The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  “As far as I’m concerned, Hey, she’s free to come and go as she pleases.”

  Hey was content. He left Nick standing there unarmed, in need of the next diversion, and then he stopped at the dining room door. He turned around as if he’d forgotten just one more thing.

  “The three of you,” he said. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

  “Of course we are,” Nick said, his eyes narrowing. He felt a bubble of anger rising. What does he mean, the three of us? “Why?”

  “You were all so sad a couple of weeks ago. Now I don’t know what you are.”

  “We’re fine,” he said. Weren’t they?

  “Good.” And then it seemed he would go. But he couldn’t contain himself. He had a theory. “Because you’re all perfect for each other, you know. Holy Brother says it almost never happens. Two’s easy—it’s what everybody does. But three—” He put up the palms of both hands, as if he were a bishop blessing a crowd. He couldn’t bring out the phrases that told how rare it was. Finally he did it by way of The Beyond. “It must have taken you all dozens of lives to get here. And we think you must have done time in ancient Greece.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Nick said, as aloof as he needed to be, “for you to include us in your religion. We’re just who we are.”

  “Oh, I know I talk too much, Nick. Forget it.” Yet his parting shot throbbed with sentiment, as if to say he wasn’t going to forget it. “You all have to get on with your destiny. There aren’t any words for it anymore.”

  Well, Nick thought as Hey disappeared into the house, I’ve made my rounds this morning. They can’t say I’m neglecting them. He already had his checkbook and credit cards in the pocket of his painter’s pants, so he went off without further ado to put a dent in his accounts. When he passed by Rita in the living room, pillowed on a sofa soft as an English cloud, the phone at her ear, he waved, but she didn’t look up. He got into the elevator, thought hard as he went up about Hey’s fruity notion of the three of them, then dismissed it as he went outside and leapt up the steps to the car. The three of them were terrific, of course—Nick knew that—but the rest was just a fairy tale. Nick might have parried: What about Sam? What would Holy Brother have to say about four? Nick bet it would rank right up there with the loaves and fishes. Hey didn’t really want to get under his skin like this, did he? After all, he knew what Judith Anderson had come to in Rebecca.

  In principle, of course, Nick fully agreed with Sam. See a man a second time only if one of you doesn’t get it right at first—assuming, that is, that the one who does get it right is fabulous. Or do it to go that one step further, to push through to the other side of the fantasy, to the place where even the cowboys haven’t made trails. After that, there is no excuse for doing it again. The third time, people are all too real. They start to do what they do at home. Nick let the Jaguar float down the curves of Bel-Air, and he swung by paneled trucks parked up and down the hill, delivering bottled water and dry-cleaned gowns and babysat kids who’d stayed all night. The sprinklers misted the lawns, and the only sound inside the houses was the Bloody Marys being mixed in pitchers. The world was full of systems. Nick’s rules for the conduct of extramarital sports fit right in, and he wished he’d played the same with Sam as he did with anyone else. He could see how a man like Sam shook the method of things. He was like an ambulance pulling up at the lacy gates of a Spanish Baroque pile on Bellagio Drive, the siren cutting a swath through the lemon trees and putting greens. Even if only one house had the mishap, the stopped-up artery and the sudden widow, the ruckus alone brought down values all over the neighborhood.

  Nick had had sex with a couple of hundred men in the two years they had lived in Crook House. If that looks to be about two men a week, then the figures are deceptive. He had gone a month or six weeks sometimes without so much as a double-take when he passed in the car a Greek statue with its shirt off. He had fucked with four men in a row, though, at the baths, four or five hours under a dusty rose light, accessorized with a cock-ring and a box of poppers. Not once had he brought a man home until Sam. He had gone up badly lighted stairs and done it in rooms with no linen on the bed, and he’d rented rooms by the hour in motels that didn’t go in for details. Nine times out of ten, he had no more connection to it as he drove on home than a roll of dirty photographs strewn in his head. Moreover, the men he went with were in it for the same regulation match. They’d had enough of their conference calls and their cliffhanger deals—or their chemistry texts if they were young—and they didn’t want to be anybody else for a while but a man fucking.

  Nine times out of ten. The tenth time, Nick’s heart went to water at the unexpected sight of a blond and thoughtless surfer running out of the waves at Zuma or—it could happen anywhere—an out-of-work actor in the checkout line at Ralph’s. He wasn’t even looking for it at the time. As a rule, Nick was as philosophical as the next fellow about the longing for the unattainable man glimpsed through a window when two trains pass abreast. Momentary as it was, it was the closest he ever got to perfect love. Wait, he’d want to call out, overcome with the certainty that he’d found at last the man in the shadow at the back of the mirror, and already the trains would be rocketing off, respectively, to Cincinnati and Santa Fe. Something as melancholy as a distant whistle would linger and haunt for the rest of the afternoon, fading finally into things that lasted longer than a moment. It happened to everyone, Nick supposed. The problem was, in LA the boy with the water streaming out of his hair might lock eyes and freeze, and the next thing Nick knew, he was rolling around in the back of a van. Or the actor would say, helping Nick unload his groceries onto the belt: “I have forty-five minutes before I have to be at Unemployment, and I live about two blocks from here. What do you like to do?” And what was meant to come and go in a flash, never meant to be, had a chance to dig its heels in and sing. And what it sang was a ballad, which always tells a fateful story. The lovers are smashed to bits by quakes and runnings aground and holy wars.

  Nick came away shaken from coupling with dreams, afraid he couldn’t readjust to the world at large. Forty-five minutes was time enough to make sex take on the feel of Paradise, if only it would never stop. But of course it did, and then the trains went flying to opposite places. In the falling dark, the ride home was full of red lights and bottlenecks. Nick would get so depressed for the next day or two, he’d think he was going to collapse, run off, start bawling in the midst of some trivial, mechanical thing he did every day. What else was there, his nerve ends kept insisting, remembering a perfect fuck, what else but the wrestles of passion? Everything else was all alike—repetitious, pointless, stale. It took Nick too long to get back to normal, so he didn’t even welcome it anymore when fate put a cowboy in his path. He wasn’t good enough at feeling nothing. He preferred the faceless goings-on at the baths, where he was in control of what it was about. He preferred his own indifference. When he emerged again into daylight, the pressure off in his crotch, real life took on, by contrast, a sharp and tonic air. He’d go get a package of ten-cent cupcakes and throw them down with a swallow of black coffee. Then he’d be ready to buy and sell. He stood on the hills of LA and raked the land in like a croupier.

  So he knew what he was letting himself in for, from the very first day with Sam, from the moment they checked in for an hour at the jail-gray motel. The thing grew like a virus. Nick’s life outside it went on by force of circumstance, powered by inertia. Right away, he saw no reason to throw up the old line between fantasy and reality—Sam was too exactly what he wanted—and he decided to let the borders establish themselves in their own way, like a waterline according to the weather. He was like a heavy drinker who decides one day he’s no longer going to chalk the mark in the dirt at five P.M. And then it was as if the story he started had been waiting all along offshore, like a hurricane feeding itself with every passing wind, and it came down on his tidy systems in a fury. Within two weeks he’d bought the ranch.

  Why am I
doing this to myself? he thought as the pain heaped up, hour after hour. To see if I can survive it, he’d say. Get rid of it once and for all. Go down with the truth at last. He was lying. He liked it, or at least he needed it, because he couldn’t handle the run of good luck that choked his wallet with bills too big to break. The image he’d had all his life of losing control—before Peter, before his personal boom in real estate—was an image of attack by nightmare, like a cancer or an incendiary bomb. Now he’d grown up to be Midas, and the merest bungalow in West Hollywood—tile-roofed, Taco Bell version of a tarpaper shack—turned out to tap into a gold mine. Nothing ever went wrong. And it made him feel out of control. Like drowning in whipped cream.

  Well, it was and it wasn’t the niceness of life, still as an unruffled pool, that sent him after Sam. Nick wasn’t the type to self-destruct. He didn’t just look for a ruinous force. He believed in the man in the dream, enough to take a lot of enemy fire in pursuit of him, and even though he’d have to let him go in the end. True to the whole story, Nick went along with the scene where the cowboy rides off alone at the end. Nick just wanted to watch for a while, to ride through town at the stranger’s side, passing the time of day. As usual, of course, there was no sex at all in the fantasied meeting—maybe the knees of their buckskin trousers touch when they rein in their horses and stare out at the grasslands, but it’s by chance—because the fantasy had been around longer than the itch in his groin. He could listen to Sam talk about nothing for hours—his MG, his acid trips, the river of violence he skirted in the street, the men he met who couldn’t hide a thing from him because what they wanted laid them wide open. It came through to Nick like a movie. He read into the grit and bitter herbs of Sam’s disconnected anecdotes the points of a symbolic journey. Sam lived one of his lives for him. Other men did it with football teams.

  Whatever it was, it changed forever on Thursday night, the twenty-sixth of February. Nick waited upstairs to go to Chasen’s, flat on the bed in a suit and tie and no lights on, and he thought once again about Sam. That afternoon, when they’d taken the tour of Crook House, Nick had an obscure feeling that he was showing much too much of himself. He guided people who didn’t know what they wanted through a dozen houses every week, so he figured he’d seen all the possible reactions. But whatever he said about this house—impersonal, statistical, the usual—Sam would seem to take a second look and slow them down, as if he were putting two and two together. Two and two what? Nick wondered. He could feel him taking note of where Nick and Peter ate and slept, what made them mad, what things they’d owned the longest. The life of the house was meaningless to Sam, Nick could tell, but all the same he seemed to be running his hands over everything. Not casing the joint exactly, not like a thief going through a jewelry box. More like an animal making a mess to get at food, except here there was no mess. Nick thought and thought, but he couldn’t get it right what he’d lost that day. It was he who’d lost it, though. Not Sam.

  And then, around eight or eight-thirty, he began to worry where Peter could be. He called the shop, called Adele’s in San Marino, called Chasen’s. He knew it must be the ranch, but he was reluctant to get in the car and drive up there, in case Peter was already on his way home. He didn’t want to get accused of hysteria, not now anyway, not since he’d shoved Peter’s face in it this morning at the ranch gates, when Sam had screeched away and left him no option. For Peter’s sake, for his and Peter’s sake, he had to be as blasé tonight as a cocktail pianist, to prove that everything was just the same as usual. But it got worse and worse, the thought of Peter crushed beneath a harrow or a caved-in shed, and finally at ten he got in the car. In LA, as Rita had observed, people feel they are doing something in a crisis if they can only drive off somewhere. At the ranch, Nick tore around in the dark looking for the pickup, and a couple of times he got out and stood on the hood of the Jag and called at the top of his voice. But by then he was just as sure it was over, and Peter was dead or alive but somewhere else. He drove home calmly, summoned in Rita and Hey to tell them, and as they all settled down to come up with a plan, the phone rang. “We have a man here with a snakebite,” they said, and the world fell into place again.

  What would he have done, Nick wondered now. How far would he have gone with Sam? He drove down Robertson Boulevard sixteen days later, on the lookout for a sound store where money would talk, still numb from the turn things had taken as time went on. Simply this: He had gotten over Sam. He hadn’t meant to—on the contrary, he’d intended to keep a candle lit in his head night and day. He thought it would persist all by itself. The first weekend, when the telephone calls to Sam were rotten with apologies and he left the seven hundred at the Beau-Numero, he imagined there must be a black cloud just behind and to the left of him, hurling down thunderbolts. If it had only held off a little longer, he might have made it. He’d wanted to have it both ways—the cowboy and the Black Sea prince—and in the process he’d thrown the switches too soon, put the tracks crisscross, and brought about a crash. The first few days, the empty place ate into him like a grave being dug in his belly. He expected nothing left by the time he got back to Sam, but Sam was to blame for that. He blamed him in advance for a foregone conclusion, and by the end of the first week he was pelting the place himself with small arms fire, in a rage at Sam’s little faith. Two superhuman fucks was all it amounted to. The third was a draw on account of the snake. But Nick was the only one who could hold onto what little there was and so protect it. He locked it up like Rusty Varda. He had to protect it even from Sam. And still it paled until it was as thin as mist, until the slightest movement through it blew it out of shape.

  So he hated him after a while. It didn’t feel especially odd at first to have his feelings change, and if he couldn’t pinpoint when it happened, it was because it was hidden deep in the nature of things. As if the eye of the hurricane had passed over Crook House sometime in the night when he wasn’t looking. While he sat on the bed with Peter and Rita, reading aloud the personals out of a New York paper. And before he had really stopped to notice, the trees were bending the other way. Suddenly, he hated Sam for having no fantasies of his own, because it meant he had no past that had gone wrong. He hated him for sticking to himself. He’d got to be terrific at fucking so as not to have to see how people really were. Didn’t have to be bored by their husbands, bury their mothers, wait with them dazed for the bad results of their biopsies.

  Can it be that I hate him, though? he had to ask. After all, it may have been himself he meant to hate, for squandering too much on men who added up to nothing. He was going on about it still, all day long, as much as when he loved him and suffered and loved that, too. But now it only made him think his life wasn’t in order, which always sent him back to Peter. He had to hold Peter in a bearhug, first things first, and look over Peter’s shoulder to see what he could do without, cut loose, give away. And it was Sam. He and Rita may have snapped at Peter now and then in his convalescence, putting down their foot like Hey and saying it was all Camille. But it was the most time they’d spent together without a program in a couple of years. Once he got up, noon or after, Peter painted the ranch from memory, canvas after canvas, one a day, and Nick took lunch hours half a day long. He spread the whole of their finances out on the bedroom floor and lectured, speculated, profited, and lost. The days of the second week went by, and he didn’t hate Sam. He’d just outgrown him.

  “What you really ought to do is read to me,” Peter said at the easel. Toward the end of the second week, the bunkhouse began to appear in the paintings, first at the edges of the canvas, then bigger and bigger, as if Peter were focusing a zoom. “Why don’t you read me poems? In Italian.”

  “I don’t speak it, for one thing,” he said. “And neither do you.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter, does it?” he asked, brush in the air.

  “Don’t be fruity, Peter.” Nick held up a pen and a power-of-attorney for him to sign. Peter put the brush between his teeth, the paper on
Nick’s shoulder where he sat on the floor at the foot of the easel, the pen to the dotted line. They were mostly quiet, absorbed, and meticulous, and it looked on those afternoons as if they could have changed places and gone on without a pause, as if they were two monks gilding the facing pages of a prayer book. They weren’t restricted by separate energies, weren’t tied to artist and banker. They were playing, after a fashion. Not play like cowboys and Indians for once, toys and reckless outdoor games. Play like the play in a rope—elastic, room to maneuver, the line going out and coming in. They were so undriven and so afloat they were half-asleep, their heads like globes of brandy. They could have been lying in bed after making love.

  All told, then, Nick thought as he pushed through the doors of the warehouse and the music jammed his circuits, he’d had a five-week thing with Sam, maybe six. Now it was up to him to call up Sam and break it off. He wasn’t as sure as he’d been a couple of weeks before that Sam had given it the finger all on his own and leapt in the saddle and gone. Nick wanted to just forget it, but he didn’t dare. Sam knew where to come back to. In the meantime, he couldn’t successfully divert his attention to stereo components, because he had a tin ear and his mind went blank in front of machines. Peter hadn’t sent him on this errand for his expertise. It was because he could handle—and Peter couldn’t, not for an instant—bleak and noisy stores where they banked the TVs row upon row and turned them all on to the bowling matches. So he put on a pleading look and collared a salesman and nodded a lot for the next half hour, full of encouragement, nicely tuned out. He spent twenty-one hundred dollars gladly, grateful to get it over with. And not including a hundred to the salesman and another to the trucker, to see that they had it blaring disco to shake the walls by 5:00 P.M. on Sunday.