Belinda (33 page)

"I don't look so innocent anymore, do I?" she asked, looking at the canvases.

"How do you mean?"

But I knew. It was in the shadows around the eyes, the subtle lines in the face. The young woman was ripe as a peach is ripe underneath the white slip, arm resting on naked knee. Even the toes looked sexual, pushed into the wrinkle of the spread. I felt a little tremor of fear. But the painter in me was ruthlessly delighted.

[28]

Four o'clock. It was getting regular. And the dream right before was getting longer.

I wasn't just examining the darkroom door anymore. I was trying to force the lock on the attic. Or was I trying to make it so nobody could get in? No, I was trying to prove that nobody could have gotten in without my knowing it. Hidden keys. Where had they been? In the spice jar on the rack in the kitchen. The one marked rosemary, that was made of white opaque glass.

One chance in a million the bastard would have found them. I counted the jars in the dream: rosemary, thyme, oregano, on and on it went. Most of them empty. One had the keys to the darkroom and the attic.

And I always locked the doors, didn't I? Always. The thieves could take the dolls, the toys, the trains, the crap. But not the paintings upstairs or the pictures in the basement.

And I had shown her the white spice jar. "Here are the spare keys. If there is ever a fire, don't use them. Call the fire department and give them the keys when they come."

"Well, I'd try to save them," she said.

"No, no. But I just want you to know where the keys are."

And she had laughed. "You're always here. When am I here that you're not here?"

Had that been true?

And when was the house empty? When we had gone to Carmel? I had locked up and double-checked. Always. Or had I? What about that last time, when she had been so anxious and we had hurried. No, I checked.

Four o'clock. I went downstairs. The old black phone was in the little room beneath the stairs. That was where you had to go to talk on it when I was a child. You had to sit at the little wicker table and hold the stem in your right hand and the earpiece in the left. And the little room smelled like phone. No smell now. Just one of those smooth white things with buttons.

I imagined myself calling California. She'd answer in that slow Texas voice. Too sophisticated to be called a drawl. I'd say, "I just want to know, how did your man get into my house? How did he find the negatives?"

AT five o'clock I was sitting in the living room when she came down. "What's happening?" she asked. "You can't sleep at all anymore?"

"Come here," I said. She sank down on the couch next to me. "When you're here with me, everything is OK," I said.

But she looked afraid. She started brushing my hair back from my face, sending little chills over me with the touch of her hand. "You're not ... worrying again."

"No ... just a little adjustment," I said. "My clock's off. It's on Pacific time ... something."

"Let's go out, go downtown. Find that coffee place on the river that stays open all night. Have breakfast down there."

"Sure. OK. We'll take the streetcar, OK?"

"Come on." She tugged my hand. "Ever miss it, the movies? Susan?"

"No. Not right now. Come on. We're going downtown. I'm going to wear you out today, then you can sleep tonight."

"I'll tell you how you can do that," I said. I put my hand inside the elastic band of her panties. My knuckles grazed her pubic lips. Immediately hot.

"Right here in the parlor?"

"Why not?" I asked. I pressed her down on the velvet pillows. The light was seeping through the lace curtains, getting caught in the baubles on the glass shade of the lamp. "Artist and Model," I whispered.

Something changed in her face. Her eyes locked. All the expression went away. Then she lowered her lids.

My heart was pounding. I felt a tightening in my belly.

She was staring at me in this cold, listless sort of way. Much much resemblance to Bonnie. So much resemblance to the last moment in Carmel, when I had told her everything, and she had broken my heart with her sadness.

"Kiss me," she said, her voice deep and beautiful. And there it was, the imploring look, so like her mother. Am I losing my mind? I am.

I had pulled her up before I could stop myself.

"What is it?" she asked. Flash of anger, red cheeks. She jerked back away from me, glaring at her arm where my fingers had left white marks in her tan. The blue of her eyes went dark, the first sun making her squint as it came through the blinds.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know. I'm sorry."

She had her mouth set in an angry way, lower lip jutting slightly. And the color pulsed in her face. Then she looked sad, hurt, as if she was going to cry. She looked desperate. "What's wrong now?"

"I'm sorry, baby darling," I said. "I'm sorry."

"Is it this house, Jeremy?" So worried. So sweet. "Is it, maybe, all the old things-"

"No, darling. I'm OK."

THAT afternoon I took her walking in the old neighborhoods. We went through the quiet shady streets of the Garden District past the fantastical Greek Revival mansions and across Magazine Street to the barren crowded Irish-German waterfront neighborhood, where my mother had been born.

I took her to see the magnificent churches built by the immigrants-Saint Alphonsus in the Romanesque style with its gorgeous paintings and stained glass windows-this built by the Irish from whom my mother had been descended. And Saint Mary's, the more delicate Gothic church with its splendid wooden statues of the saints and its soaring arches. The high narrow steeple was of curved brick, a craft now lost-this built by the Germans right across the street from the great gray facade of Saint Alphonsus.

Like treasuries, these were in the narrow treeless street, doors opening on sanctums of astonishing beauty.

I told her about the rivalry of the two groups and how the same priests had tended both churches. And once there had even been a French church on Jackson Avenue only blocks away. But that was gone before my time.

"The old parish was really dying by the time I was a boy," I explained. "There was always a sense of things passing, of the moment of high vitality being only a memory."

Yet there had been the May processions, yes, and the splendid feast days and the liturgical Latin still, and the daily masses in both churches to which you could go early in the morning and sit alone and in quiet until time for communion.

You didn't have to speak to other Catholics then. Old ladies scattered throughout the giant nave said their rosaries with lips moving in silence. Far off at the white draped altar where the flowers stood in shimmering banks amid the candles, the tiny bell tinkled in the altar boy's hand when the priest raised the host. You came and went in blessed privacy without a word uttered.

Not the way it was now with Catholics shaking hands and giving the "kiss of peace" and singing saccharine English lyrics.

We walked together back the narrow streets towards the river.

I told her about the old aunts who had died one by one throughout my boyhood. Dim memories of narrow shotgun houses, as we called them, with their rooms opening one upon another, and the oilcloth on the kitchen table, and cabbage and ham cooking in a big pot. A small painted plaster holy water fount fixed to the doorframe. You dipped your fingers and made the sign of the cross. Faded napkins, many times mended, smelled still of the hot iron that had pressed them.

Always people dying, though. Funerals. An aunt sick in an enameled iron bed in a rented room. Stench unbearable. My mother washing the plates patiently in a corner basin. Sitting patiently beside an iron bed in the charity hospital ward.

Finally only Mother was left.

"But, you know, it died for us when Mother moved out. I mean, it was never more than obligation, her taking me to visit. She had left it all behind when she went to night school and got her degree, and then marrying a doctor with a house on Saint Charles Avenue, well, that was the stratosphere to her people. And the novels? They'd go downtown and just stand there looking at her books in Maison Blanche department store. They wanted her to use the name Cynthia O'Neill Walker. But she wouldn't. She didn't like the three names. Yet we didn't even know the Walker family, never knew them at all."

"And you felt you didn't belong to anyone."

"No. It was an invented life. Used to dream I was poor, if you could believe it, and that I lived back here in one of these little houses. At Christmastime the kids talked of giving King parties. You baked a cake, there was a ring in it; whoever got the ring gave the next party. I wanted to be part of all that. I told my mother I wished we were rich enough to live in the government housing project."

We were walking at sunset past rows of the double cottages, the front porch divided by a wood partition so that each family can sit in privacy and peace. The little gardens burst with four-o'clocks. And the cracked pavements were alive with grass and the green moss that grows over everything. And the sky above was shading to a deep magenta. The clouds were tinged with gold.

"Even this is beautiful here," she said with her arm around me. She pointed to the white gingerbread eaves on each house and the long green shutters that covered the front doors.

"You know, one of the things I wanted to do in painting was to create a narrative of it-the Irish-German life that had been here. You know how I believe in narrative painting," I said. "I don't mean the exhibits where people write up long diatribes about the photographs or the pictures. I mean where the narrative is in the work itself. I believed that realism-representationalism-could embrace all this. And yet there would be remarkable sophistication."

She nodded, squeezing my hand lightly.

"I mean, when I look at the realists of our times, the photorealists, for example, I see such disdain for the subject matter. Why did it have to take that path? Why did the exact rendering have to focus upon vulgarity and ugliness? With Hopper, of course, it is coldness, utter coldness."

She said, yes, you always felt that. And even with Hockney you felt it.

"American artists are so embarrassed by American life," I said. "So contemptuous of it."

"It's as if they're afraid," she said. "They have to be superior to what they represent. They are embarrassed even that they do it so well."

"Why?" I asked.

"It's like a dream, American life. It frightens you. You feel you have to make fun of it, no matter how much you secretly love it. I mean, here is everything you want. You have to say it's horrible."

"I want the freedom of the primitive painters," I said, "to focus with love on what I find inherently beautiful. I want it to be hot, disturbing. Yet gorgeous always."

"And that's why they call you baroque and romantic, like that church back there," she said gently. "When I looked at the murals on the ceiling, I saw your work in them, your colors and your skill. And your excess."

"Ahh! Well, I'll make them think of better words than that with the Belinda paintings."

She laughed the softest, most delighted laugh. Her arm tightened around me.

"Make me immortal, Jeremy."

"Yes, darling dear. But you have things to do yourself, you know, you have films to make, roles to play."

"When you show the pictures, you should be really sure, really sure-" she said, suddenly serious. "It's easy in a place like this to be carried away."

"Yes, you've told me that. But isn't it why we came here?" I asked. I stopped and took her face in my hands and kissed her.

"You know you'll do it now, don't you?" she asked. "No doubts at all anymore."

"Haven't been for a long time. But if we don't wait that full year until your eighteenth birthday-"

Her eyes clouded. She frowned, closed her eyes, opened her mouth to be kissed. Ah, heat and softness.

"You know, you've changed towards me," she said.

"No, honey, no, I haven't," I protested.

"No, I don't mean for the bad," she assured me. "I mean, you hardly ever talked to me like this before."

It was true. I didn't say so, but I knew it.

"Why did you leave here, Jeremy? Why did you let the house stay the way it was all these years?"

We went on walking hand in hand. And then I started to tell her. The Big Secret. The whole thing.

I told her about writing the last two books for Mother, I told her about those heady days the last spring of Mother's life when Crimson Mardi Gras was made into a movie and I had gone out to Hollywood in Mother's place for the premiere.

"It was so strange, you know, knowing I wrote it and no one else even guessing. And the party afterwards, I mean not the big one at Chasen's but the little one at Alex Clementine's house, with Alex taking me up to all those people and introducing me. They would look right through me, thinking just for one split second before they turned away, how nice, her son."

She was staring at me silently.

"Alex didn't know then. But she told him later, when he came down to visit her, and he's known all these years. But it wasn't Crimson Mardi Gras that drove me away. It was what happened after, when they read Mother's will. She'd left her name to me. She fully expected me to go on using it. She expected me to write Cynthia Walker novels forever. She did not see why her death should be made known. And in the event it did become public knowledge I was to say the novels had been found in filing cabinets, that they were all finished by her before the final illness, that kind of thing-"

"That's ugly," Belinda said.

I stopped, startled by her word.

"Oh, she meant it with the best intentions. She thought I could use the money. She wanted me to have it. She'd even made arrangements with the publisher, gotten me guarantees. Her editors knew all about it. She'd exacted promises. It was really for me she did it. She didn't know anything about painting. I guess she'd thought I'd be broke all my life."

"So that's what all the little girls in your paintings are running from," she whispered. "And we're in the old house they can never escape."