The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  “I’m going to have to pretend I lost one,” she said, holding up the other earring and waving it like a little bell. “I can’t imagine what you’re going to say.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to pretend I found one,” he said.

  For Ben and Sam, perhaps, it was the story of a relationship safely gotten through, from beginning to end. Sam found out later that everyone in LA had a story about a star, but it didn’t diminish the one Ben told. The last scene especially, the pair of earrings, seemed to spirit them away to a green and lofty place where kings and mystics sat and watched sunsets. The present was the only sort of happy ending anyone ever got, and Ben had got it once with Marilyn Monroe. Only for an instant, but so what. That was part of the deal. “Don’t ever lose it, because I’ll know,” she said as she drove off, wagging her finger, but Sam wasn’t so interested in the telepathy that went with the good-luck charm. If her ghost still followed it around, all well and good—she was the sort of angel you could use in LA. But Sam cared more than anything to do a scene like that himself. Offhand, uninhibited, safe in an ordinary place on a nothing day.

  He knew, though, that he couldn’t just go out looking for the street life’s happy endings. They just fell out that way every now and again. Like the night Ben told him all of this, as they were getting ready to go to bed, which they almost never did at the same time. Stripping out of their clothes, going in and out of the bathroom. They lounged like warriors in a tent. Sam knew, even as he listened, that he would never be so glad again to hear a story. He could see he was the only one Ben had ever told it to. Whatever there was to know was there. But he held himself off from naming it in case he should stray into sentiment. And then they went to sleep, and the past came and took the moment with it. From then on, the night of the Marilyn story played itself over and over in his head and left him thirsty and heartsick. He couldn’t see why it didn’t make him happy, as it had when it happened. He even thought to wonder if Ben felt the same when he thought of Marilyn Monroe. But he never asked, afraid that, if he was wrong, it would prove he was all alone.

  It all fell apart without warning on Norma Place. A year and a half went by like nothing, and then Ben disappeared. He didn’t come home one night, and Sam didn’t pay it any mind, not then or the next day or the next. On the fourth day, he took the MG and went out looking. When he came back several hours later, there were cops all over, in the house and out, and Sam took off. This time he wasn’t wearing Jockey shorts at all. All he had was an MG with an APB out on it. He drove to San Diego for a couple of days and hustled, got beaten up one night by a sailor he looked at funny, and came back to LA and bought counterfeit plates from a mechanic who took it out in trade. He wouldn’t admit that Ben was dead, almost as if it were none of his business, part of the bargain of having no ties to each other. Ben wasn’t coming back—that was clear enough—but Ben was all right. Sam regained his equilibrium by calling it a stroke of luck. Ben must have ended up on a yacht or a Lear jet, and somebody big, a magnate or an oil baron, was even now groaning under him and throwing out twenty dollar bills like streamers. Bound for the South Seas. Back to the spell of the four elements. Once he knew that, Sam’s part was easy. He only had to go about his affairs as if nothing had happened. And nothing had, he told himself as he waited on the street. In a whole year and a half, not one thing.

  Somehow, he would decide later on, it all served as a prelude to Rusty Varda. He had been in training for the main event since he left New York. And when the ink-blue limousine purred down Sam’s block that morning, Hey at the wheel, in the back seat a cloud-eyed man, absurdly old, old enough to be the father of the men Sam tricked with, he tingled with the feeling that his own story had arrived. It was all luck. He never showed up on the street before 5:00 P.M., timing himself for the cocktail crowd, but now he needed extra cash to pay the security deposit on his new apartment. Ben had been gone two weeks. By Sam’s reckoning, it was about time for a limousine. Hey stopped and got out. It wasn’t clear to Sam that the old man had given any signal. The deal was simple—a hundred dollars for the afternoon at Mr. Varda’s stately home, sex not required. He hadn’t eaten lunch, had he? Good. And could he swim? Of course.

  He’d said it before and since, that doing it was sometimes like being on film, but at Crook House he could almost hear the film whir in the camera. Varda sat in a wicker chair in the garden, facing the pool. He wore a beret. A round table had been set for lunch, and Sam saw that only one person was going to be eating. It was all arranged like a still life—peach roses, glasses for claret and champagne, a raft of forks on one side of the plate, spoons on the other. Hey reappeared, changed into butler’s gear.

  “Now then, Sam,” Rusty Varda said, “you can go ahead and take your clothes off.” The voice professional and direct as a doctor. He’d said nothing in the car coming home. Sam had sat up front with Hey, and he wondered if the old man wasn’t afflicted with the aftereffects of a stroke, his vocal chords pulled like the lines on a switchboard. But it must have been the no-man’s-land in the car that did it, he decided as he faced the wicker chair and unbuttoned his pants. Because this guy had the script down pat.

  “A little faster. Fling them off and go for a swim. When you’re finished, come out and have lunch.”

  And Sam kicked off his engineer’s shoes and turned and dived in a single motion, as if he weren’t going to listen to any more. As there wasn’t a time limit set, he took deep breaths and swam the length of the pool underwater until he was all by himself. When he dolphined up and flipped himself onto the deck like a lifeguard, he heard the next set of orders as if they were no more than street noises, a radio turned on in a dream. He still did what he was told, but he began to think it was what he would have done anyway.

  “Now don’t dry off. I want you to shake your head like a dog and then sit down. Hey will bring you lunch.” He spoke in a sort of whisper now, as if he didn’t want to get in the way of Sam’s concentration.

  He sat at the table and stared out at the beating city and the sun. He wasn’t paid a hundred to ask, but he thought about men who wanted their sex in a three-act play. They dressed their hookers up as chambermaids and pleaded to be spanked. They wanted the door to the bedroom locked by a state trooper, and they fucked with the uniform first. The funny thing was, Sam couldn’t say exactly what the fantasy was here because it was very like his own. Watched and served and left alone, all because he was beautiful. He had a cold green soup, a slice of salmon, then—one right after the other, more and more rapidly, it seemed—sweetbreads, salad, and a Black Forest cake so rich it gave him a headache. He let his belly go slack and leaned back and shut his eyes, listening to the clink of the dishes as Hey cleared away. When he opened his eyes, wondering what it was time to do now, the wicker chair was empty. He suddenly felt exposed, and he put on his clothes fast.

  Hey proposed, driving him back to Hollywood, that he set aside one day a week. Mr. Varda, he said, would like to use him again. Did they have a number where they could reach him? No. Sam didn’t have a phone back then because he didn’t want his whole name on file with the phone company, where someone could trace him. Sam was all the name he had any use for. He tried to get gritty with Hey—“You could sure use a little, couldn’t you? Doesn’t it give you blue balls to watch a naked guy all afternoon?”—to loosen him up and get some information. They didn’t hate each other, yet. Sam could talk smut to him and keep it easy and funny. Hey thought it was cute, or he thought it didn’t matter, since a hustler’s career lasted about as long as a ballet dancer’s, and people who did it didn’t grow up till afterwards. So at the beginning they played, driving back and forth in the car, and Hey talked bitchy and teased him, too. But he stayed tight with the information. To him, Rusty Varda was an artist, even if they’d taken the film out of his camera. The nude scene at Crook House was a movie. It couldn’t be put into words.

  But Sam began to figure it out himself, even without Hey’s help. After all, he did the very
same thing, pool and lunch, every Friday afternoon for five months—Friday perfect because it gave his cock a rest before the weekend, when it went into fourth gear. Varda gave him a few more directions—slow down his walk to the table, don’t look at Hey—but after a while Sam was on his own. The scene had something to do with a moment from Varda’s own life, Sam decided as he floated on his back or buttered his roll, and Sam was some man who’d obsessed him once. Someone he’d lost.

  Then, a month or two into it, he changed his mind and thought instead he was meant to be Varda himself, and the scene at the pool was a picture postcard of LA success. He knew by then the bare bones of Varda’s film career. The immigrant juggler who landed on his feet had bought a whole mountain of his own and built a villa. For forty or fifty years, he held his wide-screen perch above the race of the city, but his fullest memory of it all must have been the seven-course days of his youth. So he made this minor little scene of himself, Sam thought, a couple of hours a lifetime ago when nothing particular happened. It was just the kind of time Sam would have plucked out of his own life. He came in the end to play it like Shakespeare, though of course without the words, which he didn’t really miss. After all, he did a lot of things as if in a silent movie—streetwalks and sex and drives in his car—so he had a technique to fall back on.

  Sam didn’t get tired of the show, but Varda became so still in his chair, he seemed half the time to be in transit between planets. No direction in weeks. No chitchat. When the menu began to repeat, Sam felt as if he’d used up this production—the play was too good for it. Five minutes before the end, one Friday in November, he called across to Varda as he spooned up his dessert. Hey was waiting with a tray of iced coffee just outside the door to the dining room. Sam felt it was mostly himself still happening here, still playing it.

  “Mr. Varda, do you ever look at your pictures?”

  To look at him, Varda had to stop looking off. There was a pause in which they waited for the stars to draw back into the planetarium.

  “No,” he said, “I hardly remember them.” But it wasn’t modest of him to say so, and he wasn’t pleading the special case of old age. He had no wish to disparage them, he seemed to say, but he himself had gone on long ago. Sam knew two things about Frances Dean—he’d found them out, from asking around in bars—she was a pinup Cinderella, and she went to pieces at Crook House, where they kept her half-asleep for years. The change in her was the reason he had left his films behind, because it was like staring at a dead child to see her on the screen. Sam was guessing. “Where have you seen them?” Varda asked, glad to talk about it if Sam cared so much.

  “No, I never go to the movies. I can’t sit still.” He put down his spoon, though he hadn’t had half enough raspberry mousse, because he had a prince’s manners when he was talking about himself. “I only meant—what do you do all day? Not including Friday.”

  “I juggle,” Varda said, and though Sam knew it was an evasion, that he didn’t do anything, the wand of the weather vane had moved, and the wind was from another quarter. How about a performance then? Sam asked politely, but as if to point out that he’d done enough performing himself and had to be spelled. Varda grinned, called for his box of props, and made his way to the pool. He was wearing his ice cream whites.

  Hey could date his hostility to the moment he set down the iced coffee on a wrought-iron bench and went across the terrace to Frances Dean’s room, to the walk-in closet where the juggling things were stored. He never stopped feeling threatened after that. Varda did a warm-up with three green balls, then Hey threw him the fourth, and they made a perfect circle in the air. Then one ball leapt about as he tapped it with his shoulder. He did rings next, seven or eight flipped up at once, so that in profile it looked like a team of bicycles. Anyone would have thought, watching him light three candles, about to spin and toss them like sticks and not snuff a single flame—you would have thought he was seducing Sam. But it was the other way around. Sam urged him on, and when Sam laughed to see five pieces of fruit go up in a circle and make a wreath revolving in the air, the laugh brought the morning glories open. He was standing, still naked, in front of Varda, cheering him on. Varda looked through the juggle he was doing as if it were a curtain. And Hey brought the last tray in and poured the iced coffee in the sink.

  Well, before that he went to his room and got his Brownie Hawkeye. He stood in the dining room window, which was shaded by a tree, and snapped a half-dozen shots of the scene at the pool. Collecting evidence. He’d had enough of ballet to know the thunder and lightning were gathering force offstage. The two men outside faced each other through a circus act, hardly like two men at all. To Hey they were Beauty and Beast, princess and frog, and he knew which was which. Some great catastrophe followed on the heels of their coming together. Hey remembered the night Frances Dean took a razor to herself. Remembered it from the pictures in the papers, long ago when he was young and lived in South America. Crook House had a well of violence down in the core, he’d felt it the day he walked in, and it shot to the surface whenever it had to. But whatever was tremoring now, Hey planned to survive and not get arrested for it. He went back to his room and hid his camera under a pile of shirts. Then changed his mind, took the film out, and went and put it in the parrot’s cage deep in the sawdust. What else could he do? There was no point trying to stop it. This boy had come to take everything.

  And the boy didn’t even know it himself. Nothing irrevocable ever happened to him, after all. Two or three Fridays later, they started spending an hour in the steam after Sam did his scene, Varda wrapped in towels head to foot, and then an hour in bed. Sam lay there and let it happen and didn’t care. He knew whatever it was would come, and he was right. Because Varda said one day as he stroked Sam’s skin, out of who knew what set of erotic associations—“There’s a treasure buried in Crook House.” It was as if Sam had known it already and only needed reminding. And week after week he begged for more from Rusty Varda. But as it was the one thing he had to be coquettish about, Varda stretched the story out and rambled on about Frances Dean. Still, in another month Sam might have learned the secret of the mirrored door. Bad luck for him, it ended before he even knew what the treasure was.

  It was so much on the tip of his tongue that he knew, ten years later, that Rita had a piece of it in her Samsonite. What and where—that is what he waited ten years to go after, and he was like a man serving time. As for the thing going wrong when he was right on the brink of it, there was no surprise in that. Rusty Varda died in his arms, of course. One moment holding on to Sam for dear life, the next a bag of puppet’s bones. And Sam got dressed and ran downstairs. Then crept back up and waited till it was the same time as usual. He was no use to Varda now. Varda wouldn’t want him in trouble. He went to the kitchen to get Hey, said he was ready, and Hey looked over his shoulder from the parrot’s cage and guessed, just like that. He pressed the intercom to Varda’s room and politely said his name. He looked like he had enough evidence to hang.

  Sam ran out. He crashed downhill through the kitchen garden and landed in the yard of the next house below. No one screamed, though a servant here and there came to the window and stared until he’d passed on through. It didn’t matter, not this one any more than Ben, as long as he didn’t stop. When he got home, off a bus up Sunset, he decided not to bother with his apartment. It wasn’t that he was out of time. As he climbed into the MG, he knew he could have gone up and packed. He had left almost three hundred in cash leafed in the pages of a Gideon Bible. And a set of barbells and a tape-deck. But what the hell. He had a hundred in his pocket from Hey, delivered as usual in advance, in an envelope. The earring was where it had always been, in the glove compartment. Always left behind whenever the car was rifled, because nobody wanted just one. He drove east, toward New York. And didn’t return for two and a half years, by which time he had no past. As far as anyone knew, his second time in LA was his first. He might never have come back at all, except there was a treasure in his h
ead.

  6

  Peter walked out to the pool, stark naked. Rita and Nick, laughing like kids, were bent over something on the table at the far end. Peter struck a meditative pose, as if he were getting his wind in rhythm before throwing himself into a game, tennis or track and field.

  “Didn’t anybody hear me?” he asked a little wearily. They looked up as if he’d found them making love. They moved in front of the table like curtains and stood together side by side, so he wouldn’t see.

  “What are you doing up?” Nick wanted to know.

  “I got up to find out why no one was paying attention to me. I bet I hollered for ten minutes.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible, Pete,” Rita said sensibly, looking up to their bedroom window as if to measure the distance. “We were right here.”

  “You will both be glad to know,” he said—and he looked as if he’d decided he’d rather not be naked now, but there were things he’d come downstairs to say, and he’d say them first—“I’m getting up for good. I’ve put away my hot water bottle and my flexible straw. I want to have a party.”

  There was a slash of red on his right forearm, inside it the purple lines where he’d slit to get at the poison. It hurt, but not a lot.

  “When?” said Nick.

  “Tomorrow night.” It was Saturday morning, ten after ten.

  “Who do you plan to invite who won’t have plans? Hey and Rita and me?”

  “Among others. It’s a business party, to say that I’m back in business. We’ll ask all my clients. If they’ve made other plans, well that’s all right. That’s up to them.” It wasn’t all right at all. Peter smiled, because he knew he was setting up a crazy test. At least, the smile went on to say, he wasn’t testing Rita and Nick. “I want it very simple. Quiche and salad and mousse.”