by Paul Monette
By Wednesday afternoon, Rita was proceeding in two different directions. She brought to the shop a tiny Renoir oil, the head of a boy, lifted from a museum in Holland during the war. She wrapped it in tinfoil at home and put it in the bag with her sandwich. Later on, she ate the one and parceled up the other in cardboard and brown paper and twine, addressing it to Amsterdam and putting on a false return address in West LA. She guessed at the postage, slapped on stamps, and dropped it off at the post office on the way home. The same day, she had made a call to the Times and talked a clerk into researching the death of Frances Dean, saying she was from NBC and promising him a credit if they got it on the air. He called her back while the stamps were on her tongue. No report of the death had ever appeared in the paper. What, he wanted to know, was the project for NBC? To do with Howard Hughes, she told him, so it had to be kept a secret until everything was in place. Could she count on him? She could.
She spent the evening going through the jewelry. Not in the ordinary way. Not in a mirror. She felt less possessive of what unfolded out of these squares of black velvet than she did about anything she’d found so far. She knew they were erotic, the ones cut and mounted as women’s jewels. And she realized how close the parallel was between Carrier gold and enamel and the wonders of King Tut’s tomb. She brought them out of a wooden chest by candlelight. A silver cigarette case inlaid in a checkerboard of black and yellow onyx. A pear-diamond ring as heavy as a stone. A bracelet of pavé links, sapphires and emeralds. Erotic not so much because they were worn against flesh as because of the power that crackled between the lovers they were tribute to. Some were beautiful in a way that broke her heart, like perfect flowers that bloomed and died, except here it was the beautiful women who had owned them who died.
Rita let them run through her hands—art deco brooches, Tiffany earrings, a string of gray pearls—and she tried nothing on. But wasn’t she being too pure? Anyone would have told her as much. Just because she’d passed through the mirror didn’t absolve her of all vanity. She owed it to herself, to the war she’d had with love for twenty years, to try them on and feel how a certain class of man kept a certain class of woman. And yet, she thought not. She simply didn’t want to be involved. She had beside her the diary list of the people whose vaults and lacquered cases had been rifled for each item. People from Sag Harbor and Hobe Sound and River Oaks and 78th and Park. She felt no welling urgency or sense of mission about returning these to their rightful owners, not the way she did about the art to the museums.
So, in part, the jewelry annoyed her. It was too sensational. Worth so much, it brought up the uncomfortable issue of telling the world outside what she’d discovered. She couldn’t just ignore it. She’d hoped to pack everything off, but of course she couldn’t. She couldn’t mail the Ming plate either, or the crystal mouse. And what was rightful about the owners anyway? The jewels stolen in the forties belonged now to various estates and heirs, Rita supposed, and it wasn’t the same as the women themselves. Of course, some of them must be quite alive, and some might be pining even now for their heavy gold chokers, but Rita wasn’t in the mood to go out of her way for them. Let them go shop and eat lunch. She would have been quick to point out that her cooled-down attitude here was a form of vanity, too.
She leased a bone white Jaguar Thursday morning early. She couldn’t be late for anything today because, for the first time, Peter had taken the whole day off and left no number where he could be reached. He was going painting. Rita had a meeting with the owners of a Continental restaurant in West Hollywood who wanted the Spanish taken out. They wanted it to look as if it had been lifted from soup to nuts out of Harvard Square. She had a bout with UPS about the millionth delay on an order of sisal shipped out of Chicago. A man on Beverly Glen had just found out that the honey-finished cabinet Peter had bought him in Mexico, which had just arrived, wouldn’t go up the stairs to the study. What the hell was she going to do about it? She sang him a lullaby of sorts and promised a house call at two o’clock. Then she finished her phoning and figured she had a couple of hours to kill, so she drove back to Bel-Air to pick up a medium-size painting.
It had to be small enough to fit in her overnight bag, because she couldn’t just carry it out of the house under her arm. Someone might see it and start asking questions. She couldn’t be choosy. She’d about decided on a Crucifixion from a monastery north of Florence when, tired of the Italians again, she took the extra time to crowbar the top off a wooden box. She’d still finished only about a third of the inventory, and there were any number of still unopened crates. This one proved to be English. Two Blake illustrations of Paradise. A Turner storm at sea. A Gainsborough boy and his dog. And then something that was just the right size: a Constable landscape. A little boring, perhaps. A ribbon of land beneath a swirl of dove gray cloud. There was a time when she could have written a paper about it overnight, a thousand words, and told the ways it was beautiful. Stolen from the library at New College, Oxford. Damn it, she thought, they probably haven’t even noticed it’s missing. The monks in Florence deserved to get their painting back much more, but what could she do? It was a little too big, and she needed to practice on easy things.
She had gotten so accustomed to locking herself up and setting herself free that she did it automatically, much as Rusty Varda must have done. She always put her head out the closet door before she came out, in case anyone should be looking through the windows from the garden, but otherwise she breezed about, opening and shutting, like a sailor who knows his boat down to the last screw. She went up the hallway, suitcase in hand, and squinted when she came into the brightness of the living room. The noon sun through the skylights pooled in three or four places, and she walked zigzag across the room in order to go through the sunny spots. No reason. She was happy. She was a little afraid, of course, to be so happy, and she hadn’t done a thing about getting over Nick. She was still letting that happen in her head. But even so. That day, in the warm spots in the living room, she was at the exact center of her life.
Sam was standing on the spiral staircase, about halfway up. When she first caught sight of him, Rita thought he had just gotten out of bed. The sleep was still in his eyes. Then she saw it differently. He looked as if he’d spent the better part of his life in bed, but none of it sleeping. His eyes had a quality that could fix and stay like a painting, and they were older far than hers. She felt, when he looked down at her, like a fool eccentric who’s neglected all the good things in life, doesn’t have time for them, and in the end doesn’t know what they are and can’t go get them. She didn’t desire an inch of him. On the contrary. She felt a bristling in her, so strong it shook her by the shoulders. He was sleazy. He looked like he’d given up on people years ago. He was beautiful, she had to admit, but it went no deeper than his tan and his sun-shot hair and carried with it the feel of its own exhaustion, like a Vegas showgirl’s beauty. The sex was mean.
“Who are you?” he asked, genuinely confused.
“Rita,” she said. Let him make what he could of that. She didn’t like being down below, but she couldn’t exactly order him down. She was furious at him for watching her crisscross the living room to stand in the sun.
“I’m Sam.”
“Well, we mustn’t be here to meet each other,” she said ironically, “because we don’t seem to ring a bell in each other’s head. You know Nick and Peter?”
“Nick.”
And she knew in an instant who he was. “Oh, Rita, who knows,” Peter had said the first night at the party, “I think Nick’s in love.” And as there was no follow-up—Peter didn’t mention it again, and Nick was as normal as could be—she’d dropped the whole thing as unfounded, a way married people had of talking about the wild uncertainties of love. Her wish to protect Nick and Peter both was what had gripped her, and before she was conscious of summoning it. It sprang full-blown, probably because she’d taken such pains herself with Nick and Peter, in the struggle with her own sharp passion. About Nick, sh
e had no expectations, and it made her free to go through the irony, the melancholy, and the tangle of being honest with herself. But not just yet. She hated this boy on sight for being so simple. And so carnal. She wasn’t being repressive or righteous, either—carnal was all there was sometimes, and when it was, it often worked. But Sam acted as if there were no other wisdom and no harder meeting. She and Nick and Peter had done all that, she wanted to say, even if she didn’t know the details. They’d let themselves go, all three, for years. And all the same, they were split off on tangents, every one, and chasing each other around in a ring, trying to perfect a love they could live with. This boy wasn’t one of them. He’d been through something else.
“Is Nick here?” she asked.
“He’s on his way,” Sam said, but didn’t say from where. It was clear, though, that Nick was right behind him. Nick’s going to walk in, Rita thought, and we’ll both be changed as if by magic, and we won’t have had anything to say about it. “Are you the one from New York who’s starting over?”
“You could call it that.” Is that how Nick would put it? “But it isn’t fair. You know who I am, and I don’t know who you are.”
“Nobody special,” he said. “I’m a cowboy. Why do you have your suitcase with you? Are you leaving?”
“Uh, no. I broke the handle. I mean the clasp. I’m taking it in to have it fixed.”
“I don’t own one.” He came down the stairs now, strutted down, as if he meant to go on doing what he was doing before Rita came in. “I’ve never been anywhere far enough, I guess. Sometimes I think I’ll pack up and go to New York, though.”
“To start over?”
“Sure,” he said, face-to-face with her. “But I’m too lazy. Someone ought to pay me to just sit and drink beer. I’d be a rich man.”
“I’ll bet you could find someone to pay you for that,” she said playfully, though giving him the option that he might not want to play with her. “People and their money love to be parted. All you’d have to do is convince someone you were the best at sitting and drinking beer. People love a winner.”
“What do you do?” he asked. He looked now as if he’d forgotten what he was doing before Rita came in.
“Me? I put together packages. And I’m always on the lookout for time-saving tips. I save up time.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know,” she said truthfully. “But I’ll need all the time I can get when I find out.”
Then they heard a droning from the dining room, and Hey walked in behind the vacuum cleaner. He had had no reason to suppose anyone else was home. They were all gathered here during an hour when the house was customarily his. For the briefest moment, his eyes took in Rita and Sam, and then, full of unconcern, he studied the rug in front of the machine as if he might pick up a stray diamond before the suction did. Rita could see he’d connected her and Sam up as a couple, and he meant to get out of their way, whatever sort of couple they were. He steered his vacuum meaningfully across the room, in the direction of the hall. Unlike Rita, he seemed to stay clear of the sun pools. Besides, he had his own reasons for getting some privacy. He’d made up his face as if for the stage—some red in the cheeks, a wide blue shadow on the eyelids, and a scatter of pencil lines to shallow his cheeks and soften his jaw. He looked like a washed-out clown.
“Hey, I’m just leaving,” she said, and Hey looked up at her and cupped his ear. “You can stay. Sam can go out and wait by the pool.”
It was the name that did it. Hey heard “Sam” and looked at him hard for the first time, his eyes darting away from Rita. She watched the transformation happen in his face. He went white, and his eyes went wide with panic. So that’s what people mean, she thought, when they say they’ve seen a ghost. It has very little to do with the ghost itself, who, after all, just wanders about in a sheet, who can’t take hold of anyone by the throat because he can’t take hold of a blessed thing anymore. But to see one, she understood now, is to stare your own death in the face. She didn’t know what to do for Hey, he went so far away so fast. How could he have known Sam that many years ago, she wondered, because the first thing she noticed about his shock was how full it was of a thing long buried. Sam seemed to Rita like a teenager. Hey was old enough to be his father. So was she. It was between them, she told herself, and put on a smile and waited for Hey to compose himself. She didn’t look at Sam.
“It’s all right. I’m just passing through,” Hey said, shifting back to her again. “It’s already clean in here.” The noise of the machine made it impossible for her to pinpoint the tone of voice. But clearly he’d decided not to show his cards just yet. “What are you doing with your suitcase? Are you going someplace?”
“No, no,” she said. “I need it at the office. I need it for samples.” Why am I lying two different lies? she thought, mentally kicking herself.
“Well,” he said firmly, “you can’t go around with that. Have Peter buy you a proper briefcase. Go to Gucci.”
He sounded all recovered, and she couldn’t hold him back. He zipped along and mowed the vacuum out of the room.
“It was nice meeting you,” she said to Sam. “Make yourself at home.”
Sam smiled and opened his mouth to say something nice. She could tell, she’d snowed him in spite of herself. People who lived in and out of their clothes appreciated Rita’s velocity, her coming to the point and getting on her way. It was just as well that he liked her. She wasn’t going to treat him like a ghost. That would amount to abandoning Nick, for one thing, and for another, she wasn’t afraid, like Hey, of the kind of man Sam was. Hey thought he was dangerous. She thought he was like a delinquent boy, though she knew they both could be right. And then the nice things got left unsaid, because they heard Nick call down to them from the balcony.
“Nothing ever happens in the living room,” he said, to mock them standing there. “If I’d come in time to introduce you, I think I would have arranged it in the garden. But my batting average is low today. I guess it’s lucky we all got here in one piece.” Rita and Sam, looking up together, looked like people plotting constellations in the midnight sky. Nick rained down his lightest comments on them. It had all stopped being in his control back at the ranch, the moment they heard the first rattle. Now he was doing what he could just to keep up. “Are you stealing the flatware?” he asked, pointing at the suitcase.
Rita grinned. “It’s my secret life. I do a juggling act in Griffith Park during my lunch hour. This,” she said, fluttering the overnight bag in the air at her side, “is where I keep my juggler’s balls and my clown costume. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“I never tell on my friends,” Nick said, leaning from the waist over the railing, as if he might fly off. “But not because I’m virtuous. It insures that I keep hearing all their stories.”
“I don’t tell on mine, either,” she called back, her voice a notch more cynical than his, the currents just as deep.
“Should we all have lunch?” Nick asked. He was talking to Rita. No one was talking to Sam.
“I can’t. I have to go push an armoire up a flight of stairs. I just stopped here for a minute.”
“To get the flatware.”
“Something like that.” She turned to Sam and said, “Take care of yourself,” by which she meant “Take care of Nick, or else.” She reached over and touched him, on the flat of his stomach, as it happened, and she thought of her statue. “Maybe next time we’ll have a swim. Or just sit and drink beer.”
“Will you hold my head under until I promise to be good?” His voice was mild and even-tempered, and it struck her that this might be the nice thing he meant to say. He knows I’m a little hysterical, she thought. And she realized she’d had her first warning about Sam—he might be a kid, in love with himself and dispossessed of being human, but he wasn’t stupid.
“I won’t lay a finger on you,” she said, knowing Nick was listening, and walked to the foot of the stairs. She could hear Nick starting down, so the
last thing Sam spoke, intimate and dense with shadows, was for her alone.
“That’s not the only thing you won’t do, Rita. You won’t tell me what’s in the suitcase, either.”
She pretended not to understand. She didn’t really have to pretend. Negotiating the Samsonite as well as she could, she started up the spiral. When she and Nick met halfway, they made as if to slip past one another, but took more pains than they needed to, in order to draw out the time. Their voices fell to conspirators’ pitch, as if by common practice. Still, there wasn’t any time.
“I don’t know what to say. Things have gotten a little out of hand.”
“This is nothing,” she said reassuringly. “Haven’t I ever told you? I’m a tough guy.”
“Rita, I’m afraid.”
“So’s Hey.”
“So’s Peter.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Good,” he said, the loudest thing he said. “I promise not to be, next time you are.”
“It’s a deal,” she said.
Then the momentum of the stairs took over, and they were swept around the spiral, one up, the other down. She didn’t look back, and the next thing she knew, she was out the front door. She put down the case and bent over, cradling the arm that had held it. She felt as if she’d never use it again. Her arm hanging lifeless, she was going to gimp around forever because she’d pretended it was empty when, in fact, there were pounds and pounds of painting in it. She stood between the house and the stairs to the white Jaguar. The shriek in her elbow joint abated after a minute, giving over to a throb that she could handle. She picked the suitcase up in the other hand and took a parting look down the green canyon below Crook House. From the kitchen garden, she could hear the parrot squawking. It was February twenty-sixth, she thought as she climbed the shaded stairs to the drive, and she no longer blamed the winter weather for what went wrong. That, right there, was progress.
