Belinda (6 page)

Like any representational artist, I believe in the eloquence of the accurately rendered image. I believe in that fundamental competence. The wisdom and magic of a work come through a thousand unarticulated choices regarding composition, lighting, color. Accuracy won't keep life out. To think so is stupid. And in my case weirdness is inevitable.

Despite my craft, no one has ever called me dull or static. On the contrary, I've been labeled grotesque, baroque, romantic, surreal, excessive, inflated, overblown, insane, and, of course, though I didn't want to admit it to Belinda, many people have called me sinister and erotic. But never static. Never overskilled.

All right. I took the plunge. I went at her full sweep with her dense golden hair and her white nightgown and her gorgeous little feet beneath the hem of the gown and the great layers of umber gloom closing in around her, and it was really working and the horse was splendid as always, and her little hand ...

Something completely unexpected happened.

I wanted to paint her naked.

I thought about it for a little while. I mean, what was this with her sitting there on this glorified toy in this white flannel nightgown? What the hell was she doing there? She's not Charlotte. It was an OK painting so far. In fact, it was better than OK, but it was also all wrong. A detour.

I took it off the easel. No. Not her.

And then, without thinking much about it, I turned to the wall the canvases of Angelica for the new book. I laughed when I caught myself doing it. "Don't look, Angelica," I said. "In fact, why the hell don't you pack up and get out, dear? Go to Rainbow Productions in Hollywood."

I looked around.

No need to turn around the other canvases. These were the grotesque ones, the ones the reporters often asked about but which no one ever saw in any book or any gallery.

They had nothing to do with my published work or images. Yet I'd done them for years-pictures of my old house in New Orleans and the Garden District around it, mansions rotting, forlorn beings in rooms of peeling wallpaper and broken plaster, landscapes prowled by giant rats and roaches. They all produced in me a kind of giddiness. I mean, I rather enjoyed it when friends came in here and gasped. Childish.

Of course, the lushness of New Orleans is in everything I do. The wrought iron fences are always there, the flowers in threatening profusion, the violet skies of New Orleans seen through webs of leafy limbs.

But in these secret pictures the gardens are true jungles, and the rats and insects are gigantic. They peer through windows. They hover over vine-covered chimneys. They roam the narrow tunnel4ike streets beneath the oaks.

These pictures are damp and dark, and the red used in them is always blood red. A stain almost. The secret trick of them is never to use pure black in them because they are already so black.

I paint these pictures when I am in certain moods, and it feels like driving my car at a hundred miles an hour to paint them. My usual breakneck speed is doubled.

My friends tease me a lot about them.

"Jeremy's gone home to paint rats."

"Jeremy's new book is going to be Angelica's Rats."

"No, no, no, it's going to be Bettina's Rats."

"Saturday Morning Rat."

My West Coast agent, Clair Clarke, came up into the studio once, saw the rats, and said, "My God! I don't think we'll sell the movie rights to that, do you?" and went downstairs immediately.

Rhinegold, my dealer, had looked them all over one afternoon and said that he wanted at least five for immediate exhibit. He wanted three for New York and two for Berlin. He'd been excited. But he didn't argue when I said no.

"I don't think they mean enough," I said.

There was a long silence and then he nodded.

"When you make them start meaning enough, you call me."

They have never started meaning enough. They have remained fragments, which I paint with a vengeful hilarity. Yet I have always known that these pictures have a disconcerting beauty. Yet the lack of meaning in them feels immoral. Rather horribly immoral.

Whatever the limitations of my books, they have meaning and are moral. They have a complete theme.

So much for the roach and rat paintings.

I didn't bother to turn them around when I started painting Belinda naked on the carousel horse. But that wasn't because I thought painting her naked was immoral, either.

No, I had no such idea of that. I could still smell her sweet feminine smell on my fingertips. She was all things naked and good and sweet to me in this moment. She was not immoral and this was not immoral. Far from it.

And it had nothing to do with those rat and roach paintings. But something was happening, something confusing, something dangerous, dangerous to Angelica somehow.

I stopped, thought about it for a moment. The craziest feeling had come over me, and, boy, how I liked it. How I liked feeling this, this sense of danger. If I thought about it long enough-but no matter. Don't analyze.

For now, I wanted to capture a highly specific characteristic of Belinda-the ease with which she'd gone to bed with me, the frankness with which she had enjoyed it. That was the point of the nudity. And it gave her power, that frankness and ease.

But she mustn't worry, ever, about these pictures because nobody would see any of this. I'd be sure to tell her that. What a laugh to think of what it would do to my career if someone did see this, oh, too funny that, but no, it would never happen.

I got her face effortlessly again from the photographic map of lines and proportion. And I was working double fast, as I always did when I did the dark pictures. Everything felt wonderful. I was piling on the paints, creamy and thick and gleaming, and the likeness of her was glaring there, and my brush was racing over the details, all that craft rising up without the slightest conscious hindrance.

Her body of course could only be true to my memory of it, breasts a little large for her small frame, nipples small, light pink, scant pubic hair, truly the color of smoke, no more than a discreet little triangle. There were bound to be inaccuracies. But the face was the crux; the face held the character. The slope of her naked shoulders, the high curve of her calves, all that I re-envisioned, thinking about how it had felt to touch it. And kiss it.

It was working out all right.

AROUND twelve o'clock I had a near-complete giant canvas of her and the horse, and I was so elated that I couldn't paint for very long without stopping, just to drink coffee, light a cigarette, walk around. I filled in the last details at about two o'clock. The horse was as good as she was now. I'd got his carved mane, the flared nostrils, the bridle with the paste jewels and the gold paint peeling from it.

The thing was done, absolutely done. And it was as photographically real as anything I'd ever painted-her sitting there in a dim bronze Rembrandt light, hallucinatively vital, yet subtly stylized through the even attention to every detail.

I wouldn't have changed it then if she had come in and posed naked for me. It was all right. It was Belinda-the little girl who'd made love to me twice, apparently because she wanted to-just sitting there naked, staring at me, and asking what?

"Why do you feel so guilty for touching me?"

Because I am using you, my dear. Because an artist uses everything.

WHEN I got back from my drive through the Haight the next afternoon, there was a note from her in the mailbox. "Came, went-Belinda."

For the first time in my entire life I almost drove my fist through the wall. Immediately I put the keys to the house in an envelope, marked her name on it and put it in the box. She couldn't miss it. Somebody else might find it, of course, and loot the house. I didn't give a damn. There was a deadbolt on the attic studio, where all the paintings were, and another on the darkroom downstairs. As for the rest of it, dolls and all, they could have it.

WHEN she hadn't come by or called by nine o'clock, I started working again.

This time she was kneeling naked beside the dollhouse. I'd work on her for a while, then on the dollhouse. It took a lot of time, as it always did, to reproduce the shingled mansard roof, the gingerbread windows, lace curtains. But it was as important as she was. And then everything around her had to be done, until the entire background was there with the dusty toys, the edge of the velvet couch, the flowered wallpaper.

By the time the morning light came through the windows it was finished. I scratched the date into the wet oil paint with my palette knife, whispered, "Belinda," and fell asleep right there on the cot under the burning morning sun, too tired to do anything but cover my head with a pillow.

[4]

THE last important party of the booksellers convention was scheduled that evening at a picturesque old mountainside hotel in Sausalito. It was the official sit-down dinner for Alex Clementine to launch the autobiography he'd proudly written-on his own without a ghost-and I simply had to be there.

Alex was my oldest friend. He'd starred in the most successful films ever made from my mother's historical novels, Evelyn and Crimson Mardi Gras. We'd shared a great deal, both good and bad, over the years. And most recently I'd connected him with both my literary agent and my publisher for his new book. Weeks ago I'd offered to pick him up downtown at the Stanford Court Hotel and drive him across the bay to the Sausalito party.

Fortunately the warm clear weather held out, the New Yorkers were positively moaning over the dazzling view of San Francisco across the water, and Alex, white-haired, sun-bronzed, and impeccably dressed, overwhelmed us with California Gothic tales of murder, suicide, transvestism, and madness in Tinseltown.

Of course, he'd seen Ramon Novarro only two days before he was murdered by gay hustlers, talked to Marilyn Monroe only hours before her suicide, run into Sal Mineo the night before he was murdered, been seduced by an anonymous beauty onboard Errol Flynn's yacht, been in the lobby of the London Dorchester when they'd wheeled out Liz Taylor on the way to the hospital with her near-fatal pneumonia, and "had almost gone" to a party at the house of Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, on the very night the Charles Manson gang broke into it and massacred all the occupants.

But we forgave him all that for the countless authentic little tales he told about the people he really had known. His career had spanned forty years, that was a fact, from his first starring role opposite Barbara Stanwyck to a regular part on the new nighttime soap "Champagne Flight" opposite the indomitable erotic film star Bonnie.

"Champagne Flight" was the season's camp trash hit. And everybody wanted to hear about Bonnie.

In the sixties she'd been the Texan who conquered Paris, the big beautiful dark-haired Dallas girl who became queen of the French New Wave along with Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda. Seberg was dead. Fonda had long ago come home. But Bonnie had remained in Europe, in seclusion a la Brigitte Bardot, after years of making bad Spanish and Italian films never released in this country.

It had been the hard-core pornographic flicks-Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, The Devil and Miss Jones-that had killed the stylish, often profound erotic films that Bonnie had made in the sixties, driving her and Bardot and others like them from the American market.

Everybody at the table admitted to remembering those old pictures, loving them.

Bonnie, the brunette Marilyn Monroe, peering out from behind big horn-rimmed glasses as she talked existentialism and angst in her soft American-accented French to the cold, callous European lovers who destroyed her. Monica Vitti was never more lost, Liv Ullmann never more sad, Anita Ekberg never more voluptuous.

We compared notes on the rat-hole art theaters where we'd seen the flicks, the caf6s in which we'd talked about them after. Bonnie, Bardot, Deneuve-they had had intellectual approval. When they stripped for the cameras, it had been courageous and wholesome. Was there anyone comparable to them now? Somebody still had the Playboy in which Bonnie first appeared wearing only her horn-rimmed glasses. Somebody else said Playboy was reprinting the pictures. Everybody remembered her famous ad for Midnight Mink with the coat open all the way down the front.

And every single one of us admitted, to our shame, having tuned in the stylish but wretched "Champagne Flight" at least once just to get a look at Bonnie. Bonnie at forty was still first-rate Bonnie.

And though her few Hollywood films had been disasters, she was now in the pages of People magazine and the National Enquirer along with Joan Collins of "Dynasty" and "Dallas" star Larry Hagman. Paperback biographies of her were in every drugstore. Bonnie dolls were on sale in the madcap gift shops. The show was in the top ten. They were bringing back her old films.

Soulful Bonnie; Texas Bonnie.

Well, Alex had had his arms around her only last Monday afternoon; she was a "darlin' girl," yes, she did need the horn-rimmed glasses, couldn't see two feet in front of her; yes, she did read all the time, but not Sartre or Kierkegaard or Simone de Beauvoir "and all that old foolishness." It was mysteries. She was addicted to mysteries. And no, she didn't drink anymore, they had her off the booze. And she wasn't on drugs either. Who said such a thing?

And would we please stop knocking "Champagne Flight"? It was the best break Alex had had in years, he didn't mind telling us. They'd used him in seven episodes and promised him a couple more. His career had never had such a shot of adrenaline.

The nighttime soaps were bringing back all the worthwhile talent-John Forsythe, Jane Wyman, Mel Ferrer, Luna Turner. Where the hell was our taste?

OK, OK. But we wanted real dish on Bonnie. What about the shooting last fall when she mistook her new husband, "Champagne Flight" producer Marty Moreschi, for a prowler and pumped five bullets into him in their Beverly Hills bedroom? Even I had paid attention to that story in the news. Now, come on, Alex, there's something there, there has to be.

Alex shook his head. Bonnie was blind as a bat, that he could swear to. She and Marty were lovebirds on the set of "Champagne Flight." And that Marty, well, he was director, producer, writer of "Champagne Flight."