The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  “Where did you get it?”

  “In there,” she said, not looking, not pointing.

  “Oh.” He sounded as if he hoped they’d be able to get through this without going into all of that. He knew it was his room waiting in the dark behind the mirror, but he felt just then no wish to explore it. He didn’t need to add another thing to his inventory, and though of course he couldn’t speak for Peter, he knew Peter could live without it, too. Rita could have it, for all Nick cared. Besides, she had some rights in the matter because, for the present, Frances Dean’s room was her room, and didn’t that lay a claim to everything in it, ghosts and all? Nick was prepared to abandon all logic. If Rita had come upon an old carved ring of Frances Dean’s in a medicine chest, or a tortoise comb that had fallen into a crevice, he and Peter would have insisted she keep it. It didn’t matter to him what was in that room. If she’d said it was corpses, that she was a vampire, he’d have scarcely taken it in. That was all on her own time, he would have reasoned. He was mad at himself. I am going to do this, he thought, so that Rita feels no crimes, no grief, no lonely nights, and no impediments to whatever it is she’s doing in here. When Nick gave people space, he didn’t take no for an answer.

  “Can I take a look inside?” he asked her.

  “Of course,” she said. She understood that she’d been deferred to. “But tell me, why did you bring the parrot? Or did the parrot bring you?”

  “You mean, did he give me the secret word? No. I never think to look for buried treasure. I’m more in the market to bury my own. I don’t know why the parrot’s here, but he came here by himself. Are there things in there that belonged to Rusty Varda?”

  “In a way,” she said evasively. “It’s a long story.” She was trying to make him more curious. He talked as if the secret room was nothing but a box of souvenirs, a jumble of cuff links and coins and yellowing letters.

  “So tell me about it,” he said appealingly, and she answered him with a sigh, “If you insist.” By now they were both in a wonderful mood. She beckoned him along, and she paused at the mirror’s edge to light two candles she took from a shelf. They entered the inner room. Close on her heels, Nick watched Rita screw a candle into a holder on a six-branch standing silver candelabrum. “Medieval,” Rita said, and nothing more. “The Bishop’s Treasury, Ely Cathedral, 1928,” it said in Varda’s diary. But Rita was in a hurry to tell it all, and she didn’t have time to identify things as they made their way. She scrambled over the crates and boxes like a mountain goat and slid around the Renaissance stone table and stopped at last in the sitting-room space at the far end, where she waited for Nick. He was right behind her most of the way, intent on her, oblivious to it, like Alice tailing the rabbit. But he was boggled in spite of himself by the sheer amount of things, and he paused to gape at the Chinese porcelains ranged, bargain-basement, on the stone table. By the time, he sat down in one of the great gilt chairs and looked over at Rita sitting at the cherry desk, the candle throwing light on the Varda diary, he was suitably out of breath.

  Rita began to talk by talking figures. It surprised her how much she’d filed them away in her head like a story. It was as if, with all the study and putting together and adding up columns, she’d been hearing the story piecemeal for weeks from Varda himself, and now she was spinning it out in the proper order. About the major acquisitions in the twenties, for instance—the Rembrandt, the Assyrian reliefs, the Shakespeare folios, the lion’s share of the china. Tailoring it to her audience, she dovetailed the money disbursed on black market art with the Bel-Air land Varda was selling off in lots for a profit of fifteen hundred, two thousand percent. At the same time, she worked in the highlights of the breakdown and long sedation of Frances Dean. It is like this in here, she seemed to say, because of what it was like out there in the house.

  And when the story began to be about the people and not the things, Nick could see Rita sifting the human dilemma out of the catalogue. She caught the thread of the other diary Varda never wrote down. And Nick saw for the first time who they were, the ghosts who haunted Crook House. Sometimes, Rita said, the hopheaded Frances was probably well enough to take a turn with Varda through the house. Now and then, leaning on his arm and gliding in the garden, she must have seemed once more the dreamy girl who’d been in movies. He was forever giving her presents, whenever she was alert enough to hold one in her hands. Here, Frances, have a Degas. Have a Tiffany bracelet. A sky blue dish from China. Anything she’d like, just to keep her here in the outside world. And she must have smiled a mile-wide smile from a silent from time to time, delighted by his attentions. To get through to her, Rusty Varda was glad to buy more and more. A daze was better than nothing. Most of the time, after all, she lay in her room, hospital-quiet, whistling through her lips from the bottom of the ocean.

  “It went on like that for twenty years,” Rita said admiringly, as if she was impressed by anyone who could stand time on its head like an hourglass, over and over, keeping things the same.

  “Why?” Nick asked. He seemed to want to hear a moral purpose, suspecting none at hand.

  “Because they loved each other, I guess. Well, he loved her.”

  “But it sounds so sad.”

  “Does it? I thought so too, at first, and now I don’t.” But she said it quickly, not expecting to be agreed with and anxious to get on. She cares too much, Nick thought. She appeared to believe that what it all came to—the secret room in the hill—was so outrageous it made all the rules. So what, Rita seemed to say, so what if she was drugged up in a stupor and the stuff was all stolen? Look at it. But then why was she breaking it up? She got quite grave when she told him the next step, the sending things back to their proper places. In part, perhaps, she was ashamed to be giving away goods that might by law be Nick’s and Peter’s. As to the contradiction, loving it so much and at the same time taking it apart, it didn’t seem odd to her. Varda had reached a romantic pitch as acute as Anna Karenina, and now it was time to take down the set. Rita was a great believer in things in their own time.

  “Of course,” she said, “I don’t give a real return address, so I don’t know what happens when something arrives. I even go to different post offices.” She got up from the desk, as if leaving the figures behind her, and went to the ice-white silk divan to sit down. “The only thing I’ve heard is a little paragraph in the Times this week, about a Toulouse-Lautrec that went back to the Detroit Museum. They had a reward of a thousand dollars, and they didn’t know who to send it to. I don’t care. I don’t want it. Somebody ought to give me a government grant to buy stamps, but that’s all.”

  Then silence. It was Nick’s move. “I’m calling the cops,” it just might be, or “You’re making this up,” or “You need help.” She’d said too much, she knew it—she’d left him with nothing to add or ask. He’s going to try to be nice, she thought with a pang, and all the while he’ll be throwing me out of the house. And for the first time she wondered: Would I prefer it if he got mad? She had a sudden picture of him throwing plates at her off the stone table, like a juggling act gone mad. Meanwhile, it was next to impossible to sit there plainly on the sleek divan looking spiritual, like Marie Antoinette awaiting the verdict, because she was up to her hips in silk cushions and felt like a tart. She should have stayed at the desk. In any case, she wouldn’t have believed what Nick was thinking.

  Whew, he said to himself as he watched Rita’s face. Who would have guessed there was so much story blowing about in Crook House? Something as flat as that, as uninvolved and empty of judgment. Not unmoved, though, by Varda’s courting of Frances Dean, and properly reeling from the magnitude of the loot. Nick was nevertheless more riveted by Rita than by anything else. She’s as lost in this as I am in Sam, he thought, and then he revised his opinion of a minute before that she’d gone too far. Compared with Sam, none of this was a bad thing. No one got hurt, either then or now, and now it was just a public works project, like planting trees by the freeway. Nick wished he had o
ne of his own. No wonder she’s not distracted half the time, he thought, like I am—her secret place isn’t a fantasy. His sudden picture of her was, by contrast to hers, as calm as a Dutch interior—a row of windows sending in bright light, and Rita there in a white silk dress, holding real things in her hand. Not a single cowboy going up in smoke.

  “Well?” she asked, breaking his reverie, as if to say how long was she supposed to wait.

  “But why are you so sad?” he asked her back. He was confused. Didn’t the treasure make her happy?

  “I’m not so sad,” she said, more angry than not, now that she thought of it.

  “Maybe it’s me. You looked a little hangdog when you went off to make the phone calls for the party.”

  “What do you want me to say, Nick? I was sorry we couldn’t spend the day together.”

  She was crystal clear. It wasn’t what she had in mind, but she’d talk about this if she had to. She didn’t bring it up.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, so was I.” And he thought: Hold it, I’m two steps behind and making an ass of myself. I’ll catch up in a minute.

  “Okay, so we’re both sad. Poor us. Let’s drop it.”

  “Are you mad?” he asked, still trying to gain time. Of course she was mad, but he hadn’t a clue why.

  “Only because I don’t think we’ll get anywhere talking about it.”

  “About what?” he asked, wincing now.

  “Us,” she said between her teeth, so slowly it ended in a long hiss. “How Rita feels about Nick.”

  At last he got it. For a moment more he tried to duck it, but it didn’t work—there was too much evidence falling all over itself in the wings like a troupe of clowns, waiting to tumble on. The last sixteen days, for instance, went down like a row of dominoes. Rita was his safety zone. While he rode out the hairpin turns of his feelings for Peter and Sam, he came back day after day to Rita, to steady himself. He was about to go sprawling. He’d tripped, he was in the air, and he thought in the long, drowning man’s moment before he hit the earth: I’ve gone crazy. Anyone else would have known by now, but not Nick, because loving had driven him crazy. And he turned on himself the moral rage he took such care to spare others—you’re no damn good, he thought, and you’ve thrown your life away on cheap little sideshows. The human things that were really happening went on and on without him. That, at least, is what the dread in his heart was signaling. But there was something else—though he might have denied it, too, if he hadn’t been locked up here—please, he thought, I don’t want to give this up yet. As if anything would listen to him anymore.

  “Just now,” he said, swallowing hard, as if his throat were sore from a sudden draft, “I can’t think of anything nice you might be feeling.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” she said. She wasn’t agreeing, she didn’t mean him. She meant that she wasn’t so far gone, that her heart was more her own than not.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “How will we go on, you mean.” She was following it all far better than he. Let her decide, he thought, because I’ve fucked it up enough. Whatever she wants. “The same as usual,” she said. “I’m not going to corner you in empty rooms and tear off my clothes. Now’s my chance, and look how pure of heart I am. I figure, even if we did it, if we ran away to Reno and made it legal, I’d still get over you after a while.” She leaned back on the sofa—sank in, really—and put her arms wide along the tops of the cushions. The flare-up was over. “We ought to know when we’re both well off,” she said with a light laugh. She smiled so winningly that even Nick couldn’t say for sure she’d been so sad. If we can just incorporate this, she seemed to say, in our easy way with each other, and laugh and tease and agree and agree, it will all go away. What she said next was born of irony, not heartache, and she did a small lift of her shoulders as if to laugh it off, even as she said it. “I’m a little in love with you is all.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “So I’ve gathered.”

  “It’s because of the last two weeks,” he said, beginning to get the thread of an idea. We spent too much time together, I knew it, he thought, and what Rita was feeling was stress. Fixing the blame on the course of situations, he put the whole thing in its place.

  “Not really, Nick,” she said. “It’s been so as long as I’ve been here. And it’s funny, because Peter and I have always been attracted to opposites. I’ve done a big business in failures myself. Men who’ve lost their shirts, or men who’ve settled down to let their lives run out in crummy jobs and four walls in Long Island City. You’re really not my type. But I saw you at the pool that day, your back was to me, and I thought: This one’s the one. Even though I knew right then you were out of bounds. Does it make me sound like a nut? It’s probably never happened to you.”

  “You’re wrong.” It happens all the time, he wanted to say, except it sounded so condescending. Sam was only his most fatal case of it. But its happening more than once didn’t make him better at it, needless to say. He took no shortcuts through the miseries.

  He stood up to go now, cutting it short for her sake. There was no point in making a spectacle of Rita’s feelings, now that he’d caught the drift. He had his own thinking to do, to make things right again if he could, and he thought he should leave her here by herself and thus let her know the room was hers and the secret safe with him. She stood up at the same time, to bustle about and prove she was a survivor. She meant to turn over the diary and accounts, for Peter and Nick to study at leisure. From now on, she thought, she was only an interim curator. They both stood up, then, to change the subject. If there had been a Rusty Varda masterpiece at hand—the little Rodin study for Atlas was on the desk, along with a folder of Napoleon’s letters, and the porcelain was visible out of the corners of their eyes, just out of reach—they might have fallen into a chat about art like a couple of tourists. But they were suddenly face to face and, like children warned against breaking a thing that is doomed the moment they’re warned, they fell into each other’s arms.

  They had so many motives they practically canceled each other out. He held her first to let her know he didn’t run from love. As for Rita, she wanted to put it across that she loved him the other way, too—the painless way. They met in the center of the room like the best of friends, a stone’s throw from the outside world. They were guarded by a flame-colored cousin of the hawks that stood sentry over the bones of pharaohs. It was more than they had a right to hope for, so soon after such thin ice. But they had forgotten something. She had been, some two and a half months now, out of the ball game. For sixteen days, Nick had been married to Peter till death do them part. Nick had admitted it early on to Rita, and vice versa: They were neither of them very good at avoiding sex. So the hug that told them they each had a friend went off on its own and floated free, and their motives took a turn for the worse. He embraced her in case she was feeling meaningless in a houseful of men who were stuck on men. She drew him just as close to prove she was a woman, no matter what the odds. They kissed at the same time. Neither did it first.

  And they might have stopped cold if the terrible reasons had taken root, because he wasn’t really being nice and she wasn’t really being tough, and they could both spot a lousy fuck a mile off. On the other hand, they’d been through all the high-minded hugging they needed. So when they pulled apart to come up for air and looked each other over, they might well have decided to quit while they were ahead. They’d done enough acting in bed to last them a lifetime. But by the time they had it in mind to object and go separate ways, their objections no longer applied. In the last two minutes, they had already changed again—their footwork got fancier with the years—and they saw it in each other’s eyes. They’d confessed to each other at the beginning that sex was something apart, or sometimes life was and sex wasn’t, but they knew what they were talking about. They’d both done it a lot outside themselves—that is, it either brought them outside while they did it, as if on wheels, or it drew t
hem outside to do it. So why not put it to the test?

  Well, why not, indeed, they decided as they moved to their buttons and zippers. But it was more than that. It dawned on them both at the same time that the easy way they had with one another—casual, guileless, undefined—reminded them of what they felt in bed when love was easy. Easy? Once again, they knew what they meant. It was the one-shot lovers—no past, no future—that made them who they were. By means of things of the moment, they saw into the long, long time they lived with themselves alone. What if it’s all a delusion? they tended to think in a panic, but by then they were always half in, half out of their clothes, and for the moment their bodies were more insistent than their souls.

  Rita let her Irish sweater fall to the floor. Nick undid the front of his flannel shirt and pulled the shirttail out of his pants. If he can’t get it up, she thought, I won’t even bat an eyelash. I can make love on a Saturday, can’t I? he reasoned with himself, and not dredge up the women I used to fail by feeling nothing. Rita and Nick got naked at the same rate of speed, and it had its mysterious side, since they let each other see—in the momentary pauses, the lift of the eye, the faintly smutty cool—exactly what they were like when they went this far. A composure to match the sharpened, concentrated light of the two candles came upon them with each revelation—her breasts one minute, his cock the next—and they seemed as tranquilized as fashion models, as loose inside their bodies, but selling more than clothes. And with their combined experience, they didn’t take each other’s measure stupidly. Though he hardly ever saw anything else in LA above a certain altitude, Nick didn’t think skin-and-bones and gold jewelry was the only way a woman was beautiful. Rita’s full body, the pale of her skin and its swell into roundness, praised nature for extravagance and luxury. As for Rita, Nick was almost too chiseled by his years at the gym, his tight skin slick as a magazine, but she found him touching when he acted like a cowboy, as if he were dancing and stealing looks at his feet. They trusted what each other saw. They didn’t desire each other’s body, it seemed, half so much as they did the chance to show who they were.