The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  Except with Rita. He had laid out his rags-to-riches theory last night at dinner, the difference between his and Peter’s expectations, and she filled in the narrowest pauses with “Go on. I’m listening.” He talked about money, and she talked in her turn about sex, and it didn’t take Freud to let them know they were parallel lines, sex and money, that defied the laws of geometry by meeting all over the place. Grown-ups talked about one or the other, Rita knew from experience, and more and more was what was usually wanted. But Nick and Rita seemed to share a sense of missed connections between the progress of desire and the daily life of the self. Nick was half-ready to say he was through with money, to make the same point that Rita made about men. He didn’t really mean he wanted to give it all up, and he told Rita she didn’t, either. If she went too long without a man, he said, she’d take up pride and make the world atone for her illusions. Nick intended to have it both ways, money and no illusions. The very juggler’s act he’d decided on with Sam, as well, though he was careful to let on nothing of that to Rita. Rita had enough on her mind without it. She tried to see the probabilities for an equation of her own, about a man and no illusions. It sounded wonderful when Nick described it. That was the problem.

  What had she said about sex? She tried to remember as she went back to the bathroom to get a towel. When she got there, she found she was all dry. It must be late. More than anything, she remembered, as she rifled through her string bag among the five-and-dime cosmetics, the way they’d given each other their invitations. Nick came home and got dressed up and sat in the garden to wait for Peter. She came home and got undressed and wandered out to walk by the pool in her flimsy summer robe, expecting to be alone. While they talked about the weather, Hey called out through the dining room window, “Peter can’t get away. He says to tell you not to wait for dinner. What dinner?”

  “No dinner,” Nick said to reassure him. “Peter made a mistake.” And the mistake, Nick told Rita after a moment when they couldn’t seem to get back to the weather, was forgetting a reservation for two at Chasen’s. “There’s no point in letting it go to waste,” Nick said brightly, rubbing his head through his curls like a sheepish boy about a date. “Why don’t you come?”

  “To Chasen’s?” Rita asked from the edge of the pool. “Sorry. I’d have to spend the whole day getting ready. I’m going to eat salad and an unwashed apple. For calories, I’ll drink Scotch.”

  “You can eat all that at Chasen’s.”

  “I doubt it,” she said, dipping the toes of one foot in the pool. “There I would be tempted to eat a whole cheesecake. Do you and Peter eat there all the time?”

  “Oh, no. No one does. Besides, we don’t get a very good table there. You have to be Louis B. Mayer or Irving Thalberg to get a good table. But we do it now and then to keep in touch.”

  “With what?”

  “With the generals,” he said. “It’s the officers’ club. The people who eat at Chasen’s aren’t hungry anymore, or not for food, at least. You have the feeling they would sing if someone at their table asked them to. Am I a cynic?”

  “Not to me you aren’t. I was wounded in the war myself,” she said, her memory throwing out a snapshot of Peter’s grandfather tied up by his knees in traction, an icebag over his eyes. “Is the food good?”

  “Yup. Want to come?”

  “Some other time. Stay here?”

  “We’ll flip a coin,” he said, and stood up and dug one out of his pocket. He didn’t care one way or the other, she could see. Really, she thought as he flicked his thumb and the quarter bulleted in an arc above her head, she didn’t, either. She called it “Heads.” It sailed in the air and plopped in the pool and sank. They stood side by side, waiting for the ripple to give out.

  “Hey will get furious if we mess up the kitchen,” Nick said.

  “You don’t know how simple this is going to be,” she answered. “I’m not going to cook anything. We’ll just eat enough so as not to feel faint in the morning. But how do you know you’re not going to win? Don’t you always?”

  “In a way,” he said, “but someone’s been passing you the wrong information. I got stood up tonight, not you.”

  The quarter came to rest on the bottom, heads up. Within half an hour they were standing at the sink eating a basket of cherries where they could spit the pits economically. Then they sat at the kitchen table, hunched over a wooden bowl three feet wide at the rim, and ate a green salad with their fingers. They had not compromised about their clothes and so were still dressed in a dove gray suit and a dusty rose robe, the latter a Joan Crawford version of the terry number.

  About sex, she’d said it was two different things. At first, she started out with a girl’s three wishes, all of them the same: to get so naked and come so close, the self was all but lost. Intimacy, she decided at N. Y. U., would cure the migraine of too much consciousness, and the form it took for her was a man who would hold on tight until he’d finishing making the two of them one. She got mixed results. The other thing started later, in her late twenties, when the three wishes were all used up. Then all she seemed to need out of a man was a fucking machine. She didn’t care if it had needs of its own, as long as they were carnal and not sentimental. She went to bed in those years as she might have walked onto the court for an equally matched game of tennis, in love with the game but planning to win. When at last the two sides of sex came together, she told Nick, slicing up the apple and parceling it out, she was well over thirty. By then, she said, anyone will make a strange bedfellow. Now, she didn’t know what she wanted when she found herself involved. If a man got very intimate, she found she just wanted to fuck. If he came on like a rutting animal, she wanted promises as pretty as popular songs, claiming that love went on forever. It had happened that way so many times that sex itself, the diddling of the membranes, wasn’t as important as the moods she was locked in whenever it happened. She sighed as if she’d given up the ghost. Was it ever that way for Nick? she asked him finally.

  Yes, he told her, it was. Except he still believed in his membranes as if he’d just turned sixteen. And though he’d gone through a time in his own late twenties—he was still straight then, more or less—when he felt about fifty whenever he went to bed. The contrary moods that hit him when his cock stood up were not his cock’s fault, he decided. A long time ago, he said, he must have separated sex from who he thought he was, feeling like a failure too much of the time and trying to keep something pure and simple. He knew it only seemed pure and simple. He was sure his detachment had caused him to boil ever since with guilt and a little boy’s temper and a horror of the grave.

  “But it still feels good to fuck,” he said with a grin, “no matter who I think I am on a given day.”

  “Do you feel good after?”

  “Oh, that,” he said ruefully, bringing up his lower lip to stroke his mustache. “That’s something else. Who said we’re all alone in bed, no matter who we’re with, but at least when we’re there with someone we like, there’s someone to be nice to afterwards?”

  “Did someone say that?” she asked. “Whoever he was, he never went to bed with me.”

  She couldn’t remember when she’d last talked sex with a man other than one she was sleeping with. At certain points last night, it had felt as good as the thing itself. By the time they had nothing else to say, he was pouring Cointreau over strawberries. It proved to be a nightcap. They both had to get some sleep because it was Thursday. Rita ate just the berries and let the orange blossoms lie, and she said “Good night” and slipped away at a quarter to ten, composed and self-contained, as if she’d said exactly what she meant.

  Rita now took a last swipe at her cheekbones with a powdered sponge and went back to the bed for her clothes. They looked all right, but she had another sudden change of heart about Hey. It didn’t do him any good to have her as a mannequin, she thought. She had no notion of what she should wear instead, but she went to the closet—across from the windows and beyond the bathroo
m door—to throw something on indifferently. The look Hey had given her was too studied. In the closet, as big as her bedroom in New York, with built-in cedar drawers and shelves for thirty pairs of shoes, she stood at the three-way mirror smirking. Then she reached out and took up a jumble of shirts and pullovers from the open top drawer. One by one, she disentangled them, held them up any-which-way at her breasts, and dropped them in the drawer again.

  She didn’t have a thing to wear, she thought, and the thought delighted her. It struck her funny because she was sure it was a remark being repeated at that very moment up and down the hills of Bel-Air. “I wept because I had no shoes,” she said with a scowl to herself in the mirror, “until I met a man who had no feet,” quoting her mother quoting—who knew—the Reader’s Digest and Dr. Peale.

  Laughing, she pulled the jacket of a black knit suit off a hanger and draped it over her shoulder, her hand on her hip like a toreador. Well, she thought, why not the widow’s weeds? She did a bit of flamenco in the alcove of the three mirrors, winking at herself as she whirled by. Then she slipped, and her heel knocked the wall hard under the center mirror as she went down. There was a thud, she thought in midair before she landed, as if the wall were hollow.

  But that couldn’t be. She drew her knees up under her chin and sat in the pile of clothes that had broken her fall. She looked the alcove up and down. The three mirrors were set in and framed, and the ash paneling that lined the whole closet was pieced in a chevron pattern to the ceiling and the floor around the mirrors. This was the wall that, to move, you would have to move mountains. Rita was a stickler about her wonderful sense of direction, and she knew the closet corner of her room was cut out of the side of the hill. She’d already thought about the tons of earth crashing in on her if the earth should quake. The hollow sound would madden her if she didn’t get to the bottom of it, because once she saw a thing one way, she incorporated it instantly and went on to the next. She didn’t like the laws of matter changing on her when she wasn’t looking.

  “Rita, we’re leaving,” Peter called through her window from the garden. “Are you ready? You’re not ready, are you?”

  “I’m coming,” she said, “I’m coming.”

  She went over onto her hands and knees and bent down near the floor of the alcove. She rapped the paneling under all three mirrors with her knuckles. Only the center one rang hollow. She sat up again, and there she was, face to face. She was amazed at the look in her eyes. Then she turned her head to either side and saw how many Ritas felt the same way, though none could put her finger on exactly what it was. Rita looked the alcove up and down again, and she knew she was right.

  The center mirror was a door.

  3

  Nick stood in the doorway and watched the battered MG kick dust as it drove the trail over the hill from the main gate. Sam was going so fast that the car skidded badly out of the ruts and spun its wheels when he cornered to make the turn to the bunkhouse. He was out of breath and laughing, both at once, when he braked in front of Nick. He jumped out over the door.

  “We did the last five miles on two wheels,” he said. He was an hour and a half late. “I broke my own record, but it’s unofficial, so I do it all the time. Some day you and I will have to go to Vegas together, so you can see me open her up. She likes that trip.” He reached in behind the front seat and brought up a sweaty six-pack of Coors. He was talking too much. “I brought us a picnic lunch.”

  He came up the three steps to the porch and stared right at Nick, grinning, as he got closer. When Nick didn’t move to let him by, Sam kept on walking until they were only an inch apart. Nick was leaning on one shoulder against the door, as mild as could be. They were both dressed western today, exactly alike, as if by common consent. Nick had changed out of his office gear and left it in the car. His grin still in place, Sam put his knee up and parted Nick’s thighs in a gesture something like a caress, though behind it was the force that could double Nick over with a knee in the groin. Sam reached forward and got an open-handed grip on Nick’s genitals, then leaned close and kissed the side of his neck hard, sucking in the skin.

  “I’m here now,” he said in a husky voice, and when he pulled back to look at Nick again, his face was quiet. Sam wasn’t unconcerned, Nick could see, about the hour and a half, but he wasn’t going to apologize, either. If he could, he would bring Nick out of it by being there now completely, but he wouldn’t have a thing to say about the particular sorrows of Nick’s afternoon. Now was all he had ever had time for. Nick wondered what it would be like not to care what other people thought. Sam didn’t, and it turned Nick on. He liked careless people. They got that way because they were sexy rather than beautiful. Beautiful people took pains and, like Peter, moved to a kind of slow and cautious music. Nick liked Sam’s attitude in spite of himself, knowing as he did that it had no plans and never gave ground.

  “That car looks older than you do,” Nick said, sorry as soon as he’d said it that he’d made a remark about anyone’s age, but he wasn’t alert because he was trying not to say: Where the hell have you been?

  “Sheila?” Sam said playfully. “She’s my twenty-dollar gold piece. I told you I was in New York for a while. I got back here answering an ad for a driver. A hundred and expenses to get an MG to LA in two weeks. And the guy never showed up.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Disappeared. I never found out.” Sam shrugged, as if to say that people had to take care of themselves.

  “How did you get the car registered to you?” Nick asked, but then decided to drop it. Peter called him Nick the insurance man when he started cross-examining.

  “I met a guy who fixed it,” Sam said. He opened a beer. He went over to the bed against the wall where the burlap and blankets were thrown, and sat back and drank. “You know, I’m not that attached. If you want to get me a Porsche, I’ll strip Sheila down and leave her in a parking lot.”

  “So much for loyalty,” Nick said. “Do you really get it on with people who give away Porsches?”

  “No, but it never hurts to ask. It’s not that people don’t offer them, but it’s usually got some strings attached. Like a long fuse.”

  “So maybe you wouldn’t take it,” Nick said, “even if I offered.”

  “Maybe. Why don’t you take your shirt off and come over here?”

  Nick could see now that he hadn’t wasted the time alone. Because he wasn’t hurt and wouldn’t pout and didn’t need loving. He felt a little leap of freedom, as if he’d just had proof that he wasn’t going to get lost. He could not remember who it was, he or Sam, who’d started the teasing, but they made fun of one another whenever they were feeling wild and didn’t care how it ended. Things weren’t tense between them anymore. The separation and the white noise that blew about the lonely terrace, ten days ago in Venice, had vanished. Nick supposed they had laughed it off. So they teased, and Nick did all he could to punch holes in Sam, but he loved him still like knights and squires in a story that called for heroes.

  “I thought you wanted to walk in the hills and scare up some ranch hands.” Nick unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it off, and draped it on a rocking chair whose seat had rotted out. The chair sat back on its haunches. They’d gone off on foot the other day, charged with fantasies—over the next rise, what if they came upon men in chaps, branding and cutting calves. Or a wild horse in a corral, a rodeo rider breaking him bareback. Even as they laughed, imagining the dirty things they’d do, Nick had thought: The man we are after is still external to us both, even now. If asked to pin down who that man could be if not Sam, Nick would have said two or three things without thinking: He regularly wrestles some actual creature of the earth, and he’s glad to be alone, whenever he can, and one day is so much like another that he doesn’t hear them going by. It was another way of saying he had to be careless. Oddly enough, the cowboy lover in Nick’s head didn’t need sex and hadn’t had a lot. He was pretty shy. And if he wasn’t Sam, then Sam could not obsess him like a dream
any longer. That meant that here they were at last, merely a man and a man, and Nick had the same power to be careless as Sam. He knew how much he preferred the dream.

  “I never know what I want until it’s time,” Sam said. “You know what I thought about doing when I was driving up here? Going to your house.”

  “In Bel-Air?”

  “I figured I ought to see how the other half’s living these days. But then when I saw you at the door, I remembered I wanted to get laid.”

  Nick was standing at ease, halfway across the room, his hands in his back pockets. They both looked surly, as if it were a duel coming up. They were just out of range of each other’s weapons and they went through their footwork to loosen up. Sam was already hard as he slipped his Levi’s down around his thighs. No underwear, of course. Sam followed the fashion in these matters to the letter.

  “And after that?” Nick asked with mock weariness, as if Sam was going to have his own way no matter what. “Then would it amuse you to tour Bel-Air?”

  “I won’t know until it’s time. I don’t think ahead if I can help it.”

  Rita’s right, Nick thought as he moved to the bed and knelt between Sam’s legs. The flash of Rita brought back, like a second in a dream, the whole halting theory of Rita and the world. “Instead of growing up,” she had said last week at dinner, “I read a thousand books. In books, the people start their letters, ‘Dear So-and-so, I think of you so often.’After a while it made me mad. I wanted to say, ‘But people don’t think that often. About anything.”And Nick protested. He never forgot a face himself, and it would have been the truth if he’d said it in his letters, because everyone he knew went through his mind from time to time, as if on cue. But Sam was the sort of person Rita must have meant. Meanwhile, the thought of Rita passed in a moment, but it was odd enough for anything to intrude among the cowboys and surfers that crowded Nick’s heated brain when he went to bed. As to letters, he didn’t know what he was talking about. His only commerce with the mails had to do with paying bills.