The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  “Not this time,” he said, cocking his head to the side like he did when he painted. “My grandfather’s gone.”

  “Died?”

  “‘Gone’ is how they like to put it. That was the lawyer in Brooklyn calling. There wasn’t anything left to leave, of course,” he said with a shrug. He was, as he said already, a man without expectations. After all, he’d pawned the icons and caviar spoons himself. “But at the end he directed that all the hereditary titles come to me. I can’t tell you what they are, they’re all in Russian, but I swear it goes on for a couple of paragraphs.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I guess so. Are you?”

  Of course, Nick thought. Did Peter expect him to go into black for a man he’d never met, just because he was a little oversensitive? He looked up fiercely, to prove he wasn’t indiscriminate. But he noticed Peter was gazing over his head, and when he turned, he discovered they were back to being three again. Rita was standing at one of her windows, arms folded on the high sill, looking as if she’d forgotten the way to the room behind the mirror. She’d thrown the casement wide and broken the pattern.

  “I don’t know,” she said carefully. “But I wish it hadn’t had to be today.” And Nick remembered now that the old man was more to her than Peter. She was his friend. Peter let it go when he left New York, disowning Alexander Kirkov without a second thought. It was something of a tradition in his family. “I was going to write him a letter about you. Tell him how you’ve done.”

  “Is that how it’s all supposed to end up?” Peter asked in mild surprise. “You let him know I grew up to be King Midas, and he hustles his old bones off to the airport and comes out here to kiss and make up.”

  She nodded and picked up the thread. “And he moves into Frances Dean’s room,” she said, “and every day at sunset you walk with him arm in arm around the garden. He talks, like always, about the past. You talk about being the last prince.”

  “I see,” he said. “Very pretty.”They talked across the courtyard, Nick thought as he watched them, one and then the other, like courtly characters in a Renaissance play. It was partly the pitch of their voices, raised so they could be heard. “He was lucky to have you as long as he did. You’re too good, you know—though I suppose you’d say you got back as much as you gave.”

  “Didn’t you ever guess?” she asked. “I’m the lost Grand Duchess, masquerading as a shopgirl.” The grief was beginning to go, for her as well. Too much life and death had intervened between the time she left New York and now. In some way, everyone there was already gone. Besides, she had no time—something needed doing right away. Like a magician with one more dove in his coat pocket, she had a secret in reserve for this occasion, too.

  “It never would have worked,” Nick said, not the least put out to follow them into the past. They crossed his borders, and he crossed theirs. “That room is already spoken for. It has an indefinite lease.”

  “I’ll be right out,” she said, almost as if she hadn’t heard him. “I have to get something in Varda’s desk.” She pulled the window shut and went along the row, turning locks. When she disappeared, Nick looked up at Peter.

  “I bet she went to get the other earring. Though I kind of like the look of one, don’t you? On her it’s touching.”

  “She’s planning to leave, you know.”

  “What for?” Nick asked. “To go where?”

  “Get her own place.”

  “Oh. Is that what she should do, do you think?” He bent over and retrieved his robe, but he let the pajamas lie, since he wasn’t a bed case anymore. Peter didn’t answer right away, and the window was empty when Nick looked back. Was the question so hard that it scared him off? Well, Nick was just as glad to leave it hanging. He put on the robe and sat down at the table, taking the seat that faced the city head-on. Varda’s seat, as it happened. He buttered his roll and peeked in all the covered dishes. He wouldn’t stand in Rita’s way for the world, he thought. She knew she could have a lover in her room, so it wasn’t that. She could have a husband and twins if she wanted. Perhaps, he decided, she wanted a separate entrance, all to herself. And she ought to have a little kitchen, to make a cup of coffee in. He reached across for Peter’s roll, then Rita’s, and kept on buttering, and his mind began to tinker with a model of the house. He didn’t for a minute consider the obvious, that she might deliberately prefer a more private place than Crook House. She couldn’t. They’d fought for this ground, and they owned it now in a way that none of his clients ever would. He’d sold in his time houses as far as the eye could see, and he discovered that nobody knew how to stake a claim.

  “It’s probably very hard to live with lovers,” Peter said, pulling out the chair that faced west, toward the ocean. “If she really means to make it alone, get by without a man, she thinks she ought to go the whole route and be all alone. I’m guessing. Are you planning to eat all three of those?”

  “I’m saving time,” he said, handing over a roll to Peter, dropping the other at Rita’s plate. “I don’t think she has a master plan anymore. Which is good. She’ll know what she wants soon enough. We won’t be here forever, you know, but here we are at last, and we have to see what we can make of it.” Did Peter understand he was talking about the house? Was he?You can’t live long, he’d always thought, in a place you only pay money for. The people who tried to do so tried to buy time. “Does she think we want to be left alone?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Serve the soup,” Nick said, pushing the ladle in Peter’s direction and lifting the cover off the tureen. “We don’t, do we?”

  “Nobody does. But listen, my darling—we can’t tie her down.”

  “But I promise I won’t. I only mean she shouldn’t leave for the sake of good manners. We’re over that. Should you fly back for the funeral?”

  “I can’t. It’s tomorrow morning,” he said, holding out the corkscrew in his left while he ladled with his right. Nick started to work on the bottle. “There’s no reason to, really. I wouldn’t know anyone, anyway.”

  “He didn’t want you to,” Rita corrected as she came up between them. She laid a little package next to his plate, about the right size for a watch. A little speech went with it. But again, though she’d had her remarks prepared for months, they came back to her quaintly now, as if lifted from the vanished code of an ancient civilization. New York was nearer by far, it seemed right now, to the glacial palaces of St. Petersburg than Crook House was to New York. “It’s like this,” she said, looking out for a way to put it casually. “The two of you were deadlocked. He knew that you took a hard line with him, just like he did with you. I think he was secretly glad of it. So he didn’t want you to have to walk behind his coffin, in case it would force you to be a hypocrite.” And though it was true, she wondered what happened to the graver things she’d put away for this very ceremony—about the treaties that went with love and the tenacity of the past. “He was pretty sure you’d get to like him some day,” she said, making up this part, trying to compensate for being matter-of-fact. “But probably not till you’re an old man.”

  “What’s in this?”

  “I didn’t ask,” she said, passing around the table to her side, tapping Nick lightly on either shoulder as she went by. “I only promised to deliver the goods when he died. All I know is, it rattles if you shake it. Like marbles, I thought at first. But then they’re not exactly round, either. If I had to guess, I’d say it was hard candy.”

  She drew her chair from under the table and let out a little gasp. On the seat was still another box, twin to both the juggler’s gear and the crate of films. But the difference was apparent right away. Whereas Peter’s box and Nick’s were plain and wooden and practical, meant for the attic, Rita’s was richly bound in a faded blue leather, tooled by a Persian who couldn’t let go one bare inch. The corners, the lock, and handle were heavy silver. It was clearly the Frances Dean equivalent of the kit a body had to leave behind. And it seemed intended for the fam
ily jewels of a robber baron, an ancient safe-deposit box. Rita put out her hands and felt along the leather with her palms. It was warm from the heat of the sun, and it smelled of old books that didn’t tell lies.

  “Oh, Christ,” Peter said, “will you open that after we eat? There’s altogether too much doling out of packages in this house.”

  “You’re just saying that,” Nick put in, “because you don’t know how to juggle. Open it, Rita. See what it is.”

  She pressed a silver button, and the front opened up like double doors. When she swung them all the way back, they could see it was fitted out with dozens of little drawers. The facing on these was leather as well, but bright Moroccan red, and the tooling in gold was sharp and flawless, as if it had been finished only this morning. Each drawer sported a little ivory knob. Now the smell was deep like brandy. Rita crouched, then knelt on the terrace floor, so as to be at eye level. She pulled out a drawer at random and brought it close.

  “What is it?”

  “Shells,” she said, but almost disappointedly. They were gray and cream and spotted brown, as plain as clams. Not in a class by themselves. They ought to be shot with orange and come from a gravelly cliff-locked beach in Cuba. But there was a trick to get through to the jewels, surely, so Rita pressed on. She slid the shells back in and pulled the next drawer just below. When she’d glanced inside, she handed it up to the table. Nick took it out of her hand.

  “Feathers,” he said.

  Gulls and sparrows, a jay and an owl. And the next was ordinary stones—too small for weighting paper, too large to use as counters in a game. Then stamps and penny postcards. Then a whole drawer full of buffalo nickels, as heavy as an ingot. They were doing it now in a bucket brigade. Nick took a look, then held the drawers out in front of Peter, who stirred the soup and waited for it to be over. As Nick would finish with one and hand it down to Rita, she gave him a fresh one. Rose petals, sherry brown and thin as insects’ wings. Then ticket stubs. Price tags. Chestnuts and acorns. By the time they’d gone through eight or ten, the look on all their faces was the same.

  “I give up,” Nick said, picking over a drawer full of champagne corks.

  “If you ask me,” Peter said, “she mixed it all together and shot it up. There’s probably one drawer full to the brim with syringes.”

  “But don’t you see?” Rita said wistfully—and they could hear the reproach in her voice, though they didn’t know it was all directed at herself and not at them. She should have guessed that here at last the jewels were over. “It’s not meant to connect,” she said. And she put back all the drawers that were out and kept the rest for later. The disappointment hadn’t got its hooks into her. The drifter’s music had. She found when she cleared her head of the pearls and the dinner rings that she was every bit as tense and eager. More so, since these odds and ends from country walks and old pocketbooks would not distract her with their own worth. “It’s only little things she picked up here and there.”

  “He used to call them her collections,” Hey explained as he swept up to the table, a tray perched at his good shoulder. “I see you’re getting nowhere fast with lunch.”

  “Just watch us, Hey,” she said. “We’re all half-starved.”The tone of self-reproach had fled as quickly as it came. She was exuberant now, shutting up the front of the case and lifting it down next to her chair. Then she sat and put a spoon to the soup. “It’s really nothing more than a kind of bird’s nest. Twigs and hair and bits of string.”

  “If you cleaned it all out,” Peter said, “you could use it as a little secretary. Or a medicine chest or a spice box. But of course you won’t.”

  “Why not?” Nick asked.

  “Because she’d rather look through it for Frances Dean. Isn’t that right?” he prodded her, but she wasn’t about to take the bait. She seemed to have nothing more on her mind than cream of sorrel soup. “I don’t honestly think you’d know what to do with her if you found her, but you’re the sleuth. A detective always does the legwork for its own sake, doesn’t he?—unlike a decorator, for instance.”

  “Frances Dean is dead,” Nick said.

  “So is Rusty Varda, but that doesn’t seem to prevent us living out his life. And Rita wants to get to a very particular Frances Dean. Fresh out of Indiana. Eating her first avocado and taking a trolley out to the beach. Before she went on the needle. Aren’t I right?”

  “It’s all some kind of an underworld, you know.” She wasn’t contradicting Peter’s rough analysis. It was because she agreed that she had other things to add. “Wherever you look in all of this, it’s closets and boxes and caves. Like a world behind a door that no one opens, because it’s in a room that looks like all the world there is. I didn’t expect,” she said, “that I’d end up with something to take away with me.”

  “Are you going somewhere?” Hey asked suspiciously.

  “Be quiet, Hey,” said Peter. “Rita’s got her own life to live. We don’t own her.”

  “Don’t worry,” Nick said. “She’ll still come and visit us.”

  She took a sharp breath, intending to go on with it, but her mouth dropped open and then puckered up in a little o. She held the air in as if it were a gasp, because she saw two steps ahead to her own conclusion. Peter and Nick sat straight in their chairs and very still, full spoons frozen in midair. Hey saw his chance. The arm in the sling loomed across the table, and he snatched up all three soups before they knew what hit them. He set down a big bowl of salad in the center. They didn’t move a muscle, even when he plucked the spoons one by one out of their hands. By the time he was done, Rita was ready to speak again.

  “What I’ve been afraid of all this month—you see, I thought everything had stopped. Didn’t you? All this winding down and settling of accounts,” she said, abruptly going into another pause. But they didn’t appear to mind the broken train of thought. She picked an artichoke heart from the salad, and in a moment it was as if she’d started a fashion. Nick went in after the mushrooms, and Peter picked off the croutons. Not able to bear it, Hey hurried off. “Ever since that day,” she said at last, “I could tell the ground rules wouldn’t be in force anymore. No more secrets. From now on, the rooms I was in would have to have windows and hundred-watt bulbs. There are only so many things that are lost. I thought they’d all been found. And then today—,” but she let it trail off before the remark was half begun. After all, they’d been through today as much as she had.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Nick said, nodding slowly, “that it was over.”

  Peter insisted, “But it is.”

  “It is, if you want,” Rita was quick to agree, “but only because the stars of it are gone. The story still belongs to us.”

  “But you’re not Frances Dean,” he said fiercely, “no matter how much the idea appeals to you.”

  “Of course not,” she scoffed. He was on the wrong track, but she was happy to risk the rest of what she’d figured out. It had only just dawned on her as well, so it didn’t count as wisdom won at high cost. Like everything else today, it was free for the taking. “Nobody’s anybody, as far as that goes. You think I mean like Hey and Linda. But don’t you see, most people spend their whole lives trying to find a story that’s all theirs—and they never get it. They go to the movies week after week. They read all the shit in the paperback racks. But nothing takes.” Just now, she saw, Peter was the key to it. They needed a resident skeptic terribly, and she didn’t want to drive him off by seeming wacky. She’d live alone and like it if she had to, but not here. If they stuck with Crook House, they stuck together.

  “Most of the regular stories,” she went on, “are simply unavailable. To people like us. Romeo and Juliet is not about my first time.”

  “Or Sleeping Beauty, either,” Nick suggested. Not by way of insulting Rita, though. He finally understood the degree to which he and Rita had kept the same door unlocked—willing to leave some part of themselves unattached, till the right thing came along to tell them just h
ow their sort ended up. Cowboys were only the barest approximation. So were Rita’s Gothic girls in country houses, calling out the family curse. This whole affair, he thought, amounted to a drama he’d made a false start on a hundred times, whenever he fell into bed with a man he’d never met before. Nothing in his life had played itself all the way out before.

  “I see what you mean,” Peter said, rocking back on the legs of his chair, the little box in the palm of one hand. He tapped it with a finger and got it to make a clicking sound like billiard balls. “We’re aliens and spooks, and the stories they tell around the fire don’t include us. Or at least not you two. I still have Rasputin and Catherine the Great and all of that in my back pocket. But anyway, I’ll give you the fact that now you’ve got a story of your own. What do you do with it? Start buying art on the black market? Maybe you ought to become a junkie, Rita.”

  “Or a hustler?” Nick added sarcastically, to let him know they could tell their own jokes, thank you.

  “I just want to live with it a little while,” she said, dropping her napkin across her plate to signal lunch was done. Nick did the same. Then Peter. “At least until the aftershocks are over. It’s like Crook House has these scraps of extra footage, all disconnected, all out of order. We’re the only ones who can put them together.”

  “How?” Peter asked, and not quite so suspiciously. A moment ago he would have asked why. Now he could see how richly the other two shared it, and it made him happy. And not jealous, which he’d had a turn at when Nick and Rita went too far for a week. It was the three of them she was talking about. The turmoil that blew up over Varda, Sam, and Frances Dean had paralleled the subtler lines developing between them, one with another, almost like blood ties. They’d finished up distributed into interlocking couples—Peter and Rita, Rita and Nick, Nick and Peter.