The Gold Diggers (16 page)

“I'll bet you could find someone to pay you for that,” she said playfully, though giving him the option that he might not want to play with
her
. “People and their money love to be parted. All you'd have to do is convince someone you were the
best
at sitting and drinking beer. People love a winner.”

“What do you do?” he asked. He looked now as if he'd forgotten what he was doing before Rita came in.

“Me? I put together packages. And I'm always on the lookout for time-saving tips. I save up time.”

“What for?”

“I don't know,” she said truthfully. “But I'll need all the time I can get when I find out.”

Then they heard a droning from the dining room, and Hey walked in behind the vacuum cleaner. He had had no reason to suppose anyone else was home. They were all gathered here during an hour when the house was customarily his. For the briefest moment, his eyes took in Rita and Sam, and then, full of unconcern, he studied the rug in front of the machine as if he might pick up a stray diamond before the suction did. Rita could see he'd connected her and Sam up as a couple, and he meant to get out of their way, whatever sort of couple they were. He steered his vacuum meaningfully across the room, in the direction of the hall. Unlike Rita, he seemed to stay clear of the sun pools. Besides, he had his own reasons for getting some privacy. He'd made up his face as if for the stage—some red in the cheeks, a wide blue shadow on the eyelids, and a scatter of pencil lines to shallow his cheeks and soften his jaw. He looked like a washed-out clown.

“Hey, I'm just leaving,” she said, and Hey looked up at her and cupped his ear. “You can stay. Sam can go out and wait by the pool.”

It was the name that did it. Hey heard “Sam” and looked at him hard for the first time, his eyes darting away from Rita. She watched the transformation happen in his face. He went white, and his eyes went wide with panic. So that's what people mean, she thought, when they say they've seen a ghost. It has very little to do with the ghost itself, who, after all, just wanders about in a sheet, who can't take hold of anyone by the throat because he can't take hold of a blessed thing anymore. But to see one, she understood now, is to stare your own death in the face. She didn't know what to do for Hey, he went so far away so fast. How could he have known Sam that many years ago, she wondered, because the first thing she noticed about his shock was how full it was of a thing long buried. Sam seemed to Rita like a teenager. Hey was old enough to be his father. So was she. It was between
them
, she told herself, and put on a smile and waited for Hey to compose himself. She didn't look at Sam.

“It's all right. I'm just passing through,” Hey said, shifting back to her again. “It's already clean in here.” The noise of the machine made it impossible for her to pinpoint the tone of voice. But clearly he'd decided not to show his cards just yet. “What are you doing with your suitcase? Are you going someplace?”

“No, no,” she said. “I need it at the office. I need it for samples.” Why am I lying two different lies? she thought, mentally kicking herself.

“Well,” he said firmly, “you can't go around with that. Have Peter buy you a proper briefcase. Go to Gucci.”

He sounded all recovered, and she couldn't hold him back. He zipped along and mowed the vacuum out of the room.

“It was nice meeting you,” she said to Sam. “Make yourself at home.”

Sam smiled and opened his mouth to say something nice. She could tell, she'd snowed him in spite of herself. People who lived in and out of their clothes appreciated Rita's velocity, her coming to the point and getting on her way. It was just as well that he liked her. She wasn't going to treat him like a ghost. That would amount to abandoning Nick, for one thing, and for another, she wasn't afraid, like Hey, of the kind of man Sam was. Hey thought he was dangerous. She thought he was like a delinquent boy, though she knew they both could be right. And then the nice things got left unsaid, because they heard Nick call down to them from the balcony.

“Nothing ever happens in the living room,” he said, to mock them standing there. “If I'd come in time to introduce you, I think I would have arranged it in the garden. But my batting average is low today. I guess it's lucky we all got here in one piece.” Rita and Sam, looking up together, looked like people plotting constellations in the midnight sky. Nick rained down his lightest comments on them. It had all stopped being in his control back at the ranch, the moment they heard the first rattle. Now he was doing what he could just to keep up. “Are you stealing the flatware?” he asked, pointing at the suitcase.

Rita grinned. “It's my secret life. I do a juggling act in Griffith Park during my lunch hour. This,” she said, fluttering the overnight bag in the air at her side, “is where I keep my juggler's balls and my clown costume. You won't tell anyone, will you?”

“I never tell on my friends,” Nick said, leaning from the waist over the railing, as if he might fly off. “But not because I'm virtuous. It insures that I keep hearing all their stories.”

“I don't tell on mine, either,” she called back, her voice a notch more cynical than his, the currents just as deep.

“Should we all have lunch?” Nick asked. He was talking to Rita. No one was talking to Sam.

“I can't. I have to go push an armoire up a flight of stairs. I just stopped here for a minute.”

“To get the flatware.”

“Something like that.” She turned to Sam and said, “Take care of yourself,” by which she meant “Take care of Nick, or else.” She reached over and touched him, on the flat of his stomach, as it happened, and she thought of her statue. “Maybe next time we'll have a swim. Or just sit and drink beer.”

“Will you hold my head under until I promise to be good?” His voice was mild and even-tempered, and it struck her that this might be the nice thing he meant to say. He knows I'm a little hysterical, she thought. And she realized she'd had her first warning about Sam—he might be a kid, in love with himself and dispossessed of being human, but he wasn't stupid.

“I won't lay a finger on you,” she said, knowing Nick was listening, and walked to the foot of the stairs. She could hear Nick starting down, so the last thing Sam spoke, intimate and dense with shadows, was for her alone.

“That's not the only thing you won't do, Rita. You won't tell me what's in the suitcase, either.”

She pretended not to understand. She didn't really have to pretend. Negotiating the Samsonite as well as she could, she started up the spiral. When she and Nick met halfway, they made as if to slip past one another, but took more pains than they needed to, in order to draw out the time. Their voices fell to conspirators' pitch, as if by common practice. Still, there wasn't any time.

“I don't know what to say. Things have gotten a little out of hand.”

“This is nothing,” she said reassuringly. “Haven't I ever told you? I'm a tough guy.”

“Rita, I'm afraid.”

“So's Hey.”

“So's Peter.”

“Well, I'm not.”

“Good,” he said, the loudest thing he said. “I promise not to be, next time you are.”

“It's a deal,” she said.

Then the momentum of the stairs took over, and they were swept around the spiral, one up, the other down. She didn't look back, and the next thing she knew, she was out the front door. She put down the case and bent over, cradling the arm that had held it. She felt as if she'd never use it again. Her arm hanging lifeless, she was going to gimp around forever because she'd pretended it was empty when, in fact, there were pounds and pounds of painting in it. She stood between the house and the stairs to the white Jaguar. The shriek in her elbow joint abated after a minute, giving over to a throb that she could handle. She picked the suitcase up in the other hand and took a parting look down the green canyon below Crook House. From the kitchen garden, she could hear the parrot squawking. It was February twenty-sixth, she thought as she climbed the shaded stairs to the drive, and she no longer blamed the winter weather for what went wrong. That, right there, was progress.

5

Sam didn't get the story straight for three or four days, but it was his own fault. He didn't pay attention the first couple of times Nick called. He made noncommittal noises here and there and kissed it all good-bye, because he didn't really believe what Nick was telling him. Sam heard stories all the time. He was used to scaring off married men and men with futures. As soon as it hit them they had gone too far, gotten too involved, they back-pedaled, threw the bolts, and went to unlisted numbers.
Sam
never got too involved, and his manner with any man went unchanged from the first encounter to the last, assuming he permitted more than one. They didn't have to worry about him sticking around. He always took the first hint when things were over, as he did now. All he knew was that Nick promised him Thursday afternoon in Bel-Air that they could make it in Nick's own bed the next day and then take steam and then a swim. And Friday morning at seven, Nick called and woke him up to cancel.

“My friend Peter was missing last night,” he said. “He had an accident.”

Sam knew who Peter was. He was the man they'd found painting at the gate to the ranch. And Sam figured the two of them must have had it out right there, after he took off in the MG. An hour or two later, when Rita left and he and Nick were alone again, they went on a tour of Crook House that was curiously formal, as if Nick were showing it to a buyer from out of town. If he only knew, Sam thought, he'd let
me
do all the talking. Sam could have walked these rooms in his sleep. Did, some nights. And yet he didn't mind Nick going on about Varda, the land he sold off in half-acre lots, and the will he never made because he was all alone. Though that was a lie, Sam thought, because what about Frances Dean? Why didn't he leave it all to her? Sam didn't say a thing out loud. He merely asked a tourist's innocent questions. Nick's version was just what he hoped for—it proved he was the only one who knew the truth.

“He's all right now,” Nick said, “but I can't see you today. I'll call you Monday.”

“Who knows where I'll be on Monday?”

“Will you call
me
?”

They left it open. Nick rang up again on Sunday afternoon, when Sam was just back from a heavy session with a trucker who'd driven straight through from Salt Lake City. One of his out-of-towners, who showed up every couple of months and paid top dollar. Sam held the phone in one hand and leafed through a bikers' magazine with the other. Feeling so satisfied with the animal scene where men said nothing, he was in no mood to give an ear to Bel-Air reasons. Nick seemed to want to tell him even more of the story, and he didn't know why. If you want to get out of this, Sam wanted to say, then just let go. He didn't care about Peter's accident. He didn't care about Nick, for that matter, and he had a certain specific contempt for Nick because Nick didn't know it. This was not the same as no affection. He
liked
Nick well enough. He liked everybody, really. Yet, as Rita had intuited, he had no interest in people, and the stories they lived out were all the same to him. And since he paid no attention to his own story, either, you had to admit he was consistent.

“It was the snake, Sam. The same snake.”

“How do you know that?” he asked, suddenly aware that he might tip over if this went on too long. “Did it introduce itself?”

“It happened in the bunkhouse. Peter was fooling around in the fireplace, and it got him in the arm.”

Sam felt his stomach tie up in a knot. Did it hurt? he wanted to ask. How
much
? But that was all. He didn't want to know the story because a hairsbreadth shift in the compass or the clock would have made it
his
story. But he let Nick talk on for a bit, waiting for some word about the pain.

From the moment the snake flashed, apparently, Peter moved as if he were being filmed for a documentary on the right thing to do. He made a quick tourniquet above the punctures. He picked up a Coors from the bed, pulled the tab, and used it to cut the sign of the cross in his arm, right in the middle of the wound. Then he sucked at it till the poison milked out into his mouth, sweet-sour, the sweet being the blood. Then he staggered to his pickup and drove out of the ranch and down through the canyon to the Pacific Coast Highway, where he floored it to a clinic he'd passed for years in Malibu. He walked in, held out his arm as if for a shot, said “Rattlesnake bite,” and fell over in a dead faint. There wasn't a clue in his clothes as to who he was, and the slow-witted clinic crew didn't think to match him up with a car in the parking lot. He came out of the faint in a fever, and it was just before midnight that he dropped the long, delirious Russian tale of his crowns and estates and remembered who he was.

Sam tuned out. The pain stopped. It was just another story, after all. There was so little that he bothered with beyond sex. The Concept of pain still had the power to somersault Sam's certainty that he was self-sufficient, but even then it took the snake gliding close to his own body to bring it home to him. What's more, it would have required a bite in the small of the back, something that couldn't be reached, the pain going deeper and deeper, no truck, no clinic, to keep Sam riveted to Peter's danger.

“So I can't see you for a while,” Nick said, as if he were betraying something.

“Why?” Sam asked.

“I just told you. Peter's got to take it easy. His nerves are shot. It isn't the snakebite, because it wasn't really bad. They think the snake must have just finished eating a mouse or something, and, besides, he was old. Anyway, I've got to stick close to Peter for a while.”

“For a while,” Sam repeated without inflection. “Well, I hope the two of you will be very happy together.”