Belinda

by Anne Rice

  Who had my friends been in the past? Trish, .Jill, Blair Sackwell, my dad. That’s who. Not kids.

  Things stayed superficial, if not downright artificial. Nothing really worked.

  Well, of course, Marty showed up at the Chateau Marmont.

  If he hadn’t, I think my faith in life would have been crushed. I mean, not even one visit to see what had happened to me? And I don’t know what I wanted then except maybe to see him and tell him that I would not sleep with him while he was sleeping with Mom. But I tell you, I was not prepared for the scene that Marty threw.

  This was Marty’s first big Italian opera number on me.

  It was the middle of the night when he came to the door of the bungalow. And he was in some state when he came in.

  First off, he wanted to know what kind of family did I have? Didn’t they care that I was living down here on Sunset in a place like the Chateau with absolutely no supervision? That word again. I laughed.

  “Marty, don’t give me this shit,” I said. “Don’t wake me up to tell me my family doesn’t give a fucking damn what I do. I’ve known that since I was two years old.”

  What about school? he demanded. Didn’t anybody in the whole family care that I wasn’t going to school?

  “You dare suggest such a thing and I will kill you, Marty,” I said. “Now get out of my room and leave me alone.”

  Then he got very embarrassed and upset, and he was almost crying when he said that Bonnie was asking for me. Bonnie didn’t understand why I was never there.

  “You tell me that,” I said. I was crying.

  And without another word spoken we were in each other’s arms. I said no, of course, I said no over and over, but I didn’t mean it and Marry knew it. And we were in bed together and it was iust as it had always been. I suppose in some bittersweet way it was better, and then Marty was lying there holding me and trying to tell me what a hell this had all been for him.

  “You know, sweetheart, it makes me think of the old saying, ‘Be careful what you ask for, ‘cause you might get it.’ Well, I did. I asked for Bonnie, I asked for a number-one show. And I’ve got both of them, sweetheart, and I’ve never been so miserable in my entire life.”

  I didn’t answer him. I was crying into the pillow. I was thinking mad things, like what if we got married, ran away to Tijuana and did it and then came back and told them, what would happen then? But I knew such a thing would never never happen, and I felt this rage inside me, just burning up all the words I might have said.

  Marty went on talking. Marty went on saying things, until I realized what was going on. He was telling me he needed me, that he couldn’t do it without me, that he couldn’t get through the season the way things were. “You’ve got to come back, Belinda, you’ve got to. You’ve got to think of this thing in a different light.”

  “Are you putting me on? You think I’d live there in the house with you and Mother and her not knowing that you were sleeping with me, too?”

  “Belinda, a woman like your mother doesn’t want to know things,” he said. “Honest to God, she does not. She wants to be taken care of, lied to. She wants to be used and use everybody else at the same time. Belinda, I don’t really think you know your mother, not the way I do. Belinda, don’t do this to me, I’m begging you.”

  “Don’t do this to you!”

  If you think you ever saw me throw a fit, you should have seen me then. I got up out of the bed and I started hitting him and screaming at him and telling him to get out of there and go back to her. “Do this to you!” I kept screaming. And then he grabbed me and he shook me and he sounded like a madman.

  “Belinda,” he said, “goddamn it, I’m only human, that’s all I am.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.

  He sat on the side of the bed with his elbows on his knees. He said that the pressure was building and building and if he blew, Mom would blow, too.

  “Look, honey, we’re all in this together, don’t you understand? She’s banking it hand over fist, and that’s your money, and we’re riding this wave. Just please don’t turn against me now, honey, please.”

  I just shook my head. Banking it hand over fist. What could I say? “Come back to the house,” he said, taking my hand. “Stick this out with me, Belinda. I am telling you, honey, the time I have with you is all I’ve really got left.”

  “You really think I would do that, Marty?” I asked.

  And then he just broke down. He cried and cried, and I was crying and then it was time, he had to go back. If he wasn’t there when she opened her eyes at five a.m. all hell would break loose.

  He got dressed, and then he said, “I know what you think of me. I know what I think of myself. But Jesus, I don’t know what to do. All I know is, if you don’t come back, I can’t fake this much longer, I’m telling you the truth.”

  “So it’s my job to hold it all together, is that what you’re saying? Marty, how many times do you think I have held it together for her? How many times do you think I’ve just swallowed it all and did what had to be done to make it OK for Mom?”

  “But it’s all of us, honey, it’s you and me and her. Don’t you see? Listen, those Texas chicks, they’re leaving soon, I know they are. And there’ll be nobody in that house but all those creatures, the nurse and the masseuse and that crazy hairdresser—and her and me. I tell you, I’m going to take that gun out of her dresser drawer and blow my brains out or something. I’m going out of my head.”

  I didn’t have any more to say. I expected him to go then. He was already late. And I was thinking about calling G.G., asking if it would be all right with Ollie Boon if I stayed with him and G.G., but I knew I didn’t have the courage to do that just yet.

  Then I realized Marty wasn’t leaving. He was just standing by the door. “Honey, she and I ... we’re getting married,” he said. “What?”

  “Big outdoor wedding by the pool at the house. The publicity’s going out today.”

  I did not say one word.

  Then Marty made a speech. In a very quiet manner unlike himself he made a speech.

  ‘q love you, Belinda,” he said. “I love you like I never loved anybody before now. Maybe you are the pretty girl I never had in high school. Maybe you are the fancy rich kid I could never touch in New York. I only know I love you, and I have never been with anybody outside my own family back in New York that I loved and trusted so much. But life’s played a filthy trick on both of us, Belinda. Because the lady has announced that she wants to get married. For the first time in her whole fucking life she wants to get married. And what the lady wants, the lady gets.”

  Then the door closed behind him. He was gone.

  I think I was still lying there alone and in a state of shock, when Trish came. If she knew Marty had been there, she never said so to me. She told me the wedding was supposed to be Saturday, that Mom wanted to do it right away and Uncle Daryl had already left Dallas and would be at the house sometime this afternoon.

  “I think you should go back to Europe,” she said. “I think you should go to school.”

  “I don’t want to go to Europe, I said. “And I don’t want to go to school.”

  She nodded and then she said I had to come and get my dress for the wedding and it was best Uncle Daryl didn’t know I’d been at the Chateau Marmont.

  Well, I got through the wedding and the week before it. I smiled at everybody. I did my part. Uncle Daryl was much too busy to even ask what I’d been doing, and so was everybody else. But when I did find myself talking to people now and then in the living room or at the reception itself, I said I would be going to UCLA soon, that I thought I could pass the examinations and start early. It ought to be fun.

  The wedding itself was the big ticket in Beverly Hills. The tabloids offered a flat $30,000 for any picture taken inside the grounds. And the p0lice had a hell of a time keeping people from blocking the streets. Mom was clearly in love with Marty. I had not seen her this way since
the days of Leonardo Gallo. She was not just leaning on Marty or clinging to him, she was focused on Marty completely. And they both looked wonderful that afternoon.

  But I will tell you something, the wedding itself was a put-up job. The minister was an overgrown flower child from the sixties, you know, one of those long-haired fifty-year-olds who lives in Big Sur or someplace and got his minister credentials in the mail, and the whole ceremony was sort of dingy with shared wine cups and wreaths of flowers on everybody’s heads and all that. I mean, in the woods it might have been OK. But with this crowd, whose vocabulary goes like ‘We’re talking major package’ and ‘What about the bottom line’ roaming around in the smog and the orange trees, it was a scream. And Uncle Daryl took me aside right after and told me not to worry about the money part of it, Marty had signed an airtight premarital agreement, and this thing was, well, strictly for Mother to be happy, it wasn’t scarcely legal at all. “She’s just lost her head over this New York Italian guy, that’s the truth of it,” he told me. “But don’t you worry. He’ll be good to her, I’ll see to that.”

  I was dying. When I went inside to be alone for a little while, I found Trish and Jill in my bedroom, just sort of hiding from everybody, and Trish told me that she and Jill were going back to Dallas at the end of the week.

  “She doesn’t have any more use for us,” Jill told me. “We’re tripping on our own feet around here.”

  “Time we did something on our own, too,” Trish said. She went on to explain that Daryl was willing to help them get started with a boutique in Dallas. In fact, he was giving them plenty. And Mom was going to endorse the store, too.

  I felt crushed that they were leaving. Saint Esprit had been over for a long time now, but when they left, it would all be really gone.

  I remembered what Marty had said about being alone in this house without them. But I wasn’t staying here. I couldn’t. It was just out of the question. Only I couldn’t think about it right now with the music pouring in from the patio and people moving through all the rooms, like zombies, making no sound on the wall-to-wall carpet. I had to get away somehow.

  “Belinda, come with us to Dallas,” Trish said.

  “Bonnie would never let her go,” Jill said.

  “Oh, yes she would. She’s happy with her new husband. Honey, come stay in Dallas awhile with us.”

  I knew I couldn’t do that. What would I do fifteen hundred miles from the Coast? Go to shopping malls and video arcades or take some nice class in English poets at SMU?

  The whole afternoon had been a nightmare, and yet the worst was yet to come.

  After Trish and Jill went back out into the crowd, I decided to change and get out.

  Then Marty came and closed the door. The thing was over, he told me, everybody was leaving. And he just fell into my arms.

  “Hold me, Belinda, hold me, honey,” he said. And for a moment that was just what I did.

  “It’s your wedding night, Marty,” I said. “I can’t stand this, I just can’t stand it.” But all the time I was feeling his arms around me and his chest against me and I was holding him as tight as he was holding me.

  “Honey, please, just give me this moment,” he said. And then it started again, him kissing me—and I just left in my long dress and all, and caught a ride with one of the limos going out the gate.

  On the way to the Chateau I asked this nice handsome man next to me, one of Marty’s staff, to run into a liquor store and get a bottle of Scotch for me. When I got back to the bungalow, I drank the whole thing.

  I slept for twelve hours straight and was sick for twenty-four after that. The phone woke me up on Wednesday. It was Trish, saying Uncle Daryl kept asking where I was.

  “Just get down here till .he leaves,” she told me. “Then you can go back up there on the hill.”

  I got to the house around four o’clock. And nobody was around. Nobody except M6ther, who was just telling her exercise coach and masseuse that they could go for the rest of the day. She had been swimming and she looked all tan and natural with her hair loose. She had on a simple white dress. Suddenly these people were gone, and we were alone in the room.

  It was so strange. I don’t think Mom and I had been alone like this in ages and ages. She looked amazingly clear-eyed and rested, and her hair was very pretty because it had not been done.

  “Hi, darlin’. Where you been?” she asked. Drugged-out voice, OK, very level, but not slurred.

  “I don’t know, no place,” I said. I shrugged. I think I started to move away when I realized that she was really staring at me. Now for Mom this is not a usual thing. Mom usually has her head down. She is usually looking away when you talk to her. She is not ever very direct. But she was looking right at me, and then she said to me in a very steady voice; “Darlin’, he was too old for you.”

  For a second the words were just there and I didn’t know what they meant. Then I really heard them and I realized we were still looking at each other, and then she did something with her eyes that I have seen her do to other people a thousand times. She looked me up and down slowly, and then she said in the same flat drugged voice: “You’re a big girl, aren’t you? But you’re not that big.”

  I was numb. Something was happening between me and Mom in these few seconds that had never happened before. I went down the hall and into my room. I closed the door and I stood there against it, and my heart was pounding so loud I could hear it in my ears. She knew, she knew all along, I was thinking, she knew.

  But what did she really know? Had she thought it was a crush, a little teenage thing, that Marty had never reciprocated? Or did she really understand what had gone down?

  I was shaking when I came in for dinner. But she never once looked me in the eye. She was really drugged by that time, murmuring and looking at her plate and saying she was sleepy, and obviously she could not follow the conversation at the table at all.

  We all kissed Daryl good-bye and then I told them I was going, too.

  I saw the darkest look of bitterness on Marty’s face. But he just smiled and he said: “OK, honey, good-bye.”

  I should have known it was too easy. Two hours later, when I was crying in my room at the Chateau, he arrived. He was crying and I was crying, real Marty-style Italian opera, and we did not even talk about it. We just made love. I felt like something was broken in me by that little encounter with Mom. It killed me. It killed me inside.

  That wasn’t the woman I had looked at in the Carlton and thought, Ah, well, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t know at all.

  Something else had come out and, to tell you the truth, I had seen it come out at other moments, much less important moments over the years.

  After a long time I told Marty about it, what she had said, how she had looked.

  “No, honey, she doesn’t know,” he said. “She may think it was kissyface and crushes, but she doesn’t know. She wouldn’t want you to come back to the house if she did.”

  “Does she want that, Marty?”

  He nodded. He was getting up to get dressed. He had told Mom’s nurse that he was going out to an all-night drugstore. It was a cinch Mom would wake up sooner or later and ask for him.

  “She keeps asking, ‘Where’s Belinda?’ She just doesn’t seem to understand why you’re not at her right hand.”

  I didn’t argue with him, but I had a deep dark suspicion that Mom did know, and still she wanted me to come back, because she thought sure she’d taken Marty away from me. I mean, she was Bonnie, wasn’t she? And what had she said, “You’re a big girl, but you’re not that big”? Yeah, she thought she could have both of us, all right; she’d just rearranged things a little, hadn’t she? Better to suit herself. Another one of those instances of “Everything’s OK now, Belinda, cause I feel fine.”

  And as of this day I think I read the situation right.

  After Marty left, I got really drunk. I’d taken several bottles with me back to the Chateau from the house, and I drank every
drop over the next few days, just lying alone in that room, and crying over Marty and wondering how I could make this misery end.

  I thought of Susan. I thought of G.G. But then I thought of Marty. And I didn’t have the strength to go to G.G. And the thought of telling anyone the whole story, the thought of ever confiding to anyone what had happened was an agony. I didn’t want G.G. to ever ask.

  I felt terrible and alone and I felt like a fool. I felt like Mom was right, I should never have fallen for Marty, Marty belonged to Mom. But half the time it was the booze thinking and I just drifted in and out of sleep like I’d seen Mom do on Saint Esprit for years and years.

  The only thing that broke the nightmare of those few days was a call from Blair Sackwell one afternoon in which he told me furiously how Mom had dumped him and Marty Moreschi had cut him off.

  “I was willing to put three inches of white mink stole on every one of those Bonnie dolls! My label! And the son of a bitch told me to back off. They didn’t invite me to the wedding, you realize that!”

  “Oh, get off my case with it, Blair, goddamn it!” I shouted.

  “Oooh, like mother like daughter!” he said.

  I hung up. And then I was so sorry. I sat up and started calling around trying to find him. I called the Bev Wilsh and the Beverly Hills. No Blair. And Blair was my friend, my really true friend.

  But an hour later I got a delivery, two dozen white roses in a vase with a note saying, “Sorry, darling, please forgive me, love you always, Blair.”

  When Jill called the next day to say she and Trish were leaving, I had a hell of a time even talking I was so drunk. But I slept it off, got through being sick hung over, and took a cab to the house for the last dinner with them.

  Mom was dopey but all right. Our eyes never met. She said how she was going to miss Trish and Jill, but they’d be coming out for visits all the time. Most of the talk was about the Bonnie dolls and the Saint Esprit perfume campaign and the big fight with Blair Sackwell because Marty didn’t think she should do anything but “Champagne Flight” products right now.

  I tried to put in a word for Blair. I mean, Midnight Mink was Midnight Mink, for God’s sakes, and Blair was our old friend.