The Gold Diggers (3 page)

She could tell Nick knew what she meant. She'd wear what she wanted. She probably could have said what she was afraid of, too, that she couldn't stand being alone any longer, and yet she had to if she gave up men, which she had to. But it wasn't all put into words yet. She only knew she was jittery, and here was someone who must have been, not long before he was sad, scared to death. He had an ambushed look about his eyes, like the victims of natural disasters.

“Nothing,” Nick said. “He died. He lived here forty-five years, collecting coins. When you're rich enough, you get to collect money. He died without a will. No heirs. Enter the State of California.”

“Did he die here?” she asked, looking down at the deep blue tiles, rimmed in gold, that paved the pool. She couldn't imagine why she cared. It was a jumpy thing to want to know, the young bride's line in the Gothic novel.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. He gave up the ghost one night in front of ‘The Late Show' in his den. The house was empty eight years while they traced his phantom cousins and the lawyers siphoned off the liquid assets. We bought the house intact at auction. All the furniture in place. We junked just about everything. But we kept Hey.”

“Who?”

“The houseboy. The one who picked you up at the airport.”

“We weren't introduced,” she said apologetically. Nick might get the wrong idea that she was snotty with servants. But he started to laugh.

“Don't worry,” he said. “It's nothing personal with him. He has bad days when he can't stand people and talks to his parrot. Those eight years, he lived here all by himself.” As he leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper, she realized he was as conspiratorial when he told stories as she was. “Twenty-
five
years ago, he used to dance with Balanchine. Come on. We'd better get going.”

They walked across the terrace to the house, passing tubs of flowering trees and the big old white wicker chairs that sit on the porches of northern islands. The stones underfoot were slate gray. The house was built in a “U” around the terrace, with wide, rough-beamed eaves and a terra-cotta roof. Casement windows, mahogany like a ship, and stucco walls. Spanish, sort of. All the windows faced in, toward the pool terrace and, beyond it, the garden and the city. There were no windows to speak of on the outer skin of the house, where the hillsides came down steeply. Seen from above or, even more, from the back, it would have looked like a fancy motel; but it was sited so as to mask that view. It was built on an idiotic principle, hugging the shape of the hills so that it cracked at the seams in earthquakes and shook all the glass into powder. Hey used to say they'd toted up a thousand years' bad luck, just in cracked mirrors. Perversely, Rusty Varda loved the idea that the earth might swallow up him and his house and his sixteen thousand Greek and Roman coins at any moment. And these things equal out. It turned out that, when the fires swept down through Bel-Air, they tended to leap over Crook House, nestled as it was, burning the leaves off its trees as they passed and ripping into the houses on the bare hilltops.

It was like walking into an opera. The room at the center, airy and high—with the spiral stairway going up to a balcony, where the front door was—appeared to be swathed in peach silk. Waves of it draped the terrace window, and it wrapped around the sofas, the chairs, and the footstools. Close up, you could see it was embroidered here and there with exquisite little peach bees. But it wasn't a room intended for close-ups. It was a living room where nobody lived, designed for the view from the balcony. Nothing like a newspaper or telephone would have fit on any of the table surfaces. “Fit” in both senses. They wouldn't have been suitable, as having too much to do with people; and there wouldn't have been room either, what with the bowls of camellias and crystal eggs and covered silver boxes. It was a room that had to do with other rooms, measured against the way people lived who lived above the fray. Surprisingly, Rita was more proud of it than put off, because it showed how pure Peter's work had gotten to be. There were rooms elsewhere in the house, no doubt, where people could live.

Nick led Rita around behind the spiral stairs and opened a closet door which turned out to be a two-man elevator. As they rode up to street level, Nick ticked off the specifications of the house, but they didn't register because Rita was reeling with the incongruity. The elevator was painted inside,
trompe l'oeil
, to look like the view from a balloon. The wicker of the gondola was painted waist-high, then the guy ropes, and above their heads the bottom of the great gas bag. For the view, they were supposed to be floating above an English park. Rita didn't know what to say. Not wanting like a bumpkin to comment on everything, she let it pass. They got off at the balcony, walked out the front door and up a flight of steps shaded over by willowy trees, arriving at last at the driveway, high above the house. They took the Jaguar instead of the Mercedes. They drove down and down, out the east gate of Bel-Air to Sunset and left toward Beverly Hills. Nick tried to keep her posted on the lay of the land. She heard him all right, stone cold sober at last, but turned her mind to the string of vehicles. The DC-10, the Mercedes, the balloon elevator, and the Jaguar sedan. It was a very pricey game of musical chairs.

She was half in love with him already. It was just a manner of speaking, “half in love,” and she'd use it to caution herself about men she shouldn't get involved with. The problem was, she more often than not went ahead and got involved, no one to blame but herself. Or worse, she'd fall all the way in love because the man in the picture didn't look twice at her, and she'd end up half-dead from the misery. Rita admitted she wasn't good at the matter of the heart. She'd had a bad run of married men, one after the other, as if she willfully refused to learn a lesson. What did she want? She'd never dreamed of asking, but it had to do with being alone. It simply never occurred to her that that was the very thing she might ask of a man. She thought that to ask it was to call the love off. Nick would say she was all wrong. For one thing, you can't be half in love, he'd say. He was a boy idealist about love, earnest and wide open. Tom Swift and His Pounding Heart. That's what Rita was half in love with, and they hadn't talked about anything yet.

“Have you lived here all your life?”

“In LA, yes. Not here,” he said, taking his hands from the wheel for a moment and gesturing at the close-clipped lawns on either side of the boulevard. “When you're on your way up or down, you don't live anywhere long.”

“Haven't you always been on the way up?”

“More or less. Not as much as Peter. He's the skyrocketing kind.” He spoke without awe of the process, and seemed to relish it. He knew that Peter would never have become a decorator if it hadn't been for Rita, and he was asking her now to share the marvel of it.

“I don't even understand what happened,” she said. The leather smell in the Jaguar was a shade sweeter than the Mercedes, like the difference between two perfect tobaccos. She was always good at hairline distinctions. “He got a job arranging pots and pans in a store window. Then it was antiques. The next thing I knew, he was decorating a yacht. The rest is history. My friend Peter, the star.”

“Superstar, you mean.”

“Is there a difference?” she asked playfully. She had got Peter his first job, doing the flowers at a wedding. She made a thousand phone calls to get him the next one, but he couldn't do it. His Village lover was jealous when he worked. Rita decided the Village lover had to go.

“I thought you'd never ask,” Nick said. “I'm one of the handful of people who knows. With stars, history is the last three weeks. They have all the time in the world to get their hair done and go shopping. Time is what superstars give up. It doesn't exist.”

“Peter doesn't have any time?”

“None. I wish I could buy him some, but he has more money than I do, so it mustn't be for sale.”

He spoke evenly, the skin around his eyes crinkling with pleasure. Not because the news about Peter was pleasant. He seemed happy that he had a handle on the situation, that he knew Peter well enough to see him through the haze. She didn't think there was anything wrong between Nick and Peter. What was sad, what was making Nick talk rueful and portentous, was a split in their rhythm. Nick seemed to have all the time on his hands that Peter gave up. He had time to kill. Rita didn't know how she knew it, since she didn't have any idea of what it took to do a day of real estate. Maybe because he'd taken time for her this afternoon, she thought, and then thought it didn't say a lot about her self-image, if time with her was time killed.

“So LA is a gold mine,” she said. She meant there were veins of it, and some people tapped into it and some didn't, and then it had to be mined, pick and shovel. It was a remark about how difficult it was, not how easy.

“You know those old prospectors they used to have in westerns?” Nick asked her as he turned into a driveway lined with freshly polished cars. “They're all grizzled, and they cuss and have rotten hats.”

“Yes,” she said, as if they'd seen the same movie that very day, projected in the middle of everything else, like a movie on a plane. “People who never make a strike. You wonder what they'd do with the money if it came to them now. After all that waiting.”

“My grandfather,” Nick said, shaping the irony into one final photograph, sepia-toned and out of an album. He used to go off by himself to the middle of nowhere and hunt for minerals. I don't know if it was a scheme about water or uranium or what; but when my father told me about it, I had a very clear picture of my grandfather putting a double handful of sand in a sifter. With a mule tied up nearby.”

A boy who should have been in movies took the key to the car from Nick to park it, and the two of them made their way to the front of the house. It was an ordinary place, not so big, and Rita wasn't in the mood to go overboard about it. But she forgot until she walked in, shying behind Nick and edging through the crowd in the front hall, all of whom seemed to be kissing good-bye, that she was here to see the latest piece of Peter's work. If possible, there was more silk in this living room than in Peter's own, pale as cream on every wall, upholstered to the room itself. The furniture was variously English, provincial French, and just a bit of wild-priced American, all of it old and perfect and brought together as if by an inner will to be beautiful in a well-protected place. This was what Rita said to herself, adopting the eye of a country-squire magazine, or, rather, its breathtaken voice. She turned to tell Nick she loved it, but he was gone to the bar to get them champagne. Peter appeared as she drew in her breath, before it turned into panic.

“You look like you just blew in from the East,” he said, grinning. “I can always tell, because you look as if everything here had a price tag on it, and you can't afford it.”

“It's not that, Peter. I'm afraid they won't take traveler's checks, and I have to have that little chest of drawers under the window.”

“The lady has good taste, I see.” He was full of mirth, but he was looking sleek, his yellow hair cut close. He always looked like he'd just finished posing for a portrait six feet by four, but today he was an Art Deco poster, cool-eyed and angular. Not too thin, like he used to be in New York. No hunger about him at all.

“Maybe I could take it out in trade,” Rita said, “because I see now I have to have it. I can dust and do ironing and run the vacuum around. How long would it take me to earn that chest?”

“Oh, about three years. But you know, you can't eat a chest. They just sit there and hold up ashtrays.”

They were so glad to be together again they were flying. Nick appeared with champagne, slopping it over his fingers, and they clinked glasses in a solemn toast before they went on laughing. Rita knew they had drunk to her arrival, but they also seemed to have paid their respects to the moment when they'd all three finally hooked up. It had taken them years and years.

“Go away now, Peter,” she said. “You're busy. I'm okay. Nick is just who I needed. He's telling me about his grandfather.”

“‘A Tale of the Old West,'” Nick said.

“Look,” Peter said to her, “I have to talk to you right away; Nick, go find Jennifer and tell her the house is fabulous. I'm going to take Rita for a ride.”

“Okay, Buddy.” Nick took Peter's glass and poured what was left in his own. He lifted it to them both and began to move away. Then he called back over his shoulder. “What are the dogs' names? Poo-poo and Tinkle, right?”

“Pyramus and Thisbe, and they're angels, so don't tease them.”

Peter led Rita through the room, and she noticed that everyone stopped to watch her. She understood they were keeping their antennae out for Peter, and they scrutinized her as something new about him. But it was odd. In New York, she was accustomed to centering herself in group after group at a party, until there was no line anymore between her energy and the party's. It tended to hide the fact that she was shy. There were perhaps thirty people in this room; but since it could have held sixty, the groups were islanded. As Rita and Peter threaded among them, she felt a whir and crackle around the two of them like a field of force. No one here, she realized, knew she talked too much. No one was weary of hearing she was wounded at love and so would hold out hope for her. Wouldn't have to
hope
. No one suspected her of less self-regard than the average. It made her feel fine, free to file for a new passport. It made everyone else seem easier to deal with, a little less than met the eye. She liked it that she'd been up three hours longer than anyone in the room. To make the point stick, she hadn't changed her watch yet.

When they left the living room, they went down several steps into the library. And there, suddenly, was Los Angeles again, this time through a mammoth plate window that showed how nervous it must have made someone to give up a whole room to books. Yet the books went on and on, rising to ten or twelve feet and scaled by ladders on tracks. But the first thing Rita saw was the swing. It was suspended on ship's ropes from the ceiling, more like a rickshaw with no wheels, or a sedan chair. It was painted, lacquered, carved, and beaded with stones like jade or lapis. From the Orient for sure, but Rita would have passed if asked what country. The rest of the room was more or less an English library. A Chippendale partners' desk and wing chairs by the fire, sherry and pipes, and a half-acre library table for magazines and bronzes. With this wedding cake of a swing chandeliered in the middle.