Belinda (65 page)

Belinda was telling G.G. in a soft voice about being in Rome again and how lonely it had been but that working at Cinecittá had been OK. She had a nice room in Florence just a block from the Uffizi, and she'd gone there just about every day. On the Ponte Vecchio when she saw all the glove stores she thought of him and how he'd bought her her first pair of white gloves there when she was four years old.

Then G.G. was assuring her it didn't matter about his New York business closing. He could have stayed, fought it out, probably won. He never would know how the rumors started. Maybe it was not Marty, but Marty's men. But now he and Alex "had something," something that was better than it had been with Ollie, and maybe G.G. would set up shop on Rodeo Drive.

"You know, I'm forty years old, Belinda," he said. "I can't be somebody's little boy forever. My luck should have run out before now. But I'll tell you, it's wonderful having one last go at it with Alex Clementine, with the guy I used to watch up there on the screen when I was twelve years old."

"Good for you, Daddy," she said.

It was a real possibility, a Beverly Hills G.G.'s, why not? He had really cashed out in New York, rumors or no rumors. If he sold the Fire Island house, he would have a small fortune. "Oh, but you know," he laughed, "G.G. on Rodeo Drive would make Bonnie sooo mad."

The clouds were just like a blanket outside the window. The late-afternoon sun hit them in a fan of burnt golden rays. The rays came through the window. They struck Belinda and G.G. together, their hair seeming to mingle as it became light.

I was half-dreaming. I saw my house in San Francisco like a ship cut adrift. Goodbye to all the toys, the dolls, the trains, the dollhouse, goodbye to all the roach and rat paintings, goodbye to the china and the silver and the grandfather clock and the letters, all the letters from all the little girls.

Awful to think that the little girls felt hurt. Awful to think they were disappointed in me. Please don't let them feel a dark feeling of betrayal and unwholesomeness. Please let them come to see that the Belinda paintings were supposed to be about love and light.

I tried to think of something I wanted from home, something I would ache for later. And there was nothing at all. The Belinda paintings were going all over the world. Only four were not going to museums-they would go to the august Count Solosky, which was almost the same thing.

And nothing called to me from the house in San Francisco. Not even Andy's wonderful sculpture, because I knew Dan would move it to the right place. Maybe Rhinegold would take it with him when he went back to West Fifty-seventh Street. Now that was a fine idea. I hadn't even shown it to Rhinegold. What an inexcusably selfish thing.

But the paintings, now the paintings, that was where my mind, half in sleep and half-awake, really wanted to go. The May Procession, The Mardi Gras, I envisioned them again. I could see every detail. But I could see other works, too. I saw those big shaggy police dogs sniffing at the dolls. Dogs Visit the Toys. And I saw Alex in his raincoat and fedora walking through Mother's hallway, looking at the peeling wallpaper. "Jeremy, finish up, son, so we can get out of this house!"

Got to paint a picture of Alex, terribly important to paint Alex, Alex who'd been in hundreds of movies, and never been painted right. The dogs would become werewolves sniffing through the porcelain babies and, yes, I'd have to deal with all that darkness again in that one, but it had an inevitable feel to it, and Alex walking through Mother's house, too, all right. But Alex, important to move him out of the dark house. Alex at the garden gate on that morning twenty-five years ago when he had said:

"You stay with me when you come out west."

III. THE FINAL SCORE

THE long weekend at Alex's quiet sprawling canyon house in Beverly Hills was dreamy and slow. Belinda and I made love often in the undisturbed silence of the bedroom. I slept twelve hours at a stretch, deeper than I had ever slept since I was a kid. The eternal southern California sun poured through the many French windows onto vistas of thick carpet, and down on gardens as well-kept as interiors, the stillness unbroken except by the noise of an Occasional car on the distant canyon road.

Susan's plane had gotten us back without incident. For the first twenty-four hours at least nobody had known we were here.

And by Monday morning the tabloids had the story:

BONNIE'S DAUGHTER MARRIES ARTIST.

JEREMY AND BELINDA MARRY IN RENO.

BELINDA ALIVE AND WELL AND MARRIED. And the video tape of the wedding had been shown by a thousand news outlets all over the world.

The big local news, however, was Blair Sackwell's full-page insert advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle and the national edition of The New York Times: BELINDA AND JEREMY FOR MIDNIGHT MINK.

It was just about the first shot of us that Blair had taken. I was unshaven, shaggy headed, a little puzzled in expression, and Belinda, wide-eyed, babylips jutting slightly, had the unselfconscious seriousness of a child. Two faces, blankets of white fur. The lens of the Hasselblad and the size of the negative gave it a startling graven quality-every pore showed, every hair was etched. And that is what Blair had wanted. That was what Eric Arlington had always delivered to him.

The picture transcended photography. We appeared more real than real. Of course, Blair knew he did not have to spend another cent to publicize his picture. By evening, newspapers all over the country had reprinted it. The news magazines would inevitably do the same. Everybody would see Blair's trademark. Midnight Mink was news, the way it had been years ago, when Bonnie had been its first model with the coat half-open all the way down her right side.

Nevertheless, the advertisement would appear in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar eventually as well as in a host of other magazines. Such was the destiny of those who posed for Midnight Mink.

Dozens of long-stemmed white roses began to arrive on Monday afternoon. By evening the house was full of them. They were all from Blair.

Meantime the news around us was comforting. The LAPD had dropped its warrant for Belinda. Daryl Blanchard claimed "profound relief" that his niece was alive. He would not contest G.G.'s consent to the marriage. The age-old power of the ritual was recognized by this plainspoken and rather confused Texas man. Bonnie wept heartrending tears on network and cable. Marty broke down again.

The San Francisco police decided not to pursue their warrants for me. Quite impossible to press me for crimes against a delinquent minor who was now my legal bride. And I had not been under arrest at the time I had "flown" from San Francisco. So Susan could not formally be charged for her part in the escape.

The lines continued outside the Folsom Street exhibit. And Rhinegold reported that every painting was now spoken for. Two to Paris, one to Berlin, another to New York, one to Dallas, the four to Count Solosky. I had lost track.

Time and Newsweek, hitting the stands at Monday noon with a load of obsolete garbage about the "disappearance" and "possible murder," nevertheless gave enormous coverage to the paintings, which their critics begrudgingly praised.

As early as Monday afternoon Susan had a national distributor for Final Score. Limelight was taking it over, and the labs were working overtime on the prints, and Susan was in there with the cinematographer making sure that Chicago and Boston and Washington each got a jewel. The papers already carried their ads for a weekend opening in a thousand theaters nationwide.

Susan also had the go-ahead from Galaxy Pictures for Of Will and Shame with her script and Belinda, if Belinda was willing, and Sandy Miller was back from Rio with the lowdown on locations. As of the first of the year, Susan was ready to go to Brazil.

As for Alex, he was hotter than ever, as far as we could tell. His champagne commercials were running on schedule, and there was renewed interest in the television miniseries to be based on his autobiography. Would he consent, the producers were asking, to play himself?. He had two other television films in the works, and the talk shows were calling him, too.

Susan wanted Alex for Of Will and Shame and was trying desperately to get the studio to meet his price, which was enormous, and he was promising to throw up the television offers for a real picture "if the agents could just work things out."

All Alex wanted to do at the moment, however, was lie on the sun-drenched redbrick terrace and turn browner and browner as he talked to G.G. And G.G. insisted he was having the time of his life. The work of opening the Beverly Hills salon would come all too soon, as far as he was concerned.

When the word got out that G.G. was in Beverly Hills, friends of Alex started calling. G.G. could start freelance any time he chose.

The shadow in paradise was Belinda.

Belinda had not said absolutely go ahead to the movie, which was making Susan a bit nervous, but Belinda was not entirely all right.

There was something tentative about Belinda's every gesture, something clouded and uncertain in her gaze. There were moments when she reminded me uncannily of Bonnie and the brief time I'd known Bonnie in that Hyatt Regency room.

Over and over she asked me if I was certain that everything was OK with me. But I came to realize as I repeatedly reassured her that she was the one who was agitated and tense. She was the one who could not take a deep breath.

She read every article in the papers about her mother. In silence she watched her mother and Marty scrambling to salvage their reputations and their positions on the evening news.

The tabloids had not let up on Bonnie and Marty. There was talk of "Champagne Flight" being revived on cable, but nothing firm had been announced.

Meantime Belinda had also spoken to her uncle briefly by phone on Sunday afternoon. Not a very pleasant call. The man had not believed her when she said she had called her mother at the hospital several days ago.

Then I took the phone. I explained to Daryl that Belinda was all right now, we were married, and that maybe the best thing was to let all this simmer down. Daryl was confused, plain and simple. It was obvious Bonnie had been lying to him about everything, and so had Marty. He told me that he had pushed for the warrant for Belinda against their wishes, in a desperate effort to find his niece, if she was still alive. Now he didn't know what to do exactly. He wanted to see Belinda. But she would not see him. The call ended with uncomfortable pleasantries. She would write to him. He would write to her.

She was quiet and withdrawn after. She was not all right at all.

She was happiest in the evening when we all sat around the supper table together and Susan was storyboarding Of Will and Shame in the air. Sandy Miller, Susan's lover, was constantly with Susan now, throwing in little stories about her madcap adventures in Rio, and Sandy Miller was indeed a voluptuous young woman, every bit as seductive as she had been on the screen.

The Rio picture sounded terrific, I had to admit. The relationship between the teen prostitute, to be played by Belinda, and the female reporter who saves her, played by Sandy, was quite good. And I liked the idea of going with them on location. I wanted to see the majestic harbor of Rio de Janeiro. I wanted to walk the alien and frightening streets of that old city. I wanted to paint pictures by Brazilian light.

But this was Belinda's decision. And Belinda obviously could not make it. Belinda kept saying she needed to think it over. And so I waited, watched, tried to fathom what was holding Belinda back.

Of course, there was one very obvious answer: Bonnie was holding Belinda back.

Tuesday night we all piled into Alex's black Mercedes and went down to Sunset for dinner at Le Dome. Susan was in black satin rodeo finery. Sandy Miller was the ripe starlet in beautifully draped white silk. Belinda, in the classic little black dress and pearls, picked up Blair's floor-length mink coat and threw it over her shoulders and kept it on all night long, letting it hang off the chair like a rain poncho. Alex and G.G. went black tie again, because the black dinner jacket and pants were the only decent clothes I had, other than jeans and sweatshirts that Alex's man had bought for me, and Alex and G.G. said we should all match.

So there we all were together in the soft romantic gloom of Le Dome. And the wine was flowing, and the food was delicious and lovely to look at before we ate it. And nobody busted us or bothered us, and lots of people saw us. And Belinda looked gorgeous and miserable, the mink coat hanging on the floor, her hair a cloud of gold around her soft and tortured little face. Belinda just picked at the delicious food. Belinda wasn't getting better. She was getting worse.

So we bide our time. We wait.

Early Wednesday when I awakened, I went out into the fresh air of the garden and saw Belinda slicing back and forth through the clean blue water of the long rectangular pool. She had on the tiniest black bikini in the Western world which Sandy Miller had brought her from Rio. Her hair was pinned up on the top of her head. I could hardly stand to watch her little bottom and silky thighs moving through the water. Thank God, Alex was gay, I thought.

If the old familiar Los Angeles smog was there, I could not smell it or taste it. I smelled only the roses and the lemons and the oranges that grew in Alex's garden all year round.

I wandered into the green house off the cabana, a large cool empty place of whitewashed glass and redwood timbers where Alex had set up my easel for me, the same one I'd left with him twenty-five years ago. He'd had his man, Orlando, go all over Los Angeles to find really big and properly stretched canvases, with just enough give in them, and plenty of brushes, turpentine, linseed oil, paints. Alex had rounded up a lot of old china plates for me to use as palettes and given me the old silver knives-the ones banged up by the garbage disposer-to use as I chose.

An artist never had it so good, it seemed to me. Except for the Muse being silently and uncomplainingly miserable. But that just had to change.

Two days ago I had started The Mardi Gras on a huge eight-by-ten canvas. And the great shadowy oaks above the torchlighted parade were already painted in, along with two of the glittering papier-mâché floats crowded with revelers.