The Gold Diggers (6 page)

In an hour it was over, and Peter had fled. The final shouting match got out of hand, the last recriminations animal and infantile—“Pig!” from the old prince, “Donkey!” from the boy. Alexander Kirkov had a sinking spell. He realized that Peter had gone beyond the need to justify or even win, and the argument as old as the wind on the Steppes, of who owed what to whom and who was to blame for the argument, wasn't going to take place in Brooklyn Heights. Alexander Kirkov needed to shout good sense at his loved ones because the shouting, he thought, kept it basic. The quiet in the heavily rugged apartment deepened into evening, and the prince skipped his dinner and ate a whole rice pudding—cried into it, really, and ate it as bitter herbs, because it was so cruelly humble. Cried for the whole hundred and fifteen miles on the Black Sea. And the Kirkov sapphires.

They were sewn into his pillow, five of them in graduated sizes from a pea to a kidney bean, so blue they were almost black. They were given to him in Paris when he got out of the hospital, by the cousin who gave him the keys to his Swiss accounts. The remnants of the Kirkov family who had made it to France after the revolution had grouped and voted to turn over the stones to Alexander Kirkov because he was the most highly titled. The cousin had smuggled them out of Russia by swallowing them. He was on foot for two weeks dressed as a peddler, stopped and searched a couple of times a day, and methodically every morning he did his business in the bushes by the side of the road. He dug the sapphires out of the shit and boiled them in a tin next to the tin where his tea water cooked. And then ate them again like vitamins, which in a way they were, because they kept him going. He had prized them himself out of a choker given to his wife—shot dead by revolutionaries with her baby in her arms—by the Empress Alexandra herself, as a memento of a trip through the fjords on the royal yacht
Standart
.

Alexander Kirkov received the sapphires gravely and brought them to America. During most of the transatlantic voyage, he was so nervous for their safety that he held them tight in his hand. He walked the decks with his fist balled up, as if he had taken a war wound somewhere in his arm and was clenching against the pain. Ever since, he would lie down in bed at night and feel for the sapphires through the feathers in his pillow, where they were wrapped in a square of dove gray velvet. He went to sleep with his head exactly over them. He had never even shown them to his wife, since they had come to represent to him the Kirkov blood itself, the stuff of the male line.

Then his own son broke his heart and didn't deserve them. Peter was the only one who had a right, even if his mother had thrown away the Kirkov name when she married a fool named Gilmore. Alexander Kirkov always planned to hand them over to Peter as he lay near death. Over the years, he polished up a speech full of pearls that gleamed, when he thought of it, like beads of caviar. But the night Peter left, he moaned on his bed because it wasn't going to happen as he'd always wished. He pounded the pillow with his fist until he was panting. He hid his face in it and gripped it as if he would tear it in two. The sapphires worked their way out of the velvet pouch and got buried among the feathers. Somewhere, the empire bided its time, but the Kirkov line was done.

“How hot is it? Can you see?”

“Ninety-eight.”

“That's not hot enough,” Nick said. “And besides, I can still see you.”

Nick and Peter usually made an appointment to meet in the steam room off their bedroom. Originally, they were being practical—no point in bringing the steam up twice. Lately, though, they were both so busy working that they made the arrangement to assure they would both get home at the same time now and then. They didn't say so, but each had a troubled vision of the other sitting in the gathering fog all alone, and it was insupportable. Not the same as coming home and finding someone has gone ahead with dinner or left for the party already. More like forgetting someone waiting in a restaurant, all dressed up, shrugging off the look of being left in the lurch. Yet the steam room was only as intimate as they wanted to make it, in that way not unlike the bed in the next room. They were just as happy sitting on opposite benches, heads bent and breathing eucalyptus oil, as they were talking and giving each other a rubdown. But the place had a peculiar intensity, maybe because they were both naked, their voices filling the room, and the act of sweating loosened the tongue like fever. In their case, it happened that they first met in a steam room long ago, or, rather, they sucked each other off and met when they stepped out afterward into the pest-ridden corridor. This was in the baths on Hollywood Boulevard, over near Western Avenue. Nobody went there anymore, but for half a year it was the thousand and one nights.

“It doesn't matter, Nick,” Peter said, moving back through the clouds to where Nick sat. “I'll get Hey to call the steam man and raise the pressure. Let me do your head.”

Nick leaned forward and hung his head down. As Peter stood over him and gripped his scalp and began to knead it, Nick reached up instinctively and took hold of Peter's thighs. Through the steam, it looked like something carnal going on, but the hold that each of them had on the other was classic as a wrestler's and just as cool. They stood still sometimes, Nick had come to think, in a world of ancient games and dances where sex had not yet taken place. Close up, one might have even called them innocent, except the innocent aren't conscious of what they do with their hands, and Nick and Peter were. The two of them
sought
consciousness in moments like these. As Nick's head gave in to Peter's rhythm, lolling and swaying, Peter had the feeling that he held Nick entirely in his hands. He knew what he would do for Nick and also what he didn't have to do. Peter liked the difficulty of the two of them, and he didn't mind the constant test of limits. As far as love went, he would have said, it was innocence that was a kind of sin.

“Did you take a look at the ranch?” he asked, and wasn't prepared for the tightening of the cords in the neck. He'd meant to be innocuous. What if the ranch was just a fiction? he wondered. Nick must have spent the day with the man who was tying him in knots, whoever that might be. They couldn't talk about it yet.

“Yes. This afternoon. I love it, Peter. It's like the middle of Montana or something.”

“Are you buying it or selling it?” The ranch was real enough, it seemed. It must have been that Nick took the new man there with him.

“Both. I want to get it now and wait for a big buyer. Do you want to go into it with me?”

Peter lifted Nick's head and looked down at his face. He wiped the sweat off Nick's forehead and out of his eyes with the back of his hand, as if he could physically clear the air between them. Nick was dark and tough from a day in the sun. Cowboys, Peter knew, were his fiercest daydream.

“You must be thinking of someone else,” he said ironically. “I don't like the West, remember? I'm the one who wants things civilized.”

“You don't even have to see it, Peter,” he said, curiously enthusiastic. “I mean as an investment.”

“My money's all tied up,” Peter said, letting Nick go and bringing up his hands to wipe his own face. He breathed in the smell of Nick's gypsy hair. A sorrow came over him because he was suddenly countering the wall Nick had thrown up with a wall of his own. Let's not talk about money, he thought. There were truckloads of property between them already, and not enough insurance, philosophically speaking. Lately, they did not seem able to decide together what it was they were trying to buy. The truth was, Peter just didn't have the time. But it probably seemed to Nick that if Peter's money was tied up, it was roped around with impossible projects. He was putting everything in his savings account, as if he were trying to bankroll a Russian palace and needed every penny. Nick thought they
had
to talk money because they had just moved into yet another new financial bracket, and they couldn't stay where they were, even if they'd wanted to. Meanwhile, the money ought to be a way to bring them together, to make certain bets and take risks as crazy as the two of them. But Peter knew what he sounded like just now. Threatened, as if the money had started to separate them. He didn't believe it, but he didn't know how to say so. Here, too, he didn't have the time.

“What are we going to do about Rita?” he said out of nowhere.

“Does something need to be done?” Nick asked mildly, going with the drift. “She seems terrific. Even Hey's in love with her. Isn't she good at the job?”

“She's fine.” Peter hadn't told him yet about going into art, and he didn't know why. “I mean men.”

“Are you so sure she's interested?” Nick said.

What had gone wrong, he wondered, in what he'd said about the ranch? Ever since this afternoon with Sam, he'd wanted to make Peter part of the desert territory he had happened on. He was too much off balance, dazed by the heat that he and Sam threw off. They'd sat on a fence and watched an old chestnut horse doze above a water trough. They drove the pickup, sliding in and out of wheel ruts, up a wagon trail to the top of a high hill, where the spread of the land was as far as they could see. Barbed wire crisscrossed in the near distance, running in lines between Nick's and the neighbors' boundaries, but Nick didn't care what was his and what wasn't. If he bought this place, he was doing it to get a ticket to all that space, whomever it belonged to.

And wherever they went, he and Sam were turning on more and more, but making no move until they couldn't hold it any longer. It happened in the bunkhouse, on a wooden bed with a stack of horse blankets for a mattress. They pulled their pants down around their boots and did it with their clothes on. He'd gone too far, Nick thought, and here he didn't mean sex. If only he could bring Peter into it. But he knew he'd picked the very place Peter had no use for. Somehow, he began to see, he was engineering things in such a way that he would end up unable to say what he wanted. Already he was hard put to talk to Sam or Peter about anything important because what was important now about each was the other. He did what he could to be with Peter now. But he might as well be all alone if Peter and Sam were going to cancel one another out.

“I know Rita better than you,” Peter said. It was one thing to find themselves at cross-purposes, Nick thought, but Peter was getting ornery. “Do we know anyone?”

“How about Amos?”

“
Amos
?” Peter laughed and sat back on the opposite bench. It must have gotten hotter because Nick couldn't see him now. “He only does it with himself. He can't even do it in front of a mirror, in case the other person looks like he wants something.”

“But he's nice.”

“Nice is not enough. Nice doesn't fuck.”

“If I were you,” Nick said after a moment when the pipes knocked as if someone were hammering them, “I'd wait until Rita asks.”

“But you're not, right?” Peter snapped. Nick was not Peter, particularly in the timing of moral appointments. Peter shook his head benignly, not about to be trapped in Nick's system of cautions. And the gesture got through, even if, in the steam, it didn't register to the eye. Suddenly they were sitting in silence—actually, in something of a hiss, like the sound of a tropical rain. They would have called this occasion neither a fight nor a thin slice of the human condition, though they knew there was a white noise to which the missed connections led. They had learned at last, by way of each other, that the line in the liquor store, the misdelivered mail, and the fatal seating at a party were in the nature of things, pure and simple. They were alert for ways to love each other whenever they could. But they didn't expect, just because they were together, that a sort of order was restored. Peter was Nick's reality principle, Nick Peter's, but it didn't mean they could abandon themselves to expectations. The desultory talk in the steam doesn't
have
to be harmless, and the world doesn't go without saying. They let themselves bicker, if they had to, or come to no conclusion. They ran down sometimes like clockwork, right in the middle of something.

After several minutes passed, Nick made his way across to Peter's bench and straddled his legs where they stretched out in front of him. Peter was slumped like an unstrung puppet. Nick squeezed Peter's thighs between his knees for no special reason, just to make contact. After the ranch, he was finished with desire for the time being, and his cock ached dully, like the root of a tooth. He leaned on the wet tiled wall against his elbows and buried his head in his hands. When he sagged forward sleepily, his belly brushed Peter's face. Peter slowly shook his head against the hair around Nick's navel, as if to wipe the sweat away. It was abstractedness that made their motions those of sleep instead of love. The sweating and the heavy air had slowed them down to a degree below passion. They beached against each other, their muscles full of cotton. They were so close that a third person coming in wouldn't have been able to tell from across the room that it was two people here and not one. It was funny. They twined about each other because the steam made them punch-drunk, and they got closer than they sometimes did when they tried to.

“Oh, Nick,” Peter said, panting in the heat and giving up, “if I don't take a cold shower now, I won't be able to go out tonight.”

“I don't want to go out,” Nick said, very groggy, as if he'd gone nine rounds already.

“It's Friday.” As if to say Friday was a law, bigger than both of them. Peter slid out from under him, touched him at random with both hands, and padded off. They had a dozen invitations between them that had accumulated during the week, and they hadn't even pooled them yet. A possible route would reveal itself when they did—two or three parties in the same neighborhood, or on a straight line to Studio One by midnight, where they could dance until it closed. Play was work on Friday night. By Saturday night it was a profession.