The Gold Diggers (12 page)

But he couldn't, on the other hand, avoid the whole thing. Stardom was, to use Nick's word, Peter's fate. It was his subject and condition, and he spent his fantasy time fixed on the shine and shoot and fall of this one and that one. He was near enough to the top to pale the run of lesser lights that used to cluster around him just a year or two before. About making it big, he'd learned it was a problem either way—if you made it, you struggled to cope and hold on, and if you didn't, you worked at keeping the gun from your head. It wasn't for everyone. You had to be ambitious, to start with, and you couldn't know until it happened whether it was the up or down button the gods had pressed, so you never really knew which struggle to prepare for. Now Peter knew. Until a couple of weeks before, all he thought he would have to do from here on in was keep his drinking down, his checkbook balanced, and his ass clean in the LA
Times
. Then the bill came. He could have everything else but Nick or fight for Nick and put everything else on the line.

Because he couldn't do it alone. Nick was the only thing in his life that he bothered to keep like an island, temperate and ripe. And the funny thing was, he would have agreed with Nick that nothing was wrong with the two of them. There was the island, whole and long enchanted, ruled by a wizard and an exiled prince. But where things were always the same on the island, as against the thousand shifts and turnabouts in the world outside, the world's things had come more and more to be the same, too. The island and the world were still day and night, at opposite poles, but there were two poles now instead of one. He knew, from the moment he began the drive through Malibu Canyon and turned in at the gate of Nick's ranch, how far apart their dreams had ranged. The scale of the ranch told him what it was equal to in Peter's world. A first class stateroom on the
QE2
. The Cecil Beaton suite at the St. Regis. A hunting lodge once, in the Hebrides, that couldn't be reached except by plane, and then four hours in a Jeep that just about rattled his teeth out.

Yet even as the catalog began in his head, he knew it wouldn't satisfy him. As soon as the picture clicked, he saw himself shouting at room service over the phone. There weren't enough towels. Where was the ice? Short of the epic picture—the champagne cocktails on the Kirkov balcony over the Black Sea—he'd outgrown dream after dream because they turned out to be nothing special once he'd brought his suitcase in. So what he really should have seen about the dreams was this: Nick still had one strong enough to bid on, and Peter didn't. It was as if, to be a star, he'd had to give up the capacity to do something people who weren't stars needed to do more. In a word: dream. Life went on for days sometimes like a too deep sleep.

Leaving the easel where it was for the moment, he climbed into the pickup, started it, dropped it into second, and did a three-quarter turn to regain the gravel road. He headed up the hill. It was an idle enough desire, now that his plan to wait for Nick had gone awry, to see the other side. He probably wanted to know, too, where Nick and Sam were coming from, but not in any conscious way. He was right when he said he wasn't the type to follow people. Perhaps because he'd just told Nick he didn't dare go very far alone, he wanted to clock how far he did dare, now that Nick had driven off. He thought of LA, as he had most of the morning while he painted, though he was painting something right out of the Malibu hills. And not that anything here reminded him of the city that had no end. But he loved LA so much that he didn't like to be this far away in the country. Unlike Nick, he didn't care for California with a discoverer's lonely passion, though of course he thought it was beautiful and better than man and all of that. But LA was Peter's Paris-in-the-twenties. He couldn't imagine Josephine Baker or Schiaparelli or the Murphys footing it out to the farmland that lay a couple of hours in any direction from Maxim's. They stayed put.

Peter thought of Adele DesRoches, his big spender in San Marino, whose house he'd turned into a dream of wicker and travertine on the one hand, Persian miniatures and handwork on the other. Adele had lived in Pasadena and thereabouts for forty-five years and two and a half marriages. Once you had enough money, she'd told him, you ceased to live in California, even though it went on and on outside your windows. She'd bought a very airy Mediterranean place in San Marino for four hundred, and she budgeted—if “budgeted” is the right word—another hundred and fifty for interiors. Not including art. “There is no Tahiti,” she said one day, her sunglasses down on the tip of her nose. “What do you mean?” Peter asked. “It doesn't exist. I've been there,” she said, and went back to working on her tan. And when you felt that way, Peter knew, it didn't much matter where you lived. Or you lived where Adele did, in the south of France a few blocks out of downtown Pasadena. He supposed there was no Tahiti wherever you looked in Beverly Hills. But Peter didn't buy it. He thought he lived at last in the center of the world, and the more people he met who thought LA was all dead-end, the rim of the abyss, the more there was for him.

When he crested the hill, he braked. It was more of the same, brush-covered hills—jade green, bottle green, sea-shaded—and a puzzle of fences. The bunkhouse leapt at him out of the distance, the one human thing. But he didn't for a minute think of cowboys. If he had had a notion of who lived here, he had them handcuffed to the land, dry-lipped and cheated and prey to bad weather. They hadn't a clue how to live in a house. Peter's mind worked like the mice in
Cinderella
—shutters at the sides of the windows, boxes of geraniums nailed to the sill, a knocker on the door, and coats and coats of paint. It was so sway-roofed and loose-boarded outside that inside must be old tin coffeepots and chairs made out of bent branches. Still, he thought, it was nicely proportioned for a single room. And there might be an attic in the peaked roof that would make a cheery loft for a bedroom. With a skylight over the bed.

He took off the hand brake and shifted into neutral and let the truck roll down the hill. An inadvertent glance in the rearview mirror, just as he left the rise, showed him the easel standing near the gate like a surveyor's upright. A flurry went up and down once in his stomach, as if for a moment the ranch was more real than he was and he, like the painting, not real at all. That's Nick's house now, he thought as he came down the long slope to the turn. In a way, then, it was his as well, and though he knew it was only an investment, just another kind of money in the bank, he suddenly thought they'd have to pull the bunkhouse down or fix it up. If it was Peter's, it had to be the best. All his life, he'd made do in a thousand different ways with nothing at all, just to avoid having anything around that was cheap or brutish or ugly.

He stopped again at the right-angle turn where Sam skidded the MG. When he got out to walk the rest of the way, a couple of hundred yards, he was slightly below the level of the house. From here, it sat low on the hill with a certain vividness and clarity, but he went toward it now as if he'd finished with it, his mind already somewhere else. He was going on only because he'd come this far.

He would have to tell Adele about Nick and Sam, he decided. He couldn't tell Rita any more about it, though he trusted Rita more, because she was in Bel-Air in the middle of it. It was close enough quarters as it was. He wouldn't admit that he might prefer Adele because she didn't know Nick. Or because Adele did what he told her to.

Just last week, the day he didn't make it home to go to Chasen's, he'd brought over to Adele's a tall blue and white vase from Isfahan. 1760. Thirty-two hundred dollars. That broke down to about sixteen dollars a year, he'd told her playfully over the phone, swearing it was a bargain. “Whatever you say,” she said. She didn't even want to look at it first. So he picked it up at a shop on Wilshire and drove it over to San Marino, holding it on his lap. He walked right into the house, not bothering to knock. He called out for Adele and, because it was heavy, set the vase down on the travertine table in the entry hall. And it cracked. A hairline fracture about a foot long, starting at the bottom. The price went down to fifteen hundred, and he could hear Adele clattering down the stairs in wooden shoes. Like lightning, Peter swiveled the vase and turned the crack to the wall.

“Oh, Peter, it's too beautiful. I'm going to pass out,” she said. “Tell me the story. Tell me about the little Iranian lady who spent twenty years painting my vase.”

“Adele, it has to go right here. Don't touch it.”

“But I thought it was for the bar.”

“We'll find something else. This is where it belongs.”

“Honey,” she said with a dreamy smile, taking his arm and leading him into the wicker and travertine reaches, “I wouldn't move my bowels without asking you first.”

Peter remembered it now, climbing up the steps to the bunkhouse porch, because whatever it was Adele saw in him was what everybody wanted. Except Nick. It was notable for Nick's lack of interest in it. Peter knew where he'd had his training in the styling and housing of Adele DesRoches: in his grandfather's study, turning over photographs of uniformed men and women in summer white. He used to go through a stack of dance cards, each as thick as a water cracker, as if they were pages in a diary. They had belonged to the woman Alexander Kirkov was signed up to marry after the war. Dead in a bombed train. A life lived out in a lost world, Peter always thought, and light-years removed from the gray and railing prince in Brooklyn Heights. It was the feel for that glimpsed and guessed-at life that Peter sold now on the open market. And only Nick seemed to know where the real Peter stopped and the romance began in people like Adele: Peter Kirkov, prince among men, his ancient blood like vintage wine, enameling greater LA with rich men's rooms like the bits and pieces of long gone landed estates.

The door was open. He saw the beer on the bed and went over and touched a can with his fingertips, as if he were taking its pulse. Because it was still cool, he opened it and sat down. He never drank beer. Better not to go home, he thought, in case Nick needed some time alone. He might as well drop by the shop. See how Rita was making out. He wasn't getting anywhere here, and it didn't do a thing for him to find Nick's trysting place.

What I'll do, he said to himself, looking around, is take those logs, as long as I'm here. One in each hand. I'll finish my Coors, he thought, and lug that wood to the pickup. He wanted to take it home for a winter fire. He imagined himself and Nick after dinner in the bedroom, making love in the firelight. It made him feel terrific. It wasn't a waste of time, once he had something to carry away. Peter was a star because he held old Europe in his heart like the jigsaw of a broken porcelain, and he passed it out like relics. He knew good wood when he saw it. He knew good everything.

4

Rita wasn't in any rush. When she rode off on Friday night with Nick and Peter—clothes thrown on, her fingers tingling like a safecracker's—she was calm enough to realize that the door in the triple mirror might be more than she could handle. It might take a professional to get through. And the room beyond might be empty, or it might be the wine cellar or a narrow little safe and not a room at all, and Nick and Peter might already know about it, anyway. She didn't
believe
any of this, but she figured she owed it to the false god of luck to make the appropriate noises. She knew a crossroads when she came to one, if only because—especially because—it was her first. She'd been through doors with everyone, from Nancy Drew in an old windmill to Howard Carter, live, from the Valley of the Kings. If Alice had stopped to wonder if the hole was full of wine, Rita reasoned, she would have lost the rabbit. Rita had the notion that you had to be ready to go, damn the luggage, the moment the story began. You ordered the cabbie to follow that car and hunkered down for the long haul. And you had to be in fabulous shape, in case the air got thin or the road played out. Your only tool was a nail file.

She was nice that night to all the absolute strangers, agreeing with everything they said. She stood with an untouched plate of fancies, a couple of feet from the buffet, purged of all her pedestrian hungers. She heard out a man who'd been through “total therapy” in Santa Barbara. The specialty treatment had him immersed in a tub of heated mineral oil, so-called “the French fry” by the patients. He swore that whatever it didn't do for the head, it did for the skin. Peter strolled by, and, putting his mouth close to her ear as she took a breath between exclamations, whispered that she was a cinch for the cover of
House and Garden
within a year. Rita grinned and nodded and agreed with him, too, though she had in mind something more like
National Geographic
. A border of yellow around Rita the intrepid, at the entrance to the pass to Shangri-La.

All evening, she was going through what she knew about locks and hinges—which, since she came from a New York apartment, was considerable enough. She knew it wasn't anything to do with a key. Captain Kidd, as she recalled, sank his treasure chest in a cave that showed its opening only in a certain tide that ripped in a certain weather. Off the Gaspé Peninsula or something. She guessed she was mixing it up with something else, but it gave her the feel of heavily treasured places, the “X” on the hand-drawn map—put her in the mood, so to speak. You didn't crack the enemy's war codes by knowing only the alphabet and how to count on your fingers. It took a different turn of mind, in this case a bird's-eye view of the course of a treasure—the source and the value in dollars, the owner, his heirs, his brand of paranoia, and his taste in gadgets. The lock on his secret room, Rita thought, was a plundering man's last stand against death. If you left behind a chamber hidden in a hill and stuffed with booty, like an Aladdin's cave, you had in a sense taken it with you. Because she understood the implications, Rita felt, she was the proper sort to break the seals. She took note of all the curses and went ahead and risked them, acknowledging that they went with the territory. It was all a matter of attitude.