Cheap Diamonds

by Norris Church Mailer

  I had fixed my eyelash while I was sitting on the bench beside Honest Abe in Union Square Park, but it still felt a little funny, so I took out my compact in the lobby of 830 to adjust it, touched up my new mulberry-colored lipstick that Lana thought looked better than my old pink one, then found Ron Bonetti’s name on the list by the elevator and punched the number for the eighth floor. The elevator door opened directly into the studio instead of a hallway, and I stepped out into a little waiting room with an old leather couch and a couple of chairs. A great big spool that some kind of wire cable had been wound around was being used for a table, with magazines arranged on it. There didn’t seem to be anybody around.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Ron? Ron Bonetti?” There was some noise in the next room, so I went to the door and looked in.

  Four guys were scattered around, lying on old couches or flat on the floor, sound asleep, as naked as picked birds.

  “Uh, uh, uh, excuse me! I’m sorry!” I said, hypnotized like a mouse staring at a snake, so to speak. One of them opened an eye and sat up, rubbed his hand over his face, looked at me, and said, “Bonetti’s not here, honey, but I can take a look at your book.”

  He started to get up, his hand outstretched, but I said, “Ohhhhh, that’s all right. I’ll come back later.”

  I ran to the elevator and punched the button, thinking more and more that my daddy might have been right about New York. It seemed like it took forever for it to come back up. When the door finally opened, I ran smack-dab into a short guy, probably just a couple of years older than me, with dark hair and a close-cropped beard, wearing yellow aviator glasses.

  “Hold on—where’s the fire?” he said, picking up my pictures, which had been knocked out of my hand. The elevator door rolled shut.

  “Are you Ron Bonetti? What kind of a place is this? There are four naked guys in there!”

  “What! Hey, Axel! What are you guys still doing here? You were supposed to be out of here last night!”

  “Hey, man, give us a break. We shot all night and just needed to get a little shut-eye. Be cool.” The guy who had talked to me earlier came out, zipping up his jeans. His hair was long and wild, and he had a black beard and mustache.

  “Aw, man, look at you. Get those guys out of there! I’ll take this lovely girl out for breakfast. We’ll talk later.”

  Axel went back and I heard grumbling. We stood in silence while we waited again for the elevator. I clutched my pictures, which were beginning to get a little bent. Another one of the guys stuck his head around the door. His hair was sandy blond and he had the most amazing blue eyes. His shirt was still off, showing chest muscles carpeted in dark-blond hair, but at least he had put on his pants. He grinned at me with a perfect set of white teeth.

  “Morning, ma’am,” he said. “I apologize. My mama raised me better than that.”

  I did a double take. He looked familiar and had a thick accent, which had to be Arkansas. Maybe Tennessee or Texas. Before I could say anything, Axel came back out.

  “Come on, Zack. We got to get out of here. Bonetti has business to do.” He pointed at me and they disappeared.

  The elevator door opened and Ron and I got inside.

  “Those guys are making a student film, and I let them use the studio last night. I’m really sorry about that. Let me buy you some breakfast.”

  “You don’t have to do that. It’s okay. I just never saw that many naked men at one time before. They couldn’t have been comfortable, on the floor like that without any blankets. I wonder why they weren’t sleeping in their clothes?”

  “I’ll have to ask them that.” We had walked out the door and stopped in front of a coffee shop on the corner. “Is this okay?”

  “You don’t have to buy me breakfast. Really. I can come back some other time. I’ll just go on…”

  He took me by the arm and ushered me in.

  “Please. It’s the least I can do.”

  I was kind of hungry, so I went along without too much arm-twisting. Like most coffee shops, the place was narrow, with six or seven red booths, a counter with stools, and air that sizzled with bacon frying. The cook was flipping eggs and pancakes as fast as he could, a big pile of hash browns mounded up over to the side of the griddle, and the waitresses rushed around, putting down plates and clearing dishes nonstop as a stream of people came in and out. We had to wait a couple of minutes for one of the girls to wipe our table, leaving us, unluckily, standing right in front of a case full of muffins and pastries. I eyed the cheese Danish, which I’d had for the first time in the coffee shop in the Barbizon and had gotten kind of addicted to. I’d never really thought about what I ate before, being naturally skinny, but Suzan had told me, in one of her brief, pointed comments, that I had to watch my diet because she didn’t want to see me gain even one pound, so I decided not to have the Danish, especially in front of a photographer.

  “Coffee?” the waitress said, putting down menus and two glasses of water after we got settled in a booth.

  “Yes, please. Thank you,” I said, trying not to sound too southern. She filled both our cups. Ron glanced at the menu.

  “What’ll you have?”

  “I guess I’ll have scrambled eggs. And a sesame-seed bagel. But I’ll pay for it.” He shot me a look, and I knew I shouldn’t have said that.

  “My friend will have the number one, sesame bagel instead of toast. I’ll just have coffee. And the check.” She flashed him a quick smile and rushed to give the order to the harried cook.

  “Have you already had breakfast?”

  “I never eat breakfast. Just black coffee and a little gasoline to kick-start the day.” He pulled a small bottle of vodka out of his pocket and poured some into his cup.

  After the last week, nothing surprised me.

  “So what’s with the accent?” he said, sipping his coffee like it was just coffee. “Where are you from?”

  “Arkansas.”

  “Arkansas! I never met anybody from Arkansas.”

  “Well, now you have.”

  “Do they all look like you?”

  “No, some of them are really tall.” He laughed.

  “Who was that blond guy in the studio?” I asked. “He sounded like he might be from Arkansas. The one Axel called Zack.”

  “Beats me. Axel is an old buddy from college who is going to film school. He drags in anybody who’ll work for free to be in his movies. Why? Did you know that guy?”

  “No. His voice just sounded kind of like home, and I was curious.”

  The waitress put down an oval plate piled up with scrambled eggs and hash browns, the bagel on a separate little dish. It had taken all of three minutes. They don’t fool around in these coffee shops—you’re in and out before your shirttail has time to hit your rear end.

  “So. Arkansas, huh?” he said after a pause. “I see you’re wearing shoes.”

  He grinned, like he had said something really witty. I wanted to like this guy, but he was making it hard.

  “Yeah, well, they make us rent them at the border when we leave, and we have to check them in when we come back.”

  “You’re pretty funny.”

  “So are you. Funny like an iron lung.”

  “Is that an old Arkansas expression?”

  “Must be. We used to say stuff like that in the seventh grade. Funny like a three-legged dog…”

  “Funny like a dead kitten?” he countered.

  “Funny like a squashed baby duck.”

  “Funny like a putrid…”

  “You want to see my pictures, or should we just try to think up some more funny Arkansas stuff? I know a joke about two possums crossing the road.”

  “I would love to see your pictures.”

  I handed them over with a little attitude. They had been tossed back at me a few too many times.

  “I know these aren’t real model pictures, but they’re all I have. I’ve just been here…”

  “Wow! These are incredible! Who took them?”
>
  “Father Leo, a priest in a place called St. Juniper’s, up in the Ozark Mountains. He was a friend of mine. I mean, is a friend of mine.”

  “A priest, huh? Well, he sure knows photography. These are really fine.” He took his time, studying each of them. He finally put them down. “So, you a Cat’lic like me, then?”

  “No, I belong to the First Apostolic Holiness Church of God. In Sweet Valley.”

  “Oh, yeah? Is that like Baptist?”

  “Kind of.”

  “What’s different about them?”

  “Well, we’re noisier. We speak in tongues and do healing services and shout when we’re filled with the Holy Spirit and…and…stuff like that.” I ran out of steam. It sounded bizarre in my own ears, and I was trying not to be embarrassed, because we’re supposed to testify to sinners and be not ashamed—not that I knew for sure Ron was a sinner, even though he was drinking vodka at nine in the morning—but I had never been much good in the testifying department, and I was flustered.

  He was staring at me like I’d grown another nose. Bad for my soul or not, I was embarrassed and I know my face got red.

  “So. Okay. Let me get this straight,” he said after a minute. “You belong to an Arkansas church that shouts and speaks in tongues, whatever that is, and then you had some hot pictures taken by a Catholic priest, and now you’re in New York modeling for Suzan Hartman.”

  “Well…yeah. That’s about it.” It sounded weird when you put it that way, I had to admit. For a flash, I saw it all through my father’s eyes. He’d seen the fashion magazines, the swimsuit ads, the models posing half naked in bra and girdle and stocking ads, and all. He was no dummy. He knew what men were like. But I couldn’t be his little girl forever, and he knew that, too, and finally he had let me go. A little pang went through my heart, like I had lost something precious.

  I had changed a lot in the past year, and frankly, going back to the summer a year ago, when I lost my virginity to Tripp Barlow and smoked pot without being struck by lightning, I’d kind of stopped believing I was going to burn in hell for every little bad thing I did, like Brother Wilkins said. I hadn’t once thought about finding a church in New York. I guess I was close to being what we call back-slid. Still, even though my mind said not to worry, I knew deep down that I could never really get away from feeling that whatever I was doing was the wrong thing.

  “How long have you been at it?”

  “At what?”

  “Modeling.”

  “Oh. A whole week. And not one person has wanted to do a test with me. One guy started to, but he only wanted to see me naked when I was changing and grab my boobs, which is kind of impossible since I don’t have enough to grab. Don’t laugh. Please don’t laugh.”

  He had been ready to laugh, but his face changed. All of a sudden my bravado had run out and I was on the verge of crying. He reached over and took my hand. That made it worse, and to my horror, tears started running down my cheeks.

  “Hey, sweetheart, don’t do that. Come on. Everybody has to start somewhere. I have a fine-arts degree from NYU. I wanted to be an art photographer, but I couldn’t get a gallery or make any money at it, and now I take pictures of food.”

  “You do?” I sniffed. “Food? Like in Good Housekeeping, when they give the recipes?”

  “Yes, exactly like Good Housekeeping, and I’m really good at it, but what I want to do is fashion. I want to be the next Avedon, work at Vogue and Bazaar. So here I am. Reaching for the same gold ring as you.” He fumbled in his pocket, looking for a handkerchief while I wiped at my eyes with my fingers, trying not to dislodge my eyelashes again. “Tell you what,” he said finally, pulling a napkin out of the chrome holder and handing it to me. I blew my nose. “Let me do some pictures of you. You have something unique, and so do I. We’ll start this thing together, and we’ll wind up big stars, you and me. You wait and see.”

  “You want to take pictures of me? Are you sure? You don’t have to, just to pay me back for Axel and Zack and them, you know. I’ve seen a naked man before. It was no big deal,” I lied.

  “I’m sure I want to photograph you. I’m not paying you back for anything.”

  He smiled and took a swig of his coffee.

  “You know, if we’re going to wind up big stars together, you’ll have to tell me your name.”

  “Cherry. Just Cherry. Well, it’s really Cherry Marshall, but they don’t want me to use Marshall because some other, older model in England has it.”

  “Cherry. That name is going to be in the pages of Vogue, Cherry Marshall. You wait and see.”

  4

  * * *

  FLYIN’ JACK’S

  I couldn’t believe that guy named Zack in Ron Bonetti’s studio. That had to be a made-up name. The chances were he wasn’t Lale—that would have been too much of a coincidence—but that accent sure did sound down home, and he looked a lot like the pictures Cassie showed me, only his hair was shorter now. Coincidence or not, I had to find out. Maybe I’d get Axel’s number from Ron or something, but that could wait a while until I did the test and got some pictures out of him, if he didn’t back out on me.

  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t in all that much of a hurry to find Lale. What I would do if this Zack was Lale, I didn’t know. He had done a real number on a sweet girl who had become a friend, and when Cassie found out I was coming to New York she made me promise I would look for him. I couldn’t say no, and I figured if somehow by chance we ran into each other, I would just start a little conversation and try to find out why he had done what he did. I mean, I sort of already knew why he had done it—that wasn’t hard to see—but maybe I could convince him to call or at least write her. As ugly of me as it was, though, I kind of wished I had never promised. I hated to be in the middle of things that were not my business. On the other hand, I wanted to help Cassie. It was a real predicament.

  As I thought about Cassie and all that, it hit me how one teensy little decision can change your whole life. If I hadn’t taken a wrong turn and got lost in a snowstorm, thereby coming into Buchanan on the wrong road, I wouldn’t have stopped in at Flyin’ Jack’s, where Cassie was a waitress, and I might be teaching art somewhere right now, like Baby was. More important, Cassie might be dead. In fact, two people might be dead.

  Mama always says there are no coincidences in life.

  It seems like so long ago, in another life even, but it was only back in late February, and I was on my way to do my practice teaching at St. Juniper’s, which was a slow four-hour drive from Sweet Valley up through the Ozark Mountains. It had just started snowing when I left, but as I climbed higher, it got heavier, and those winding mountain roads are tricky, even in good weather. Off to the left was a sheer drop-off with a breath-sucking view of the valley below, all silent and misty with snow, like a Japanese painting. My trusty little Volkswagen was doing its best—thank goodness Daddy had put on chains—but the wiper blades were old, smearing the windshield, and it was hard to see.

  As if the worsening weather wasn’t enough to make me nervous, I rounded a curve and there up on the rocks, somebody had hung a big homemade sign that said in crooked letters PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD!!! The words screamed out underneath a black paint-dripped cross. Not the most reassuring thing to see right at that particular moment because while I was trying to figure out how they had gotten up there to hang it, a Mack truck whipped around the curve, half over in my lane, and came within two feet of smashing into me. The blast of air as it passed blew my little car sideways, and I had to swerve to keep from going into the rocks. It shook me up to the point that I crawled along at five miles an hour until my heart stopped hammering. I could see him in the rearview mirror barreling toward the next curve, spraying up snow, oblivious to what was around the bend. I had no doubt he would plunge off the mountain and kill himself or somebody else before he made it to the bottom. Truckers are crazy. The stress of all those long hours of driving, not to mention the gallons of coffee and stay-awake pills they all t
ake, must do some permanent damage to their nerves.

  Unhappily, this near-miss made me remember the time when we were in the sixth grade and the state troopers came to our school in their uniforms with Smokey the Bear hats and real guns hanging on their hips and all, to show us a film about traffic safety. It was actual home movies of car wrecks, if you can believe it. One was of a big truck carrying a load of pipes. The guy had been going down a mountain (truth be told, it looked a lot like the one I was on) too fast to make a turn, and went flying off the road; the truck wound up perched half on the road and half in the top branches of a tree. The pipes had crashed through the back window of the cab and jammed the guy’s head clean through the steering wheel. They showed a good tight close-up of it, all bloody and purple.

  We all had nightmares for weeks. I don’t know what they were thinking about, showing stuff like that to kids, or why I had to remember it now, driving up this steep, narrow road in a snowstorm. There was no way I was about to turn tail at this point, though, so I just kept going and tried to see through my bad wipers as the snow came down and the knot in my stomach grew bigger. I had only been to St. Juniper’s the one time, when I went for my interview, and although I thought I knew the way, everything looked different from the way it had back in the fall, when I had come on a bright sunny day and the leaves were red and gold.

  The road split into a fork, which surprised me. I didn’t remember any fork at all when I came up here the last time. Well, I would just have to trust my instincts. After a few miles, there was another fork, and then a while after that, another one. Just when I was beginning to wonder if I might have made a couple of bad choices, the road began to sharply slope up, and finally I topped a hill. It was snowing so hard I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of me.