by Paul Monette
“I don’t miss much, you can be damned sure of that,” Peter said as he opened the door and came back into the bedroom. “I can’t believe you’re still doing this grim little retrospective. You know, they’ll be here in an hour. What’d I miss?”
“Among other things,” Rita said teasingly, “the resolution of A Test of Faith. She passes the test, you’ll be glad to know. And just now I was telling Nick what a great painter you turned out to be. But you probably know that already, after last night.”
“Is that what last night was trying to tell me? I could have sworn it was saying enough is enough.”
“We were really talking about the day it all happened,” Nick said simply.
“I know. I listened.” He looked from one to the other, disarmingly open and full of contrition. “What can I tell you? I have this basically sneaky nature.”
When they all began to laugh at once, they each drank in the faces of the others. Though they looked to the naked eye as glad as they did in the picture snapped on their very first evening together, it was better than back to normal now. It’s a happy ending, Rita thought, and then she thought, Of course, it’s only temporary. But she didn’t like it any less for being so. They didn’t need more than a moment’s rest, at least for now, and besides, there must be more where that one came from. For now they laughed till they’d forgotten why, till they laughed at so much laughing. Peter dropped to his knees at the foot of the bed, weak with it. Nick buried his head in the pillows and shrieked. When Rita’s eyes, brimming with tears, alighted by chance on the film, the penthouse and cocktails had vanished, bumped by a western. The good guys chased the bad guys and threw up a lot of dust. So the kiss at the end of the comedy went right by them, but it didn’t matter. Rita knew now that Frances Dean was like a mirror, and Rita would have to look into it more, to see how she looked, but not right now. She looked all right.
The laughter died down to fits and starts. They were all three so relaxed from it that they might have just stumbled sleepily out of the steam room. A catnap, in fact, was the logical next step, and then they’d meet the press refreshed. The sound of the projector, Rita thought drowsily, was really very like the sound of the camera. Someone ought to be filming them as they lolled about on this plateau, if only to show it was possible to be between events. She closed her eyes and so couldn’t see Peter and Nick, but she felt they were islanded right there with her, just as full of sleep. In a minute she was going to reach out and touch them both, as if to knock on wood. In a minute.
When the door flew open, and Nick sat up and tipped the projector over, she had to come back very fast from far away. It was only Hey, standing in the doorway, the phone in one hand, the plug in the other. The film was snuffed out, but it could be fixed. She knew right away it was only a minor household crisis. No big deal, as Nick would say. But in the end, the moment of rest hadn’t been long enough, after all. Nice as she thought she’d be about the way things come and go, she could see where it all led. The more she got, the more she had to have.
“Where does this go?” Hey demanded shrilly, shaking the phone. The cord looped down to his feet like a jump rope.
“Right here,” Nick said meekly, waving his hand at the bedside table.
“And where did I find it?”
“I give up.”
“In the garage,” Peter volunteered, “where I put it. I hate it. It’s the wrong shade of gray. I’ve ordered it in white.”
“But you don’t tell me,” Hey said angrily. “And I don’t understand why no one’s answering, it’s driving me crazy. You expect me to do that too, when I got all these reporters coming.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Peter said. “I am a man without expectations.”
“He’s had this phone in here eleven months,” Hey said at last, appealing to reason. “It’s never bothered him before.” He crouched behind the table to plug in the jack. He got up, brought it close, and stood over Peter, who was still half on, half off the bed. It looked like the start of violence. “The phone is only a thing, Peter. You can’t hate the phone. It’s for you.”
But it took a moment for Peter to make the transition. There was someone waiting on the other end. When he realized it, he sat up and looked at the others helplessly. It might be no one, of course, but it might be a client, and client calls were privileged information, involving as they did the latest-breaking news on various people’s reputations. Rita and Nick were on their feet in an instant, bustling to get out of the room. They knew instinctively not to listen in on each other’s outside calls. One of the secrets they kept from each other was the hype they used to negotiate the world in general. The rifling of one another’s personal effects was pretty fair game. They could eavesdrop if they had to on all the affairs of the heart. But a person’s hustle and fast-talk was none of the business of his loved ones. It was the only sure way they had to separate the outer world from the inner.
Nick and Rita shooed Hey out of the room ahead of them, and Peter said hello just as the door clicked shut behind them. Hey kept saying “Wait,” until finally they stopped at the head of the stairs, each of them holding one of his arms as if they meant to throw him out a window. Hey said, “You know how much time you have? You don’t even have an hour, and you’re all just playing.”
“Don’t worry, my dear fellow,” Nick said grandly. “We plan to spend the next hour huddled in prayer. In our other life we were Joan of Arc. This time around, they decided to split us up into three, to spread the wealth. Rita got the saintly parts.”
“No, you,” Rita said deferentially, leaning across Hey. “I am only an Onward Christian Soldier.”
“You’re all loonies,” Hey remarked, shaking loose the grip on either side. “Thank God you’ve got me to keep you respectable. Luncheon is by the pool today, so hurry up, before the birds get to it.”
“But wait. I thought we were all supposed to grab a burger on our way home,” Nick said. Hey was already halfway down the stairs.
“But you didn’t, did you?” And they both shook their heads. “You see?”
Continuing down with his head up, he threw back his one good shoulder and lilted along in triumph. Rita, suddenly startled to be out of the theater, decided in the naked light of day that somebody had to check everything out again—one more time. The ice was probably already melted, and who knew what didn’t get done to make way for lunch. Hey had surely produced the lunch to be perverse. She hurried after him, her mind in a spin as if by reflex. She left Nick stranded in the upstairs hall, still in his pajamas and wrapped in a Sulka robe. He was the one in the position to feel the change most sharply—from all of them safe in bed to scattered wide to the four winds. He stepped up to the window at the top of the stairs and saw across the terrace to the table set up by the pool. Set up, as near as he could make out, with the Sèvres and the Baccarat.
It reminded him of something.
He flew down the stairs and out. He had only a few minutes before they’d all be eating lunch, but even so, his speed was something special. Though his feet had healed, he still tended to walk in a gingerly way by habit, every step deliberate. But now he was running barefoot across the cold stones, and he felt a restless tingle in his feet that urged him on. It was as if he’d seen a light and thrown down a pair of crutches. He stripped to the skin at the pool’s lip. Before he fell forward in a shallow dive, he glanced at the lavish table and almost shook the memory into place—but not quite. He didn’t understand that he was acting out something. Either Sam or Hey could have told him the whole story—about the boys off Hollywood Boulevard that Varda brought up, year after year, for a swim and a naked lunch. But they hadn’t said a word. Sam had never had the time to. And Nick hadn’t yet sat down with Hey for the long talk they had coming to them, finally to detail the scene between Varda and Sam, when Sam was still a boy without a rotten fate. Well, it must have been a stray remark of Hey’s, that very day—after they laid him down in the living room, and Rita went to let in
the men with the stretcher. Hey filled Nick in on the sins of the past, but only a couple of sentences’ worth. There wasn’t room, if he said it at all, for more than the barest phrase about swimming and lunch. But it must have grazed Nick’s head as it zinged on by, because now he knew what he had to do to come back to life, though he didn’t know why.
He landed with a slap along his body that took his breath away. He did a dead float to the other side, giving himself over to the water’s chill. Nick had been up and about for a couple of weeks, so nobody thought of him still as an invalid, but he knew better. Since his hour in the mine, he’d limited himself to minimal gestures, slowed himself down to lull his broken nerves to sleep. It worked, but lately he felt so weak he could hardly climb stairs. It was as if he’d crossed a line that he couldn’t go back over. It didn’t show on the outside yet. He had gone to the gym three times a week for fifteen years, and he knew he could coast on looking good for months. But to him the muscles were soft as pudding, losing shape, and they didn’t connect. Now, as he winged one arm out of the water and started a slow crawl, up and down, he felt it all begin to go the other way.
It was as if he was in a race. He hadn’t swum lengths in a pool in years, but he curled and did a flip turn that shot him forward with the spring of a lifeguard. He no longer seemed to be fighting his way out of sleep, so he didn’t thrash. His stroke came back intact from his days at the beach in Venice. He was so startled, in fact, to be moving again on his own steam that he agreed as well to the darker side of going forward—to face up to the blindness of all their acts. The flight from that certainty was now his deepest secret. The only way he could hide from it was to act like a man who did nothing at all, because fate appeared to require a moving target. And he wasn’t even worthy of the word. What he’d always called fate was a lot of posing and self-deceit, compared with the thing itself. Sam at the end was a whole Greek tragedy, whirling the world to pieces. Thus Nick’s grief required of him an edge of stillness equal to the force of the chaos. But the grief was really camouflage, though he swore to love the boy forever and put the blame on life as murderous and meaningless. It wasn’t that at all. Not fate. Not tears. Everything was a layer of lies ringed around the guilt that seized him as soon as he knew he’d survived: It was all his fault that Sam was dead.
Back and forth, back and forth, he churned the water and clocked the fractions of a mile. He’d thought the guilt at having thrown Sam over would make him even sadder than the grief, because the guilt turned on him for its nourishment, the grief on Sam. Yet it hadn’t turned out that way. In the end, the guilt left him all alone, the only man in a fallen world, where the grief had merely leveled him instead, till he was brief and frail and doomed like everyone else. He didn’t feel precisely what he thought he ought to, and it threw him. Even his guilt had to have a rhythm and a plot. If he’d only known, for instance, that death was where it was leading for Sam, he would have acted differently. To begin with, he never would have tripped him up with the final push, which was after all what killed him, since it left him nursing cuts and bruises when Nick ran off and the final minute ticked away. Nick couldn’t forgive himself what he saw in the last glimpse from the ledge, the picture of Sam rolling in pain. Nick’s heart sank on the spot, even as he fled away, to see how easy it was to cut a man down.
But it wasn’t even that, entirely. It was all these contradictory things at once, and yet the guilt that crippled him up on the bottom line was the guilt at feeling nothing but relief. He didn’t really care, in one way. Sam’s death was on his hands, and all he was able to carry away in the end was the proof that it was over with at last. All except for the guilt.
If anyone could have thought it through to the end and still kept swimming, it was Nick. He loved to force the truth out—the cutting through the masks, the filtering down from level to level, then the face-off, when the truth suggested something further, toward a meaning he hadn’t even dreamed before. He got it all decided now, pulling himself through the pool, faster and faster. Decided it not in so many words. With Nick, the words didn’t tend to catch up until later. So what he saw when he took to the water was something else. It opened in his mind like a Wild West show.
There was a line of men who were all the spitting image of Sam, walking out of a string of Varda’s films like men released from a witch’s spell. They were still in costume—cowboy, playboy, prodigal son—but they looked as if they had no memory of the stories they’d been through. They came out clean. They bore no scars—not even a soldier with a splash of red seeping above his heart—and they had no plans. The only thing that connected them one to another was Varda. And now Nick. If they’d stared in each other’s faces, they probably wouldn’t have recognized the likeness. They couldn’t see that far. They were too wrapped up in who they were, and it was in their nature not to go further than looks. They were content to keep the costume while they let the story go.
So maybe Nick was through with Sam, but he could see, as the films had shadowed by him all morning, that he’d only scratched the surface of the type. Maybe he had to play it out like Varda did. He was stuck with the same kind of vision in his head, and he had to track it down. But had he learned nothing? Would he die in the arms of a man like Sam? He certainly wasn’t naive enough—and neither was Peter—to think he’d tricked his last trick. He supposed he’d be combing the streets again before long. Maybe the best he could hope for was not to pick up another man who had a prior claim on his house. Perhaps he’d had his brush with the deepest nightmare, and he would be safe from here on in from the violent acts of loving and dying. He could only go forward and see.
He finished what felt like the right amount of distance in the right amount of time. Then he hunched up against the side of the pool and flung himself backward, settling into a float. He rode low in the water, only his nose and mouth in the air, but he could see the dazzle of the sun, even with his eyes closed. One thing he had that Varda didn’t—Peter and Rita. They were a hell of a lot more reliable than Frances Dean, and altogether real. He knew, because of them, that the search for Sam was not for someone to love. It was more an urge to affirm a principle—call it beauty, Nick might have said, except he couldn’t say it out loud to Peter and Rita, whose taste was more refined, who’d brought it to earth themselves in Varda’s secret room. But for their part, the crowd of clear young men in Varda’s films had found in the immigrant juggler their ideal lens. He tricked them out of the mirror. They probably didn’t feel it consciously when they crossed his path, since they were busy, so long as their beauty lasted, taking everything they set their hearts on. But consciousness was not required. Varda made them into something they didn’t understand, and whatever it was they became didn’t last much longer than the boys themselves. Now they were doubtless all old men, and the films were as good as lost in a box in an attic. But the principle got proven. Thanks to Varda, it took a grip for a while on the real world. All it needed now was someone to be passed to.
And Nick, who came back to life to pick up where Varda left off, didn’t understand that the deal was reciprocal. When the memory of Sam sent him coursing through the pool, it sent up an echo that sounded just out of his reach. And the boy it called back was a harmless gypsy who played a peasant instrument and sang for his supper, who otherwise had no time, no kin, and no inclinations. Nobody but Hey believed that Sam had actually murdered Rusty Varda. Perhaps they went too far for an old man, but it may have been a lucky way to go, the irony more to Varda’s credit than Death’s. Sam wasn’t dangerous until he came up short against the disappearance of the one dream he’d ever gone after. Nick had decided when he broke it off between them that he was the cowboy and not Sam. A month ago, they had nothing left but the distances between them. Sam seemed never to have had any substance beyond Nick’s fix for turning out heroes with the golden look of movie stars. But something still stood them face to face, like men in a duel with pistols stepping off paces at the crack of dawn. The cowboy in Nick wa
s a man like Sam.
And though he loved Peter better than himself, though Rita was the only friend to surface in his whole adult life, there was still a quarter of his heart where he turned his body over to anyone who wanted him enough. Then he could be the one to remain unmoved while someone loved him. He could watch the thousand twists of the hungering heart, just as Sam had. In the region of dreams that had no end, Nick was Sam and Varda both at once, because he shared the drive that linked them—they never ceased to dig for treasure.
He didn’t care now if he never ate lunch, but it was time. A voice from the house calling his name broke through to him. He shook his head free of the water, shook it out of his ears, and suddenly heard in the tone of Peter’s shout that more than lunch was yet to be announced. He blinked as he tried to get a good focus on the upstairs window. Nothing stood still, he thought. If he was so ready to go ahead, it seemed he had better go now, because the train was pulling out. He suppressed a last impulse to dive to the bottom and hide forever among the reeds and dim-eyed fishes. He sprang from the pool like a gymnast, landed neatly on his feet, and glittered in the sun. He looked up, ready for anything.
“Are you listening, Nick? I’ve been promoted. I’m the king of all the Russias.” He leaned precariously out of the window, waving his arms as if there were music to back him up. He seemed to want to announce it to the whole of LA, or at least Bel-Air. “Peter Kirkov is now seventh in line to wear the double eagle crown. From the Caucasus to the Sea of Japan,” he said, cradling in his arms the desert sprawl from Santa Monica to Long Beach, “the empire is trembling.”
“Why? Have the people counterrevolted?” It was a very old joke between them, the matter of Peter’s succession. Every time a royal exile died, a chair was removed from the circle, and Peter was a little more alone in the swagged and gilded ballroom. Nick and Peter chose to find it funny. “Did somebody finally prove she’s the lost Grand Duchess?”
