by Paul Monette
“It doesn’t matter, Nick. I came up here to be alone and paint, too. I don’t need you until four o’clock. I’ll find you.”
Just then they heard the MG growl. It backed up, as if to ready for attack, then screeched around Nick’s car and sped out the gate. Nick and Peter watched it down the road as if they’d wound it up and set it going themselves.
“That’s Sam.”
“Very pretty. Or should I say he looks the part?” he asked with a smile. He spoke with less irony, Nick decided, than with the wish to pin it down precisely. “I’m sorry, you know. I wouldn’t be so tacky as to follow you around. I have my price for practically everything else. But not that.”
“Don’t make me feel worse than I do, Peter. I’m the one who’s being tacky.” He hadn’t mentioned Sam yet. This wasn’t how he’d planned it. He felt a storm of sorrow start at the line where the roll of the hills cut the sky. “And I have to go right now, so I can’t even explain. What do I do?”
“You do what you have to,” Peter said mildly. “There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a morning in the middle of the week.”
It wasn’t a choice, Nick thought. Between Peter and Sam, here was his real life, materializing in the spare winter green of the scrub and running weeds. Peter stood away from the car to let him go. There was irony in the smile now, as if he could appreciate the turn of events, even when they turned like a cat going after its tail. He’s tougher than I am, Nick thought. Nick wanted to get it straight that he wasn’t going to tamper for a minute with this, whatever he did with that. He said it all the time to himself. The two things were separate by nature, like earth and water. Of course, that was the quarter from which the fantasy came that he was frittering away his life on the beach, and it wasn’t his favorite view of himself. Sam didn’t matter to Peter and him, he was sure, but the other thing, the split in his head between what really happened day to day and what he imagined, he thought he had to hide. Mainly because it was tacky. Peter had no moral code to speak of, having lost it before he was born, in the revolution. Good taste was virtue enough. He fled bad taste like a virus, like the spots on the lung that his family used to favor for the last illness.
“Is that a painting over there?”
“Yes,” Peter said, folding his arms and turning to eye it in the distance. An easel and a tackle box of paints beneath. “I’m painting it.”
“Why?”
“Well, you ought to ask it. I’m just a medium, I assure you.”
“You never did a painting before.”
“That’s true. This is my first one. Did you ever have a kid in an MG before?”
Peter wasn’t going to leave it at an art lesson, no matter how pressed Nick was for time. There was a brief pause while the lighting changed. The noon sun had no character. It was indistinguishable today from the glare of midsummer.
“You know I’m not faithful to you,” Nick said tensely. Not angry. Upset.
“Is that what I’m asking?” Peter was taken aback, as if he’d wounded Nick in play and wondered now what else he thought would happen if he juggled with grenades. When he went on talking, he found himself trying to describe wittily a thing he thought so sad it made him tremble. But even Nick didn’t notice. The wit did its sparkle act and drew them back to safety. “I didn’t mean sex. It was more to do with the stories I used to like. The old sort of romance. Two people in love who change their clothes a lot. If it was a movie, they had a lot of MG’s in them. And drinks outdoors to catch the view. Very fifties. They don’t do them anymore.”
“It’s worse than you think,” Nick said wryly. “Sam works the street.”
“Oh,” Peter said slowly, getting it in focus at last. “Well, that’s probably the story they’re doing now, instead. I guess he’s not as young as he looks.”
“They never are.”
“Younger than we are, though.” He looked at the backs of his hands and then began to scratch out a stroke of yellow paint on his thumbnail. “Didn’t you always assume we would stay the youngest of anyone? I did.”
“I don’t think that ever happens, even in stories, does it?”
“I think it used to,” Peter said, but as if he couldn’t explain how. “I made a reservation at Chasen’s.”
“So did I.” They looked at each other then, and for a moment their faces were free of expression. It would have seemed nothing to anybody else. “Eight-thirty.”
“Nine. Split the difference?”
“Sure,” Nick said.
Then there was nothing to do but go. They’d done about as well as they could. Peter watched Nick’s car out of sight and walked back to the easel. He didn’t have a stroke left in him today. And he could see that he wasn’t leaving it in the most opportune state, because it looked all pale and muddy. He needed to learn, he told himself, how to let it go along on its own. He’d let the idea get ahead of the paint while he was with Nick, half his mind still riveted to the canvas. He even felt the moment pass, as he and Nick talked on, when he knew it was no longer possible to get what he thought in the painting. It didn’t signify a thing, he realized, capping tubes of acrylic that lay open on the easel tray. He hadn’t expected art yet. In just two hours he’d already learned that he couldn’t tell yet when the least square inch was done and ought to be left alone. And he’d watched himself mess it up time and again when the brush stayed too long in one place.
But the fact was, he couldn’t keep it up because things were going crazy. When I have enough money, he’d always said, I’m going to do something hard. Enough was never enough, of course—he’d seen through that. It was harder to admit there was no point to going on today because of Nick. He’d never thought to think that way. The whole thing had literally ambushed him from behind. He had had it all planned, a finished painting before the sun set and a drink with Nick while they sat on the back end of the pickup. Now he packed the tin box and swirled the brushes around in a cup of water. He carried the canvas over to the truck and propped it on the passenger’s seat, as if it might get inspired by the view. When he turned and stared back at the empty easel and the box of paints, ripe with possibility in the basin of the hills, he was afraid. It was the first time that he faced the worst: He could end up alone.
Peter didn’t suffer from the human condition. Except for Nick and Rita, he had no patience for those who did, because they always overdid it. He chalked up his own bad years to the luck of being young, and that was all over. Since he’d gotten to where he was, there hadn’t been a human condition. Hell might well be a cocktail party in Brentwood, but it didn’t singe his hair or scorch his heart with a vision of his sins. He liked what he did. He hadn’t gotten it right if Rita thought, the night in the howdah, that he had to paint because he didn’t have the strength to throw another petit point pillow on a sofa. He never minded going on about meaningless things, and he wouldn’t have called them that. Wallet-headed women and fancy old queers who wore a lot of turquoise jewelry huddled with him on terraces and told him everything. He paid no attention to what they said, which they appreciated, but he loved to be confided in. And his opinion in matters of gossip, which he never gave, became more and more sought-after. It was madness, but so comical and innocent, Peter could have said, it fell outside the shadow of man’s fate. This wasn’t the same as saying any of them would escape it. It simply didn’t come up unless someone died, and no one did that in LA until he ran out of deals.
Peter spent a good deal of his time out of the office playing with the stars—at pools, in saunas, of course in cars, passing a joint back and forth like an opera glass. Mutual success was the only thing they shared, but that one lucky circumstance gave off a certain glow in these encounters. Peter knew that Nick had a sweet tooth for anonymous and indiscriminate sex, and over the years he had come to see it as no more self-indulgent or significant than his own delight in butter-and cream confections. Nick preferred to skip lunch and get sucked in the steam at his regular baths on Melrose, and Peter was mor
e often than not a few blocks away at Ma Maison, eating a plate of avocado and lobster tails. They didn’t push each other’s faces in it. And Peter knew there was a precipice along one border for both of them. For Nick, it was letting it go too far and get too personal, so that he ended up involved with one of his tricks. For Peter, it was losing track of time, getting so caught up in power and glamor that he played more chess than he lived life.
But he couldn’t, on the other hand, avoid the whole thing. Stardom was, to use Nick’s word, Peter’s fate. It was his subject and condition, and he spent his fantasy time fixed on the shine and shoot and fall of this one and that one. He was near enough to the top to pale the run of lesser lights that used to cluster around him just a year or two before. About making it big, he’d learned it was a problem either way—if you made it, you struggled to cope and hold on, and if you didn’t, you worked at keeping the gun from your head. It wasn’t for everyone. You had to be ambitious, to start with, and you couldn’t know until it happened whether it was the up or down button the gods had pressed, so you never really knew which struggle to prepare for. Now Peter knew. Until a couple of weeks before, all he thought he would have to do from here on in was keep his drinking down, his checkbook balanced, and his ass clean in the LA Times. Then the bill came. He could have everything else but Nick or fight for Nick and put everything else on the line.
Because he couldn’t do it alone. Nick was the only thing in his life that he bothered to keep like an island, temperate and ripe. And the funny thing was, he would have agreed with Nick that nothing was wrong with the two of them. There was the island, whole and long enchanted, ruled by a wizard and an exiled prince. But where things were always the same on the island, as against the thousand shifts and turnabouts in the world outside, the world’s things had come more and more to be the same, too. The island and the world were still day and night, at opposite poles, but there were two poles now instead of one. He knew, from the moment he began the drive through Malibu Canyon and turned in at the gate of Nick’s ranch, how far apart their dreams had ranged. The scale of the ranch told him what it was equal to in Peter’s world. A first class stateroom on the QE2. The Cecil Beaton suite at the St. Regis. A hunting lodge once, in the Hebrides, that couldn’t be reached except by plane, and then four hours in a Jeep that just about rattled his teeth out.
Yet even as the catalog began in his head, he knew it wouldn’t satisfy him. As soon as the picture clicked, he saw himself shouting at room service over the phone. There weren’t enough towels. Where was the ice? Short of the epic picture—the champagne cocktails on the Kirkov balcony over the Black Sea—he’d outgrown dream after dream because they turned out to be nothing special once he’d brought his suitcase in. So what he really should have seen about the dreams was this: Nick still had one strong enough to bid on, and Peter didn’t. It was as if, to be a star, he’d had to give up the capacity to do something people who weren’t stars needed to do more. In a word: dream. Life went on for days sometimes like a too deep sleep.
Leaving the easel where it was for the moment, he climbed into the pickup, started it, dropped it into second, and did a three-quarter turn to regain the gravel road. He headed up the hill. It was an idle enough desire, now that his plan to wait for Nick had gone awry, to see the other side. He probably wanted to know, too, where Nick and Sam were coming from, but not in any conscious way. He was right when he said he wasn’t the type to follow people. Perhaps because he’d just told Nick he didn’t dare go very far alone, he wanted to clock how far he did dare, now that Nick had driven off. He thought of LA, as he had most of the morning while he painted, though he was painting something right out of the Malibu hills. And not that anything here reminded him of the city that had no end. But he loved LA so much that he didn’t like to be this far away in the country. Unlike Nick, he didn’t care for California with a discoverer’s lonely passion, though of course he thought it was beautiful and better than man and all of that. But LA was Peter’s Paris-in-the-twenties. He couldn’t imagine Josephine Baker or Schiaparelli or the Murphys footing it out to the farmland that lay a couple of hours in any direction from Maxim’s. They stayed put.
Peter thought of Adele DesRoches, his big spender in San Marino, whose house he’d turned into a dream of wicker and travertine on the one hand, Persian miniatures and handwork on the other. Adele had lived in Pasadena and thereabouts for forty-five years and two and a half marriages. Once you had enough money, she’d told him, you ceased to live in California, even though it went on and on outside your windows. She’d bought a very airy Mediterranean place in San Marino for four hundred, and she budgeted—if “budgeted” is the right word—another hundred and fifty for interiors. Not including art. “There is no Tahiti,” she said one day, her sunglasses down on the tip of her nose. “What do you mean?” Peter asked. “It doesn’t exist. I’ve been there,” she said, and went back to working on her tan. And when you felt that way, Peter knew, it didn’t much matter where you lived. Or you lived where Adele did, in the south of France a few blocks out of downtown Pasadena. He supposed there was no Tahiti wherever you looked in Beverly Hills. But Peter didn’t buy it. He thought he lived at last in the center of the world, and the more people he met who thought LA was all dead-end, the rim of the abyss, the more there was for him.
When he crested the hill, he braked. It was more of the same, brush-covered hills—jade green, bottle green, sea-shaded—and a puzzle of fences. The bunkhouse leapt at him out of the distance, the one human thing. But he didn’t for a minute think of cowboys. If he had had a notion of who lived here, he had them handcuffed to the land, dry-lipped and cheated and prey to bad weather. They hadn’t a clue how to live in a house. Peter’s mind worked like the mice in Cinderella—shutters at the sides of the windows, boxes of geraniums nailed to the sill, a knocker on the door, and coats and coats of paint. It was so sway-roofed and loose-boarded outside that inside must be old tin coffeepots and chairs made out of bent branches. Still, he thought, it was nicely proportioned for a single room. And there might be an attic in the peaked roof that would make a cheery loft for a bedroom. With a skylight over the bed.
He took off the hand brake and shifted into neutral and let the truck roll down the hill. An inadvertent glance in the rearview mirror, just as he left the rise, showed him the easel standing near the gate like a surveyor’s upright. A flurry went up and down once in his stomach, as if for a moment the ranch was more real than he was and he, like the painting, not real at all. That’s Nick’s house now, he thought as he came down the long slope to the turn. In a way, then, it was his as well, and though he knew it was only an investment, just another kind of money in the bank, he suddenly thought they’d have to pull the bunkhouse down or fix it up. If it was Peter’s, it had to be the best. All his life, he’d made do in a thousand different ways with nothing at all, just to avoid having anything around that was cheap or brutish or ugly.
He stopped again at the right-angle turn where Sam skidded the MG. When he got out to walk the rest of the way, a couple of hundred yards, he was slightly below the level of the house. From here, it sat low on the hill with a certain vividness and clarity, but he went toward it now as if he’d finished with it, his mind already somewhere else. He was going on only because he’d come this far.
He would have to tell Adele about Nick and Sam, he decided. He couldn’t tell Rita any more about it, though he trusted Rita more, because she was in Bel-Air in the middle of it. It was close enough quarters as it was. He wouldn’t admit that he might prefer Adele because she didn’t know Nick. Or because Adele did what he told her to.
Just last week, the day he didn’t make it home to go to Chasen’s, he’d brought over to Adele’s a tall blue and white vase from Isfahan. 1760. Thirty-two hundred dollars. That broke down to about sixteen dollars a year, he’d told her playfully over the phone, swearing it was a bargain. “Whatever you say,” she said. She didn’t even want to look at it first. So he picked it up at a sho
p on Wilshire and drove it over to San Marino, holding it on his lap. He walked right into the house, not bothering to knock. He called out for Adele and, because it was heavy, set the vase down on the travertine table in the entry hall. And it cracked. A hairline fracture about a foot long, starting at the bottom. The price went down to fifteen hundred, and he could hear Adele clattering down the stairs in wooden shoes. Like lightning, Peter swiveled the vase and turned the crack to the wall.
“Oh, Peter, it’s too beautiful. I’m going to pass out,” she said. “Tell me the story. Tell me about the little Iranian lady who spent twenty years painting my vase.”
“Adele, it has to go right here. Don’t touch it.”
“But I thought it was for the bar.”
“We’ll find something else. This is where it belongs.”
“Honey,” she said with a dreamy smile, taking his arm and leading him into the wicker and travertine reaches, “I wouldn’t move my bowels without asking you first.”
Peter remembered it now, climbing up the steps to the bunkhouse porch, because whatever it was Adele saw in him was what everybody wanted. Except Nick. It was notable for Nick’s lack of interest in it. Peter knew where he’d had his training in the styling and housing of Adele DesRoches: in his grandfather’s study, turning over photographs of uniformed men and women in summer white. He used to go through a stack of dance cards, each as thick as a water cracker, as if they were pages in a diary. They had belonged to the woman Alexander Kirkov was signed up to marry after the war. Dead in a bombed train. A life lived out in a lost world, Peter always thought, and light-years removed from the gray and railing prince in Brooklyn Heights. It was the feel for that glimpsed and guessed-at life that Peter sold now on the open market. And only Nick seemed to know where the real Peter stopped and the romance began in people like Adele: Peter Kirkov, prince among men, his ancient blood like vintage wine, enameling greater LA with rich men’s rooms like the bits and pieces of long gone landed estates.
