The Gold Diggers (28 page)

The phone rang. Lose one turn, she thought. She picked it up and strangled the ring in the middle. When she said hello, she noticed Peter turn his head to listen, looking up from moving a chair closer to a potted plant by fractions of an inch. “Yes, it is,” Rita said quietly. Peter stopped listening as soon as he could hear that it wasn't for him, but he still might finish fidgeting and come within earshot before she was done. “I understand, Mr. Webber,” she said. “I know just what to expect.” Suddenly Peter was calling her over as if he didn't even remember she was on the phone. He was standing at the chair, peering at it as if there was something spilled on the silk. “Of course,” Rita said, “fifteen minutes will be fine.” Peter called louder and looked up angrily. When he saw she was still busy, he picked up the chair in one hand and headed in her direction. “Please understand, Mr. Webber, it's my last chance. I'll take what I can get.” She spoke as neutrally as a disembodied voice in an airline terminal. “I'll be there at three,” she said, and then hung up.

“Rita, why is this chair only four twenty-five? People will think they've wandered into Sears. Change the tag to seven fifty.”

“Okay, Pete,” she said, reaching for a pen. “I know we have to do our part in the fight against inflation.”

“Who was that?”

“On the phone? Nobody.”

“Oh. I have to go now. You know what I was just thinking? The first time I was ever really happy was the night we had dinner at ‘21.'”

“You're kidding,” she said as she made out the tag. She remembered it as if it were yesterday, mostly because it was awful. Ten or twelve years ago. She and Peter and a man named Jerry, whom she couldn't recall beyond the smug little smile he wore in fancy places. It was going very badly, anyway, but she figured to set herself up with a
really
swanky dinner before she finished him off. Somehow she'd arranged to have Peter included. She looked up now from tying the tag on the chair's spine, wondering if the past had played another joke. She ticked off the facts. “All I remember is that he wouldn't let us order for ourselves. He sent the wine back. He made a remark about how we didn't have much to compare the place with and he did. And he didn't leave a tip.”Then she shrugged as if to say: How do you get happy out of that?

“Really?” Peter said, smiling in disbelief. He either didn't recall what she was saying or didn't use the past in quite the same way. “They could have served us tuna fish, for all I cared. I just kept thinking how I'd
arrived
. I hadn't, of course, not for keeps. I had to go back to eating on earth with everyone else the next day. But I sat there and looked around at all those classy people, and I finally got over my grandfather's curse. He thought everything after Russia was shit. But I finally saw that for some people things were better than ever. That was the night I decided that money could make you happy.”

“It sounds like a religious experience,” she said. She stood up, and they carried the chair between them back into the shop proper, where everything gleamed and posed, ready at the drop of a hat to double in price. It was very still and very clean, as if the furniture itself found the thought of customers distasteful. They came well-screened, by appointment only. Rita plunked the chair down next to the plant, and Peter eyed it suspiciously, ready to fidget again. But he made no move. Apparently Rita had put it just where it ought to be.

“Well, does it?” she asked him.

“Does what?”

“Money make you happy.”

“Oh, who knows,” he said, dismissing it now. It was only a road through a boy's small town. Rita walked him to the door and decided to drop it and let him go. Money wasn't really what he meant. She knew it was more the feel of the best. Peter would have been just as glad if going first-class were free, and he didn't care if everyone had a piece. Money to him was not the means of protection and isolation, and thus it never crossed his mind to want a room like Scrooge McDuck's. What made him happy was nice things, and as for money pure and simple, that was all in people's heads.

“Happy I don't trust,” Peter said, opening the door and closing it again, because he wasn't finished. It was as if he'd followed her train of thought. “That's what people used to be in my grandfather's day, and it made them dopey and got them pumped by a firing squad. What I want to be is”—and he widened his eyes and held his breath for a philosophical breakthrough, then went on—“okay. That's all.”

“Well,” she said, “don't worry. You're okay.”

“Nick's come back, you know.”

“I'm glad.”

“I still don't know where he's been. And whoever it was, they must have gone easy on him, because he doesn't seem to hurt.”

She felt a little woozy for a second, but held her ground. She didn't hurt, either, she would have said. What was strange was knowing more than Peter, about Sam first, and then about her and Nick on Saturday. Peter didn't know it, but
she'd
come back, too. Not all the way yet, and not from the same place, and not to him, but she was three days full of her own free world and getting better and better.

“Nick's okay, too,” she said.

“We all are. I have the pictures to prove it.” He winked. He opened the door for real and slipped out, and she watched him bound across the curb to his car like Gene Kelly, wild with anticipation, as if a slew of lunches were a polo match or a fox hunt. But he stopped in his tracks. Something had dawned on him, and he sang out, “Rita!” She stuck her head out. He turned around again, and he looked forlorn and caught short, as if he were going to ask for carfare. His big gray Russian eyes, she thought, are so transparent. “I forgot to ask you,” he said, “do you need me to do anything?”

“No. I'm taking the afternoon off.”

“Terrific. Let the answering service run the place for a while. They'll get more done if we leave them alone. Go buy yourself something.”

“Oh, do I have to,” she said. And waving vaguely, she shut the door without even finding out. He thinks I work too hard, she thought as she walked back to her table and her list of things to do. Maybe she did, but she didn't mind. Four or five hours a day, eight or nine in a pinch like Peter's accident—those were the hours she had to spare, and if she gave over another couple or three to Varda's room, even then she had enough time. She'd be better off in West Covina at three, she knew, because she was going to work till she had to leave, eating Hey's food right out of the tinfoil.

She moved the picture and gave it a last long look before turning away, and it still reminded her more of the party Sunday night than it did the far past when she'd first arrived. Luckily for this brief image, the three of them were laughing like old friends, but as a matter of fact they weren't then, not all three. Sunday night they were. All through the party, they darted back and forth like the Marx Brothers, aloft on a separate level of buzz and jazz from the eighty honored guests. They mugged each other from the middle of different conversations. And when they came together to huddle, they teased one another with the gossip they'd picked up, like kids with trading cards. Peter had it harder than Rita and Nick, because he was the star, so a lot of what went on among them privately was to keep him feeling easy. Hey, ordinary-looking except for a black sliver of eyeliner, glided up to them with a tray of canapés, and said, “If the three of you don't start behaving, you're not going to get invited out anymore.” They chorused back, “Who cares?” And Peter said, “It only means more for us.”

He gave a party like the Queen of Hearts. The delivery men had been in and out all day, bribed with steelworkers' wages to do it all day Sunday. The living room was reconceived in brilliant reds, with lacquered furniture and screens and lattices and, facing each other across a white sand garden, a pair of opium beds pillowed in peacock silk. What was taken out to make room had been redistributed around the house, adding to the clutter Peter did for a living, and some other things had found their way back to the shop. From where she sat now at her worktable, Rita could pick out chairs and sofa, a chest and a garden seat that had shaken off the air of home and taken on, along with prices that could bring on a nosebleed, the polish of custom goods. Nobody cared if a chair had done time in Crook House. Or no, Rita thought, that's not quite right. They cared like crazy. It was that they didn't consider it secondhand, a thing that had lost its newness and first-bloom flash. Because Peter had actually sat in it, included it once in the floor plan of his life, it got priceless fast, like Cardinal Richelieu's bed, or Carole Lombard's.

She wasn't all the way over Nick. Not the way he'd said he was over Sam, as if it were something not just done in the past and faded but done as well by someone he used to be for a little while who'd passed like a fad. Rita didn't push herself. It worked, thank God, in the secret room, and their making love, such as it was, took away a layer of poses that had run their course and at the same time called a spade a spade. She wasn't going to stop being drawn by certain types—she expected as much, and, if pressed, she took a little to be polite, a lot more if the type was human, too. But she didn't think love had anything to do with it. So all she had to do was get over
wanting
Nick. She could love him as much as she wanted, as long as she didn't mix him up with the class of lover that, take it or leave it, ended up in her bedroom.

And what about Rusty Varda and Frances Dean? Hadn't she cut out a valentine to put around their picture? Somehow it didn't seem like a contradiction to Rita. She still believed in the usual thing, to a point. Two people who were struck by the moon at the same time, maybe in the same dance hall, or like Garbo coming off the train through the steam, when she catches her first glimpse of the count—two people like that still went through love like visionaries on a quest. Rita allowed a little room just in case, with an attitude not unlike Pascal's wager about the slim chance for true love. It was Paradise enough if you could get it. Nevertheless, she declared herself through with being taken in by what her lovers
said
, this after so many years of men who thought they were telling the truth and always being nice. Rita wasn't looking now. Getting the wrong idea about Nick was a warning she didn't ignore. She'd fooled herself and gotten a knock and a couple of bruises and then come out the other side in one piece. She meant to stay that way.

Gee, she thought as she peeled off a couple of slices of red roast beef, I've gotten as hard as nails. She wondered if she even had it in her still to sob at the drop of a hat in a movie. Maybe she'd have to make do with less, with a lump in her throat and an aura of prickly heat behind the eyes. Now that she preferred her feelings in a different key, she was as partial as Hey to the notion of the three of them. And she had to admit, stealing a glimpse, that the picture was right for what they did best, standing in a circle laughing, clustered about with pearls and jewels. All the same, she knew she couldn't stay on much longer at Crook House. She would have found a place of her own already if it hadn't been for the work to do in the treasure room. The three of them, she thought, had a fifty-fifty chance of remaining what they were, but only if the pressure was off from too much forced togetherness. She didn't have the same good cheer about desert islands as she did about country houses looming in English parks—with the latter, at least, you often got a town house thrown in in Belgravia, so that Monday to Friday you lived in the world, and weekends alone in Utopia.

What do you suppose we are? she asked herself idly, arranging raw vegetables on a bed of lettuce as if it were going to be photographed. Not a family. The mere idea made her queasy. Not a ménage à trois, she was pretty sure, though here she wasn't certain how broad the term might be. She thought all three had to fuck with the other two to qualify, and, technically, didn't they mostly do it in the same bed at the same time? If Peter and Rita and Nick were something else again, it got its character from what they broke down to, which was two plus one. Looked at that way, she reasoned, Peter and Nick were the title bout, the star-crossed pair, the group of two that Freud, in the dryest remark of the twentieth century, called a marriage. Rita had nothing to do with it. Part of what they were as a trio, then, was as the bearers of a sort of irrelevance one to another. Or are there three of us, she thought flippantly, because you need at least three to keep one honest? Not that anyone cared if you were honest, and knowing that, you had to either laugh or cry, and you needed three to laugh as well. One to tell the joke and two to hold their sides and whinny. Two because an audience of one was not enough for comedy. One would always laugh to be polite.

But who knows for sure, she wondered at last, staring at the plate with a sudden loss of appetite. She might be all wrong about the three of them, in which case she'd better work it all out tomorrow and make it make sense. Right now she couldn't be bothered. Rita was down to the wire. She still had dozens of major works to get rid of out of the room behind the mirror, but she had a thing to do at three that superseded everything else. It had come out of nowhere and pulled the last three days right out from under her. But she'd known as soon as she made the connection that she couldn't back out of it. It called for hair-trigger timing. She'd pulled apart Aladdin's cave, and now she had to face the genie.

Hey had let it out. When the party was all over and the caterers had left and Nick and Peter had staggered up to bed, she stood in the kitchen and did a double check while Hey counted the silver and tied it up in black felt pouches. When did Frances Dean get bundled out of Crook House for good? she asked him. Forty-three, forty-four, he wasn't certain which. And where did they take her? West Covina. Where was that? Out Route 10, in the middle of nowhere. Why so far? Publicity. They both were talking to pass the time. She wouldn't even have said that Frances Dean was on her mind, though she must have been, what with the party and all. As she and Hey chatted, Rita had begun to think Frances Dean would have fit in nicely in a catered crowd in evening dress, lying back in a vamp's repose on an opium bed—white skin, skimpy dress, no makeup except a smear of red on the lips, the blue-gray circles under the eyes. No one would have guessed it, but a part of Rita identified with the tale of Frances Dean. The helpless girl with the saucer eyes and needle tracks was at the mercy of things, like Rita used to be when she was in love. Listless, given to dreaming, caught without past or future. Frances Dean had engineered her very own silent film to live in. So had Rita, and the only difference was that hers at least had been a serial, an episode at a time, with breathing room in between. Frances's went on and on, the theater darkened day and night.