The Gold Diggers (20 page)

So he woke one morning hard and got up to let it go in the bathroom. Closing the door, he looked over at Ben lying naked on the bed, taut with his own erection. Suddenly he knew—Ben was a hustler. Not that any street airs hung close about him. It was more that Ben seemed like a dream his genitals were having. Sam was years ahead of his time. He believed already that sex didn't have to leave the circle of the self at all. Wasn't meant to. He and Ben were the doubles of each other, he thought, and the world would have to feed on them to get tough. It came to Sam in the middle of things, something like a vocation. If it was love for Ben he was hiding, he was doing it all too well. They were born not needing love, it seemed. Their cocks, he thought as he stood there, were symbols of quite another force. Like the needles on sundials. Like radar. Yet even if Sam couldn't see it then, the two of them in the room on Norma Place—one half hidden behind the door, the other spread-eagle in a double bed, open to attack—looked like an allegory of love forever out of phase. Even if they didn't care what they looked like.

Sam got right into it, all by himself. Took a bus to Hollywood and walked the starlit streets till he found one set aside for kids. Dressed working-class, as if he were going to grow up one day and be a telephone lineman. He did his training on the job. He was amazed, in fact, at how little the old men expected of him. Fifty was the age that wanted him, and since it seemed an eternity to Sam, since he found them so unpracticed and so mute, he wondered what they'd been doing all their lives. He was almost never asked to touch them back. After a time, he hardly noticed them. His cock didn't care where it went, as long as it got a good rush. The older they were, the clumsier, the better, because it made it a snap to see nothing of himself. He did what he could to let them know what they
ought
to have done these thirty or forty years. Meanwhile, he got to know the cycles of the traffic in the street with a sixth sense. And, like a midshipman staring at waves, he felt kin to it all, as if the cars going by were one with the rhythm of his blood. Altogether, it was like getting paid to go to the movies.

He met Ben one day in the parking lot of an apartment house in Westwood. They were both walking—Ben in, Sam out—with men who could have been their fathers. They looked through each other as if they weren't there. And never brought it up. It may have been then, that night at dinner, that Sam began to get his bourbon neat when Ben made drinks. If so, it must have been a coincidence. This was not a fraternity they were in. Sam's debut in the business didn't fulfill a wizard's prophecy. And the upshot of it all was not kisses on Norma Place. Or to put it another way, there is more than one sort of romance. In the customary one, the knight and the squire meet by chance in the palace court, each carrying a freshly severed dragon's head under his arm. Their mail is rank with sweat. It is hard to say who is more proud of the squire's noble deed. But the torch passes on, and at last they are free to unbuckle each other's armor and bed down together. The monsters have all been taken care of. In the less well-known romances, the ones without the ballads, there are no knights and squires. There are no distinctions at all. Nothing is passed on. The romance comes from the going forth alone, time after time after time.

One other thing. Ben told him the story of him and Marilyn Monroe, and Sam understood he wouldn't have heard it
before
Ben knew he was hustling. To anyone else, it would hardly have seemed a story at all. Because it had no point. She stopped one day when she was driving past and asked him for directions. Ben knew who it was, and he knew she knew the quickest way to the Hollywood Freeway, too. But he told her. And they smiled at each other like movie stars.

“You know what I mean, Sam? I mean, if Marilyn Monroe doesn't know her way around Hollywood, then what the fuck are the rest of us doing here?”

The next time, she wanted to know the nearest branch of California Federal. Then, a week later, was there a college around. She was thinking of taking up reading, she said. Then a long time went by. Then, it was the day The Dark Lady brought flowers, she wanted to know where Valentino was buried.

“‘Hollywood Memorial,' I said, ‘but you don't want to go there.' ‘Why not?' ‘Because that's why we live here,' I said, ‘to banish all that.'”

So it became a regular thing. She dropped by about every ten days, always dressed down, in a loud old Ford that must have been her maid's. Once Ben was at the curb talking with a john in a car when she drove by, but she didn't show that she noticed. They didn't talk about their work, in any case. They talked about the city, overgrown and seedy, and what it was like before, in Mary Pickford's day, in Garbo's day. They actually talked about the stars, and it turned out she didn't know any more than he did. He knew more, because he knew who was gay. They were strict about keeping their places—Ben out on the curb, Marilyn on the passenger's side of the car, legs tucked under her, elbows on the window sill. It went on for eight or nine months, until one day she said she was leaving town for a while. Ben knew she was going off to shoot a movie. He read about her, just like everybody else.

“I was going to buy you something,” she said, “but then I didn't know what you'd want. What would you have liked?” He didn't know. He couldn't think of a thing. “Well, as long as it doesn't matter,” she said, as if she'd guessed what his attitude would be, “then anything will do.” She reached over into the back seat and brought forward a leatherette handbag, off-white, very fifties, with a rhinestone clasp. She opened it and held it out. “Close your eyes and pick something.” And, when he made no immediate move, she added, “So you'll remember me.”

Though he did it in broad daylight, it would have been hard for someone going by to know what he was doing. Not scoring dope or making change for the meter, because his eyes were shut. You don't shut your eyes on the street. But for a moment he'd suspended that part. His hand fished around among gum wrappers and eye pencils. He chose small and delicate and came out with a screw-on earring. A little disk of silver from which hung a cameo on a tiny chain. Just costume jewelry. Marilyn laughed and twirled a feather of hair.

“We'd better get you the other one, honey. You have to have a pair in this world.”

“Pick me something else,” he said, making as if to hand it over.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You keep one. I'll keep one.”

She wore no makeup except a sugar red lipstick, and she pursed her lips just then in a rosebud, as if to stifle a smirk. The sentimental hadn't got its hooks into her, she seemed to say, though she wasn't through trying to outwit it. Ben wondered if she meant, giving him a keepsake, that she couldn't see him again, even after she came back. That day, he could have asked her whimsically what was she planning, why was she paying him off. She didn't come back, in fact, not to him, and then she died a year or so later. By then she was once again the picture in the papers. He hadn't pinned her down on that last day because they were busy savoring how casual they were. They banished the future. It took itself too seriously.

“I'm going to have to pretend I lost one,” she said, holding up the other earring and waving it like a little bell. “I can't imagine what
you're
going to say.”

“I suppose I'll have to pretend I found one,” he said.

For Ben and Sam, perhaps, it was the story of a relationship safely gotten through, from beginning to end. Sam found out later that everyone in LA had a story about a star, but it didn't diminish the one Ben told. The last scene especially, the pair of earrings, seemed to spirit them away to a green and lofty place where kings and mystics sat and watched sunsets. The present was the only sort of happy ending anyone ever got, and Ben had got it once with Marilyn Monroe. Only for an instant, but so what. That was part of the deal. “Don't ever lose it, because I'll know,” she said as she drove off, wagging her finger, but Sam wasn't so interested in the telepathy that went with the good-luck charm. If her ghost still followed it around, all well and good—she was the sort of angel you could use in LA. But Sam cared more than anything to do a scene like that himself. Offhand, uninhibited, safe in an ordinary place on a nothing day.

He knew, though, that he couldn't just go out looking for the street life's happy endings. They just fell out that way every now and again. Like the night Ben told him all of this, as they were getting ready to go to bed, which they almost never did at the same time. Stripping out of their clothes, going in and out of the bathroom. They lounged like warriors in a tent. Sam knew, even as he listened, that he would never be so glad again to hear a story. He could see he was the only one Ben had ever told it to. Whatever there was to know was there. But he held himself off from naming it in case he should stray into sentiment. And then they went to sleep, and the past came and took the moment with it. From then on, the night of the Marilyn story played itself over and over in his head and left him thirsty and heartsick. He couldn't see why it didn't make him happy, as it had when it happened. He even thought to wonder if Ben felt the same when he thought of Marilyn Monroe. But he never asked, afraid that, if he was wrong, it would prove he was all alone.

It all fell apart without warning on Norma Place. A year and a half went by like nothing, and then Ben disappeared. He didn't come home one night, and Sam didn't pay it any mind, not then or the next day or the next. On the fourth day, he took the MG and went out looking. When he came back several hours later, there were cops all over, in the house and out, and Sam took off. This time he wasn't wearing Jockey shorts at all. All he had was an MG with an APB out on it. He drove to San Diego for a couple of days and hustled, got beaten up one night by a sailor he looked at funny, and came back to LA and bought counterfeit plates from a mechanic who took it out in trade. He wouldn't admit that Ben was dead, almost as if it were none of his business, part of the bargain of having no ties to each other. Ben wasn't coming back—that was clear enough—but Ben was all right. Sam regained his equilibrium by calling it a stroke of luck. Ben must have ended up on a yacht or a Lear jet, and somebody big, a magnate or an oil baron, was even now groaning under him and throwing out twenty dollar bills like streamers. Bound for the South Seas. Back to the spell of the four elements. Once he knew that, Sam's part was easy. He only had to go about his affairs as if nothing had happened. And nothing had, he told himself as he waited on the street. In a whole year and a half, not one thing.

Somehow, he would decide later on, it all served as a prelude to Rusty Varda. He had been in training for the main event since he left New York. And when the ink-blue limousine purred down Sam's block that morning, Hey at the wheel, in the back seat a cloud-eyed man, absurdly old, old enough to be the father of the men Sam tricked with, he tingled with the feeling that his own story had arrived. It was all luck. He never showed up on the street before 5:00 P.M., timing himself for the cocktail crowd, but now he needed extra cash to pay the security deposit on his new apartment. Ben had been gone two weeks. By Sam's reckoning, it was about time for a limousine. Hey stopped and got out. It wasn't clear to Sam that the old man had given any signal. The deal was simple—a hundred dollars for the afternoon at Mr. Varda's stately home, sex not required. He hadn't eaten lunch, had he? Good. And could he swim? Of course.

He'd said it before and since, that doing it was sometimes like being on film, but at Crook House he could almost hear the film whir in the camera. Varda sat in a wicker chair in the garden, facing the pool. He wore a beret. A round table had been set for lunch, and Sam saw that only one person was going to be eating. It was all arranged like a still life—peach roses, glasses for claret and champagne, a raft of forks on one side of the plate, spoons on the other. Hey reappeared, changed into butler's gear.

“Now then, Sam,” Rusty Varda said, “you can go ahead and take your clothes off.” The voice professional and direct as a doctor. He'd said nothing in the car coming home. Sam had sat up front with Hey, and he wondered if the old man wasn't afflicted with the aftereffects of a stroke, his vocal chords pulled like the lines on a switchboard. But it must have been the no-man's-land in the car that did it, he decided as he faced the wicker chair and unbuttoned his pants. Because this guy had the script down pat.

“A little faster. Fling them off and go for a swim. When you're finished, come out and have lunch.”

And Sam kicked off his engineer's shoes and turned and dived in a single motion, as if he weren't going to listen to any more. As there wasn't a time limit set, he took deep breaths and swam the length of the pool underwater until he was all by himself. When he dolphined up and flipped himself onto the deck like a lifeguard, he heard the next set of orders as if they were no more than street noises, a radio turned on in a dream. He still did what he was told, but he began to think it was what he would have done anyway.

“Now don't dry off. I want you to shake your head like a dog and then sit down. Hey will bring you lunch.” He spoke in a sort of whisper now, as if he didn't want to get in the way of Sam's concentration.

He sat at the table and stared out at the beating city and the sun. He wasn't paid a hundred to ask, but he thought about men who wanted their sex in a three-act play. They dressed their hookers up as chambermaids and pleaded to be spanked. They wanted the door to the bedroom locked by a state trooper, and they fucked with the uniform first. The funny thing was, Sam couldn't say exactly what the fantasy was here because it was very like his own. Watched and served and left alone, all because he was beautiful. He had a cold green soup, a slice of salmon, then—one right after the other, more and more rapidly, it seemed—sweetbreads, salad, and a Black Forest cake so rich it gave him a headache. He let his belly go slack and leaned back and shut his eyes, listening to the clink of the dishes as Hey cleared away. When he opened his eyes, wondering what it was time to do now, the wicker chair was empty. He suddenly felt exposed, and he put on his clothes fast.