The Gold Diggers (22 page)

“I got it because of that time your grandfather couldn't afford to buy his own horse and rider back from Parke-Bernet. I thought, Peter must be the only prince in the country who doesn't have a scrap of Fabergé in the family.”

“But this cost a fortune, Rita.”

She shrugged. In fact, it had cost Mrs. Lisle Beatton of Baltimore fourteen thousand dollars in 1924, which was a bargain. Then it was paid as part of a ransom in 1933. Rita didn't like the looks of the heirs she tracked down in the Baltimore Social Register, especially the ransomed daughter. But she was checking it out only halfheartedly, having already decided it had to be Peter's. She had returned to a small museum on a horse farm in Delaware a silver tankard by Paul Revere, so she figured she'd done enough for that part of the country, anyway. Rita couldn't be sure what a fortune was anymore, if this was one. To her, the picture frame was like a box of chocolates compared to most everything else in the secret room. The day before, she'd sent back to Paris a diary and a square of needlework, both interrupted, left on a plain pine table when Marie Antoinette was led from the cell at the Conciergerie to give her life for her country. Pinned to the needlepoint canvas was the account by the priest who heard her confession and stayed behind and slipped both things into his surplice. Rita didn't know what to say. She would have given Peter a Cézanne if it wouldn't have raised so many questions.

“It's nothing,” she said lamely, trying to play it down a little. The diamond suddenly seemed to her about the size of a raspberry. She realized, here in the light of day, what the whole thing would be worth chopped up and strung on a bracelet. “The problem is,” she went on, as breezily as she could, “it doesn't really go with anything, does it? I mean, it makes you want a Louis XV desk, and then you have to have the chair—there's no
end
to something like this. You're the only one I could give it to, Pete, because you have all that breeding to bear up under the burden.”

“What about you?” Peter asked, turning from Rita and calling across to Nick.

“Oh, I just let Rita put my name on the card. I didn't know you needed a picture frame crusted with pearls, but she said you did, so you must.”

“Well, you're both nuts,” Peter said, standing up and letting the wrappings lie. “Maybe I'll have a picture taken of the frame and put it in the frame so I'll never forget how much you both love me.” He went back into the dining room, holding it out in front of him. “On the other hand,” he said as he walked off, his voice dying away across the room, “maybe we'll start the other way around and throw out everything else. Because this is going to need a hell of a lot of room.”

Rita started to laugh, and she stooped and retrieved the black ribbon before she turned around again. “Well, doctor,” she said as she sauntered toward Nick, “I believe the fever's finally broken. Tell me the truth now, didn't you think it was a hopeless case?”

“Some of these things, my child, are in higher hands than mine. He has been spared to do great work.”

They were both grinning as they met at the pool's edge. They had to wait now for their orders. It wasn't stated out loud, but they had both been more or less planning to spend the day together. They were there in Saturday clothes, with no other plans. Before Peter came down, Rita was about to propose a day at Disneyland, if only to get her mind off beautiful things. They were clever enough to keep it from themselves as well as each other how clear they kept their calendars lately. After all, they would have said, they were thrown together more often than not by circumstance. Living in the same house and all. In fact, they were shy at times, and they'd never been that when they first met. The more time they spent with each other, the more care they took about intruding. It wasn't their fault if they were all tangled up. Peter had been in bed, in and out of it but in the house, for fifteen days. Rita and Nick had meanwhile logged half a dozen dinners out, four late parties, and an opening or two. Partly, they thought they stuck together because it was easier to answer questions about Peter's accident and lingering rest cure. The rumor was that he'd had a breakdown. And then Peter kept insisting that they go. “I'll feel better,” he said, “if you two are having fun. Do it for me.” So they did it for him. It was a tribute to how much they loved him, really, that they were glad just now to see him so well.

“We'll have to stop meeting like this,” she said ironically. It was a hard-won irony, to be sure, but it showed how much confidence she had in the run of excuses they had collaborated on.

“Time has had enough of us,” he said, staring into the water for all the world as if it were a stream dancing over a bed of rocks, “and now it rushes on.”

She knew where
her
line came from, more or less, but she couldn't place his. He sounded a bit like Rusty Varda. And though he was mocking men who spoke too much of time, it wasn't fair for Nick to act so grave, even in fun, because her own irony hovered just this side of hysteria. I don't mean hysteria, she thought—it was more like going balmy, as if she would be prone to curious noises, overly chummy with strangers, if she lost her footing just once in the balancing act with Nick. It was nice the way it was. She would be crazy to ruin it now by talking out of turn. They were about to touch down again on earth, and that was that.

“Maybe he'll let
us
go to bed for a couple of weeks,” Nick said, “so we can decompress.” He meant the sickbed variety of bed, of course, but her cheeks burned as if he'd suggested the other. Which was pretty odd, since she hadn't blushed about sex in fifteen years. Worse, she and Nick had stopped talking about it.

“I'll take a raincheck on that,” she said. “I'm sure I'll have a snakebite of my own before long, and then I'll want all the pampering I can get. Peter will have to change my ice water every couple of hours.”

He's acting as stilted as I am, she thought, and only a moment ago we were grinning like a tap-dance team. She hadn't thought about what to say to Nick for days and days, but here she was, trying to make conversation. But what's
his
excuse? she wondered ruefully. He'd just gotten his lover back.

“Are you two ready?” Peter was upstairs, leaning over the windowsill in the bedroom. He was decked out in three pieces of Yves Saint Laurent, camel with a pale orange stripe, so he'd presumably assigned the furniture moving to one of them. “Rita, all you have to do is invite everyone.”

She flung the ribbon away to her left, into the garden, and followed it with her eyes as if she hadn't heard. Then she said distinctly, between her teeth, “Groan.”

“Look, I'd do it myself, except they'd all want to talk for an
hour
. It'll be like their psychiatrist coming back from vacation. Nonstop. Besides, they all like you.”

“They do not all like me,” she said defiantly. “Half of them would put out a contract on me in a minute if they didn't think it would make their draperies late. Some of them think that I've drugged you like Frances Dean, that I keep you prisoner here.”

“You're too sensitive, Rita, you always were.” Up where he was, pots of fuchsia hung from the roof beams in baskets of rope and moss. He seemed very, very happy. One did not have to be overly sensitive, for instance, to appreciate a window flooded with purple flowers. “Nicholas,” he went on, “I know you'll say it's the last minute and all, but we can't have a party with this crummy sound system.”

“You're joking.”

“Alas, no. But if you get the most expensive, they'll install it on a Sunday. You'll see.”

“What are
you
going to do, Pete?” Rita asked.

“I'm keeping an open mind about that. I've been working on this for three days, and I need a break. I'm going out. The Fabergé has inspired me.” He sounded as if he were going to enter a monastery. “Let's all meet about five and have some bubbly and fish eggs. My treat.”

He couldn't stay another minute. He vanished from the window, and Rita and Nick were both so railroaded by it all that they couldn't come up with the words to hold him. Crook House was an absolute monarchy today, and Rita and Nick were the masses. They turned to each other as if to ascertain whether they'd been hearing things. And when they saw that it was real, they wasted no time clucking their tongues. They'd had a suspicion all along that it would end in a burst of theater. And they had to do it. On the other side of the party, everything was going to go back to normal. All Peter required was a ceremony grand enough to trample the rumors underfoot. Or so they all hoped. Peter was a star in part because he was good at cracking a bottle of Piper across his own bows. Somehow he could do it without getting wet.

“When you signed on for this trip,” Nick said, “I'll bet you didn't count on so much suddenness, did you?”

“I suppose we're lucky it's not tonight. You know, it never occurs to him something can't be done. He's that way with people's houses, too.”

“I know.” She sounded sad to him. She ought to be angry if it didn't sit right. She understands me better than I do her, he thought. And then he said, “I get scared that some day he'll come up against a wall and beat his brains out on it. Because he's gotten his way so much that he doesn't see.”

“He'll be fine,” Rita said, “as long as no one ever puts a ceiling on the money. And the clients never do.” She paused to gather up half a dozen examples, then let them go. You bitch, she told herself, you leave Peter alone. “You know, if I don't start these calls right now, I'll probably run away. Good luck in the technology race.”

Nick, least of any of them, had had no thought he would end up by himself today. It was either Peter or Rita or real estate, every waking hour for the last two weeks. So when she walked away through the garden, head bent, hands in the pockets of her big Irish sweater, he felt a little ulcer start to blow its bellows in his gut. She closed the door as she went into the living room. What now, he thought in a panic, and he meant: What am I going to do about Sam? He wasn't ready yet. He'd thought he had at least until the middle of next week before Peter was up and about. He'd even come close to asking Rita what to do, convinced she'd got Sam's number in the couple of minutes she'd spent in passing. But everyone else, he knew, would say only that it was easy. Nobody else had been in love with Sam. Oh, that was what it was, Nick was sure, and part of the suffering that put its hooks in him now was disbelief that it was over. He was afraid he might never have loved any better than two weeks here and two weeks there.

“Nick, I have to talk to you.”

He turned to see Hey on the other side of the pool. He couldn't imagine where he'd come from. Up the hill out of the bushes, he supposed. He was relieved just then to be given any sort of diversion at all, but it also flashed through his mind that Hey had been listening in.

“About the party?”

“He doesn't understand. He thinks it's a goddamned vacation for me because he's got a caterer coming in. But I have to make sure they don't pocket the silver. And it takes two days to clean up after them.”

“I know.” Hey had been on edge ever since Peter's accident. Nick decided he must have a morbid fear of snakes. “I wouldn't have let him go ahead with it, Hey, except it got him out of bed.”

“That's another thing,” Hey said, as if he'd just remembered. “I told him the other day, I'm not going to climb those stairs one more time.
That
cured him fast.”

Nick laughed. “Why don't you take a few days off? You can have the whole of next week if you want. You want more money?” It was only a formal gesture, like the first draft of a treaty. Hey shrugged and looked away. Nick had known from the beginning, when he'd agreed to stay on with them, that Hey was not moved by time and money. He kept his loyalties simple—the house and Rusty Varda. Nick suspected they were lucky, he and Peter and Rita, that Hey had come to include them in his vision of Crook House. If he hadn't, the whole lot of them would have vanished into thin air. In any case, it was not like Hey to speak to one of them about the others. Hey fought battles on the spot. In fact, he was more likely than Nick was to convince Peter that Sunday was out of the question. Something else was up.

“He'll be all right,” Hey said, his voice quite gentle now. That's just what Rita said, Nick thought. It was as if they all knew it wasn't snakes but Nick and Sam. “It's about Linda.”

“Oh.”

“Holy Brother says she's going through a transitional phase. She's got to fall back on the physical plane for a while. That's me.”

Nick nodded. I am not embarrassed about this, he said to himself. He was troubled about the rip-off, though, and he wondered again how much Holy Brother charged for an office call. It was never clear what the medium was, crystal ball or tea leaves or tongues. Nick didn't think Hey was crazy. He did think Hey was gay, and the elaborate machinery of other selves was a camouflage for a self he couldn't face. But it had worked for Hey for four or five years, and Nick had a tough streak that would fight to the finish for anyone's right to do what worked. He realized suddenly that, though he didn't yet know what to do about Sam, things were going to be all right once he'd done it.

“And what exactly does that entail?” he asked Hey.

“I don't know, Nick.” He looked down into the water, as if to catch a glimpse of Linda passing across his face. “Maybe nothing. Maybe I'll just be a vessel and never know. But I want to be free to move if the rhythm hits me. What I need to know is: Do you care how I look?”

“Of course not,” he said. Hey meant drag. There had been no mention between them of the makeup he wore when he walked in on Rita and Sam. Was it going too far? he wondered. What if Hey served them lunch some day in spike heels and an off-the-rack dress? Peter wouldn't like it. He was irritated as it was by Hey's proprietary air, where Nick was charmed, and besides, Peter wanted to get a French couple some day and dress them up starched in black and white. But Nick meant it when he said he didn't care. We all look okay to me, he thought. So many of the things power and money had brought him had turned ambiguous or dumb or dull, but at least, he thought, we have come far enough to do what we want in our own house. He meant for Crook House, above all things, to be home for a troupe of consenting adults.