Belinda

by Anne Rice

  Marty just dismissed it. Product identification was everything, blab, blah, blah. This boutique of Trish and Jill’s was going to be sensational, with a life-size mannequin of Mom in the window. But why not Beverly Hills? he kept asking. The whole world wanted to shop on Rodeo Drive, and he could start them there, didn’t they realize? Dallas, who goes to Dallas?

  I watched them, the looks on their faces. They couldn’t wait to get out. And they had been buddies with Blair, too, after all. No, they wanted to go home all right.

  “Look, we’re Dallas girls,” Trish said. Then she and Jill and Mom looked at each other, and then they all did some school cheer or something, and they laughed, but then Mom looked real sad.

  Time for more hugging and kissing, time for all the farewells. And then Mom lost it. She really lost it. She was crying in that terrible way she does before she really tries to hurt herself or something. Awful sound. And Marty had to take her in the bedroom before Trish and Jill left. As soon as I kissed them, I went in there.

  “You stay with her, while I take them to the airport, I just can’t let them go like this,” Marty said.

  Mom was sitting on the bed crying. And the nurse was there in a white uniform and she was giving Mom a shot.

  Now this thing of the shot scared me. Mom had always taken drugs, all kinds of drugs. But why an injection? I didn’t like to see the needle going into Mom’s arm.

  “What are you doing?” I asked the woman, and she made a little patronizing sign to me like, Don’t upset your mother. And Mom said in a real drowsy voice:

  “Honey, it’s just for the pain. But it’s not really pain.” She put her hands on her hips. “It’s just like a burn there, you know, where they do it.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t your mom look beautiful?” the nurse asked.

  “What did they do, Mom?” I asked her. But then I could see it for myself. Mom’s body had been changed. Her hips and thighs were much much thinner. They were taking the fat off her, that’s what they were doing. And then she explained to me it was done in the doctor’s office and they called it liposuction and it wasn’t dangerous at all.

  I was horrified. I thought the world thought my mom was beautiful just the way she was! Nobody had to re-sculpt Mom! These people are crazy, Marty is crazy to let this happen. She cannot eat a full meal, she is doped constantly, and now they are draining her body away from her. This is mad.

  But the nurse was gone, and here we were alone, me and Mom. I felt this awful terror that something would happen, that she would say something like she did before. I didn’t want to be in the room with her. I didn’t even want to be near her.

  But she was too far gone to say anything. The shot was really taking effect.

  She looked sad and terrible suddenly, just sitting there in her nightgown, like she was lost. And I kept looking at her, and the strangest thought came to me. I know every inch of this woman’s body. I slept with her a thousand nights when I was a little girl. She’d even leave Leonardo Gallo to sneak into my bed and we would snuggle in the dark. I know what she feels like all over, what it’s like to curl up in her arms. I know what her hair is like and what she smells like, and I know where they took the fat off her. I’d know the places blindfolded by just feeling with my hands.

  “Mom, maybe Trish and Jill would stay if you asked them to,” I said suddenly. “Mom, they’d come back.”

  “I don’t think so, Belinda,” she said softly. “You can’t really buy people forever. You can only buy them for a while.”

  “Mom, they love you,” I said.

  “And you have to go your way, too, don’t you, darlin’, you’re never here anymore at all.”

  She was staring forward and her words were coming so slow it was frightening.

  “Mom, tell me,” I said. “Is this what you want?”

  She turned towards the pillows, but she was groping, her hands just stroking the sheets, like she was looking for something invisible.

  I pushed her back gently and moved the sheets down for her, and helped her to get under them and then I tucked her in. “Give me your glasses,” I said.

  She didn’t move. She was staring at the ceiling. I took the glasses and put them on the bedside table right by her private phone.

  “Where’s Marty!” she said suddenly. She tried to sit up. She stared at me, trying to see me, though she couldn’t without her glasses on. “He’s gone to the airport. He’ll be back right away.”

  “You won’t leave till he gets back. You’ll stay here with me?”

  “Course. Just lie down.”

  She sank back, just like somebody had let the air out of her. She reached out her hand for me to take it. She closed her eyes. I thought she was gone, but then she reached out again, feeling for her glasses and then for the phone.

  “They’re there, Mom,” I said.

  It was still California daylight outside. I sat with her until she was deep asleep. She felt cold. I looked around this bedroom, this long white chamber with all the satin and mirrors and white carpet, and her dressing gown and slippers made of the same things as the bedspread and the curtains, and it all seemed horrible to me, horrible. Nothing in it personal. But the worst part was her.

  “Mom, are you happy?” I whispered. “Do you have what you want?” On Saint Esprit she had dozed off day in and day out on the terrace with her books and her beer and her television. Four years she had been like that—or was it longer? Was that really so bad?

  She hadn’t heard me. She was sound asleep, and her hand felt icy now. I went into my room and closed the door to the hall and I laid on the bed and looked out the patio doors and the whole house seemed quiet and still. I don’t think I had ever been in it when it was so empty. The staff had disappeared into the back cottages. There was no gardener prowling outside. All Beverly Hills seemed empty. You would never have known the filth of LA was beyond these orange trees, these walls.

  I was crying. And mad thoughts were running through my head. I had to do something! I had to leave Marty, no buts about it. I had to go to either Susan or G.G., no matter how hard it was. But the pain in me was the worst I’d ever felt.

  I knew I was just a kid, a kid gets over these things, this isn’t even supposed to be love, love is illegal for a kid, I knew all that, oh, yes. Until you’re twenty-one nothing’s supposed to be real. But God, this was awful. This was so awful I couldn’t move or think or even want to get drunk.

  And, of course, I knew Marty was coming. I knew I’d heard the car in the drive. I knew I’d heard a door open somewhere. I kept looking out over the patio, through the orange trees, and I saw the California twilight coming, and the only sound was me crying. Just that.

  It got darker and darker, and then I realized that somebody was standing on the other side of the patio doors. It was Marty, and he was opening the doors.

  I felt so defeated. I knew it was wrong to sit up and to put my arms around him and kiss him, but I did not care. Just for this moment I did not care.

  And I also knew that if I did it now with him in this bed, not ten steps from Mother, that I would do it again and again. There’d be no going to G.G. There would be just what Marty wanted, the three of us under this xxx.

  But I kissed him and I let him kiss me. I let him start taking off my clothes.

  “Oh, honey, don’t leave me, please don’t leave me,” he said. “Don’t leave her, honey, don’t leave either of us. She means it when she says she wants you to come home.”

  “Don’t talk,” I said.

  “We’re all she’s got now, honey, you and me. You realize that?”

  “Don’t talk about her anymore, please, Marty,” I said.

  And then we weren’t talking, we were just together, and I thought no, I will never never be able to give this up.

  Then I heard the loudest noise I have ever heard in my life.

  I mean, it was positively deafening. And for a second I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was.
Well, it was a .38-caliber pistol fired in a room about fifteen by twenty feet. And Marty shoved me off the bed onto the floor and screamed:

  “Bonnie, honey, don’t!”

  And then the gun went off what seemed like twenty times. Everything was breaking. The glass bottles on the dresser behind me, the mirror, the electric clock by the bed.

  But actually it was only five shots, and Marty had her by the hand and had gotten the gun from her. She was screaming. He was bleeding. She struggled and broke the glass in the patio door.

  “Get out, Belinda, go!” he shouted. “Get out!”

  She was screaming, “Give it back to me, let me finish it, there’s one more bullet, damn it, let me use it on myself.”

  I couldn’t move. Then the nurse came rushing in and the cook was there, and some other people I did not even know. And Marty said: “Get Belinda out of here, now! Get her away, go!”

  Well, I went as far as the pool and I listened while they called the ambulance. I could see Marty was OK and that Mother was sitting on the side of the bed. Then the nurse came running towards me:

  “Marty says to go to the Chateau and stay there till he calls.”

  She had the keys to Marty’s Ferrari and she drove me, telling me to crouch down and stay down until we were out of Beverly Hills. Well, that night was hell.

  The nurse did call to tell me Marty was OK, he was in intensive care, but he’d be out by noon probably, and Mom was sedated, not to worry at all. But then the reporters started. They started on the phones first and then they were coming to the door itself.

  I was frantic. I opened the door once and six flashbulbs went off. Then I heard somebody ordering them off the premises. But somebody was knocking on the windows only minutes after that. I looked up and saw this guy who works for the National Enquirer, a guy I brushed off constantly on the Strip. He was holding up a matchbook with a phone number inside it. He was always giving these to me, saying, Couldn’t a kid like you use the spending money, that kind of thing. I could use the matches, I always said. I pulled down the shade.

  Finally about eleven A.M. I heard Uncle Daryl’s voice through the door. I let him in and two flunkies from United Theatricals came with him and they started to pack up everything I owned.

  He said he had already checked me out, to come with him. There were reporters all over the drive, but we managed to get into the limousine and on our way to the house.

  “I don’t know what got into you, Belinda,” he said, taking off his glasses and staring at me. “That you could hurt your mother so much. It’s all the fault of that Susan Jeremiah, if you want my opinion, putting you in that X-rated movie and all.”

  I was too disgusted to say anything to him. I hated him.

  “You listen to me, Belinda,” he went on. “You say nothing to nobody about what happened. Bonnie mistook her husband for a prowler. You were not even there, you understand? Now Marty has been shot in the arm and in the shoulder, but he will be out Thursday and he will handle the reporters, you are not to utter one word to a living soul.”

  Then he took out a handful of papers and informed me he had closed my bank account and I had no more money and no more credit either at places like the Chateau Marmont.

  When we reached the house, he held my arm so tight that he hurt me as we got out of the car.

  “You’re not going to hurt Bonnie anymore, Belinda,” he told me. “No, you will not. You are going to a school in Switzerland where you can’t hurt anybody anymore. You will stay there until I tell you that you can come home.”

  I didn’t answer him. I just watched in silence while he picked up the phone to call Trish in Dallas and tell her that everything was OK. “No, Belinda wasn’t there, absolutely not,” he kept saying. I didn’t say a word.

  I turned around and I went into the den and I sat down and I wrapped my arms around my waist. I felt sick. And it seemed I was thinking about everything, I mean absolutely everything, that had ever happened between me and Mom. I was thinking of the time she left me in Rome and that time on Saint Esprit when she floored the gas pedal and headed for the edge of the cliff. I was thinking about the time she had a horrible fight with Gallo and he was trying to pour the whiskey down her throat to make her pass out. I had tried to stop him and he had turned and kicked me across the room. His foot caught me right in the stomach and the wind had been knocked out of me. I had been lying on the floor thinking, If I can’t breathe, I can’t be alive.

  Well, it was how I felt now. I could not breathe. The wind was gone out of me. And if I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t be alive. I could hear Uncle Daryl talking to somebody about a school called Saint Margaret’s and about going to London on the five-o’clock polar flight.

  This cannot happen, I was thinking, he can nor make me go there, not without seeing Marty, not without talking to Susan, not without G.G. This cannot go down.

  I stared at my purse for a moment before I opened it, and then all of a sudden I was feeling around in it, making sure I had my passport and my traveler’s checks. I knew I had three or four thousand in checks at least. Maybe a lot more than that. I had been hoarding them for years after all. I’d saved them after every shopping spree in Europe, I’d bought them in Beverly Hills from the money Uncle Daryl gave me to spend. I was just zipping up my bag when Mom came in.

  She had just come from the hospital and she had on her coat. She looked at me and her eyes had the usual glazed drug look to them. And she spoke in the flat drugged voice:

  “Belinda, your Uncle Daryl will take you to the airport. He will sit with you until it’s time for the Pam Am flight.”

  I stood up and I looked at her, and through all the haze of drugs I saw the hardness of her face, and the look in her eyes seemed absolute hatred as she looked back. I mean, when someone you have loved looks at you with hate like this, it is like seeing a stranger in that person’s body, an impersonator inside that person’s skin.

  So maybe I was talking to the stranger when I spoke up, because I don’t know how I ever could have spoken this way to Mom.

  “I’m not going to any school in Switzerland,” I said. “I’m going to where I want.”

  “The hell you are,” she said in the same fuzzy voice. “You’re going where I tell you. You’re no kin of mine anymore. And you won’t live under any roof under which I live.”

  I couldn’t answer for a minute. I couldn’t do anything. I just swallowed and tried not to cry. I kept staring at her face and thinking, This is Mom talking. No, it can not be Mom.

  “Look, I’m going,” I said finally. “I’m leaving now. But I am going where I want to go. I’m going to meet Susan Jeremiah and I’ll make a picture with her.”

  “You go near Susan Jeremiah,” she said real slowly, “and I’ll fix it so she never works for any studio in this town. I mean, nobody will touch her. Nobody will bank one nickel on her or on you.” She looked just like a zombie, the way she stood there, the way her voice was coming in that slow almost slurred way. “No, believe me, you are not going to Susan Jeremiah with any stories of what went on here. And don’t you get any ideas about G.G. either. I ran G.G. out of Paris and he remembers it. And I can run G.G. right out of New York. You will not go to these people and tell them stories about Marty and me. You will go to this school in Switzerland just like I told you. That is exactly what you will do.”

  I could feel my mouth moving but nothing was coming out. Then I heard myself say to her:

  “Mom, how can you do this! How can you do it to me!” Dear God, how many times had she said those words, to everybody—How can you do this to me!—and now I was saying them. Oh, God, this was awful.

  She went on looking at me like a zombie, and her voice came really low like before:

  “How can I do this to you?” she said. “Is that what you ask me, Belinda? Well, I’ll tell you how. When I had you, I thought you were the one thing in all this world that was mine, my own baby, come out of my body. I thought, when I had you, you were the one perso
n who would always be loyal to me. My own mother was dead before I was seven, nothing but a drunk, that’s all she was. Big fancy house in Highland Park. Might as well have a beer joint far as she was concerned. Never gave a damn about me and Daryl, didn’t care enough about us just to keep herself alive. But I loved her. Oh, how I loved her. If she had lived, I’d have given her anything, I’d have scrubbed floors for her, given her every penny I ever made, done anything to make her happy, just to keep her wanting to be alive. Just the same way I gave you everything, Belinda, everything you ever asked for, things you never even had to ask for. What did you ever want that you didn’t get?”

  Of course, Mom often talked about her mother, as I’ve mentioned. But this was taking a new turn.

  “Well, you don’t need your mother, do you?” she asked me. “You’re real grown-up, aren’t you? And blood and kin mean nothing to you. Well, I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a tramp, Belinda. That’s what we would have called you in Highland Park. That’s what we would have called you in Denton, Texas. You’re a cheap little tramp. And it’s got nothing to do with spreading your legs for every man you set your sights on, Belinda. A tramp is a woman who doesn’t give a damn about her own friends or her own kin. That’s you, Belinda. And you’re getting on that plane now with Daryl or I will turn you over to the California Youth Authority, so help me God. I will pick up that phone and I will tell them that you cannot be controlled and they will take you into custody and they will put you in a jail, Belinda, and they will make you do what they say.”

  It was like Gallo’s foot hitting me in the stomach again. I was not breathing, and yet I was feeling this rage inside me, like something filling me up right to the roots of my hair.

  “You do that, lady,” I said to her, “and I’ll put your husband in San Quentin for statutory rape on account of what happened. I’ll tell the juvenile authorities everything that went on between him and me. It was unlawful intercourse with a minor, in case you’re interested, and if you think they drove Roman Polanski out of this town for it, you wait and see what happens to Marty. It’ll bomb your fucking ‘Champagne Flight’ right out of the sky!”