The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  “Not a chance,” Nick said, steely-eyed for the moment. Charlie was the agent Nick kept on to remind him real estate was shitwork. He gave off an odor like the rusted underside of rotten cars. Peter refused to be in the same room with him. “One-eight is final.”

  “You’ll never get it.”

  “Never is a long time, Charlie,” he said, still tossing the keys. He kept Charlie Burns around for another reason too, so he could talk tough. The name’s Lew Archer, lady—I’ve been in this town thirty-five years, and I never yet ate an orange off a tree. A million three, a million eight, it was all such hoodlum’s language. “That’s the top of the world up there,” he said expansively. It was the top of Coldwater Canyon, anyway. “We don’t dicker for the big ones. They want a grown-up’s house, they got to pay a grown-up’s price.”

  When it was over and they’d picked each other’s pockets to find out who was winning, they tumbled out again to the four corners of the county, their blood up. Nick was free, and with a whole hour to kill, he headed out early. Free, he thought as he walked to the car, was not the right word. He’d taken off more time in the last month or six weeks because of Sam and then Peter than he had in the whole three years before. He knew he had to stop coasting and go out hunting, and he’d wondered for days if he still had it in him to hustle the same as ever. He had to, didn’t he? Money cost more and more, after all. For the first time in his life, he considered taking stock. But not today. He wanted to finish it up right with Sam, and he wasn’t going to skimp and try to fit it all in during his lunch hour. A new car had always been for Nick the perfect symbol for starting fresh, and before he gave this one away, he wanted some of the new rubbed off on him. He couldn’t go back to a mere MG himself anymore, the LA status system in the four-wheel division being what it was. So he slung himself into the bucket seat to be innocent again, and the smell alone sent him back twelve years to the feel of his first new car. He looked down at the mileage, 3.6, and laughed out loud. Free was the word, all right.

  He drove out Sunset to the beach, and though the Jag and the Mercedes could have probably passed him in third, it felt like eighty when he did forty-five. As he took the last long curves through Pacific Palisades, he realized he was on the route he always took for the maiden ride in his own cars. Sunset, with its turns and its country club terrain, was a very showy road, and the show was cars. Nick was twenty-three when he traded a ’58 Chevy, two-toned, blue on white like a Chinese jar, for a ’63 silver Tempest just off the line. He drove it around for days in a trance of pride, sending out a psychic beam up and down the roads he traveled: Look at me, look at me. Probably nobody did. For one thing, there were always more riveting cars on the road than this year’s Tempest. Soon enough he came to see that that included the Jaguar and the Mercedes, too, all the way up the line. In any case, everyone was most possessed by only two cars, the one he had and the one he wanted next. Which, once Nick understood it, sent his innocence up in a cloud of smoke. But he’d say this much for cars: For a moment, at least, for the first long ride out Sunset, they gave it back to you again, which was more than he could say for the kind that disappeared with sex.

  He turned north toward Malibu on the Coast Highway. The beach pads hung between the road and the water, elbow to elbow, and Nick could practically watch the prices going up like the rolling dollars on a gas pump. He’d had a place himself for a couple of years before he met Peter, and since it was only a few miles further along, he went faster. He just had time to take a quick look at it before he turned back to meet Sam in Santa Monica. The old house crossed his mind as a pair of numbers: sixty-five, the purchase price, and ninety, what he sold it for. As always, he shook his head and kicked himself, because he knew it went a year ago for two-oh-five. I wonder, he thought, if I’ve gotten as sleazy as Charlie Burns and don’t even know it. Since when, for instance, did he start to see the whole bloody coast as pots of gold, as if he’d forgotten the broken hills and the ocean? Mile after mile, the houses lined up like the numbered lots at an auction. He didn’t need a bit of it. He had the windows open, and the wind was in his hair. Buttoning up his lip like Gary Cooper, he thought with only half a smile: The thing about a cowboy is, wherever he rides, he owns it all. No call to act like a worry wart clerk whose head is stuffed with numbers. He convinced himself of everything. So he rose above the rut of money as he zipped along. Forgot, for the sake of the moment’s innocence, that numbers turned him on.

  It was up ahead. He signaled and made a turn in the driveway. They’d added a deck upstairs, he noted, and faced the wall on the highway with redwood planks, taking the windows away. Nick couldn’t see in at all, and he didn’t care. He literally only wanted a glimpse. He’d lived in fifteen different places in LA, moving like everyone else whenever the mood struck. If he was in the neighborhood, he touched bases at this one or that one. For him it was just like keeping a diary. In a moment he was heading back south to Santa Monica, all settled in for the flashbacks. He was straight when he bought into Malibu, gay when he sold out. He might have kept it forever, or at least until two-oh-five, except Peter got edgy so close to the ocean. Flipping the pages of an album in his head, Nick hardly recognized himself swinging back and forth—at the beginning, between a steady girl and a hustler once a week, and later on, Monday a man, a girl on Tuesday, and so on. Nobody left a name and number. Nobody was asked to.

  And look at me now, he thought with equanimity. Now that I’m with Peter, I’ve stayed the same for the longest time so far. He used the past exclusively at times like this to congratulate himself. He knew it was bullshit. The lulling smell of newness in the car and the kick of it that took the years away were whistling in the dark. What was really going on all morning was his fear of Sam. He wouldn’t own up to it because it was crazy. He’d said good-bye a hundred times before. And he used the car to mush around in the past because he didn’t want to think too hard about why he found it suddenly expedient to say good-bye with flashy toys. He wasn’t free or innocent at all. He wished he could have said he’d gone too far with Sam and gotten in too deep, but the dread he’d felt about today had nothing to do with second thoughts. It seemed as if it didn’t matter what he did. The course of things had a mind of its own now. It wasn’t going to stop till it was finished.

  He left the highway and climbed the hill straight up to the cliffs that bordered Santa Monica at the ocean. They were meeting in a shelter in the park along the rim, and Nick wanted to leave the MG in plain sight so as to point it out, Exhibit A, at the right time. No hard feelings, Sam, okay? He saw the wooden shelter just ahead, an alley of royal palms going off on either side, no sign of Sam, and at that moment a van pulled out of a parking space, right where he wanted to be. So far, so good. He got out and locked it fast so he wouldn’t start to practice what to say. But he took a last look over his shoulder as he walked away, to possess, one more time while it was still his, the past it reminded him of. When he sauntered across the grass to the shelter, an elaborate thing of two-by-fours that held up a shingled roof over a cluster of benches, he noticed the shuffleboard couples padding about, retired and arm in arm. They were all in civilian clothes, and they stared at him openly, probably because he was dressed to the teeth. He wore a pearl gray gabardine suit, Hong Kong shirt, Bond Street tie, and Gucci shoes—deliberately, it almost seemed. He was a long way away from the day he shucked his office clothes in the car to come to Sam on equal terms. Power, not sex, was what he was dressed for now.

  He went through the shelter’s arch to the ocean side, and there was Sam, leaning forward on his folded arms, on a fence post at the edge. The fence was chicken wire and sagged in places, but the drop-off was so sheer, the distance down so far, that it made its point.

  “In the old days,” Nick said, and all of a sudden Sam tensed and began to listen, but he didn’t turn around, “when they needed to drive a car off a cliff in a movie, this is where they drove it.”

  “Did you used to come here and watch them when you we
re a kid?” Sam asked, in some ways the only nice thing he said the whole time, and then he turned around. The look on his face was so far off, so uninvolved, he might have been watching the ocean for hours and hours. “You should have been going to baseball games.”

  “It was before my time,” Nick said. “I just heard about it.”Varda was who he was thinking of, but Sam might not remember who that was. “How are you?”

  “Fine. I’m always fine.”

  “Good. You want to go for a walk?”

  “Why not?” Sam said with a shrug. “We’ve never done that before.” Sparring now with everything he said, the look on his face was one thing. He sounded as if he wouldn’t look at an ocean if you paid him. Nothing there. “So,” he went on, “are you getting much?”

  “I’m all right,” Nick said, sidestepping the reference. “I’m too fucking busy is what it is. Sometimes I think we ought to start over out here and not let the land be owned at all. Squatter’s rights. I get so sick of houses I want to live in a tent. In the mountains or something.”

  “Or on a ranch,” Sam said. “With the boys. I bet you’re so busy you haven’t got time to get laid anymore. Isn’t that right?”

  Oh, please, Nick thought, not yet. Sam was upping the ante in irony, and Nick caught himself wanting time out, to change the tune before they said another thing. He was hit broadside by a wave of the pain he’d bought the MG to neutralize. He called it pain. Guilt was more like it. And irony was fine, he wanted to say, but couldn’t they have it subtle and more ambiguous? Like a man being bested in a bargain, Nick had already given up the mood he thought they’d be able to do this in. He wouldn’t admit it now, but he’d seen the two of them as if from the air, a couple of melancholy men on the cliffs, high above the lordly ocean, worlds apart. Like the clear-eyed lieutenant and the Polynesian girl in South Pacific. He scrapped it like a comic routine at a wake. Today is all we’ve got, he thought hopelessly, so why doesn’t he see that what we do now is what we’re left with? He’d never, like Rita, read Henry James straight through, but instinctively Nick fell into social forms and complicated manners. He favored ways of saying things that said at the same time: I love you, I hate you, don’t leave me, good-bye forever. Who the hell did he think he was? Sam would have demanded if he’d known. He made it clear that the situation at hand wasn’t designed to follow Nick’s instincts.

  “I know I should have called you,” he began, but Sam interrupted before he got his excuses going.

  “Like I always said, Nick, you don’t have to call me at all. Unless you want to fuck. You get off on all these secret agent meetings, but for me it’s just a run of red lights between here and West Hollywood.”

  “I just want to talk, Sam.”

  “Oh, I know. That’s what I mean. I don’t.”

  “I can’t see you anymore.”

  “So what else is new?” He turned to Nick, and in the same motion he cuffed Nick’s shoulder with the back of his hand so that Nick turned to him, too. We can’t fight here, Nick thought sensibly, or if he jumps me, a cop at least will break it up. And Sam snapped out, “I can’t see you either, baby. Get it?”

  “Sam, I don’t want it to be this way.”

  “Oh? Just how do you want it to be?”

  Fair enough. They stood face to face, and Nick wondered as he looked into Sam’s angry eyes, and then away, if they’d ever locked eyes since the moment they met. They’d had to then, if only to telegraph the terms of the contract, that they wanted to fuck, that one would get paid. Essentially, from that point on, there was no reason to. Nick didn’t know what Sam used to look at, but for weeks his own eyes, hungry for the whole of the cowboy’s body, had taken a million pictures of Sam in motion, roused by everything he did. Nick hadn’t had the leisure to get lost in the meantime, fishing the deeps of the boy’s black looks. He was just as able to fall in love without it.

  “I still care what happens to you,” he said—staring over Sam’s shoulder out at the ocean, as a matter of fact. “I’d do things for you, or I would have, but I knew you’d feel pushed if I said something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I could have gotten you a job.”

  “I got a job already,” he said fiercely, as if he was being patronized.

  “So you do,” Nick said. “But that’s what I mean. You don’t want to be intruded on.” He thought, I didn’t pick it to be like this, and I won’t fight dirty, but I won’t lose. It was something he’d learned from Peter, to be ready on no notice at all to counterattack. But Peter always smothered it out at the first spark, before it ate up so much as a handful of grass. Nick came in late, when the fire was already out of control, exploding the trees like popcorn. He wondered, finally, if Sam knew how much a man might give away gladly, without a fight. There must have been those who were left without nothing when Sam ran off, but since it wasn’t money, Sam would have called it a fair deal every time. Weeks ago, he’d told Nick he wasn’t the most expensive. But only to tell him money was cheap. He could get a price to choke horses. And his notion of what things were worth placed no value on someone’s caring. So you care what happens, Sam must have thought, well that’s your problem.

  “You can’t tell me you don’t wonder where you’ll be in ten years,” Nick said. He was surprised Sam let him keep talking. Peter would have locked him out of the bedroom. “You may not worry about it at all, but everyone has an idea.”

  “What’ll I be in ten years?” he asked, as if he’d need a hint. “Your age, right? Well, I don’t intend for it to matter. Either I’ll be dead inside, or I’ll be dead, period.” And then he grinned, as if he’d had an afterthought. “How do I know? I might be just the same.”

  “What do you want?” Nick asked him bluntly. At least we’re talking, he thought, and more than we did when we had no clothes on.

  “Didn’t I just tell you? I want to be where I am now.”

  “You’ll need money.”

  “I got what I need,” he said, but something changed. He went back to walking and seemed to coax Nick to come along and fall into step. He had the balls to tear up checks in people’s faces, probably, but Nick could see that he looked them over first. Make me an offer and I’ll laugh till I’m sick. But make me an offer.

  “Don’t you get tired of the street?” Nick asked. “All that waiting?”

  “No,” he said quietly, but not trying to cut Nick off. He’d talk about it some, he seemed to say, except he didn’t know where to start. “I like it. I never wanted to live in a house. Or a tent or anything. The street’s where I live, and my room is just a place to keep stuff in. It’s like an airport locker.”

  The Gray Line bus pulled up, and the door hissed open as they went by. The tourists filed out—looking like they all lived in the same town in Iowa, so that you could practically tell who was the grocer, the fire chief, and so on—and they straggled across the grass to the fence, cameras aimed at the Orient. Nick, the tireless LA booster, silently wished them all a happy trip. If he could have stepped out of the three-act play with Sam for a minute, he would have tried to tell them all how it would break their hearts if they saw it at sunset. Which was not to disparage the glorious view trumpeting out even now on every side—a DeMille production of a view, really, because it looked from the top of the cliff like it was twenty or thirty miles across. The ocean, GI green and rough, was probably the biggest thing the Gray Line had. Nick couldn’t say himself how far it went, from Long Beach or something at the southern verge, all the way to Zuma on the north. Ahead of Nick and Sam, through the still tall palms, the spring had turned everything very green, and they could see the Santa Monica Mountains and the Malibu Hills both. They’d seen them last from the empty café in Venice, the third time they met. Unlike them, the mountains seemed a good deal closer here, and today they were the deeper blue to which the water aspired. To Nick, when he was feeling the way he wanted to, the coastal ranges were a mystery that ended a long way off. They connected him up with holy places,
the Sierras and then the Rockies, and as a result the West took place in his head, all of it. That was when he thought it was heaven on earth.

  But why was he thinking it now?

  “I guess I knew you’d be all right. You don’t need me,” Nick said. He was suddenly flying, and it wasn’t the Gray Line folk, innocent as they were, radiating niceness, that had picked him up like a helicopter trailing a rope. It was this: He finally knew he was off the hook. He didn’t have to keep working at a happy ending. Or not the one he’d envisioned, where they smiled and clapped each other on the shoulder, and Sam drove off grateful, changed, and ready to go to law school. Sam had let him know he didn’t care. He hadn’t given Nick the time of day since the day at the ranch. And Nick had to admit he was giddy with relief. If he’d thought all along he wanted to be someone to Sam, to salvage out of a meaningless ending a moment for them to ache with all their missed chances, he didn’t want it anymore. It was a happy ending because it was meaningless. What’s more, he found he didn’t want to be understood. He always had before. I have a lot of commitments, see, and it doesn’t mean it wasn’t great, but I gotta go. No apologies from now on, Nick vowed. And no more fretting for sympathy.

  “I’d just drive you crazy if I tried to hang around,” he went on when Sam said nothing. It didn’t seem like an ominous nothing, since he took his cue from Sam’s own love of distance. “It’s better if it’s over altogether. We can say good-bye right here. No big deal.”

  So this is the last time I’ll ever see him, he thought, moving off at the slightest angle as he walked, so that they veered again toward the fence. For the sake of decorum, he let the air out of his balloon and came back to earth. It wouldn’t do to seem so overjoyed. Like a fancy overcoat, he put on instead the melancholy mood he relished. It’s not us, he thought nicely of him and Sam, it’s time itself that brought us here. They came up short against the cliff edge, and he looked down at all the little naked people on the beach. If Sam had continued to just shut up, Nick might have given a speech, the parting lover’s equivalent, say, of the Gettysburg Address. He didn’t seem to know he was hysterical, any more than he did when he drove along in the MG with a sap’s lens on his Instamatic. He was a whole lot more narrow-eyed than Iowa. The people who would have done anything for Nick—Peter and Rita at present—would have sworn he never went too far with sentiment. He went farther than Peter, not as far as Rita. They were none of them tacky about it, though, with the possible exception of Nick when he was fixed on cowboys. The question, then, was why today he was getting his feelings off greeting cards. Unless it was that he was as scared as ever. But now he didn’t even seem to know it. The fear had made over the world.