Judith Krantz (65 page)

“And Jimmy? Does he get more than a good-night peck?” Fernanda asked, deeply curious. She needed to know the answer, but she dreaded it.

Georgina’s eyes dropped to the tablecloth and a curious hardness, fleeting but unmistakable, transformed her face, making her look far older than she was. She bit her lips and didn’t answer at first, as if she were trying to make up her mind to fend Fern off with her usual tranquil, self-mocking humor. Finally she shook her head in the unmistakable manner of someone determined to tell the truth, but she spoke with lowered eyelids.

“When I said Jimmy was rather a pet, just now, I meant that he was unfailingly sweet to me. But bed … that’s the price I have to pay, and, oh, God, how I hate it! I suppose I shouldn’t complain, any man would expect the same thing, but Jimmy … well, you can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s not as if he abuses me, darling—don’t think that—he’s never hurt me, but he’s so … voracious. So revoltingly, sickeningly voracious, so avid, so tireless. Oh, I don’t know, Fernie, maybe they’re all that way, I’ve never slept with another man so I can’t compare, but he never seems
to be satisfied. Do you think that’s normal?” Georgina dared to look Fernanda in the eyes as she asked the faltering question.

“Normal? There’s no such thing as normal,” Fernanda said violently. “Not where men are concerned. You’ve only been married less than two years; he’s certain to become less demanding sooner or later, I can promise you that much.” Fernanda thought of the afternoon she’d spent with Jimmy Rosemont, and if she had been able to kill him on the spot, she would have done so with joy.

“Oh, that’s exactly what I’m praying for! For one thing, everyone knows perfectly well what a cheat he is. Even on our honeymoon he had other women, thank heaven. The more women he goes after, the less pressure I’m under. And when he’s involved in the last stages of putting a deal together, like these last few weeks, he almost leaves me alone. Of course, when it’s concluded, he’ll want to … celebrate.” Georgina shuddered. “And, Fernie, the weird thing is that he’s convinced that I’m frigid, and it simply doesn’t make any difference to him. Wouldn’t you think it should? How can a man force himself on a woman who doesn’t want him? But no, if anything, he somehow
likes
the idea. If he can’t make me—well, you know—then no one else can either. He considers my frigidity an invisible chastity belt. An asset in a wife. Oh, let’s never talk about him again, promise me, my darling? He has nothing to do with us … he’s a necessary evil in that department.”

Georgina’s smile as she looked Fernanda in the eye was devouring, dangerously alluring, filled with memory and worship and acceptance of her right to all her emotions, all her impulses.

“God! When you say that ‘well, you know,’ like a prudish spinster, I almost … well, you know,” Fernanda said, lowering her voice.

“Oh, my darling, let’s get the check and go back to the suite,” Georgina said urgently. “I’m so horribly jealous of you already that I can’t stand it.”

“Jealous! You don’t think I’ll let another man
touch me! I’m getting a divorce the instant I get back to New York, no matter what it costs.”

“It’s not men I’m jealous of. Now that you’re … aware … now that you know exactly what you need … there’ll be women everywhere, women who you never dreamed preferred women, trying to get you to go to bed with them. And the older you get, the more of them there’ll be, swarming around you. Women like us don’t reach our most desirable age until we’re forty.”

“Oh, that’s crazy! That’s the opposite of real life!” Fernanda protested.

“Wait and see, Fernie darling. So many women are looking for mother figures, and who can begin to qualify under forty? But don’t go and gain weight—that would make you even more irresistible.”

“Why?” Fernanda demanded, fascinated.

“You’d look more womanly. Women who prefer women adore the female body, and you’re still much too slim, too pert, too much of an ingenue for some tastes.”

“Good Lord, how strange,” Fernanda said, almost indifferently. She’d never had so much good news in one time in her life, but she certainly wasn’t going to take advantage of it. Not for years and years.

“Barbra would really appreciate this place,” Jazz said to Casey.

“Who?”

“Streisand. When I went to her place in Malibu to photograph her for
Vogue
, the security was just as good as it is here.” She waved around the reception room of the Huntington Museum’s manuscript collection.

She didn’t have to entertain him, Casey thought, looking at her unnecessarily beautiful face, in which only the rueful eyes betrayed her woebegone state of mind. When they had hightailed it off to the Santa Ana County Recorder’s office, and eventually located the title record of the sale of the Rancho Montana de la Luna, property of Don Antonio Pablo Valencia, to
Michael Kilkullen, they had excitedly pored over the one-page legal description of the land, dated 1865 and signed with the names of the grantee and the grantor, and found nothing, absolutely nothing, that related to any covenant.

“I think it ends here, darling,” Casey had said.

“It
can’t
end here!” Jazz had blazed. “I won’t let it!”

Casey had told the temporary Cow Boss, a seasoned vaquero who had replaced him while he was in the hospital, to carry on his duties, and he and Jazz had spent all the next day in San Diego, at the Historical Society, trying to find one of Mr. White’s “bits and pieces.” The day after that, they had turned the San Juan Historical Society upside down, with just as little success, and spent another fruitless, frustrating, dusty day at the Orange County Historical Society. Next, Jazz had become possessed of an idea that the Bancroft Library, up at Berkeley, should have been the first place for them to look, for she reasoned that during the San Francisco fire, someone had probably had the presence of mind to save files from the General Land Office. They had flown to San Francisco in the morning and returned the same night, not just empty-handed but hungry, for in that mecca of good food they hadn’t been able to spare the time to go to Chez Panisse for a meal.

They had seen more “bits and pieces” of California history than Casey would have imagined still existed, but nothing that related to the particular sixty-four thousand acres between the mountain and the sea that had become the Kilkullen Ranch.

Now they were down to the last destination Mr. White had mentioned, the Huntington, in the San Marino section of Pasadena, known to most people as the museum that owned the
Blue Boy
.

Of course, they could spend weeks and weeks in California, going through the files of minor historical societies in each and every old town, but the curators who had witnessed their disappointment had told them pointedly that they shouldn’t expect to find anything
of serious interest outside of the larger, better-known collections.

Nobody had used the words “wild-goose chase,” but you could see them thinking it, Casey thought mordantly. When they had explained that they were looking for a covenant, the mere word sounded so improbably otherworldly, as if it were a pact with the devil, that the people they’d talked to had probably pigeonholed them in the nut file anyway, Casey decided. Not that they hadn’t been helpful, they’d been entirely professional, but they certainly hadn’t been surprised by the nonexistence of a covenant with the Franciscans.

The day after their doleful, weary return from San Francisco, Jazz had telephoned the Huntington and made an appointment with William P. Frank, the Associate Curator of Western manuscripts.

Today, after being checked out twice by uniformed men on the sweeping drive that mounted through the magnificently landscaped gardens and lawns that had once been the park of the Huntington Mansion, they had parked, located the modern building that housed the library, and climbed a staircase past a bewildering series of doors to this perfectly appointed room in which they were the only people waiting.

Casey could wish that Jazz had never found her great-grandmother’s letter, wish that she had not tried to translate it, wish that Jimmy Rosemont had a clear-cut victory in hand, so that Jazz could turn her attention away from her furious obsession about the sale of the ranch and begin to think about their future together.

Since the day she had agreed to marry him, they had spoken of nothing, it seemed to Casey, but that letter, that legend, that covenant. Jazz was a creature utterly possessed by her need to keep the land out of the hands of the Hong Kong bankers and their Monte Carlo plans. All of her concerns in life had been put on the back burner. Love, no sooner admitted, and marriage, no sooner envisioned, had both immediately
taken second place—a far second—to the mysterious promise of the mountain.

Was chasing the promise of the mountain Jazz’s way of not letting herself be happy with him, Casey wondered. Did she feel, on a deep level she wasn’t aware of, that she had no right to happiness so soon after her father’s murder? Deeply worried, Casey knew that the quicker this fantasy faded, the quicker this last chance failed to pan out, the faster she’d come back to the real world, and to him.

“Darling,” Casey said, “when Mr. Frank asks you what we’re looking for, why don’t you not say ‘a covenant,’ but call it ‘a private land agreement’? I haven’t been able to feel comfortable asking a stranger to help us find a covenant that’s over two hundred years old.”

“It sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” Jazz objected.

“Could we compromise and try it my way? This time?”

“Compromise,” Jazz said darkly. “That’s what Red told me. Marriage was all about compromise.”

“But when we told her, she was so delighted—”

“Of course she was, but later, when I was alone with her, she started talking about how I’d have to learn to compromise.
Shit
, I hate that word! It’s so incredibly dreary and dull, just when the most wonderful, exciting thing you could ever imagine happens to you, everyone jumps down your throat with compromise, compromise, like a bunch of bush-league Dear Abbys, even Susie cackled that I’d better start to expect to compromise, and she’s always on your side anyway. Why didn’t Susie ask when we were going to get married, why didn’t Red ask me what I was going to wear, why didn’t anyone get all carried away with surprise and Mumsie-like?”

The only satisfactory response had been Pete’s, Jazz thought. He’d shouted that she couldn’t possibly get married until she’d given him a chance to fuck her brains out and change her mind, an offer she decided not to pass along to Casey.

“I’ll make a deal with you.
I’ll
compromise,” Casey said.

“I thought it took two.”

“Only one, if he’s a mind reader, bewilderingly crafty, and a monumentally classy guy.”

“I’m lookin’ at him.” Jazz laughed, and for a moment they both forgot where they were and why.

They jumped when Bill Frank came into the room. The curator was young, tall, with dark sandy hair and a friendly expression. In exasperation, after San Francisco, Jazz had decided that all curators had friendly expressions in direct proportion to how little they had to show you. Now, in order to get practice with compromise, she let Casey do the talking.

“A private land agreement between the Franciscans and the Valencias? Hmmm? The Franciscans had no power after 1833, but still, who knows? There aren’t too many places to look. Let me go and see what I can find,” Bill Frank said, as he ushered them into a larger room, furnished with a long table and a number of chairs. He unlocked the door to the manuscript room with a key he fished out of his pocket, and disappeared into his treasure troves. Jazz looked with longing at the fortunate researchers who shared the room with them, all of them bent intently over old manuscripts.

It seemed forever before Bill Frank came back, carrying a brown portfolio that was at least two feet square. He put it down on the table and sat opposite them.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting, but there was quite a lot to eliminate first. I didn’t find anything that looked promising except this portfolio, and it’s only a long shot,” he said, opening it. “Here we have sets of tracings of documentation relating to various land holdings, all of them made by the Land Commission
after
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the war between Mexico and the United States. There probably won’t be anything here that goes back as far as the Franciscans, but I thought I’d go through it with you, anyway. I’m curious myself.”

There were seven pink-jacketed files, each bound into a sort of pamphlet by a ribbon. “These are copies of seven
expedientes
that were destroyed at the General Land Office in the San Francisco earthquake,” the curator said. “In other words, they’d be United States reaffirmations of Mexican land grants, which might possibly, but only rarely, be reaffirmations of Spanish land grants. Living history.”

“We’ve already been to San Francisco,” Jazz told him. “We didn’t find anything useful there!”

“Documents have a strange way of getting lost and turning up elsewhere, in fact, just about anywhere except where they should be.” Bill Frank meticulously untied one of the pink pamphlets and carefully looked through pages of thin paper, bound together, crackling and brittle and yellow with age. The
diseño
was a separate document, a rough map on a folded sheet of paper, with a compass drawn at the top, place names written here and there, and a river clearly indicated. He showed them the petition and the succeeding pages that contained the Spanish testimony of various witnesses to the legitimacy of the Mexican land grant. He looked at it and shook his head. “This land is up north.” He looked through several more of the pink pamphlets and found nothing helpful.

The fifth pamphlet looked like all the others, but when Jazz and Casey saw the fanlike shape of the land drawn on the unfolded map with the wavy lines that indicated the ocean they both shouted, “Wait!”

“Look!
Diseño del Rancho Montaña de la Luna
—it’s written on the top! That’s it!” Jazz was so electrified that her voice filled the room. The researchers looked up, startled, and Bill Frank quickly picked up the large folder, closed it and took all its contents into his office. He took out the
expediente
they had looked for so stubbornly and held it open, beginning to translate from the archaic Spanish into a contemporary English version.