The Gold Diggers (29 page)

“When did she die?”

“Hmm,” Hey said, as if it was less and less familiar ground. “In the mid-fifties, I think. Yes, that's right.” After a certain point, he seemed to say, his memory got sketchy. That didn't register to Rita. She pressed on because she assumed he
had
to know the whole story. Anyone in Hey's position, she knew, would automatically have been splicing together the inches of film that Varda told from time to time about his grandest passion. Besides, she knew Hey didn't miss a trick. Just like her.

“Where's she buried?” Rita asked. It went one of two ways, she was thinking as she sorted two dozen demitasse spoons into slots of felt. They either freighted a movie star back to his old hometown to lie in a grassy yard with a picket fence, or they consigned him to oblivion in a corner of Forest Lawn or Hollywood Memorial, where the big names got the same top billing as ever. Rita was just asking. She wasn't a visitor of graves. She didn't care, which is why she was taken aback by the turn in Hey's mood.

“Why do you want to know so much?” he asked in a sort of quiet fury. “Can't you leave it alone?”

Her mouth dropped open. It was all so safely far in the past, she'd thought, that she couldn't imagine anyone wounded by it still. But a picture popped into her head of Varda and Frances Dean, buried side by side in a corner of LA nobody went to, and only Hey to mourn them and leave an occasional bunch of violets. Under a freeway or something. She looked over at him, and she wondered at last about the secrets he kept. He always seemed to tell everything.

“I'm sorry, Hey,” she said, putting out a hand and touching him lightly on the arm. “I go on and on about Rusty Varda, and I forget that for you it's not just a story.”

“It's not that, Rita,” he said with a shake of his head. “You don't
want
to know it all. I'd tell you, but you know what would happen? All those pretty movies you have of the two of them would disappear”—and he snapped his fingers an inch from her nose—“like that! It's not a story at all. People change.”

Oh, my God, Rita thought, she's still alive. And before she could say a thing, she begged the powers that be not to kill her off before Rita got to her, just for the sake of irony. I'm the one she's been waiting to talk to, Rita thought, the only one since Varda who knows who she is. Hey was saying what they always say when the stakes double: Be satisfied with what you've got. And Rita thought: I will be, once I've seen her.

People change, she warned herself as often as she thought of it after that. She said it again in the shop. She pushed away the lunch she'd only scratched the surface of. She picked up the phone and dialed the man who did their indoor plants. She'd be twenty minutes with him, then ten apiece with the three or four clients who needed daily care. That left her a half hour to stop off at a post office on the way with the Goya etchings on the folly of war. Don't expect a thing in West Covina, she told herself. Just go on with what you're doing. Hey had told her how bad it was, but she went ahead and set it up anyway, trying not to care too much. She was feeling too good after Saturday afternoon and Sunday night not to risk it. From where she sat at the table, she could hear the three of them laughing behind her in the picture. Not
at
her. They were trying to keep her spirits up, because at three she had to go visit a kind of grave. As she said hello to the plant man, she swung her chair around again and saw what it was like when it was easy. It suddenly seemed a million miles away.

The dealer's rep delivered the green MG to Nick's office in Beverly Hills at nine o'clock. He wasn't meeting Sam till twelve, but pretty soon he couldn't stand it, sitting at his desk and staring out the window at it gleaming by the curb. While he cradled the telephone with his shoulder, he lobbed the ring of keys back and forth between his two hands and, without paying any attention, talked out a mortgage problem with a buyer, a seller, and a bank. At ten he chaired his Wednesday meeting with his staff. The four of them exploded into his office, deals coming out of their ears. Compared with them, Nick was calm as a Sufi, and he looked on them all benignly while the properties flew about the room, traded off and pyramided. The agents ran around the Monopoly board with ever greater speed and begged for the chance to set a price on anything with walls. Any of them could have sold the Brooklyn Bridge in a morning's work. Nick gave here and there a word of advice and privately thanked his stars he'd got them all working for him and didn't have to compete. And every few minutes he'd lose himself in the green MG that beckoned him out for a spin.

“Listen, Nick,” said Charlie Burns, putting his hands down flat on the desk and leaning too far into Nick's airspace. “I've got a firm one-three on Lookout Grove.”

“Not a chance,” Nick said, steely-eyed for the moment. Charlie was the agent Nick kept on to remind him real estate was shitwork. He gave off an odor like the rusted underside of rotten cars. Peter refused to be in the same room with him. “One-eight is final.”

“You'll never get it.”

“Never is a long time, Charlie,” he said, still tossing the keys. He kept Charlie Burns around for another reason too, so he could talk tough. The name's Lew Archer, lady—I've been in this town thirty-five years, and I never yet ate an orange off a tree. A million three, a million eight, it was all such hoodlum's language. “That's the top of the world up there,” he said expansively. It was the top of Coldwater Canyon, anyway. “We don't dicker for the big ones. They want a grown-up's house, they got to pay a grown-up's price.”

When it was over and they'd picked each other's pockets to find out who was winning, they tumbled out again to the four corners of the county, their blood up. Nick was free, and with a whole hour to kill, he headed out early. Free, he thought as he walked to the car, was not the right word. He'd taken off more time in the last month or six weeks because of Sam and then Peter than he had in the whole three years before. He knew he had to stop coasting and go out hunting, and he'd wondered for days if he still had it in him to hustle the same as ever. He had to, didn't he? Money cost more and more, after all. For the first time in his life, he considered taking stock. But not today. He wanted to finish it up right with Sam, and he wasn't going to skimp and try to fit it all in during his lunch hour. A new car had always been for Nick the perfect symbol for starting fresh, and before he gave this one away, he wanted some of the new rubbed off on him. He couldn't go back to a mere MG himself anymore, the LA status system in the four-wheel division being what it was. So he slung himself into the bucket seat to be innocent again, and the smell alone sent him back twelve years to the feel of his first new car. He looked down at the mileage, 3.6, and laughed out loud. Free was the word, all right.

He drove out Sunset to the beach, and though the Jag and the Mercedes could have probably passed him in third, it felt like eighty when he did forty-five. As he took the last long curves through Pacific Palisades, he realized he was on the route he always took for the maiden ride in his own cars. Sunset, with its turns and its country club terrain, was a very showy road, and the show was cars. Nick was twenty-three when he traded a '58 Chevy, two-toned, blue on white like a Chinese jar, for a '63 silver Tempest just off the line. He drove it around for days in a trance of pride, sending out a psychic beam up and down the roads he traveled: Look at me, look at me. Probably nobody did. For one thing, there were always more riveting cars on the road than this year's Tempest. Soon enough he came to see that that included the Jaguar and the Mercedes, too, all the way up the line. In any case, everyone was most possessed by only two cars, the one he had and the one he wanted next. Which, once Nick understood it, sent his innocence up in a cloud of smoke. But he'd say this much for cars: For a moment, at least, for the first long ride out Sunset, they gave it back to you again, which was more than he could say for the kind that disappeared with sex.

He turned north toward Malibu on the Coast Highway. The beach pads hung between the road and the water, elbow to elbow, and Nick could practically watch the prices going up like the rolling dollars on a gas pump. He'd had a place himself for a couple of years before he met Peter, and since it was only a few miles further along, he went faster. He just had time to take a quick look at it before he turned back to meet Sam in Santa Monica. The old house crossed his mind as a pair of numbers: sixty-five, the purchase price, and ninety, what he sold it for. As always, he shook his head and kicked himself, because he knew it went a year ago for two-oh-five. I wonder, he thought, if I've gotten as sleazy as Charlie Burns and don't even know it. Since when, for instance, did he start to see the whole bloody coast as pots of gold, as if he'd forgotten the broken hills and the ocean? Mile after mile, the houses lined up like the numbered lots at an auction. He didn't need a bit of it. He had the windows open, and the wind was in his hair. Buttoning up his lip like Gary Cooper, he thought with only half a smile: The thing about a cowboy is, wherever he rides, he owns it all. No call to act like a worry wart clerk whose head is stuffed with numbers. He convinced himself of everything. So he rose above the rut of money as he zipped along. Forgot, for the sake of the moment's innocence, that numbers turned him on.

It was up ahead. He signaled and made a turn in the driveway. They'd added a deck upstairs, he noted, and faced the wall on the highway with redwood planks, taking the windows away. Nick couldn't see in at all, and he didn't care. He literally only wanted a glimpse. He'd lived in fifteen different places in LA, moving like everyone else whenever the mood struck. If he was in the neighborhood, he touched bases at this one or that one. For him it was just like keeping a diary. In a moment he was heading back south to Santa Monica, all settled in for the flashbacks. He was straight when he bought into Malibu, gay when he sold out. He might have kept it forever, or at least until two-oh-five, except Peter got edgy so close to the ocean. Flipping the pages of an album in his head, Nick hardly recognized himself swinging back and forth—at the beginning, between a steady girl and a hustler once a week, and later on, Monday a man, a girl on Tuesday, and so on. Nobody left a name and number. Nobody was asked to.

And look at me now, he thought with equanimity. Now that I'm with Peter, I've stayed the same for the longest time so far. He used the past exclusively at times like this to congratulate himself. He knew it was bullshit. The lulling smell of newness in the car and the kick of it that took the years away were whistling in the dark. What was really going on all morning was his fear of Sam. He wouldn't own up to it because it was crazy. He'd said good-bye a hundred times before. And he used the car to mush around in the past because he didn't want to think too hard about why he found it suddenly expedient to say good-bye with flashy toys. He wasn't free or innocent at all. He wished he could have said he'd gone too far with Sam and gotten in too deep, but the dread he'd felt about today had nothing to do with second thoughts. It seemed as if it didn't matter what he did. The course of things had a mind of its own now. It wasn't going to stop till it was finished.

He left the highway and climbed the hill straight up to the cliffs that bordered Santa Monica at the ocean. They were meeting in a shelter in the park along the rim, and Nick wanted to leave the MG in plain sight so as to point it out, Exhibit A, at the right time. No hard feelings, Sam, okay? He saw the wooden shelter just ahead, an alley of royal palms going off on either side, no sign of Sam, and at that moment a van pulled out of a parking space, right where he wanted to be. So far, so good. He got out and locked it fast so he wouldn't start to practice what to say. But he took a last look over his shoulder as he walked away, to possess, one more time while it was still his, the past it reminded him of. When he sauntered across the grass to the shelter, an elaborate thing of two-by-fours that held up a shingled roof over a cluster of benches, he noticed the shuffleboard couples padding about, retired and arm in arm. They were all in civilian clothes, and they stared at him openly, probably because he was dressed to the teeth. He wore a pearl gray gabardine suit, Hong Kong shirt, Bond Street tie, and Gucci shoes—deliberately, it almost seemed. He was a long way away from the day he shucked his office clothes in the car to come to Sam on equal terms. Power, not sex, was what he was dressed for now.

He went through the shelter's arch to the ocean side, and there was Sam, leaning forward on his folded arms, on a fence post at the edge. The fence was chicken wire and sagged in places, but the drop-off was so sheer, the distance down so far, that it made its point.

“In the old days,” Nick said, and all of a sudden Sam tensed and began to listen, but he didn't turn around, “when they needed to drive a car off a cliff in a movie, this is where they drove it.”

“Did you used to come here and watch them when you were a kid?” Sam asked, in some ways the only nice thing he said the whole time, and
then
he turned around. The look on his face was so far off, so uninvolved, he might have been watching the ocean for hours and hours. “You should have been going to baseball games.”

“It was before my time,” Nick said. “I just heard about it.”Varda was who he was thinking of, but Sam might not remember who that was. “How are you?”

“Fine. I'm always fine.”

“Good. You want to go for a walk?”

“Why not?” Sam said with a shrug. “We've never done
that
before.” Sparring now with everything he said, the look on his face was one thing. He
sounded
as if he wouldn't look at an ocean if you paid him. Nothing there. “So,” he went on, “are you getting much?”

“I'm all right,” Nick said, sidestepping the reference. “I'm too fucking busy is what it is. Sometimes I think we ought to start over out here and not let the land be owned at all. Squatter's rights. I get so sick of houses I want to live in a tent. In the mountains or something.”