Belinda (7 page)

Everybody loved him. That's all Alex could tell us. The company line, we grumbled.

No, Alex protested. Besides, the best dish on Bonnie was old dish, the story of how she'd picked a father for her kid while she was still big bucks in the international cinema. Hadn't we heard that one?

Soon as Bonnie decided to have a baby, she'd gone shopping for a perfect male specimen. And the handsomest man she'd ever seen was the blond blue-eyed hairdresser George Gallagher, better known as G.G., six foot four and "breathtaking down to the last detail of his anatomy." (Lots of nods from those who'd seen G.G.'s shampoo commercials. And the New Yorkers knew him. You had to book him three months in advance.) Only trouble was, he was gay, absolutely thoroughly and incurably gay, this guy, and had never been to bed with a female in his life. In fact, his most reliable pattern for sexual release, "if you'll pardon my language," was manipulating himself as he knelt worshipfully at the feet of a leather-clad boot-wearing black stud.

Bonnie moved him into her suite in the Paris Ritz, plied him with vintage wines and gourmet foods, had her limo take him to and from work on the Champs-Elysses, and commiserated with him round the clock about his sexual problems, all to no avail, apparently, until she accidentally stumbled on the key.

The key was dirty talk. Real good and steady dirty talk. Talk dirty to G.G. and he didn't care who you were, he could do it! And whispering in his ear the whole time about handcuffs and leather boots and black whips and black members, Bonnie got him into her bed and "doing it" all night, and then she kept him "doing it" all over Spain while she made her last big hit, Death in the Sun. He did her hair too, by the way, and her makeup and her clothes. And she talked dirty to him. And they slept in her dressing room together. But when she was sure the baby "had took." she slapped a plane ticket back to Paris in his hand with a kiss goodbye and thank you. Nine months later he got a postcard from Dallas, Texas, and a photocopy of the birth certificate with his name on it as the natural father. The baby was gorgeous.

"And what does this kid look like now?"

Don't ask!

But seriously she was a little doll, that baby, just precious. Alex had seen her in Cannes at the film festival last year during the very lunch on the terrace of the Carlton where Marty Moreschi, on the prowl for "Champagne Flight" had "rediscovered" the woman who soon became his wife, the one and only Bonnie.

And as for GG, it turned out he loved being a father to the little dollbaby, he'd chased Bonnie and the kid all over Europe just for five minutes here and there with his little girl to give her a teddy bear and take a couple of pix for the wall of his salon, until finally Bonnie got fed up with it and had her lawyers drive G.G. right out of Europe so that he ended up with his fancy salon in New York. Tell us another one, Alex.

But as the evening wore on, as the stories got racier and funnier and Alex got drunker, an interesting truth emerged: not a single juicy anecdote had been included in Alex's autobiography. Nothing scandalous about Bonnie or about anybody. Alex couldn't hurt his friends like that.

We were hearing a best-seller nobody would ever read. No wonder Jody, my beloved publicist, and Diana, Alex's editor, were sitting there over their untouched drinks looking positively catatonic.

"You mean none of this is in the book!" I whispered to Jody. "Not a single word of it."

"Well, what is?" I asked. "Don't ask!"

I SOAKED up over three cups of coffee, then went to the phone booth and rang my house hoping Belinda had found the keys and let herself in or that she'd called and left a message on the answering machine.

No score on either account. Just a call from my ex-wife Celia in New York saying in sixty seconds or less that she needed to borrow five hundred dollars at once.

FINALLY I started the drive back with Alex, and we were arguing almost at once over the wind in the open car about why he hadn't put the little true stories in his autobiography.

"But what about the juicy ones that wouldn't hurt anybody?" I kept insisting. "Forget Bonnie and George Hairdresser What's-his-name, you know all kinds of things-"

"Too risky," he said, shaking his head. "Besides, people don't want the truth, you know they don't."

"Alex, you're behind the times," I said. "People are as hooked on the truth these days as they used to be on lies in the fifties. And you can't kill a career anymore-anybody's career-with a little scandal."

"The hell you can't," he said. "They may put up with some of the dirt they didn't want yesterday. But it's got to be the right dirt in the right measure. It's just a new set of illusions, Jeremy."

"I don't believe that, Alex. I think that's not just cynical, it's a bad observation. I tell you, things are different now. The sixties and seventies changed everybody, even people in small towns who never heard of the sexual revolution. The ideas of those times raised the level of popular art."

"What the hell are you talking about, Walker? Have you watched any TV lately? 'Champagne Flight,' you can take it from me is garbage. It's the step-kid of the fifties 'Peyton Place.' Only the hairstyles have been changed."

I smiled. Only an hour ago he'd been defending it.

"OK, maybe so," I said. "But any TV show today can handle incest, prostitution-taboo subjects they wouldn't even touch twenty years ago. People aren't scared to death of sex these days. They know that lots of the big stars are gay."

"Yeah, and they forgave Rock Hudson for it because he died of cancer, same way they forgave Marilyn Monroe for being a sex queen because she went into the big sleep. Sex, yes, as long as death and suffering comes with it, gives them the moral overtone they've still got to have. Take a look at the docudramas and the cop shows. I tell you, it's sex and death, just like it always was."

"Alex, they know the stars drink. They know they have kids like Bonnie did out of wedlock. It's a long way from the years when they drove Ingrid Bergman out of town for having a baby by an Italian director she wasn't married to."

"No. Maybe for a little while it was really open, when the flower children were big, but now the wheel's turning again, if it ever turned at all. Yeah, we've got a gay guy on 'Champagne Flight' because 'Dynasty' did it first, but guess who plays him, a straight actor, and it's all minor stuff and you can smell the Lysol they sanitized it with a mile off. Just the right dirt in the right measure, I'm telling you. You've got to be as careful with the proportions as you were in the past."

"No, you could have packed your book with the truth and they'd still love you and everybody you wrote about. Besides, it's your life, Alex, it's what you've seen, it's you going on record."

"No, it's not, Jeremy," he said. "It's another part, called movie-star writer."

"That's too cold, Alex."

"No. It's a fact. And I gave them what they wanted, as I always have. Read it. It's a damn good performance."

"Bull shit," I said. I was getting angry. We had glided off the bridge and down the freeway past the ghostly Palace of Fine Arts and into town, and I didn't have to shout so loud now. "And even if you're right, the stories you know are good. They're good entertainment, Alex. The truth is always strong. The best art is always based on the truth. It has to be."

"Look, Jeremy, you make these kid's books. They're sweet, they're wholesome, they're beautiful-"

"You're making me sick. But those books happen to be exactly what I want to do, Alex. They are the truth for me. Sometimes I wish they weren't. It's not like there's something else better that I'm hiding or passing up."

"Isn't there? Jeremy, I've known you for years. You could paint anything you want, but what do you do? Little girls in haunted houses. The fact is you do them because they sell-"

"That's not true, Clementine, and you know it."

"You do them because you've got an audience and you want them to love you. Don't talk to me about truth, Jeremy. Truth's got nothing to do with it."

"Not so. I'm telling you that people love us more for the truth," I said, really working up a head of steam. "That's my whole point. The stars dish the dirt about their love affairs in books now, and the public devours it because it's authentic."

"No, son, no," he said. "They dish the dirt about certain affairs, and you know what I'm talking about."

Dead silence for a moment. Then he laughed again, his hand lightly squeezing my shoulder. I knew we should lighten up. "Come on, Walker-"

But I couldn't let it go. It tormented me too much, him blazing away at dinner with all those stories and none of them in the book. And me, what the hell, had I said to that reporter two nights ago at the promotion dinner? That I wrote Looking for Bettina because the audience wanted it? Did I mean that? That little slip was bound to come back to haunt me, and maybe I deserved it, too.

There was some real important issue here, something that was damned near critical to my life. But I was maybe a little too drunk and a little too tired to really grasp it.

"I don't know what's wrong with me tonight. I don't know," I said. "But I tell you, if you'd put everything you knew in that book, they'd have loved it more, they'd have made a movie out of it."

"They'll make a movie out of it the way it is, Jer," he said with the loudest laugh yet. "We've got two firm offers."

"OK, OK," I said. "Money, the bottom line, all that crap. Don't I know it! I'm going to paint some pictures of money!"

"And you'll sell your little Angelica What's-her-name to the movies, too, won't you? But listen, son, they're calling you a genius for this Looking for Bettina book. Saw a window of it downtown. Downtown. Not in some kiddie bookstore. Genius, Jeremy. Got to admit it. Saw it in Time."

"Fuck it. Something's wrong, Alex. It's wrong with me and that's why I'm fighting with you. It's really wrong."

"Ah, come on, Jeremy, you and me, we're both fine," he drawled. "We've always been fine. You've got it made with those kids, and if and when you write your life, you'll lie for them and you know it."

"It's not my fault my books are wholesome and sweet. It's the card I drew, for Chrissakes. You don't pick your obsessions when you're an artist, damn it!"

"OK, OK, OK!" he said. "But wait a minute, smarty pants. Let me give you a damn good example of why I can't tell the true stories. You want me to tell everybody that when your mother was dying, it was you who wrote her last two novels for her?"

I didn't answer. I felt as if he had hit me in the head.

We had stopped at the light at Van Ness and California and the empty intersection was absolutely quiet. I knew I was glowering at the street in front of me, positively glowering, but I could not look at him.

"You didn't know I knew that story, did you?" he asked. "That you actually wrote every word of Saint Charles Avenue and Crimson Mardi Gras?"

I shoved the car into first and made an illegal left turn onto California. Alex was probably my closest friend in the world, and no, I had not known that he shared that old secret.

"Did the publishers tell you all that?" I asked. They had been my mother's publishers too-twenty-five years ago. But all those editors were now gone.

"I've never heard you talk about that," Alex went on, ignoring my question. "Not ever. But you wrote both those last two books 'cause she was too sick and in too much pain to do it. And the critics said they were her best works. And you've never told anyone."

"They were her outlines, her characters," I said.

"Like hell," he said.

"I read her the chapters every day. She supervised everything."

"Oh yeah, sure, and she was worried about leaving you all those medical bills."

"It took her mind off the pain," I said. "It was what she wanted."

"Did you want it? To write two books under her name?"

"You're making a big issue of something that really doesn't matter now, Alex. She's been dead for twenty-five years. And besides, I loved her. I did it for her."

"And those books are still in every library in this country," he said. "And Crimson Mardi Gras plays on late-night television somewhere out there probably once each week."

"Oh, come on, Alex. What's that got to do with-"

"No, it's right to the point, Jeremy, and you know it. You'll never tell for her sake. That biography of her-what was it?-I read that thing years ago, and not a word in there about it."

"Popular junk."

"Sure. And I'll tell you the real tragedy in it, Jeremy. It's about the best story that anybody ever tells about your mother. It may be the only story about her entire life worth telling."

"Well, that's my point now, isn't it?" I said. I turned and glared at him. "That's what I'm trying to say, Alex. The truth is where it's at, goddamn it!"

"You're a scream, you know it? Watch the road."

"Yeah, but that's my goddamn point," I said again. I yelled it: "The truth's commercial."

We were pulling into the driveway of the Stanford Court and I was relieved that this was almost over. I felt scared and depressed. I wanted to be home now. Or go looking for Belinda. Or get dangerously drunk with Alex in the bar.

I stopped the car. Alex just sat there. Then he pushed in the dash lighter and took out a cigarette.

"I love you, you know," he said.

"The hell. Besides, who cares about that story? Tell it."

But I felt a little stab inside when I said that. Mother's secret. Mother's goddamned secret.

"Those kids keep you young, innocent."

"Oh, what crap," I said. I laughed, but it was awful. I thought of Belinda, of reaching under Charlotte's nightgown and feeling this hot, succulent little thigh that was Belinda's. Picture of Belinda naked. Was that the truth? Was that commercial? I felt like a fool. I felt exhausted.

Go home, wait for her to call or come, then take her clothes off. Lay her down on the crumpled flannel nightgown in the four-poster bed and pull of her tight pan ties and push into her gently, gently ... like a brand-new little glove-

"It was your mother, you know, who told me about your writing the books," Alex said, his voice rising easily to its dinnertime volume. Lights, action, camera. I could feel him relaxing in the seat. "And she never told me I had to keep it secret either."