The Gold Diggers (13 page)

So when they all staggered in at two or two-thirty, she stayed up an hour and drank iced coffee and sat on a little stool, staring at the mirror. Close up, she was able to make out, through the crack where the center mirror met the one on the right, a hinge mechanism that appeared to run without a break from top to bottom. Very tight and very strong. At the left, she ran a nail file along the crack and couldn't feel a bolt or a sliding bar. Couldn't feel a thing. She never once looked at herself in the glass. From this point on, in fact. Irrevocably now, the mirror was a door and not a mirror. If she still had staring matches with herself, as in the past, she had no conscious knowledge of them. Not a conventional lock, she decided as she sank into bed in the deep middle of the night. It must be tripped by the clock of a switch or a pencil beam of light. Swooning to sleep, her head beginning to bloom with a dream that took the shape of a vault like Scrooge McDuck's, mountained with dimes and quarters, she didn't even stop to register, as she always did in New York, that she was sleeping alone again.

During the weekend, whenever she had a free hour, she poked about for secret switches. Eventually, she broke the whole suite down into sections of fifteen or twenty square feet and went through it piece by piece—the bedroom, the bathroom, and the dressing closet. She tapped gently along the wall with a mallet for pounding veal that she took from the kitchen. No switches or buttons or plastered-over knots of wire. Before she finished, she already knew what it must be instead. It would take a coming together of two different things—like a key
and
a combination lock, both at the same time, or a skull that needed to be turned a quarter-turn on a sideboard, along with a certain book that must be pushed in along a shelf. The two things might be anything, of course, and you would never know if you had guessed just one or the other right, because nothing would happen unless you hit on both. Rita, however, was not whipped. The dabblers and the amateurs, the mere thieves, had been separated out by the difficulty. Perhaps that is where Rita came by the air of purity in her search—she hadn't the least desire to steal the least little thing.

It came to her Monday at work, just after a lunch when Peter taught her how to tell rugs apart, that she needed to start from the other direction. With Rusty Varda. There might be actual evidence lying around, an architect's plans and the like, but it mostly called for a portrait of Varda himself. And Hey, Rita expected, was the resident historian about the man who'd been emptied out of this house when he died.

They all had dinner in. That night at nine, when she thought he was finished with the dishes and ready to turn to his TV, she wandered in through the dining room. He was standing across the kitchen, just outside the door in the shady kitchen garden, his arms folded, a foot from the parrot cage. If Rita had interrupted them in heated conversation, there was no indication that they minded. The parrot, red head and yellow breast, jungle green in the wings, was doing all the talking. Like the static on a radio, with here and there a telegraphed phrase that sounded to Rita like “Machu Picchu.” Now that she came to think of it, Rita noted, the rest of what the parrot said sounded like the purr and shrill of an Indian tribe, phrases that might well be spoken by believers in the sun. In that instant, Rita dropped hostilities toward the parrot. She stopped reacting as if it were a scorpion in that cage or, more to the point, a leaf-eating lizard with a scowl in the lower jaw. Things having turned out the way they had, he was no longer an alien. She decided to keep him on as a mascot. And she realized, as if in the same breath, the one thing bringing the other into focus, that she'd better get a car of her own.

She poured iced coffee from a white pitcher in the refrigerator—Colombian, filtered, floating a lemon peel and a thing that looked like a vanilla bean. She went to the doorway, and they said hello. Then they let a pause develop. When he thought to, Hey wore a white coat, and tonight it was luminous, his face far in the shadows.

“Was Rusty Varda very rich?” she asked. “How long did you work for him?” Clever Rita. She masked the baldness of the first question with the human-interest angle in the second.

“He left twelve million dollars, all told,” Hey said matter-of-factly. Neither bitter nor proud. “We were together for ten years here. Did I tell you I used to work on my body six, eight hours a day?”

“Peter said so,” she answered. “He mentioned you were a dancer.” Perhaps it was the bird cage between them, so they could look at something besides each other, but they acted as if they'd say whatever they pleased. They didn't need to be roundabout. Besides, they weren't that interested in one another tonight. They were on their own. “What was he like,” she asked, wondering: What can he say?

“Very, very private,” he said, and Rita had to guess at the limits here. So private, it might be, that they had no right to inquire too much. “He'd already closed himself off from everybody else before he hired me. He had no outside world.”

This all had the sound of an official position, Rita thought. What was he
really
like, she wanted to say, as if that were a more trenchant question. She needed Rusty Varda's most characteristic moment. What, all his life, did he used to
do
when his heart went empty and cold?

“The reason I mention my dancing is—I stopped training when I got to Crook House. I think it was the same day. I spent the morning at the gym, and a taxi brought me up here in the afternoon.” He stared hard into the cage, as if the parrot might have an idea what must have happened. Then, looking through the cage at Rita, he smiled and finished the thought. “There's probably no connection.”

“Rusty Varda got out of pictures in the twenties. Did he just
sit
here for the rest of his life?”

“I don't know. He was old in my time. The only thing he
still
did was juggle.” It was a trump card, no doubt about it, and the story rose up to it. “He was a circus juggler before he came to the States. Long before the movies. I used to watch him out at the pool in the morning. He was lovely. He had a set of balls in every color, and you could tell the mood he was in from the balls in the air.”

Juggling. Rita couldn't process it right away. She couldn't imagine what a juggler's lock would look like. It seemed as if it must be lighter than air. She might have to upend gravity to get through that door.

“What was my room in the old days?” she asked, turning to the map with the “X.” “A guest room?”

“In a way. In the twenties and thirties, it was Frances Dean's room.”

“She was his lover,” Rita said, a whiz at following out a train of thought. “Right?” It also jostled something in her mind. Frances Dean, the fallen woman. It was either a movie or a run of tabloid headlines, Rita wasn't sure, but she felt several pieces interlock when she remembered it was a story out of the twenties.

“That's what everyone said, but it wasn't so. They were like brother and sister.”

“What happened?”

“She was on dope, so he took her in,” Hey said, as if it were worse to try to be polite about it. “He had a nurse here all the time, who lived in my room.
Your
room was like a sanatorium. But they finally had to take her to the hospital.”

“That was all so long ago,” she said. Frances Dean, Queen of the Silver Screen, was Rusty Varda's silent star. Rita wondered now if the girl's habit had cost him his production company. “Brother and sister” or not, they didn't get any extra sympathy from Rita. She was on business. “Did he leave the room empty after that?”

“How long is
so
long?You should have seen him lock himself in. He'd stay in your room a whole day sometimes. Sometimes overnight. Even the windows locked. I'd think he was dead in there. What would I have told the police? But I left him alone. It was between him and her.”

“How often did that happen?” she asked slowly, her antennae beginning to sort and pick up signals. Something specific was coming in in waves. Like a set of directions—to the right, six; to the left, twenty. It wasn't numbers, exactly, because, of course, it wasn't a combination that did it. But the method was there, each step coming on the heels of the last, like a recipe.

“More and more,” Hey said, all warmed up to it. “He'd go in there, and I'd say, ‘Leave a window open, Mr. Varda. Just one, so you'll get some air.' But he wouldn't. My spiritual adviser thinks that he was doing self-hypnosis. It's very good for getting back the past, and that's where a lot of Mr. Varda lived.” He stopped, seeming to listen to whether he had said too much or had given the wrong idea, and then went on. “It doesn't seem crazy to me, anymore. The past is where I live, too.”

“I think you have to have a one-track mind, like the parrot, to live in the present.” She raised a finger to the cage and twirled it, a gesture meant to tell the parrot she had loosened up. He recoiled a fraction, went silent, and made a stab at the bars of the cage with his beak. There was a clatter against the wire, and Rita jumped and drew her finger back into a fist. Hey didn't say anything. He was neither glad nor indifferent, but he appeared to think she had to learn it for herself. That was all right with Rita, though she would have felt differently if the parrot had made off with the first joint of her finger.

“Do you miss being a dancer?” she asked. She was so calm. She could feel the electric energy of the last three days resolve itself into a pinpoint of light that the lock on the door in the mirror couldn't blink away. She
knew
. It was as good as a tele-kinetic zap from the kitchen garden across the house to the secret room. It was as if she could hear the door click open.

“I guess so,” he said quietly. “Do you miss being very young? It's like that. I was all shot as a dancer when I was thirty because I was a wreck from other things. I didn't have enough money to stay in it. I came out here to make it in the movies, like everybody else.”

“But you didn't make it.”

“Nobody does.”

It might not strictly be so. Some did and some didn't, after all, depending on the market for types to people the dream. But she knew what he meant. The more she talked to Hey, the more amazed she was by his diamond-hard finger on the pulse of the world where dog ate dog. How did he put his two faces together, she wondered—the cynic whose eyes had dropped their scales, cheek by jowl with an open-eyed innocent who would believe anything, given enough Spiritual Advice. Hey was the household god of Crook House. Peter said he couldn't serve food hot, didn't see dust, could scarcely run a wet mop over the floor. But he was indispensable. He spent twice as much time there as Nick or Peter, and the house, accustomed to the motions of a cynical innocent, had taken the mood to itself until it touched each sunlit wall and earthen tile. Hey went as far back as a palace sage or a king's gatekeeper. The year that he moved in with Rusty Varda, Peter and Nick were still in high school, three thousand miles apart, mad about anything in pants.

“I'm sorry,” he said to Rita, as if determined to see the things he said as good enough for him alone. Under any scrutiny, he seemed to say, they were fatuous and off-balance, and a woman like Rita shouldn't have a thing to do with them. “I realize now I wasn't meant to make it. But it's all right. The past is interesting, no matter how it's turned out.” He lifted his chin as if to stretch his neck, then held it high as he went on, as if hearing the words from very far away. He looked at a patch of air just above her head. “I used to dress up as a woman sometimes. Now I don't have to because of Linda. But I must have been groping back to her all that time. There was a
reason
. Do you see?”

“Oh, yes.” She was glad Hey trusted her, because she wasn't sure her face hadn't gone quite blank. She couldn't have repeated the moves that took them where they had just ended up.

“You'd better go now,” he said, reaching up to unhook the ring at the top of the parrot's cage from the chain that hung down out of the tree. “He knows it's his night to fly. Once a week, I let him loose in the kitchen.”

“How do you get him back in the cage?” She silently berated herself for lack of fortitude, for thinking right away of a dollop of parrot shit on the morning's rolls.

“I don't. He's gone back in by the time I get up in the morning. He just likes to stretch a little and limber up. He doesn't want to be free.”

Hey shut and locked the dining room door behind her. Walking back to her bedroom, Rita cocked an ear when she passed the stairs up to Nick's and Peter's room. They must have gone out dancing, because there wasn't a sound, and they never went to bed so soon. Unless they'd locked their door to make love. We'll all be locked in, she thought, and the thought fairly made her skip the last few feet to her room. She didn't want to be free, either. She wanted to be in up to her neck. However wide the breezy sky, free was unemployed. Rita liked her circuits just this short of overload.

She began by shutting each of the casement windows facing on the pool, turning the latch to the lock position. Then she double-locked both the door to the hall and the outside door that led directly into the garden. She glanced around the room with a new delight in its details. Now that she'd pinned it down to Frances Dean, she thrilled to the scenes she planned to imagine having gone on here. But later, when she had more time. Now she had to move. She danced into the dressing room and saw right away that the mirror was the same as ever. She shut the door behind her and stood against it, leaning back on her crossed hands.

Now what? She couldn't deny she was stymied. It seemed so sure. She walked over to the triple mirror and pressed the flat of one hand against the place where a doorknob would have been if Rita's life had been a different story. It didn't budge. Why did he lock himself in, the same way every time? she'd asked herself in the kitchen, and in a flash she'd seen the trick. Lock all the doors and windows, and the mirrored door releases, just like that. The secret lock, she suddenly understood, made a circuit with all the other locks. But it seemed that she was wrong. Something
else
was still required. She was mad, and for the first time she felt a desire to get a sledgehammer and beat down the door. She had a momentary picture of the scene: herself, ax in hand, standing amid the glitter of the shattered mirrors, and the others rushing in, thinking she'd gone mad because, poor thing, she wasn't as pretty as Frances Dean.