The Gold Diggers (27 page)

“
Other
people would say we're nuts,” she said, sitting down, lying back. She talked as if they were still all dressed and weighing their options. But she opened her arms and smiled, too, as if she listened to herself with only half an ear.

“People like Peter and Hey?” He sank down on his knees in the cushions, between her legs.

“Oh, no. People in general.”

“Would they?They don't fuck at all, do they?” He scratched his chest as he smiled back. They both seemed to recover something by having something to say. They'd be all right because they weren't going to get lost, either of them. In the pauses they learned they had nothing to prove. While he talked, he brushed at the thick hair at his breastbone with the tips of his fingers. She wasn't accustomed to men who touched themselves well, and she gave him another star in her book.

“No,” she said, “but—” and couldn't think of a thing people in general had that she didn't. She was all set. As she'd said on the way to the plane in the middle of January, when she waved good-bye to her last Checker cab at Kennedy, she was through falling apart, period. Other people were nice and all, and she was sure the fucking they did was the Garden of Eden to them. She silently sent them all a dozen roses, but otherwise she was glad to be on her own. There were too many doors long shut between them and her, she decided, for their opinions to stick. Besides, nobody was nuts who could make it across the hundred dozen thresholds of Rita's last ten years and still find a friend inside.

“What about all this treasure, Nick?” she asked, struck by an obscure thought that they could get it over with in a second.

“Do what you have to,” he said. “I don't want it.”

It may have been someone else's cue, but the parrot took it. He left his perch in the outer closet and flew through the room. He didn't make a sound, even when he landed, and they wouldn't have known he was there except for the flash of color that shot across the dark in his final swoop. They turned in time to see him disappear behind a Japanese screen in the corner. He may have come like a curse, of course, to announce to Nick that it didn't matter if he didn't want the Varda riches—they had to be dealt with, now that the seals were off, or they would bury him under the avalanche of their destiny. Or it may have been a purely sexual flourish, the parrot's flight, to warn them both of the jungle wet and the choke of vines they were headed into. Or why not for once a good omen, ripe with the tropical sleep at the edges of which sex grew like wildfire, pineapple cider and macaroons instead of the stinging flies and forest rot? They were both surprisingly happy to see him. It didn't do on a desert island to get uptight about the native fauna. It led you to things.

“What's he doing, catching a mouse?”

“No, that's owls you're thinking of,” Rita said. “He's looking after the stuff. It's in his blood.”

“How do
you
know?”

“Machu Picchu,” she said, as if it were an old Peruvian proverb she'd learned in her cradle. Nick looked bewildered and would have pursued it, but the echo shook it into place.

“Machu Picchu,” squawked the parrot behind the screen of irises and moss, answering promptly. It was the only time he'd ever done a trick, as far as they knew, if a trick was what it was. It sounded like a coincidence.

“See?” she said. “There's nothing new under the sun. It's all very ancient, everything around us.”

“You sound like Hey,” Nick said, a little as if it might be catching. “He says we all got started in ancient Greece.”

“Not me. I just got started a few weeks ago.
We're
not ancient.”

“What are we then?”

“We're the middle of the afternoon,” Rita said mildly. She reached up both hands and felt at the head of his cock with her fingertips, more than ever as if she were opening a safe. He was so stiff that he took a deep breath when the pressure sent him up. Though the candle was way over on the desk, he could see her clearly, because the white silk reflected its light like the moon. The parrot fluted a night noise behind the screen. If Nick could have spoken just then about why it worked out, he would have said, all jaunty: We did away with the sad part. Maybe, maybe not. They did find a way to spend the day together, which said a lot about their getting what they wanted. And they had to now or never. Today was their last chance.

7

“But I
like
clutter,” Peter snapped into the phone. “Clutter is what I
do
. If you want a lot of empty spaces, honey, you want someone else.”

And he put the receiver back in the cradle neatly, not making a noise, as if he wasn't going to be pushed into a temper. He turned to Rita, who looked up at last from her own worktable. She had just pulled the two oddest colors out of a photograph of a Pakistani rug they'd bought at an auction in La Jolla to put in a house on Mulholland Drive. A purple dark as eggplant and a green like celery. The rug was mostly rust and yellow. You couldn't even see Rita's two colors in the photograph, but Rita had been down on all fours on the rug itself, on the day of the sale, and she knew what knots of color made up the dark medallions in the pattern. Peter, who meant to go right on complaining about the heiress in Manhattan Beach he'd just hung up on, took a deep breath and said, “Holy shit,” by way of transition. But when he saw the two squares of fabric in her hand—
chintz
, for God's sake, and purple and green—he flew to her side for a different tantrum.

“What the hell are you doing? Everything has to be beige in Teddy's house, Rita. Colors make him depressed. His parents used to feed him crayons when he was naughty or something. Let me do it.”

“Do what, Peter?” she asked sweetly. Then she appealed to reason, her voice like Valium, but all the same she made it do a parody of Peter's rattled state. “So Miss Bank Account thinks you've bought things too big for her little rancho, but is that a good excuse to butt in on my room for Teddy Dray?”

“But you're not listening, Rita. He thinks
brown
is too much color.”

“I know. He's putting all that behind him. We reached an understanding.”

No question about it, they'd had nothing but trouble in the three days Peter had been back. During all the time he was cooped up in his bedroom, Rita had made a daily report, and together they'd succeeded in putting the lion's share of the current projects into suspended animation. Most of Peter's clients were so cowed by his ruthless search for the truth in their living rooms and so well-trained for delays that they were half grateful to the snake for giving them a respite. Those others who could not live without Peter turned on Rita as if
she
were the snake. They professed to be lost in their own homes like a maze, reduced to tea and toast because they couldn't get around alone. Somehow, though, they gathered the necessary strength to shriek at Rita daily over the phone, demanding things they wouldn't have dreamed of bothering Peter with. And now that Peter was back, he had to have lunch three times a day, from twelve till nearly four, to accommodate the most well-heeled, whose houses were all they had.

Peter complained that they tore him apart, and he always reserved the right to give it all up and go be a shepherd, but Rita knew he really preferred it mad in the shop. He'd dug his own grave this week, after all, by having the party, because he'd made a hundred promises in one night's revels. There were people who wouldn't have known the difference if he'd started back gradually and given himself a couple of weeks to make his rounds. But Sunday night, stoked on the speed of things in Crook House, they had to shout to be heard above the beat from the speakers, and what they wanted was Peter now. Rita got out of the way. It was a relief to pick up the second fiddle again. And yet, as she could see this morning, taking her stand on eggplant and celery, nothing ever went back to being just the same. Inevitably, some of the clients were comfortable with Rita in the house, and they saw no reason to keep pleading for time with Peter and leaving their names and numbers. They decided to forego the master and the chance of media coverage and make do with the winsome shopgirl in the Joan Crawford suits. And Peter was furious.

He didn't say so. He may not even have known it. Rita didn't think he was jealous, didn't see how he could be, since he'd been turning people away at the door for months. It wasn't that he wanted more, or even that he had to have it all, like a king who can't delegate power, driven to drink by details. Mostly, she decided, Peter suffered here from the difference in their attitudes. She kept as madly busy as he—they both required it instead of sleep, which they did only if there was
nothing
left to do, and they dropped—but being busy didn't enervate Rita or test her temper. Peter, who generally couldn't cope if he wasn't knee-deep in refinements, wasn't toughened by things going wrong with people's upholstery. He raged at the loss of quality in first-class life like an old nobleman who'd lived too long at court. Rita considered it a miracle—well, a victory at least, of money over time—when anything worked all the way to the end. So she was very philosophical about the minor squabble and disarray. She was just the person Peter needed.

“Am I a bitch,” he asked with some distaste, “or am I a bitch? You're right, you mustn't put up with me. My
mind
is cluttered.”

“Oh, but I like clutter,” she said, surprised to hear him so much bothered. She hadn't picked up the one other thing from his nagging and hovering that would have raised her protective instinct. The very people who wanted her working for them, who threw out their beiges for her like dowdy old clothes, were Peter's first customers, the people who'd taken their chance on him before he made it. The stars who hired him now, hiring one of their own, took no chance at all.

“I don't deserve you,” Peter said, moving to the refrigerator between their two heaped-up tables where they pushed their work around. Hey sent down provisions from Crook House on Mondays and Wednesdays, cheese and fruit and rolls, smoked salmon, a jug of iced coffee. Peter poured out a glass of coffee, creamed and sugared it, and stirred it with a glass rod as he talked on. “Remind me to give you a raise. We also have to hook you up with a retirement plan. You've got to get your
perks
, Rita. You're almost forty, and you don't have any perks. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” she said politely, looking off through the shop and out the window at the traffic. It was not precisely true. She wanted a call from West Covina, way off in the middle of nowhere.

“You'll think of something,” he said, as if she hadn't answered at all. The stirrer clinked against the glass. “Don't you want a promotion?”

“You mean a title?” she asked, coming back into the room again, leaning back in her Italian chair. “Sure. Vice-president in charge of consumer affairs.”

“I mean we could put our names together,” he said, “with a slash down the middle. Put up a sign and everything.” It sounded almost like a dare. They knew they weren't ready to be partners yet, but it was his way of telling her he'd given up some territory. Neither his nerves nor his ego, he promised between the lines, were going to jeopardize her future. Stars ate up little stars for breakfast, as they both were well aware. But not us, Peter was saying.

“Why don't we see,” she said, “when the time comes?” A little too evasive, perhaps, but she turned quite pink at the same time. Peter was satisfied.

“Now I have something to show you,” he said, “so close your eyes. It's sort of a present, except you can't keep it.”

Everything he did had a set of formalities. She winked at him and swung the chair a hundred and eighty degrees and faced the wall. Faced an Andy Warhol poppy, in fact, framed in yellow chrome. Her mind went like the click of a switch to the big Monet she'd crated up, a field of red flowers done in 1919, when everything but color had gone out the window. He gave it to the doctor who took care of his eyes, whose children sold it to a French racketeer for a song before he was cold. The racketeer sold it to one of Rusty Varda's agents, so it was the first thing Rita had turned up that was legitimate. They could keep it. But she'd right away tracked down the little museum in the Sixteenth in Paris where the mass of the late work went, and she was mailing it to them. As for the poppy, she hardly saw it. She couldn't look at anything much without making connections back to the secret room. It had come to be her memory bank.

“Peek,” Peter commanded her. And she let the whole construction of this against that fly out of her head as she spun around again. Propped on her table, wildly out of place, was the Fabergé frame. And the picture inside, snapped out of time by a stray and accidental lens, was as real as a held breath, more so because of the gold and jewels around it. Peter and Rita and Nick were standing in a circle laughing. At first she thought it must be the party Sunday night, because people were milling around, but it took only a moment for her to have the horrors about her clothes. When, she thought in a tailspin, had she looked as bad as that?

“Don't you remember, Rita? It's the party at Jennifer's. The day you arrived.”

“Oh, my God,” she said, her heart going out to all of them. “What are we laughing at?”

“Everybody else, of course.” And for a moment they stared at it in silence, heads to one side, pensive as people must have been when the frame was filled with a Grand Duchess, long ago in the old world. Peter spoke up again. “They certainly look like three of a kind, don't they?”

“Yup. And they don't look like they'd hurt a fly. Someone ought to let them run a small country.”

“But they already do,” he said.

And they left it at that. It made them feel more emotional things as well, with music they could dance to cheek to cheek, but they steered clear of putting it into words. They always had, about loving each other at least. Peter left the photograph on Rita's table and drifted off into the shop, killing the time before his first lunch. Rita put the chintz and the picture of the rug in an envelope, marked it “Teddy,” and dropped it on the nearest pile. It would be lost in the shuffle in a matter of hours. But it was the closest thing to filing Rita could manage, even if it meant a furious search in a few days when she needed it. What next? She attacked a folder of out-of-stock memos from manufacturers, dreading the calls she would have to make to clients, who had to be told they'd have to find something else. But she wasn't getting her paperwork done to be saintly. She was waiting, one eye on the clock and one line open, for the call from the hospital in West Covina. When Peter left, she thought, she'd transfer the photograph over to his table. It wasn't in her way. She wasn't afraid of it. But as with the Varda treasure, she was shut in with something else just now. It was touch and go, in fact—as the hands of the wall clock came together at noon like tweezers, pinching time, she knew that the call she expected and Peter's leaving for lunch were neck and neck.