The Gold Diggers (26 page)

“Of course,” she said, “I don't give a real return address, so I don't know what happens when something arrives. I even go to different post offices.” She got up from the desk, as if leaving the figures behind her, and went to the ice-white silk divan to sit down. “The only thing I've heard is a little paragraph in the
Times
this week, about a Toulouse-Lautrec that went back to the Detroit Museum. They had a reward of a thousand dollars, and they didn't know who to send it to. I don't care. I don't want it. Somebody ought to give me a government grant to buy stamps, but that's all.”

Then silence. It was Nick's move. “I'm calling the cops,” it just might be, or “You're making this up,” or “You need help.” She'd said too much, she knew it—she'd left him with nothing to add or ask. He's going to try to be nice, she thought with a pang, and all the while he'll be throwing me out of the house. And for the first time she wondered: Would I prefer it if he got mad? She had a sudden picture of him throwing plates at her off the stone table, like a juggling act gone mad. Meanwhile, it was next to impossible to sit there plainly on the sleek divan looking spiritual, like Marie Antoinette awaiting the verdict, because she was up to her hips in silk cushions and felt like a tart. She should have stayed at the desk. In any case, she wouldn't have believed what Nick was thinking.

Whew, he said to himself as he watched Rita's face. Who would have guessed there was so much story blowing about in Crook House? Something as flat as that, as uninvolved and empty of judgment. Not unmoved, though, by Varda's courting of Frances Dean, and properly reeling from the magnitude of the loot. Nick was nevertheless more riveted by Rita than by anything else. She's as lost in this as I am in Sam, he thought, and then he revised his opinion of a minute before that she'd gone too far. Compared with Sam, none of this was a bad thing. No one got hurt, either then or now, and now it was just a public works project, like planting trees by the freeway. Nick wished he had one of his own. No wonder she's not distracted half the time, he thought, like I am—her secret place isn't a fantasy. His sudden picture of her was, by contrast to hers, as calm as a Dutch interior—a row of windows sending in bright light, and Rita there in a white silk dress, holding real things in her hand. Not a single cowboy going up in smoke.

“Well?” she asked, breaking his reverie, as if to say how long was she supposed to wait.

“But why are you so sad?” he asked her back. He was confused. Didn't the treasure make her happy?

“I'm not so sad,” she said, more angry than not, now that she thought of it.

“Maybe it's me. You looked a little hangdog when you went off to make the phone calls for the party.”

“What do you want me to say, Nick? I was sorry we couldn't spend the day together.”

She was crystal clear. It wasn't what she had in mind, but she'd talk about this if she had to.
She
didn't bring it up.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, so was I.” And he thought: Hold it, I'm two steps behind and making an ass of myself. I'll catch up in a minute.

“Okay, so we're both sad. Poor us. Let's drop it.”

“Are you mad?” he asked, still trying to gain time. Of
course
she was mad, but he hadn't a clue why.

“Only because I don't think we'll get anywhere talking about it.”

“About what?” he asked, wincing now.

“Us,” she said between her teeth, so slowly it ended in a long hiss. “How Rita feels about Nick.”

At last he got it. For a moment more he tried to duck it, but it didn't work—there was too much evidence falling all over itself in the wings like a troupe of clowns, waiting to tumble on. The last sixteen days, for instance, went down like a row of dominoes. Rita was his safety zone. While he rode out the hairpin turns of his feelings for Peter and Sam, he came back day after day to Rita, to steady himself. He was about to go sprawling. He'd tripped, he was in the air, and he thought in the long, drowning man's moment before he hit the earth: I've gone crazy. Anyone else would have known by now, but not Nick, because loving had driven him crazy. And he turned on himself the moral rage he took such care to spare others—you're no damn good, he thought, and you've thrown your life away on cheap little sideshows. The human things that were really happening went on and on without him. That, at least, is what the dread in his heart was signaling. But there was something else—though he might have denied it, too, if he hadn't been locked up here—please, he thought, I don't want to give this up yet. As if anything would listen to
him
anymore.

“Just now,” he said, swallowing hard, as if his throat were sore from a sudden draft, “I can't think of anything nice you might be feeling.”

“Oh, it's not that bad,” she said. She wasn't agreeing, she didn't mean him. She meant that she wasn't so far gone, that her heart was more her own than not.

“What are we going to do?”

“How will we go on, you mean.” She was following it all far better than he. Let her decide, he thought, because I've fucked it up enough. Whatever she wants. “The same as usual,” she said. “I'm not going to corner you in empty rooms and tear off my clothes. Now's my chance, and look how pure of heart I am. I figure, even if we did it, if we ran away to Reno and made it legal, I'd still get over you after a while.” She leaned back on the sofa—sank in, really—and put her arms wide along the tops of the cushions. The flare-up was over. “We ought to know when we're both well off,” she said with a light laugh. She smiled so winningly that even Nick couldn't say for sure she'd been so sad. If we can just incorporate this, she seemed to say, in our easy way with each other, and laugh and tease and agree and agree, it will all go away. What she said next was born of irony, not heartache, and she did a small lift of her shoulders as if to laugh it off, even as she said it. “I'm a little in love with you is all.”

“I didn't know.”

“So I've gathered.”

“It's because of the last two weeks,” he said, beginning to get the thread of an idea. We spent too much time together, I knew it, he thought, and what Rita was feeling was stress. Fixing the blame on the course of situations, he put the whole thing in its place.

“Not really, Nick,” she said. “It's been so as long as I've been here. And it's funny, because Peter and I have always been attracted to opposites. I've done a big business in failures myself. Men who've lost their shirts, or men who've settled down to let their lives run out in crummy jobs and four walls in Long Island City. You're really not my type. But I saw you at the pool that day, your back was to me, and I thought: This one's the one. Even though I knew right then you were out of bounds. Does it make me sound like a nut? It's probably never happened to you.”

“You're wrong.” It happens all the time, he wanted to say, except it sounded so condescending. Sam was only his most fatal case of it. But its happening more than once didn't make him better at it, needless to say. He took no shortcuts through the miseries.

He stood up to go now, cutting it short for her sake. There was no point in making a spectacle of Rita's feelings, now that he'd caught the drift. He had his own thinking to do, to make things right again if he could, and he thought he should leave her here by herself and thus let her know the room was hers and the secret safe with him. She stood up at the same time, to bustle about and prove she was a survivor. She meant to turn over the diary and accounts, for Peter and Nick to study at leisure. From now on, she thought, she was only an interim curator. They both stood up, then, to change the subject. If there had been a Rusty Varda masterpiece at hand—the little Rodin study for Atlas was on the desk, along with a folder of Napoleon's letters, and the porcelain was visible out of the corners of their eyes, just out of reach—they might have fallen into a chat about art like a couple of tourists. But they were suddenly face to face and, like children warned against breaking a thing that is doomed the moment they're warned, they fell into each other's arms.

They had so many motives they practically canceled each other out. He held her first to let her know he didn't run from love. As for Rita, she wanted to put it across that she loved him the other way, too—the painless way. They met in the center of the room like the best of friends, a stone's throw from the outside world. They were guarded by a flame-colored cousin of the hawks that stood sentry over the bones of pharaohs. It was more than they had a right to hope for, so soon after such thin ice. But they had forgotten something. She had been, some two and a half months now, out of the ball game. For sixteen days, Nick had been married to Peter till death do them part. Nick had admitted it early on to Rita, and vice versa: They were neither of them very good at avoiding sex. So the hug that told them they each had a friend went off on its own and floated free, and their motives took a turn for the worse. He embraced her in case she was feeling meaningless in a houseful of men who were stuck on men. She drew him just as close to prove she was a woman, no matter what the odds. They kissed at the same time. Neither did it first.

And they might have stopped cold if the terrible reasons had taken root, because he wasn't really being nice and she wasn't really being tough, and they could both spot a lousy fuck a mile off. On the other hand, they'd been through all the high-minded hugging they needed. So when they pulled apart to come up for air and looked each other over, they might well have decided to quit while they were ahead. They'd done enough acting in bed to last them a lifetime. But by the time they had it in mind to object and go separate ways, their objections no longer applied. In the last two minutes, they had already changed again—their footwork got fancier with the years—and they saw it in each other's eyes. They'd confessed to each other at the beginning that sex was something apart, or sometimes life was and sex wasn't, but they knew what they were talking about. They'd both done it a lot
outside
themselves—that is, it either brought them outside while they did it, as if on wheels, or it drew them outside to do it. So why not put it to the test?

Well, why not, indeed, they decided as they moved to their buttons and zippers. But it was more than that. It dawned on them both at the same time that the easy way they had with one another—casual, guileless, undefined—reminded them of what they felt in bed when love was easy. Easy? Once again,
they
knew what they meant. It was the one-shot lovers—no past, no future—that made them who they were. By means of things of the moment, they saw into the long, long time they lived with themselves alone. What if it's all a delusion? they tended to think in a panic, but by then they were always half in, half out of their clothes, and for the moment their bodies were more insistent than their souls.

Rita let her Irish sweater fall to the floor. Nick undid the front of his flannel shirt and pulled the shirttail out of his pants. If he can't get it up, she thought, I won't even bat an eyelash. I can make love on a Saturday, can't I? he reasoned with himself, and not dredge up the women I used to fail by feeling nothing. Rita and Nick got naked at the same rate of speed, and it had its mysterious side, since they let each other see—in the momentary pauses, the lift of the eye, the faintly smutty cool—exactly what they were like when they went this far. A composure to match the sharpened, concentrated light of the two candles came upon them with each revelation—her breasts one minute, his cock the next—and they seemed as tranquilized as fashion models, as loose inside their bodies, but selling more than clothes. And with their combined experience, they didn't take each other's measure stupidly. Though he hardly ever saw anything else in LA above a certain altitude, Nick didn't think skin-and-bones and gold jewelry was the only way a woman was beautiful. Rita's full body, the pale of her skin and its swell into roundness, praised nature for extravagance and luxury. As for Rita, Nick was almost too chiseled by his years at the gym, his tight skin slick as a magazine, but she found him touching when he acted like a cowboy, as if he were dancing and stealing looks at his feet. They trusted what each other saw. They didn't desire each other's body, it seemed, half so much as they did the chance to show who they were.

They stood there utterly at ease, surprised perhaps to be in it so deep. But if it was the last chance to reconsider that stretched the moment out, they didn't give it the time of day. They took their last clear look at each other. Then she came back into his arms again, and they kissed so slowly that for a while they were almost motionless. He stroked her hips with the palms of both hands, then brought them around to the front of her thighs. She swayed a little. She seemed to hold the whole of his back in her own open hands, and she felt she could grip him like the bar of a trapeze, lifting off from the ground and swinging free. For years each had been the one who kissed the most, and together they got as serious with their tongues as players in the finals of a game. I'm still here, Nick thought, who almost never was after a certain point, and glad of it for letting him stay with her. Every few moments, of course, it hit Rita like a brick: I can't take it, I don't
want
to fuck, I'll hate you, wait and see. Because she wanted him and not it, she thought. But then it passed, and she laughed far off in her secret heart for getting overwrought like a girl in a house on a moor. No big deal, as Nick always said when he planted his feet on the ground. They were making love in order
not
to be so bloody serious.

By the time they decided to head for the sofa, the critical thing was genitals. They'd kept hands off so far. He wasn't so hard. She could tell by where it fell along her belly what its tension was, but she held off from going first for fear of seeming impatient. His one hand on her breast was lovely, the nipple between two fingers, but the other hand, grazing back and forth so close to her clitoris it felt like a dream just out of her grasp, would not light. The silence was getting thick. So they broke away and turned to the nearest thing they had to a bed, just to keep moving. For a moment he had one arm around her, and her head was on his shoulder.