Belinda (18 page)

"So you're going to go through it all, too? What is that, loyalty or something to this drunk whoever it was? Is this person dead that he or she deserves that kind of loyalty?"

Crying. Saying nothing. Foxed.

"Stop it!" I said. "Stop all of it, the Scotch, the wine with dinner, the goddamned beers you think I don't see you putting down."

ALL RIGHT GODDAMN IT! THIS WAS THE BARRICADES. IS THAT WHAT I WANTED? Was I telling her to get out of my house, was I?

"No, and you won't leave either, because you love me and you know I love you and you will stop, I know you will. You will stop the drinking now!"

"You think you can just order me to stop!"

Out the front door. Off towards the ocean. Or to the highway to hitchhike to GONE FOREVER?

I threw on the overhead light and looked at Holy Communion. If this isn't the breakthrough of my career, then I don't have one. Everything I know about reality and illusion is there.

But what the hell damn difference does this make? Never felt so much like getting drunk myself.

Eight o'clock, nine o'clock, she's gone forever. I'm leaving notes for nobody when I walk on the beach. Not a single figure approaching in the sugar white sand is Belinda.

Ten thirty. The loft without her, lying there on the giant floppy mattresses and comforters.

Front door opens down there.

Then she is at the top of the ladder, holding onto the sides, face too dark to see.

"I'm glad you're home. I was worried."

Smell of Calandre, cold fresh air. Her cheek would smell like the ocean wind if she came over and kissed me.

She sat near the top of the ladder, profile against the little window. Light from the skylight milky and chilling. I can see the red of the cashmere scarf. One of her black leather kid gloves as she pulls on the end of the scarf.

"I finished the Holy Communion canvas today."

Silence.

"You have to understand that nobody ever paid that much attention to what I did," she said. Silence.

"I'm not used to taking orders."

Silence.

"To tell you the honest fucking truth, nobody ever cared, I mean, they just figured I could handle whatever I was doing, you know, they just didn't give a fucking damn." Silence.

"I mean, I had teachers and all the clothes I could want and nobody bugged me. When I had my first affair, well, they took me to Paris to get me on the pill, you know, just nothing to it, like don't get pregnant and all. Nobody-"

Silence. Hair white wisps in the moonlight.

"And it's not like you're saying I can't handle it, because I can! I can handle it perfectly. I always handle it. You're just saying it would make you feel better if I didn't drink so much and then you wouldn't feel so guilty."

Silence.

"That is what you're saying, isn't it?"

"I'll settle for that."

Soft crush of her against me suddenly, smell of cold salt wind, her luscious mouth, just like I knew it would be.

Eight A.M. the next morning.

Slices of apple, orange, cantaloupe on a china plate. Scrambled eggs, a bit of cheese.

"This must be an hallucination. Are you actually eating real food for breakfast? Where's the Coke and potato chips?"

"Honest to God, Jeremy. Get off my case. I mean, nobody can live on Coke and potato chips. "Don't say anything.

"And there's something else I want to talk to you about, Jeremy."

"Yes?"

"How about letting me buy you a couple of tweed jackets that actually fit?"

AN innocent little remark like that in a place like Carmel can turn into a shopping marathon. Which it did.

As soon as we came back into the San Francisco house, I had another picture. Next step from Holy Communion. I knew it when I went into the living room and looked at the dolls. Belinda with Dolls.

The mailbox was full of crap from Dan, New York, Hollywood. I dumped it on the desk unopened, unplugged the answering machine, turned down the bell on all the phones, and went back to work.

"Take off your clothes, will you?" I said to Belinda. We'd do it right here in the living room on the Queen Anne sofa, the one that had been in all the Angelica books. She laughed.

"Another one of these magnificent pictures never to be seen by anybody!" she said, as she stripped off her jeans and sweater.

"Bra, panties, all off, please," I said snapping my fingers.

That brought another little riff of laughter. She pitched all the clothes into the hallway, then pulled the barrette out of her hair.

"Yes, perfect," I said, adjusting the lights and the tripod. "Just sit in the middle of the couch and I'll pile the dolls around you." She stretched out her arms to receive them. "Do they have names?" she asked.

"Mary Jane and Mary Jane and Mary Jane," I said. I told her which were French, German. This was the priceless Bru, and this smiling child, what they had called the character baby. That made her smile, too.

She was playing with their matted wigs, their faded little dresses. She loved the big ones, the girls with their long locks. Such serious expressions they had, dark painted eyebrows. Stockings and shoes were missing here and there. She'd have to fix them up. Get them new hair ribbons.

Actually they were just fine without their shoes and stockings, most of them, rather bashed and ancient-looking in wilted tulle, but I didn't tell her.

I watched her delicate fingers struggle with the tiny buttons.

Yes, this was what I wanted.

I started snapping. She looked up startled. Got it. Now the big blue-eyed long-hair Bru doll pressed to her naked breasts, both of them staring at me, yes. She gathered them all onto her lap, got it. Then rolled over slowly, stretching out on the couch, the dolls tumbling around her, little bonnets and feathered hats fluttering, her chin resting on her elbow sunk into the puce velvet, her naked bottom baby-smooth, got it.

She rolled over on her back, knee raised, picking up the biggest doll, the German Bebe with the red curls and the high-button shoes. And all the dolls around her glared with their brilliant glass eyes.

I saw her fall into the usual trance as the shutter kept clicking.

And then, as she eased down off the couch onto her knees and turned to the side with the Bru in her arms, the others all heaped behind her, I knew we had the picture. It was in the dreamy expression of her face.

This and the brass bed picture were the future. Go away, world.

[14?]

SHE popped up early the next afternoon, on her way out to see a new Japanese film. "Nothing is going to get you away from these pictures that nobody will ever see, right?"

"I can't read all those subtitles. Go on."

"You're incredible, you know it? You fall asleep during the symphony, you think Kuwait is a person, you can't follow foreign movies, and you worry about me getting an education. Good grief."

"It's terrible, isn't it?"

She zeroed in on the doll photos.

"The one where you're kneeling," I told her. "And the brass bed series, I'm going to do six panels, like the page of a comic book, all different angles of you through the bars."

"Terrific." She popped her gum, hands on hips, black sweater tight over her breasts. "And all this goes in a vault somewhere, or do you burn it finally?"

"Don't be a smart aleck. Go to the movies."

"You're crazy, you know it? I mean it this time, I do, I do."

"And what if I did show them?" I asked. "What if the whole world saw them? What if they were plastered all over Time and Newsweek and the papers, and Artforum and Art in America, and the National Enquirer and you name it, and they called me a genius and a child molester and the reincarnation of Rembrandt and a kidnapper? Then what would happen to you? Miss Belinda with no last name, no family, no history? With your picture in every newspaper in the country? And make no mistake. It would be like that. It's that kind of story."

That steady look, that serious look. I'm not sixteen. I'm old enough to be your mother. Except when I pop my gum.

"Would you have the guts to do it?" she asked. Not a mean voice. Just on the line.

"What if I said I knew it was just a matter of time? What if I said that no artist works like I'm working on paintings he never intends to show to anybody? What if I said it was like walking closer and closer to a cliff, knowing at some point, when you weren't looking, you'd go over? I'm not talking tomorrow. I'm not talking next week or next month, maybe not even next year. I mean, there is a whole lifetime of work to be undermined here, a whole lifetime to be destroyed, and that takes guts, yes, guts, but sooner or later-"

"If you said all that, then I'd say you have more guts than you let on sometimes."

"But let's keep the focus on you. What happens if these parents or whoever they are open Time magazine and see your picture there, painted by Jeremy Walker?"

Sober, reflecting.

"What could it prove?" she asked. "That we'd met? That I'd posed for some pictures? Is that a crime, to pose for pictures? They wouldn't have anything on you unless I supplied it, and I will never never supply it."

"You're still not understanding me. What happens to you? Do they come to collect their little girl posthaste from the dirty old man who's been painting her pictures?"

Eyes narrowing. Mouth getting hard. Looking at me, then away, then back at me again.

"A year and a half." A voice so low it sounds like somebody else inside her body. "Less than that, actually, until I'm eighteen and then there is nothing, absolutely nothing, they can do to me! And you can show those pictures! You can hang them on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing they can do to either one of us!" They! who are they? Who are they and what did they do to you?

"Show them!" she said. "You have to show them."

Silence.

"No. I take that back. If it's falling off a cliff, then you have to make that decision. But when the time comes, don't use me as an excuse!"

"No, I'll just go on using you, period," I said. "Using me? You? Using me?"

"That's how anybody in his or her right mind Would see it," I said. I glanced at the canvases surrounding us. And then I looked at her.

"You think it's all cut and dried?" she asked. "You think you're grownup and everything, and so I've got to be the one who's being taken advantage of?. Well, you're nuts."

"It scares me, that's all. The way I accept your word for it that it's OK you're with me-"

"And whose word could you accept!"

Silence.

"Don't get mad," I said. "We have years to argue about it."

"Do we?"

I didn't answer.

"Stop talking about being a kidnapper or a child molester. I'm not a child! For God's sakes, I'm not."

"I know-"

"No, you don't. The only time you don't feel guilty is when we're in bed or you've got the paintbrush in your hand, you know it? For God's sakes, start believing in us."

"I do believe in us," I said. "And I'll tell you something else. If I don't fall off that cliff, books or no books, I'll never be anything." Steady from her.

"Never be anything? Jeremy Walker, the household word?"

"That's right. That's what I said."

"Then let me tell you something," she said. But she hesitated; then: "I can't explain it, but just remember. The people who are looking for me? They wouldn't dare try to do anything to you."

What the hell did that mean?

THE day they came to install Andy Blatky's sculpture she did a disappearing act. I didn't know she was leaving until I heard the MG pull out.

Andy's big-shouldered work looked good on the back patio. It seemed to be reaching up towards the decks and the house, the fluid lines of the piece accentuated against the dark bricks beneath it, the plain whitewashed fence on three sides.

Andy and I took an hour or more to rig up the small nighttime spotlights. Then we sat at the kitchen table, talking, drinking beer. "How about showing me that new work?" he said.

I was so tempted. I just sat there, thinking soon, very soon.

[15]

THREE days later Dan came banging on the door.

"Where have you been? Why the hell aren't you answering my messages?"

"Look, I'm working," I said. I had the brush in my hand. Halfway through the brass bed canvas. "I don't want you coming in right now."

"You what!"

"Dan, look-"

"Is she here?"

"No, she's out riding, but she'll be back any minute."

"That's terrific?'

He came storming into the front hall.

"I don't even want to come in this house with her here."

"So don't."

"Look at this picture, idiot!" he said. He took it out of a manila envelope. I shut the front door behind him, then turned on the hall light.

It was Belinda most definitely. A Kodachrome five by seven of her in a white dress, leaning against the stone railing of a terrace. Blue sky, sea behind her. Shocking to see her in another world. I hated the sight of it. "Turn it over," he said.

I read the small clear felt-tip writing on the back: her height, weight-age, sixteen. No name. "Have you seen this girl? She's wanted for an important part in a theatrical feature. Reward for any information leading to her whereabouts. No questions asked. Contact Eric Sampson Agency." A Beverly Hills address.

"Where did you get this?"

He took the picture and returned it to the envelope.

"Halfway house in the Haight," he said. "This guy Sampson flies up here, passes these out at the youth shelters, on the street. Anybody finding Miss Up-and-coming gets a reward for it. Just call his number. I called his number. He says a big studio wants her, she tried out for a part, then vanished. He doesn't have a name."

"I don't believe it."

"Neither do I. But he's tough, this guy. And he knows a lot about her, that much I can tell you. I tried a couple of phony possibilities on him immediately. No, his kid is quite educated, trilingual, as he puts it. And her hair is definitely not bleached. And I'll tell you something else. Couple of calls to New York turned up just what I thought they would. Sampson's been on the East Coast passing these out too."