The Gold Diggers (7 page)

When Peter turned the shower on, at the end of the steam room near the door, the cold water gave off an aura that seemed to eat up the steam. The cold air rolled in, the opposite of fog. In a matter of seconds, Peter could see Nick clearly, still bent in a sweat against the wall. Peter stood with relief in the fall of water, his senses sharpening again. He watched Nick become aware that the cloak of vapor had disappeared. Nick brought his head out of the cradle of his arms like an animal waking to footsteps, as if he might have been confused for a moment about where he was. Then he stood up straight and stretched his arms behind his head.

Peter thought he was as beautiful now, shrugging his torso in the white-tiled room, as he ever was. Peter was not possessed by a wandering eye. He didn't want anyone else, no more than he did when Mark had emptied the world of everything but a soccer field on a hot fall day. Peter always made a lightning appraisal of everything he wanted—a Chinese jar, a chair, a watercolor—and he took home the very best, if it was for sale, and kept it forever and let it grow beautiful. Nick lumbered toward him. He slipped out of the shower to give it over, and he thought as they passed, one soaped clean, the other pouring sweat like a horse: I won't let you leave without a fight.

And if we have to fight about it, he went on to himself as he took an armful of towels and crossed the bedroom, I'll win and you won't leave after all, so don't try. He threw open three or four towels on the bed, flung the rest of the pile down for a pillow, and then lay back to dry off. He reached for the telephone and dialed his answering service, hardly listening to the string of names and numbers he should call. Nothing serious. They'd all call back. He was thirsty, but he didn't feel like tracking down Hey on the intercom to ask. He tried to make a picture in his head of his first painting. But he was trying to see it as if it were already done, so he tried instead to decide what it was a picture of. He couldn't say.

He heard the thump when Nick shut the door to the steam room, then the sound of him walking across to the armoire and the click of the latch as the double doors opened. Then nothing. He might have been staring inside at the stacks of shirts, sick of them all. Peter rolled onto his side and looked over. Nick was standing with his back to the room, holding the doors wide open with both hands, as if he'd surprised something going on inside. The muscles in his back stood out in perfect symmetry. He wore a towel hitched at his waist, not because it was modest but because it was sexy. He was looking over his arm and out the window, not at the shirts.

“I was a bitch, Nick. I'm sorry.”

“About Rita?” he asked. “Don't worry. It slipped my mind already.”

“She can take care of herself,” Peter said. “She's got a line on everything. What are you thinking?”

“I cleared twelve thousand dollars this week,” Nick said. “My father never made that in a year.”

“Oh, that. Well, that's not going to get you anywhere,” Peter said, whose own father's disappearance with his platinum secretary and a bag full of negotiable securities had driven his mother to the water. It would have cheered him mightily to hear his father died without a penny. But he'd heard all this before from Nick and thought it was beside the point.

“That may be, Peter, but that's the way I feel.”

“Misunderstood again,” Peter said lightly, and Nick turned to see what he thought was so funny. And the whole thing dawned on him as it had a moment since on Peter. The same old battle lines sprang up on the field while they weren't watching. Peter annoyed at the pain Nick felt, because it was unoriginal. Nick lost in the stars because he and his father were doomed by ironies. Nick had been on the point of accusations. You don't understand, he would have said in a minute, what it's like to be poor. Turning it around so that Peter was to blame. But Peter saw it coming and stopped it cold.

“Come here,” he said gently, “and I'll dry you off.”

Nick walked over to the bed and tumbled down next to him. Peter came up on his knees, took a towel in either hand, and began to pat Nick dry. Nick was still caught up in the twelve thousand twists of fate, but at least he felt them for what they were. It wasn't Peter's fault. Over the years, he knew, they'd had to call it a draw about the facts of life. Peter's life began when he finally believed he was all alone—Alexander Kirkov's cutting him loose from the dynasty and his arrival years later in LA were the two historic events. Nick was never convinced his life had really started
because
he was so alone. They avoided moralizing the worlds they inhabited before they met; and they lived with each other's motley crew—fathers, overnight lovers, and traitorous boys—as best they could. The past was a gift they couldn't refuse, after all. But they didn't have to keep it in the living room.

“You're very thorough,” Nick said.

“It comes from washing cars,” Peter said, rubbing him down inch by inch. “I always used to dry my Pontiac by hand. With a baby bunting. You know, my grandfather loved to tell me how much the family spent on things. They spent about twelve thousand a year on
roses
, for Christ's sake. His mother would only take her bath in Vichy water, and they shipped it to Saint Petersburg in boxcars. Think how long it would have taken your father to afford
that
.”

“Is that what we'll do when we have a lot of money?”

Peter leaned on Nick's raised knees as he might have leaned across a bar, and he tilted his head to consider the reach of the question.

“We'll eat a lot of aspic,” he said, “with the choicest things suspended in it. And cold bass. That's what they eat for lunch in magazine interviews. The water out of the tap gives me all the bath I want, so not that. Antiques and paintings, I guess. We have a lot of money already. What do
you
think?”

“Land,” Nick said with a shrug, as if it were self-evident, but also as if he needed the Dakotas or his own archipelago to make the word work.

“Poor Saint Nick,” Peter said. “Who ever thinks to fill
his
Christmas stocking? Is it because you were poor and straight at the same time that you need so much to fall back on now?”

“How much money is enough?” Nick said playfully, a question for a question, rocking his knees so that Peter swayed back and forth.

“Don't act as if we have too much already,” Peter warned him. He knew the implication at large was that, if one of them lost his heart in his purse, it was going to be Peter and not Nick. “Think about what you really mean by land.”

“I don't mean a place the size of Connecticut,” Nick said, killing off the princes in Sebastopol. He was a storm of contradictions, and he knew it. He stamped his foot like Lenin over all the fat dominions on the Black Sea. He had a poor boy's bitterness about the overstuffed aristocrats who wheeled around on pastry carts, cakes and clotted cream on every side. On the other hand, he permitted the cowboy on the palomino in his dreams to ride his fences, half a day's journey at a time, without turning a corner. He let the lifeguard go home from the beach in an Aston-Martin. Nick wouldn't have raised a finger in a real revolution, because he didn't want things too equal. For him, money was one of the privileges of the hero. Anything the cowboy and the lifeguard wanted, they ought to be able to get.

Peter spread Nick's knees and pulled the towel loose.

“My balls are already dry,” Nick said.

“I want to see for myself.” And he bent down and put his face against the inside of Nick's thigh. He took Nick's cock in one hand and drew his finger back and forth along the skin behind his balls until the sack quickened and went tight. Nick began to swell, but Peter held his hand still and kept the pulse low. For the moment, he was doing something different from turning Nick on. Once, in the woods, he'd reached down and uprooted a handful of leaves while they were walking. He flattened them against Nick's face as if he would smother him, and at the same time whispered “Mint!” Nick tottered. Between the perfume and the word, Nick knew when he sniffed it in that a man could mean exactly what he said. Peter stroked him now, and the tension increased like the string being pulled on a bow. Just as it throbbed in response, he said, “When can you take me up to see the ranch?”

“Anytime,” Nick said. “You really want to see it?”

“Sure.” Peter let Nick go and sat back on his heels. “I have all that land in my genes, so I'll be able to tell you if you're getting a good deal. My family is supposed to have an eye for horses, too, in case you want to price livestock. Should I wear chaps and a rhinestone shirt?”

Hands behind his head, Nick watched Peter go into a pose, one hip thrown out and his hands in his hair. Then he arched way back and let out an easy laugh. Where Sam was a runner, Nick thought, Peter was a dancer. Both so lean that the flesh on their stomach muscles stretched like a drum skin.

“And a Stetson and a dusty kerchief? No,” Nick said, aroused in spite of himself, and only three hours gone since Sam. “Pretend you're getting dressed to get picked up in a bar.”

“Well, I'll wear my silk jersey number, then,” Peter said. He fell down on his side next to Nick and pulled Nick over on top of him as easily as if he had been pulling up a blanket. “Net stockings. Patent leather pumps.”

“No, you won't. T-shirt and Levi's. I'll get you some boots.”

“I have boots.”

“I'll get you some new ones.”

“You want to fuck?” Peter said. It felt like they had just unpacked a trunk in a ship's cabin, and clothes were everywhere about the room.

“I guess so,” Nick said, wrapping Peter in his arms and thinking he was just about to touch down again on earth. “I didn't think I wanted to.”

“Well, your problem is you think too much,” Peter said, willing to be unoriginal himself. “You forget what you already know.”

“What's that?” Nick asked. He needed just a hint, and now, because in a moment he was going to be somewhere else, just he and Peter together, and he wanted a thread of reason to bring him out the other side. He'd spent the whole afternoon in a story, and he couldn't close the book as carelessly as he thought.

“Just stop thinking,” Peter said sweetly, as if he would love him no matter what, “and it'll come back to you.”

Rita, she said to herself long-windedly, if you want to get ahead, you've got to figure out why it is some people can't leave you alone and the rest look through you as if you weren't there. It had been happening forever. She thought it was about time to start
using
it. Here was a good example: In Rusty Varda's house, she was thrice blessed because all of them—Nick, Peter, and Hey—delighted in her and sought out chances to feed her and drive her and do her errands. But it could have gone the other way, she knew, and then where would she be? Besides, Hey was the type who made it a mixed blessing, coming on so strong he seemed about to faint whenever they met. She inspired reactions that were too extreme; and, consequently, daily life, the merest ordinary commerce, wore her out. And she never knew from one hour to the next whether it would be sticks and stones or a ring of kisses waiting around the corner. People tore up her magazines in subways. They passed her joints in airplanes. She made a blip in difficult people's radar, and they did their most difficult thing as they thundered by.

It crossed her mind again late Friday afternoon because Hey came in and fired a few rounds just as she was pulling herself together. She'd spent the day in the showrooms getting fabric samples for a list of upholstered pieces Peter had jotted down. She was fussy, and everything was ugly. Finally, she'd curled up in the back seat of Peter's Jaguar and doodled out a crewel design that really
looked
like a Rhode Island wing chair. She knew she couldn't spend her afternoons in parking lots. She had to make do with what was on the market. But she couldn't get out of her mind how everything
ought
to look, and four days of decorating let her know she wasn't going to be famous for sprightly solutions like red checked tablecloths done up as draperies. What kept her going was that, among Peter's clients, money was no object. So if the marketplace was barren, they could always farm it out with their own design to a custom-maker and wait a year and a half. Peter was always getting custom orders finally coming in when the clients were halfway through a divorce or, in one case, dead, leaving him with twenty-two rolls of wallpaper covered with bats and Japanese fans.

Rita was in no mood. She'd drawn a hot bath, and she was doing a perfunctory bit of yoga while it cooled to a simmer. She twirled her neck in an arc and then got down naked on the white fur rug and did her best to be a cobra. As she rose to her feet, she felt a first glimmer of calm. Float, she told herself, feeling as if she'd come at last to a place where people took care of themselves the whole day long. She executed a slow tango across the room to the bathroom, a sweeping walk somewhere between Isadora Duncan and Groucho, when suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was Hey.

“I'm doing a hand wash,” he said, somehow getting by her and into the room. “Do you have anything you want done?”

“Oh, Hey, I'm not that organized yet. Everything I own is dirty,” she said, pulling the seedy pink terry robe closer around her that she'd grabbed off the floor at the last minute. “I'll just throw it all in the machine before the weekend's over.”

“I did some things already for you that I found in the closet,” he said, and she felt a small chill creep across the back of her neck. “I separated out the delicate things for later. I can do the green shawl if you want.”

“Please don't bother, Hey. I'm used to getting things done on the run.”

“It isn't good for the clothes,” he said, as if the clothes had some rights in the matter, too, whatever her penchant for barely making do. She knew he was offering her his services so he could fall in step with the rhythm of a woman, and she resisted them, but not because she was squeamish about his reasons. She supposed he was all charm and innocence when he gathered up her nightgowns and tights, and she wasn't innocent herself about the other ways in which a man could go about it. Rather, she was afraid she would start to pose for him, to pay in kind for all his small attentions to her. He wants to be my lady-in-waiting, she thought. Yet she couldn't help but envy his enthusiasm. He wanted so hard to hear the sea in the core of the shell that he brought it up out of the coursing of his own blood. The moves of a woman were a siren song to Hey; and Rita, just come from dancing in her room, was humming a few bars of it under her breath. No wonder people told her their life stories. She came across as if she'd lived them all herself. One on one, she flashed like a mirror.