The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  “You look like you just blew in from the East,” he said, grinning. “I can always tell, because you look as if everything here had a price tag on it, and you can’t afford it.”

  “It’s not that, Peter. I’m afraid they won’t take traveler’s checks, and I have to have that little chest of drawers under the window.”

  “The lady has good taste, I see.” He was full of mirth, but he was looking sleek, his yellow hair cut close. He always looked like he’d just finished posing for a portrait six feet by four, but today he was an Art Deco poster, cool-eyed and angular. Not too thin, like he used to be in New York. No hunger about him at all.

  “Maybe I could take it out in trade,” Rita said, “because I see now I have to have it. I can dust and do ironing and run the vacuum around. How long would it take me to earn that chest?”

  “Oh, about three years. But you know, you can’t eat a chest. They just sit there and hold up ashtrays.”

  They were so glad to be together again they were flying. Nick appeared with champagne, slopping it over his fingers, and they clinked glasses in a solemn toast before they went on laughing. Rita knew they had drunk to her arrival, but they also seemed to have paid their respects to the moment when they’d all three finally hooked up. It had taken them years and years.

  “Go away now, Peter,” she said. “You’re busy. I’m okay. Nick is just who I needed. He’s telling me about his grandfather.”

  “‘A Tale of the Old West,’” Nick said.

  “Look,” Peter said to her, “I have to talk to you right away; Nick, go find Jennifer and tell her the house is fabulous. I’m going to take Rita for a ride.”

  “Okay, Buddy.” Nick took Peter’s glass and poured what was left in his own. He lifted it to them both and began to move away. Then he called back over his shoulder. “What are the dogs’ names? Poo-poo and Tinkle, right?”

  “Pyramus and Thisbe, and they’re angels, so don’t tease them.”

  Peter led Rita through the room, and she noticed that everyone stopped to watch her. She understood they were keeping their antennae out for Peter, and they scrutinized her as something new about him. But it was odd. In New York, she was accustomed to centering herself in group after group at a party, until there was no line anymore between her energy and the party’s. It tended to hide the fact that she was shy. There were perhaps thirty people in this room; but since it could have held sixty, the groups were islanded. As Rita and Peter threaded among them, she felt a whir and crackle around the two of them like a field of force. No one here, she realized, knew she talked too much. No one was weary of hearing she was wounded at love and so would hold out hope for her. Wouldn’t have to hope. No one suspected her of less self-regard than the average. It made her feel fine, free to file for a new passport. It made everyone else seem easier to deal with, a little less than met the eye. She liked it that she’d been up three hours longer than anyone in the room. To make the point stick, she hadn’t changed her watch yet.

  When they left the living room, they went down several steps into the library. And there, suddenly, was Los Angeles again, this time through a mammoth plate window that showed how nervous it must have made someone to give up a whole room to books. Yet the books went on and on, rising to ten or twelve feet and scaled by ladders on tracks. But the first thing Rita saw was the swing. It was suspended on ship’s ropes from the ceiling, more like a rickshaw with no wheels, or a sedan chair. It was painted, lacquered, carved, and beaded with stones like jade or lapis. From the Orient for sure, but Rita would have passed if asked what country. The rest of the room was more or less an English library. A Chippendale partners’ desk and wing chairs by the fire, sherry and pipes, and a half-acre library table for magazines and bronzes. With this wedding cake of a swing chandeliered in the middle.

  “What is it?” she asked, as he helped her up the matching portable stairs, a sort of jeweler’s stepladder. She sat back plumply in the swing. It was padded in down pillows.

  “It’s a maharaja’s seat,” Peter said, hopping in next to her, the force of him sending the swing into motion. “It goes on top of an elephant. Pretend we’re riding in a steamy forest in Rangoon.”

  “I can’t. I’ve never been there.”

  “You’ve seen movies,” he said, permitting no excuse. “Pretend.”

  They went back and forth above the refinements of the library. The sensation of gliding in the air while sitting cross-legged was like riding a flying carpet. As she looked down, it seemed to Rita that a scene out of Jane Austen could materialize here, which never happened in New York. Emma and Mr. Knightly reading bits out of books to each other, years before they are ready to be in love. Rita looked up. As to the view, yes the view was lovely, though not as nice, she thought, as Peter’s and Nick’s in Bel-Air. She wondered if she was being discriminating or overly partisan. What, after all, did she know about the view? She’d never had one of her own.

  “I can’t believe I left New York,” she said.

  “You left it years ago, Rita. Are you in Rangoon?”

  “A little. Peter, what am I going to do here?”

  He sighed by way of answering, and fell back on one elbow into the cushions. The intervening years hadn’t touched him. He would always be young to look at, Rita thought, and then one day go old in a flash. It had been the same with his grandfather. The only clue to Peter’s given age was his good taste, which got rarer and subtler with the years—with the months, even. People with no taste might suppose he was still in college.

  “What you have to do to begin with,” he said, “is take care of me.”

  “Are you sick?” she asked dryly. “Because if you aren’t, I can’t imagine what needs taking care of.”

  “Rita, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

  “Aren’t you happy?” she wanted to know, because if he wasn’t, what with Nick and Bel-Air and houses like this to put together, then nobody was.

  “I want to be an artist.”

  Now? If you’re an artist, she thought, you’d have known before now. Because you can’t just become one, unless you become that kind. By which she meant a con man with a gimmick, someone who was better at a gallery opening than he was all alone in a studio, who worked on the principle that the buyer was too cowed by “Art” to call his bluff about all those watery splotches. Rita didn’t see why anyone would want to be that sort of artist if he’d already made it as a decorator. Decorating was as much of a con as you could wish for.

  “What kind?”

  “A painter, I think,” he said. They floated on these pillows like angels on a painted ceiling, so art was as real as anything here. “I want to start at the beginning. I want to start lousy.”

  “But what about decorating? Are you giving up money?”

  “No,” he said, sitting up again and looking urgent. “That’s where you come in. I can’t trust anyone else. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ll make you a lot of money, too.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said, putting two and two together, “and I don’t like it.”

  “I want you to work for me, Rita. All you have to do is spend money.”

  “No, Pete, please don’t make me. I wouldn’t know what to do, and I’m not dumb enough to start something new.”

  “Rita,” he said, “you’re the world’s greatest shopper.” He gripped her by the shoulders to buck her up, the producer sending the ingénue on at the last minute. Knock ’em dead, Alice Faye. “And you know why? You’re totally dispassionate. You notice what’s good for its own sake. Not because you want it.”

  It was true. Her happiest hours were spent adrift in stores. But it was at best an ambiguous virtue, she always thought, the quality of coming home from Altman’s empty-handed.

  “All you have to do is market it,” Peter concluded. “It’s your talent.”

  Rita had done everything. Opened a restaurant, edited a magazine, modeled, acted, taken in boarders, and minded ruinous children. She’d held a dozen ni
ne-to-five jobs under Devil’s Island conditions or worse. She could do this. But she was alert enough to know she had to heed what it said about her and Peter. She couldn’t just take care of him because, for one thing, there was Rita to think of, here for her final assault on the future. Helplessly, she spent a moment wondering how pleased Nick would be if she came to Peter’s rescue. A memory of New York went through her head like a stack of snapshots being spread out on a table. On an old pecan wood tea table she used to have, one she gave away last week. With Peter, she knew she couldn’t look for the sort of way out that worked in New York, where she wouldn’t answer the telephone for weeks to shake someone off. New York, until hours ago the works of the clock of the world, was time past. The job sounded good. But it had come so much out of nowhere that she hadn’t had a chance to want it. She’d determined not to move until she knew what she wanted.

  “I’m sorry, Rita,” he said. “I’ve got it all figured out, and you haven’t even unpacked. You get a vacation first. Have you met Hey?”

  “He picked me up at the airport.”

  “Of course. Did he tell you about himself?”

  “No,” she admitted. She appeared to have evoked a contrary response out of Hey. She gathered he was everyone’s dream of a long talk.

  “He’s not very good with women,” Peter assured her. “It’s because he’s reincarnated, he says, and he’s very close to his last life, when he was a woman. You must get him to talk about it.”

  “I thought he used to be a dancer.”

  “That was in this life,” Peter said, having had more practice at making the distinction. “He told you about that?”

  “Nick did.”

  “Hey never talks about it. He’s closer to the lady he used to be.”

  Rita supposed she wouldn’t get to Square One until people started telling her about themselves. When she’d decided to move to Los Angeles, she was fed up with her friends’ predictable fads and self-delusions. She had heard the story ten times over of the wife-beater and the new girl who was different. Or the one about taking a house in the Hamptons to air one’s head for the summer. Diets and sun signs and meditative breathing were only the tip of the iceberg when Rita got cornered over coffee. Was she a cynic? She’d always thought not, because she went on listening year after year, long after she’d seen the repeating patterns in people’s fuckups and seemed to know to the day how long someone would still be sleeping with someone else. She’d never yet heard anyone out about a previous life. At least she could break new ground.

  “Peter,” she said, looking over his shoulder, “there’s a photographer outside in the garden taking pictures of us.” She said it as something of a warning, not because she thought it was the C. I. A. but because he might want to brush his hair or be seen with somebody classier than she. Besides, the photographer ruined everything. He took a cheap shot of the ride in the elephant swing and dispersed in the process the old, walled dreamworld of Peter and Rita.

  “Oh?” Peter asked absently, not even glancing around. “That’s just the newspaper people. You could be someone important. The real photographers are taking pictures of the house. Jennifer’s a little insecure. She needs both kinds.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Nobody. You’ll meet her. It’s really my house, of course, but as she paid for it, I let her live in it.”

  Peter spoke breezily enough, as if he didn’t really mean it, but Rita knew what he was getting at. Back in New York, she’d always told him decorators got by on two lines. At the first appointment, they walk into the place and shudder audibly and announce: “Everything has to go.” And when it’s done, and they come back for a highbrow occasion, just another guest, they get a fix on the horrible new chairs and gasp: “What have they done to my room?” Everything rode on your attitude. This beautiful silky house had taken a year, Rita supposed. It must be strange to turn it over to someone else, she thought, even someone with the right to have human designs on it.

  “The Bel-Air house is a dream,” she said, bringing things around to something of his own.

  “If we ever finish it,” he said. “You think I can be a painter?”

  “I don’t know, Peter. I guess if you paint long enough.”

  “But how do I know how good I’ll be?”

  You can’t, she thought about halfway through his question. A ripple of irritation ruffled the surface, and she automatically paused to let it pass. She’d never been angry at Peter, or, rather, she’d never said so. Other people, yes. She knew the only way around anger was right through the middle of it. But she’d long ago decided to go easy on Peter, even if she risked his behaving like a child. She knew from the beginning they might get locked into a game that got more unworkable the more it meant well. Then they would end up enemies. So she’d had to monitor spoiling Peter, all along keeping it to herself because the people she knew would call it queer. She made it work. But she knew already that something had to give if they did business together.

  “It’s none of your affair how good you’ll be. Painters paint.” I don’t want to be serious, she thought, I don’t want to. She’d been in the maharaja’s seat long enough now to have given it a place in the pile of snapshots. She wanted the talk light like the air that fanned them; for here they were, together again for the first time in years. She’d planned on a talk in a private language for the first meeting with Peter, so what were they doing going on about Art?

  “Well, I’d rather be good than not,” Peter said. “I’ll be able to tell, after all. I can’t stand second-rate art, Rita, and neither can you.” He turned his face now in the direction of the camera, as if he’d finally decided to cooperate. A string of pictures was taken as he went on. “Nick can. He says there’s room for amateurs, and they don’t do any harm. But you can’t trust the things he says these days.”

  “Why?” Rita asked, leaning closer because he was in profile. “What’s wrong-with Nick?”

  “Oh, Rita, who knows,” he said softly. “I think Nick’s in love.”

  2

  Peter’s Grandfather, Prince Alexander Kirkov, stood to inherit, among other more pedestrian properties which only generated rent, a summer estate that ran for a hundred and fifteen miles along the Black Sea. On Easter morning in 1912, when he was twenty-one, he opened a brassbound wooden box at the breakfast table in his parents’ palace in Saint Petersburg. Inside it was a jeweled horse and rider done up by the house of Fabergé, the horse carved from a single block of midnight jade, the horseman paved from head to foot in precious stones depicting him in the uniform of an officer in the Imperial Russian army. The hint was not lost on Alexander that the least the very rich could do was protect the fatherland. What with a grand tour and two seasons of yachting, though, he didn’t get around to enlisting until a couple of weeks before the unpleasantness at Sarajevo. He didn’t pay it any mind. While the Kaiser and the Czar—Willy and Nicky, the prep school kings—burned up the wireless, Alexander had a daily fitting for uniforms with the tailor his father kept in residence and spent a whole day in the cellars choosing a cartload of wine to take with him.

  He was blown away on the Eastern Front before the wine arrived. He spent the greater part of the First War being shuttled from one hospital to another and put back together, the doctors going in after more and more bits of iron and taking a turn at his ruined knees. He ended up in Paris for a couple of years, and by then he’d got almost everything out of order. He was all in one piece by then, but his head went. While the Revolution roared through Russia, he sat in a sunny window on the Ile St.-Louis, staring out and smiling, then seized with unaccountable fits of tears. His family was massacred, and he never knew. He got out of the clinic in 1919, and an exiled aunt and cousin gave him the number of his Swiss bank account. The balance was a trifle by a prince’s reckoning. The safe deposit box was full of nothing in particular. He moved to Brooklyn Heights and stared this time at the cliffs of Manhattan. He lived modestly ever after.

  The Imperi
al past came back to Alexander Kirkov in great operatic rushes over the years, like gleams of light in a swirl of fog. It was because the curtain rose unexpectedly one day in a downtown local train that Rita first met him. She was jiggling along, a copy of Town and Country open on her lap, reading how the world’s ten busiest women took care of their hair. On the facing page was an ad for a Parke-Bernet auction, and to announce an odd lot of fat-carated stones, it carried a photograph of the horse and rider in the brassbound box. Alexander Kirkov, standing above Rita and happening to glance down, let out a Cossack’s shriek and grabbed the magazine. Rita, a surreptitious reader of other people’s papers, had a certain sympathy in these matters, but this old man had gone too far. She got a grip on the Town and Country and chided him. He held on like Gangbusters. She was fingered as a Leninist and given a speech, some of it in Russian, about the summer parties on the Black Sea and a ballet that appeared to have been performed on the Dowager Empress’s train. Halfway through, he was weeping in her arms because she was the spit of his nanny, Tova, whose skin was like beaten cream. And so they ended up in Brooklyn, and she walked him home.

  A heavily draped apartment, burgundy velvet and tassels. With a sea of photographs in Art Nouveau frames on the piano, like the stills from a long run of The Cherry Orchard. Alexander Kirkov showed her what was left, the silver and enamels, as if to prove his claim on the horse and rider. The marquis who was selling it at auction and the Texan who would buy it were in collusion, as far as he was concerned. Common horse thieves. Rita walked about, open-mouthed. She had long ago given up on her own ancestry—the poor, she’d decided, because they had their hands full of immediate family, kept the dead buried—and was a pushover for the Russian’s stories about the vast prerogatives his people lived by, once upon a time. He unrolled for her the useless deeds and parchment titles and guided her finger through his family tree. She returned again and again.