The Gold Diggers (33 page)

“I don't think so. I spend most of my time in Europe. I'm in art,” she said—but airily, so he wouldn't think she was an artist.

“Have you left us an address, Miss Varda?”

“Why?”

“One never knows. I'd like to be the first to tell you—when the time comes.”

“Oh,” she said, the wind knocked out of her. “I'll send you one as soon as I can. I'm between places right now.”

“As you wish,” he said ironically. He didn't believe her. He'd seen her kind before. All fired up for a saintly visit, and then they get punched in the stomach by it, and they never show up again. For her part, when she heard him sound so superior, Rita had an irrational wish to protest how tough she was. You'll see, she thought grimly as she turned to say goodbye. It shocked her. The point of doing what she'd done for Frances Dean was to do it so
no one
would see. If she tried to fight something bigger, the way of things at Desertside or the look on Alec Webber's face, she'd lose. But she had the feeling he wanted to be first with the word of a death because he liked to feed on trouble. Just as he liked to say Desertside was just another part of life, so everyone went away doomed. Oh, Jesus, what if this is all it's going to amount to in the end—that, Rita thought, was what everyone must wonder as they floated across the parking lot on a thin thread of freedom.

Not this time.

You can't hurt me, she thought ferociously, and she pushed the bar on the door. It groaned open, and the frail little breeze off the asphalt was as sweet as a dive in the ocean. She made a solemn promise not to remember any of this. And in that instant she might have done anything, because life was so large outside and Webber was only a speck of darkness. At the end of its arc, the door paused a beat before it swung shut, holding its breath to let her through. She called the last remark over her shoulder as if she were flinging the end of a scarf.

“As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Webber, she's dead and buried already.” And the door slammed. “Don't call us,” Rita said coyly, “we'll call you.”

But with the door between them now, he couldn't have heard that last, even if he could have read lips. Because she said it out to the parking lot, like a proclamation to all things ugly and fruitless. She walked to the car and didn't look back, the fear all gone, knocked out by the saving shot of anger. Anyway, she thought, he was too preoccupied keeping the skeletons safe in the closets to notice what Rita had gotten away with. She clicked herself into the seat belt and started the car. She locked eyes with the rearview mirror. Now, she said firmly to herself, forget it.

And she did, just like that. She'd done it time and again—with the past when she boarded the plane in New York, with every Varda masterpiece the moment it dropped in the mailbox. She got out of there fast. She'd never be traced because Desertside had too much else to hide. Some things she couldn't forget, of course, because she didn't know them yet. She could kill only what she knew and couldn't be blamed if she didn't see that it wasn't enough. If the past had been in only one place, in fact, she would have been home free. But it wasn't. She sailed up the ramp to Highway 10 and, flushed with a triumph over time, couldn't take in what she was heading back to. Today she'd stopped going cautiously, and the past still had a back door.

8

Peter didn't know who let it out about his paintings, but now it was too late to go back, so he supposed it didn't matter. The phone was ringing at ten on Monday when he got to the office. It sounded at first like a hype. For a moment he only waited for it to be over, as if they were selling encyclopedias. Then, when it turned out to be for real, it was like winning a Nobel Prize in the wrong field. They were a gallery in Beverly Hills, and they proposed a show of all his pictures of the ranch for the middle of April. They could do it, they said, any number of ways—but suggested, since he was famous as something else, that they make it a benefit opening night, a percentage to go to a worthy cause of Peter's choice. That way, he'd come off as a model of humility about his work as a painter, and the benefit publicity would drive up star attendance on the first night and insure a clean sweep of the walls as the days passed. If the stars bought, see, then everyone would want a piece. Did he have a better idea? He laughed out loud—genuinely modest, in this at least, but they didn't know the difference—and asked for a little time to think. They didn't like it. Just remember, they said, that we called first.

My God, he thought, and they're not even dry. And then the second call came within the hour. This one bragged about their branches in New York and Amsterdam, and they promised, sight unseen, to take everything he did from here on in. They'd sign him up for life if they could. He said he was already represented.
Who
? they said, because we'll outbid anyone. Peter hung up. Then, while he was talking a client into Roman shades to run twenty-seven feet across a wall of windows, a call came in from a painter's agent. No, Peter said, but where did the guy find out about the pictures? With an audible shrug he answered back, “I don't remember. It's what people were talking about this weekend. What can I tell you?” And by that time Peter could only sit in silence, staring curiously at his trusty heap of fabric samples. Before noon, the
Times
had him on the phone. Because they were his buddies in the “Home” section, they at least took “no comment” for an answer.

“Are you sick or something?” Rita asked when he picked up the phone and said hello to her about a half hour later.

“I haven't been bitten by a snake, if that's what you mean. But I feel a little like Lana Turner on the stool at Schwab's.”

“Has someone discovered you?”

“The whole western world has discovered me, Rita. Why aren't you here? It's afternoon already, and I have to hold your hand.”

“I'll see you in twenty minutes. I'll wait right here.”

“But
you're
supposed to come
here
, remember? It's called a job. Where are you?”

“Right now I'm lying naked on my bed. I'm just about to take a bath.”

“Are you sick or something?”

“Nope. Never better. It's just I've been working my ass off to get something ready. Now hurry.”

“How did you even know I'd be here?”

“I've been keeping your calendar clean, Pete. You mustn't ever forget how sneaky I am. In fact, if I were you, I'd think about it all the way home. It'll get you all prepared.”

“Does it have to do with my paintings?”

“Your what? You mean
Home on the Range
? No, of course not. I thought you'd given that up.”

“Me, too. But it seems I might still be needed. I'll tell you about it when I get there.”

“No, you won't.”

“Why not? We never talk about me,” he said petulantly, in case she was trying to imply that he was too full of himself.

“You'll see. There will be only one thing to talk about once you get here. Hurry,” she said again, and rang off.

It was true, he had to admit as he climbed into the pickup, that he'd done the course of his career in painting like a shooting star. First he was, and before he knew it, he wasn't. The old revolving door trick. Even by the time he'd strewn the half-done things of the ranch all around the bedroom the night of the party, it was all for the hell of it. Now they were stacked in one of the closets, and he'd raised no cry when Hey took away his easel and paints as well, a couple of days later. But he could tell that Rita didn't understand. She must have come to the conclusion that painting was just a phase he needed to go through, all fanfare and no gumption. In a way, he wanted to believe it himself.

But the fact was, he felt himself go very deep into the paintings only because of his accident. The first of them was crap, the one he abandoned by the fence to go get bitten. So when the second one filled him with power, he figured it was just this: He was better when he painted out of his head. He'd been lousy on location, he reasoned, only because he was cowed by the real thing. But then they got stranger and finer and fuller every day, and something else took over. Even if he was the only one to notice—Rita and Nick scarcely glanced at them, Hey protested they were all the same—Peter knew he was entering a temple. And then on that plateau, where he was expected to coast for a while being great, he realized something. He would only be good after something awful. He whipped up a desert and a sky in his pictures that got across the lightning shock of a rattlesnake's strike. When the trauma passed, the brush was sluggish in his hand, like a stick poked in soft tar.

He didn't grieve when the magic fled his fingers, and he knew he'd be able to do it again at the pitch of the next crisis, like a secret tunnel out of a battle. But in between, he could tell, the surface of the canvas would be flat and indecisive, the work mechanical. He refused to rely on peaks and furies and hurricanes because he had an intimation that a certain kind of painter lived impatiently, waiting for the next fire storm. Through all of this, Peter was not deluded. He wasn't
really
good. He supposed great painters were possessed by their work, and he was jarred to wake up to himself experiencing even a breath of it. But he found, to his considerable disappointment, that he had a metaphysical distaste for being in the grip of forces—the metaphysical version of being squeamish about the splotches of paint on his hands and clothes. He couldn't stand the mess. He was even afraid the fire storm painter produced his own apocalypse every now and then, just to get the juices flowing. Peter saw himself empty and only half alive, waiting for the next snakebite as if for a fix. Or not even, waiting but walking naked in the tall dry grass until something terrible took the bait.

Oh, come on, he said to himself, it's not quite so fancy as that. He'd hoped to turn into a laser beam, and he hadn't. He wanted his eye aligned with his brush hand like the hairs on a rifle sight, and he wanted the world broken down into planes and colors alone. It was meant to be done with the mind and not the heart, he thought, and that was that. Peter's two laws in whatever he did were taste and style, which sound as if they amount to the same thing, but for him were like weather and climate, the active and passive faces of the one condition. Certain people criticized his living rooms as too impersonal, and he didn't care because, as far as he was concerned, certain people were too unroomed. He thought of the move from interiors to art as a way of shedding the emotional turmoil of him and his clients, but otherwise there was no difference except in the degree of concentration, like a bowl of vanilla ice cream as against a tablespoon of extract. Serious painters, he knew, would have been horror-struck by his daring to compare the two, and his reliance on taste and style would have called up to them visions of San Marino matrons who bought blue paintings for blue rooms. But again, Peter didn't care because he knew what he wanted. And when he found he couldn't have it—that he was cursed after all with a heart when he painted and hadn't a thought in his head—he had no choice but to give it up.

But he wasn't going over all of this while he drove to Bel-Air in the pickup. His mind went into neutral, as it always did in a car. A blip sounded here and there in his radar and sent up an image from the morning just past, but only because his paintings had so taken over the news of the day. In fact, what was there left to say? He hadn't
suffered
his way out of painting. He'd only thrown up his hands. Rita and Nick had probably
thought
more about why he'd put away his paints than he had—and, too, they'd probably done the thinking in a car. They both had minds that raced when they were on the road, though Nick's was more finely tuned to four speeds from years of practice. Rita was a novice at it, and she didn't so much think as conceive of things whole, which then would hang in her mind in a dazzle, like the setting sun. Peter went blank. He leaned slightly forward over the wheel, and for once he didn't look like Noel Coward. He'd never gotten used to doing it himself, as if the generations of carriage drivers in Russia had refined the skill of traveling roads right out of him. He made a better passenger. And he didn't mind that other people did most of his thinking for him. He may not even have noticed.

He certainly wasn't going to make the moves on art before he talked to Rita and Nick. Though the thing had already snowballed in such a way as to blur where it all got started, it couldn't have begun anywhere else but at the party. It was clearly the work of his clients, flexing their connections. He thought he'd left the paintings lying about to show that he had a private world they couldn't invade, but the plan apparently backfired. His decorated women wanted him happy, and his two weeks' private convalescence had whipped them up to a frenzy. No matter what he'd been doing to pass the time in his confinement—baking cakes or papier-mâché—they would have been on the phone to people who owed them favors. Peter was the one they'd decided to take care of, as if by common consent. He didn't know if other decorators got the same treatment, since decorators tended for professional reasons to barely be on speaking terms. Perhaps, Peter thought when he couldn't stand it and felt like running away to be a gypsy, it had most to do with the fate of princes. The very rich had always made their money in shady deals—none more shadily, surely, than the princes in Russia—but the money in LA was still too immediate to have shaken off the dirt, or maybe it only seemed that way in the company of princes. In any case, they couldn't bear it if they had to watch Peter measure the drapes, and giving him too much money calmed them down. It may have been, too, that they were trying to buy fate off when they coddled Peter. If the Russians hadn't been able to pay their way out of the slaughter in 1917 with all
their
assets, then nobody was safe. With Peter, at least they were taking care of one of their own. They'd expect the same themselves when they went into exile.