly detected the change in each other—could hardly feel it, even in their own unclouded faces. Each of them sensed that he somehow completed the other two, though, with nothing to compare it to, how and why would always perhaps escape them. They were just as alone as the three lost dreamers they'd brushed against in dark and smoky passages, all this winter. The difference was, they'd come through to the end together—that is, without being hobbled or put into chains, no walls thrown up by a despot, all their luggage accounted for, and through no special talent of their own.

They heard a whirring above their heads, and the parrot dropped and lighted on the edge of the bowl. They glanced down once, all three, but not for long. They'd passed the point of being startled some time back. Hey was laid up, and the bird slipped out of the cage again and again, whenever they fed him or changed the papers. They cornered him with brooms and threw their sweaters over him. None of them said it was time, but the day came when the gate to the cage was tied wide open for good. They made him take charge of his own life. He beaked at the salad's surface now, skimming off the pumpkin seeds and shreds of mint. Then he popped up and tilted his head and said, “Machu Picchu,” though whatever it might have meant to him once, he didn't seem bent on going there now, He homed in on Crook House to eat and sleep, and the visionary gleam he used to affect when he couldn't fly free had vanished.

“Open it, Peter,” she told him.

“No, I don't think so,” he said, tossing it onto his empty plate, the decision clearly final. For a moment they could hear the stones inside rattle just like dice. “I'm going to wait.”

“Not allowed,” Nick said. “Everything's got to be out in the open.”

“Does it?” Peter asked innocently. “Well, then—I promise to have the two of you by me when the time comes. But it won't be till I'm an old man—which won't be for thousands of years. We'll sit in a row on a park bench somewhere. Then we'll all tear off the wrapping and see if it surprises us.”

“But what if it's money?” she pleaded. “What if it's a map?”

“We don't
need
money,” he said. “What we're going to need at the end is something for you two to open. When all we've got left is a box apiece of everything we wanted saved.”

“It's a deal,” Nick said. “And none of us is allowed to die in the meantime.”

Rita could see that Peter had raised his last objection. Something very Russian had finally overtaken him. All this talk to do with time, no doubt. He seemed to understand that the lion's share of his melancholy was a long way off. Nick and Rita, who had a daily quota, were a fair bet to put it all behind them in the end. They'd probably turn into pensioners full of eccentric passions. Peter would need them then, she supposed, as much as they needed him now.

“They're
here
!” Hey shrieked from deep inside the house. And they stood up fast, as if on command, ready as they'd ever be. The parrot let out a tight-lipped squawk and took off, skimming low across the water. They watched him float away downhill. When they turned back, there was a bright blue feather on Rita's plate. Without thinking, she picked it up and stooped to the box. She knew right off the drawer where the feathers were kept, and she pulled it open and dropped in the fresh one. When she stood up, she felt the peach dress fall in a perfect line. She put a hand on both their shoulders, and they walked together across the terrace. They all looked thoughtful. Actually, what they were thinking was that they got too serious sometimes. They didn't have to. All they had to do was move along and see what happened.

“I still don't understand what we've decided,” Peter said. “What are we going to
do
?”

“Nothing special,” Rita said.”

“Same as always,” Nick concurred.

They were going to live in Crook House. That was all they knew. They were all on record about their chances. It couldn't go on forever—they'd said as much—so how long, then, would be just enough to get the story straight? If it turned out they were staying on only to duck the future, time would find them out. They all knew that. They might be only kids who couldn't bear to go back to school, because the summer sky was haunted with the dreams the real world was never the equal of. But if they were right, and what they'd been through was the story, somehow, of what they were after, then for once they were in a field and not on a road that went only one way. And as long as there were three of them, they'd try to want nothing from one another but the truth. If their living together lasted six months as good as today, they'd be lucky. And they didn't promise it wouldn't be sad later on.

They were at the door leading to Rita's room when Hey burst out. “What are you doing?” he thundered at them, but he couldn't wait to hear. He spoke in a torrent. “Where's your sense of drama? I've just got them
in
there. Give it time. They're pouring drinks. I'll bring them in a tray of food.
Then
I'll call you. You wait here, okay?” They nodded. Then he looked straight at Rita and dropped his voice nearly to a whisper: “Say you're staying.”

“For a while,” she said.

“Then everything's fine. It's all going to work,” he concluded, a bit too rapturously for the three of them. They glanced away here and there and tried to look dispassionate. Hey didn't notice. He beamed at them and spun around and retreated as fast as he had come.

Still in a line, they did a swift and nicely timed about-face. They must have meant to wander in the garden, leaving well enough alone, to make a show of being on their own. But their eyes all fell on the juggler's kit. The props were scattered around the box, just where Peter and Rita had left them when the movies called them away. They all had the same idea, but Nick got to it first. He scooped up a set of three batons, striped like a barber's pole, and tossed them razzle-dazzle over his shoulder, one at a time. Peter crouched like a shortstop, caught all three, and held them high and took a bow. Rita, meanwhile, running a finger over the shelf of colored balls, decided only the green was right for the dress. They didn't talk. Their smiles went ear to ear by now, but they didn't want to jinx it. They had to get a little bit away.

Rita had two balls going and sent up the third, but they all shrugged off in a tangent and bounced away. While she rushed about retrieving them, Nick twirled a plate on the end of a stick. The trick of it came too easily, though, and he wanted both hands full. Peter had the red balls out of the fitted shelf. Nick took the yellow. They all put up two right away and began to go with the rhythm. They swayed and bobbed like snake charmers. But they had to really let go to do three, and you couldn't call it juggling till they did. They couldn't have done it alone. Having gone so far, though, none of them wanted to be odd man out. One by one, they stepped out into midair, as if off a cliff or an airplane's wing. Nick got it first, and the balls that came under his spell began to loop and go weightless. Rita went into it haltingly, but the motion took, and she danced around behind a veil of moons, an astonished look in her eyes. And finally Peter. He was surely the most reluctant, but he showed a kind of equestrian grace when he entered the inexplicable orbit whirling through his hands. For one long moment, they had all nine in the air.