The Gold Diggers (30 page)

“Or on a ranch,” Sam said. “With the boys. I bet you're so busy you haven't got
time
to get laid anymore. Isn't that right?”

Oh, please, Nick thought, not yet. Sam was upping the ante in irony, and Nick caught himself wanting time out, to change the tune before they said another thing. He was hit broadside by a wave of the pain he'd bought the MG to neutralize. He called it pain. Guilt was more like it. And irony was fine, he wanted to say, but couldn't they have it subtle and more ambiguous? Like a man being bested in a bargain, Nick had already given up the mood he
thought
they'd be able to do this in. He wouldn't admit it now, but he'd seen the two of them as if from the air, a couple of melancholy men on the cliffs, high above the lordly ocean, worlds apart. Like the clear-eyed lieutenant and the Polynesian girl in
South Pacific
. He scrapped it like a comic routine at a wake. Today is all we've got, he thought hopelessly, so why doesn't he see that what we do now is what we're left with? He'd never, like Rita, read Henry James straight through, but instinctively Nick fell into social forms and complicated manners. He favored ways of saying things that said at the same time: I love you, I hate you, don't leave me, good-bye forever. Who the hell did he think he was? Sam would have demanded if he'd known. He made it clear that the situation at hand wasn't designed to follow Nick's instincts.

“I know I should have called you,” he began, but Sam interrupted before he got his excuses going.

“Like I always said, Nick, you don't have to call me at all. Unless you want to fuck. You get off on all these secret agent meetings, but for me it's just a run of red lights between here and West Hollywood.”

“I just want to talk, Sam.”

“Oh, I
know
. That's what I mean. I don't.”

“I can't see you anymore.”

“So what else is new?” He turned to Nick, and in the same motion he cuffed Nick's shoulder with the back of his hand so that Nick turned to him, too. We can't fight here, Nick thought sensibly, or if he jumps me, a cop at least will break it up. And Sam snapped out, “I can't see you either, baby. Get it?”

“Sam, I don't want it to be this way.”

“Oh? Just how
do
you want it to be?”

Fair enough. They stood face to face, and Nick wondered as he looked into Sam's angry eyes, and then away, if they'd ever locked eyes since the moment they met. They'd had to then, if only to telegraph the terms of the contract, that they wanted to fuck, that one would get paid. Essentially, from that point on, there was no reason to. Nick didn't know what Sam used to look at, but for weeks his own eyes, hungry for the whole of the cowboy's body, had taken a million pictures of Sam in motion, roused by everything he did. Nick hadn't had the leisure to get lost in the meantime, fishing the deeps of the boy's black looks. He was just as able to fall in love without it.

“I still care what happens to you,” he said—staring over Sam's shoulder out at the ocean, as a matter of fact. “I'd do things for you, or I
would
have, but I knew you'd feel pushed if I said something.”

“Like what?”

“I could have gotten you a job.”

“I got a job already,” he said fiercely, as if he was being patronized.

“So you do,” Nick said. “But that's what I mean. You don't want to be intruded on.” He thought, I didn't pick it to be like this, and I won't fight dirty, but I won't lose. It was something he'd learned from Peter, to be ready on no notice at all to counterattack. But Peter always smothered it out at the first spark, before it ate up so much as a handful of grass. Nick came in late, when the fire was already out of control, exploding the trees like popcorn. He wondered, finally, if Sam knew how much a man might give away gladly, without a fight. There must have been those who were left without nothing when Sam ran off, but since it wasn't money, Sam would have called it a fair deal every time. Weeks ago, he'd told Nick he wasn't the most expensive. But only to tell him money was cheap. He could
get
a price to choke horses. And his notion of what things were worth placed no value on someone's caring. So you care what happens, Sam must have thought, well that's
your
problem.

“You can't tell me you don't wonder where you'll be in ten years,” Nick said. He was surprised Sam let him keep talking. Peter would have locked him out of the bedroom. “You may not
worry
about it at all, but everyone has an idea.”

“What'll I be in ten years?” he asked, as if he'd need a hint. “Your age, right? Well, I don't intend for it to matter. Either I'll be dead inside, or I'll be dead, period.” And then he grinned, as if he'd had an afterthought. “How do I know? I might be just the same.”

“What do you
want
?” Nick asked him bluntly. At least we're talking, he thought, and more than we did when we had no clothes on.

“Didn't I just tell you? I want to be where I am now.”

“You'll need money.”

“I got what I need,” he said, but something changed. He went back to walking and seemed to coax Nick to come along and fall into step. He had the balls to tear up checks in people's faces, probably, but Nick could see that he looked them over first. Make me an offer and I'll laugh till I'm sick. But make me an offer.

“Don't you get tired of the street?” Nick asked. “All that waiting?”

“No,” he said quietly, but not trying to cut Nick off. He'd talk about it some, he seemed to say, except he didn't know where to start. “I like it. I
never
wanted to live in a house. Or a tent or anything. The street's where I live, and my room is just a place to keep stuff in. It's like an airport locker.”

The Gray Line bus pulled up, and the door hissed open as they went by. The tourists filed out—looking like they all lived in the same town in Iowa, so that you could practically tell who was the grocer, the fire chief, and so on—and they straggled across the grass to the fence, cameras aimed at the Orient. Nick, the tireless LA booster, silently wished them all a happy trip. If he could have stepped out of the three-act play with Sam for a minute, he would have tried to tell them all how it would break their hearts if they saw it at sunset. Which was not to disparage the glorious view trumpeting out even now on every side—a DeMille production of a view, really, because it looked from the top of the cliff like it was twenty or thirty miles across. The ocean, GI green and rough, was probably the biggest thing the Gray Line had. Nick couldn't say himself how far it went, from Long Beach or something at the southern verge, all the way to Zuma on the north. Ahead of Nick and Sam, through the still tall palms, the spring had turned everything very green, and they could see the Santa Monica Mountains and the Malibu Hills both. They'd seen them last from the empty café in Venice, the third time they met. Unlike them, the mountains seemed a good deal closer here, and today they were the deeper blue to which the water aspired. To Nick, when he was feeling the way he wanted to, the coastal ranges were a mystery that ended a long way off. They connected him up with holy places, the Sierras and then the Rockies, and as a result the West took place in his head, all of it. That was when he thought it was heaven on earth.

But why was he thinking it now?

“I guess I knew you'd be all right. You don't need me,” Nick said. He was suddenly flying, and it wasn't the Gray Line folk, innocent as they were, radiating niceness, that had picked him up like a helicopter trailing a rope. It was this: He finally knew he was off the hook. He didn't have to keep working at a happy ending. Or not the one he'd envisioned, where they smiled and clapped each other on the shoulder, and Sam drove off grateful, changed, and ready to go to law school. Sam had let him know he didn't care. He hadn't given Nick the time of day since the day at the ranch. And Nick had to admit he was giddy with relief. If he'd thought all along he wanted to
be
someone to Sam, to salvage out of a meaningless ending a moment for them to ache with all their missed chances, he didn't want it anymore. It was a happy ending
because
it was meaningless. What's more, he found he didn't want to be understood. He always had before. I have a lot of commitments, see, and it doesn't mean it wasn't great, but I gotta go. No apologies from now on, Nick vowed. And no more fretting for sympathy.

“I'd just drive you crazy if I tried to hang around,” he went on when Sam said nothing. It didn't seem like an ominous nothing, since he took his cue from Sam's own love of distance. “It's better if it's over altogether. We can say good-bye right here. No big deal.”

So this is the last time I'll ever see him, he thought, moving off at the slightest angle as he walked, so that they veered again toward the fence. For the sake of decorum, he let the air out of his balloon and came back to earth. It wouldn't do to seem so overjoyed. Like a fancy overcoat, he put on instead the melancholy mood he relished. It's not us, he thought nicely of him and Sam, it's time itself that brought us here. They came up short against the cliff edge, and he looked down at all the little naked people on the beach. If Sam had continued to just shut up, Nick might have given a speech, the parting lover's equivalent, say, of the Gettysburg Address. He didn't seem to know he was hysterical, any more than he did when he drove along in the MG with a sap's lens on his Instamatic. He was a whole lot more narrow-eyed than Iowa. The people who would have done anything for Nick—Peter and Rita at present—would have sworn he never went too far with sentiment. He went farther than Peter, not as far as Rita. They were none of them tacky about it, though, with the possible exception of Nick when he was fixed on cowboys. The question, then, was why today he was getting his feelings off greeting cards. Unless it was that he was as scared as ever. But now he didn't even seem to know it. The fear had made over the world.

“You know,” Sam said, “I used to keep count of the times I'd fucked.” Nick didn't hear him right away, because he was lost still in his melancholy reverie, where love lasted only long enough to make men fools, and then exiles. “It wasn't hard to keep track, because I did it every day. But I used to try to remember what they looked like, too. Even now I see faces sometimes from back when I started. They float into my head like people I used to know, and it's funny, because I know more about them now.”

Nick wasn't sure what to say. Sam didn't seem to be asking if the same thing happened to him. In fact, it didn't. He felt apologetic, as if he'd been found out letting his life run out without a second look. He couldn't recall the face of anyone he'd sold a house to longer than a year ago. Meanwhile, he'd never heard Sam say anything half as complicated. He would have welcomed it a month ago and drawn him out and held on tighter. Now he only thought: What about us? It was almost one o'clock, and if they were going to say good-bye, then someone had to
say
it.

“How do you know them better if you never see them again?”

“I know the type,” Sam said. “The reason I stopped counting, I realized after a while how
everyone
was a type. But I still remember the first ones.” He laughed, and he put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and hunched his shoulders as he let out the punch line. “It's the ones I fuck now that I can't remember.”

“Sam, there's something I want to give you,” Nick said soberly, changing the subject as soon as Sam seemed finished. He didn't want to talk about Sam. He was even a little sick of it. After all, he'd fucked a cast of thousands himself, and he could be just as jaded about it as Sam if he felt like it. He hadn't really been listening. It seemed as if Sam was only bragging.

“The reason I'm telling you—you know what
your
type is?” He turned and met Nick's eyes as he asked the question. They'd get to the settlement in a minute. He had a point to make first. He paused for effect, as if Nick might really hazard a guess what type, and then like a schoolmarm he gave out the answer. “You think I'll turn on you. I'll go tell Peter how you like it, maybe. Or make a scene in your office. You're scared it might cost you an arm and a leg to buy me off.” And then another moment's silence. Nick pretended it wasn't worth answering, returning a level gaze as best he could. What did it matter how much Sam knew? It was over with. It didn't have five minutes left. “I bet you got another envelope on you. Should I guess how much is in it?”

“It's not more money,” Nick said with a shake of his head. “After all, I'm all paid up, aren't I? The seven hundred was a sort of retainer. And what I'm going to give you now is just because I like you. You've been good for me.”

Even to Nick it didn't sound true, but he was damned if he'd admit Sam was right. He
wasn't
right. He'd made it sound like Nick had a horror of blackmail. But it was violence he feared, though he couldn't make it coalesce and make a picture. He wasn't scared for his body. Even at the edge of a cliff, where a lunge and a body block could send him hurtling over like a coupe in a grainy old thriller. He was frightened instead for the life he lived, that Sam would overrun it like an army. But since he couldn't imagine how, it was another reason to shrug it off, pretend it wasn't there.

They both understood it was time to go. They headed back the way they'd come, both suddenly quiet. As if on cue, the Gray Line tourists, signaled by their driver, began to make their way back to the bus, some of them lingering and looking over their shoulders, not ready yet to go back forever to fields of corn with nothing more than a snapshot. This time Nick and Sam had to thread their way through the crowd as they gathered in line. For a moment, the two of them were quite outnumbered, and Nick was struck by the strangest thing. Silence. He'd expected to hear the din of down-home chatter. But as they passed in front of him like a veil, he couldn't tell if they were speechless out of awe or they were talked out and sick of seeing sights. He wanted terribly to know, because he'd begun to get the feeling that everything he'd said about everything all day was dead wrong. If the tourists, after all, didn't act as they were meant to, like the simple folk in a Currier & Ives, then perhaps he was misperceiving more than he knew. He and Sam were down to the final minutes, and Nick couldn't be sure, even as the countdown ticked away, that they wouldn't go through another reversal. More than ever, today they were holding different scripts.