Cheap Diamonds

by Norris Church Mailer

  He knocked on the door.

  “Hey, gorgeous. You don’t have much of a tan for being in Miami. How did it go?”

  “Great, sweetheart. I think Mrs. Vreeland will like what we did. I hope so. Did you miss me?”

  “Of course I missed you. C’mere and give me a kiss.” I went over and gave him a good one, then clung to him.

  “I think you did miss me.” I started unbuttoning his shirt and before you knew it, we were in bed. I tried, I really tried, to do everything I could to please him, and he was obviously pleased, but somehow it ended up the same way it always did, me with nothing but frustration and him with a big ol’ smile on his face. He held me and brushed my hair out of my eyes. He was surprised to find them wet.

  “What’s wrong, baby? Something’s not right. I can tell. Did you meet somebody else on the trip? You can tell me. I don’t want any secrets between us.”

  “No, I swear, I didn’t meet anybody else. I don’t want anybody else, Aurelius. I just want you. But that’s the problem. I don’t feel like I have you. I don’t feel like you love me. You never have said it. Do you love me, even a little bit?”

  “Well, baby, of course I do. I love you a lot. It’s hard for me to say it. It’s always been hard for me to give myself to a woman. I’ve never been close to getting married, and I’m not sure I ever will be. I guess I’m kind of a loner. I always liked not having anybody to answer to, not having to explain myself to anybody. Coming and going when I wanted to. But I could get used to having you around. I think I could.” I nestled into his chest, but didn’t say anything. He raised his head and looked at me. “Hey—come to think of it, you never said ‘I love you’ to me. Do you love me?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all so new to me, coming to New York, this whole different life. Once I thought I was in love with Tripp Barlow, but when he left me to go back to his wife, it was almost a relief. I don’t think I’m ready to settle down and get married, either, Aurelius. I feel like I’m just starting my life. Not that I don’t love you a little bit—I surely do. You are the most beautiful man I’ve ever met, and you can wring feelings out of me with that saxophone I didn’t even know I had. I don’t want anybody but you…”

  “But…”

  “But I don’t think I’m in love with you.”

  “That’s cool, baby. I understand. We don’t have to make any promises to each other right now. Let’s just enjoy what we have and not worry about what might happen tomorrow. We’re both just getting started here. You’re going to be a big star, and I hope I am, too. One of these days we’ll be ready to settle down, and if we make it ’til then, we’ll be together. We’ll get married and have the prettiest babies you’ve ever seen. Can you imagine? You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been with, you’re scarily beautiful. My Lord. What has a li’l old sharecropper like me done to deserve a goddess like you? Some angel from de cotton patch done come and visited po’ ol’ Aurelius and done give him a angel.” He started to tickle me, and I broke out laughing.

  “Well, you po’ ol’ thang. You must’ve done somethin’ raight, or you’d still be out there in the hot sun, drankin’ out of a gourd while you scrap the cotton bolls to save up and get yourself a new pair of britches! You sure don’t have none on now.” We started to pillow-fight and it was okay. Except it wasn’t, but we’d deal with it another time. He didn’t want any secrets between us, but he’d made it clear he didn’t want to get married, either. I would never, like Cassie, try to drag a man to the altar with a shotgun. I’d learned that much from her.

  Aurelius went to his place to shower, and I took a bath, then dressed and went over. He’d made a wonderful dinner of fried catfish and hush puppies with pinto beans, collards, and sliced tomatoes. I groaned with pleasure. This meal was going to be the orgasm I couldn’t seem to have with him.

  48

  * * *

  THE GUIDING LIGHT

  “Salvadooooor! Salvador de Vega! Where are you?” Lale burst through the door, yelling at the top of his voice. Sal flushed the toilet and ran out, alarmed.

  “Lale? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  Lale grabbed him and swirled him around the room, singing at the top of his voice, “Some enchanted evening…you may see a stranger…you may see a straaaaanger across a crowded room.”

  “Well, you’ve flipped. You’ve finally flipped. To what do I owe this exhibition of exuberance? And when did you learn the lyrics to that song?”

  “You play the dang record night and day. How could I not learn the lyrics?” He let him go and whirled around. “You’ll never guess what I got today.”

  “A big booking to go to Europe for GQ?”

  “Well, yes, I got that yesterday, but something else. Guess. I’ll give you a hint. It’s not modeling.”

  “I have no idea. What did you get today?”

  “A part on The Guiding Light!”

  “A real part? Not just a pretty face dancing in the crowd? Not an under-five?”

  “Nope. It’s more than five lines. It’s a six-month contract, and if they like me and the story line goes they might make it more. Maybe even a three-year contract. Six hundred smackaroos a day.”

  “Oh, Lale! That’s so great! How did this all come about? I didn’t even know you were up for anything.”

  “Woman who’s the casting director saw the Diamonds & Ermine. What she wanted was a James Bond kind of guy, because with that voice-over they all think that’s how I talk, but when she met me, she kind of liked my real southern voice even better, so they’re going to make the character a southerner. I’ll be a mysterious stranger who comes to town, and nobody knows I’m really a P.I. who’s looking for the heir to a fortune. Of course I fall in love with the star of the show, or she falls in love with me or whatever, and I don’t know how it turns out. I don’t think the writers even know how it turns out—they just write it as they go along.”

  “What’ll happen to your modeling career? You can’t just quit now.”

  “I can do both. I only work three days a week. They don’t care over at Ford. It’ll help with the image if I’m a big soap star, too.”

  “Well, let’s break out the champagne! May I give you a congratulatory kiss?”

  Lale laughed. “Sure. Why not?” Sal leaned in and kissed him gently on the lips. A tender, sweet kiss that lit a spark and surprised them both. They leaned back and looked in each other’s eyes. Something had been building in both of them all these months and that sweet little kiss wasn’t enough. They kissed again, this time longer, with more feeling, as if they had waited a lifetime for it. The kiss became hotter, as the spark grew into a flame and finally roared into a fire.

  They wrestled their clothes off and barely made it to the big red satin bed behind the curtain before their hands were all over each other.

  After a long couple of hours, they lay exhausted.

  “Well, now I know what it is y’all do. I never quite could figure it out before,” Lale said, lazing back on the pillows.

  Sal laughed. “You seemed to know what you were doing. You’re a quick study. Not so different than it is with a girl, is it?”

  “Yeah. Sure it’s different. They don’t have beards. Or peckers. And they have tits.”

  “Tits, tits. What is the big deal about tits? Cherry doesn’t have any and you seem to like her.”

  “I do. I like her a lot.”

  “More than me?”

  “I like you both the same. In different ways. Most of the models don’t have tits, either, come to think of it. Cassie used to have great ones. Did I ever tell you about her, really?” Sal snuggled up under his arm. Lale hugged him close. “She was fat. I hated that. At least I thought I did. But it’s crazy, now sometimes I wish some of the women had a little more flesh on them. It’s downright painful to bump up against bones all the time. There was this one girl who was so bony, I was twisting her shoulder bone one night in the dark, thinking it was the electric blanket control. To tell you the truth, I k
ind of miss Cassie sometimes, as nutty as that is.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Why, is that weird or something?”

  “You know how there are no coincidences in this life? I believe that. I think that everything that happens to us happens for a reason, and we might not know what it is at the time, but it’s all connected, on some big scoreboard in the sky.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, like, for instance, that driver, Smitty.”

  “Snuffy.”

  “Snuffy, stopping at the very same truck stop where I was, that fateful day back in February, which is nearly a year ago, my goodness, and me finding you, and then you coming with me to New York, where we ran into Michel Denon…”

  “You don’t have to recite my life story. I get what you mean. What are you trying to say?”

  “Well, I was going to tell you tonight, but today I worked for Richard Avedon, a last-minute-favor kind of thing, on this girl who is doing a little job for Vogue, and you won’t believe it, but…”

  “But what? Are you trying to make me strangle you?”

  “The girl was named Cassie Culver and she was from Arkansas.”

  Lale stared at him in stunned silence.

  “Are you making some kind of joke here? Because if you are…”

  “I am not. I would never kid about something like that. But she wasn’t fat at all. She was thin. And beautiful. She did have a rather large nose, which I gather was the whole point of the shoot. Diana Vreeland saw her somewhere, pounced on her to be in an article about plastic surgery—a ‘Do You’ or ‘Don’t You’ kind of thing. Cassie is going to be the ‘Don’t You.’ She’s a sweet girl, only been in town two days, fresh off the farm.”

  “I can’t believe it. She did come. What an idiot I am.” He got out of bed and started to put on his clothes. “Where is she staying? Did she say?”

  “She told me everything, including that she was looking for a certain ex-boyfriend named Lale Hardcastle. I neglected to tell her I knew you, of course, but I’m quite sympathetic to talk to, as you know. The secrets I have under my hat would…”

  “Come on! Cut the chatter! Where is she staying?”

  “The Chelsea Hotel. I don’t know how she picked that place. Every artist in the world lives there. Andy Warhol’s gang lives there, for Pete’s sake. Does she have some kind of connection here? In town two days and working for Avedon? What’s her story? She can’t be as naïve as she seems to be.”

  “Oh, yes she can. I’ve got to find her.” He headed for the door, then stopped in his tracks and turned around. “Listen, Sal. What we done this afternoon stays between you and me, okay? I mean, I’m not a homo—you know that. Don’t you?”

  “Of course I know that! Who do you think you’re talking to? You know I can keep a secret. We’ll just say it was an experiment, all right?”

  “Right. An experiment.”

  “Everyone is entitled to one experiment in his life, don’t you think?”

  “Right.”

  “Be home for dinner? I’ll make fried chicken.”

  “Sure. Great. See you later.”

  Sal lay back, a big smile on his face. He’d known from the day he set eyes on Lale he could get him if he just took his time. It was that radar thing, whether anybody believed in it or not.

  49

  * * *

  THE LITTLE BLUE FAIRY

  I went back and slept in my own bed after the dinner with Aurelius. I told him I was tired from the trip, and it was the truth. But I really just needed some time by myself to think everything through. What if I was pregnant? What would I do? I was just starting out in a big career, just beginning my life. I’d have to move back to Arkansas and be in disgrace, because I couldn’t model and take care of a baby, too. If I came back home pregnant with a half-black baby and no husband, I don’t know if Mama and Daddy would ever get over it. They loved me more than anything in the world, and they had been so afraid of me coming to New York, sure that I’d get in some kind of trouble. I just pooh-poohed them and thought I was so big and tough and was immune to anything the city could throw at me, and here I’d gotten caught in the oldest trap in the world. I wouldn’t blame them if they threw me out and never spoke to me again. I didn’t think they would care so much that the baby was half black—they’d love it anyhow—but everybody else in that little town would. If I moved back there and had the baby, nobody would treat the little thing like they should. He or she would have an uphill fight every step of the way. Who would ask it over to play? Who would it date? With the best Christian will in the world, you can’t change people who, a scant hundred years ago, had slaves and thought black people were like smart livestock who didn’t have souls. My generation was enlightened by Martin Luther King and the whole civil rights fight, but all the while I was growing up, all we heard in church was about how we had to help the poor savages in Africa. We took up love offerings for the missionaries who came back from there with slides of half-naked natives all painted up with feathers in their hair, the little skinny kids with bloated bellies and flies all over their faces. In the movies, ever since I could remember, all the blacks were portrayed as cannibals or somebody’s maid or a stupid Step’n Fetchit kind of guy saying, “Yassuh, boss. I sho will shine yo’ shoes. I shine ’um up good!” Or Butterfly McQueen blubbering, “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!” and Scarlett slapping the fire out of her. It’s horrible, but it was the way we were brought up. If Aurelius came down there with us, we’d be shunned in the politest way, but shunned all the same. I couldn’t imagine him even wanting to go down there with us. He’d grown up in it himself and he knew how it was. Like he said, men had been hanged for doing a lot less with a white woman than we’d done. In New York, I’d felt so free and didn’t care what people thought. Maybe, if I was honest with myself, I was showing off, so proud that I was open and above all the petty racism that it was almost racism in reverse. I liked walking down the street with Aurelius, seeing the looks on people’s faces, the admiration, the slight shock, the envy. I liked how we looked together, all dressed up in our finery, and how we looked when we were naked, our pale and dark bodies wrapped around each other in front of the mirror. The baby would undoubtedly be beautiful, if it looked like a mix of us. Maybe it would be a girl with pale-coffee skin and blond curly hair. Maybe she would have green eyes like me. Or it might be a boy with caramel-colored skin and dark brown eyes, a nose like mine. He would have a beautiful megawatt smile like his father and be a musician or a dancer or an actor. Whatever he did, he would be a big success. We could live in New York and after a while my parents would get used to the idea and come and visit and bring toys for the baby. It was a lovely dream.

  But the reality was that we didn’t want to get married, neither one of us. If I told him I was pregnant, he probably would marry me, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to go to Moscow and be in Vogue on a white horse in a birch forest in the snow and meet a man—black, white, Asian, or mixed, it didn’t matter—who turned my blood to fire and gave me the kind of orgasms that Tripp used to. Except this one would love only me and not have a wife he hadn’t told me about, or hang-ups about showering after having sex with me, or have anything at all to stop him from loving me. I couldn’t think about spending the rest of my life with Aurelius and never again having that feeling like I was whooshing down the mountain in a lava flow, blown out of a volcano. My life would be sitting up with the baby, waiting for him to come home from some gig, worrying when he didn’t show up, once in a while hanging out in a smoky little jazz club and waiting for him to finish a set. I’d have to learn how to love jazz and drink bourbon. There’s no way to spend your life in a smoky jazz club, only half liking the music and drinking a single glass of white wine. I couldn’t imagine a life like that. I would become old and bitter and always wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t done it.

  But the alternative was horrible, too. Abortion. What an ugly word. As ugly a
s the word murder. Cassie wouldn’t get an abortion, and look what happened to her. What would have happened if she had? I knew. She would have forever been sorry, paying a price, and even though it turned out the way it did, at least she knew she did the right thing and wouldn’t go to hell. Which I surely would. If I could even find somebody to do it. It was illegal and you couldn’t get a real doctor to do it. Girls went to quacks who stuck wire coat hangers and knitting needles up them without benefit of anesthesia or cleanliness. I’d known a girl my sophomore year at DuVall, another art major, who disappeared one day and didn’t come back to class for six weeks. When she did, we all gasped when we saw her. Her skin was whiter than mine, even, a pale shade of green, and she was so weak she had to sit down every five minutes. Somebody had to help her carry her books to class. She’d had an illegal abortion and they almost killed her. I didn’t know details like where or how, but we heard she nearly bled to death and had to be rushed to the hospital, where they gave her six pints of blood. They didn’t treat her all that well in the hospital, either. Hospitals didn’t look kindly on girls who tried to kill their babies. Neither did her parents, who’d kicked her out, and she’d had to get a job in the cafeteria to pay for her schooling. She had the look of a dog that had been beaten one too many times, and she dropped out that year. I lost track of her.

  I tried to sleep, but the room was hot, and I flung off the covers and lay with my legs out. I must have dozed off, because it seemed like there was something flying around the room, some kind of bug. It made a funny little tinkling noise, not like a bug at all, and it looked blue. As crazy as it sounds, a little blue light was flitting around the room, like a fairy. I knew it was my imagination, but there it was. And there was something familiar about it. It flew from a shadowy corner to the window, then came and hovered right over my head. When I closed my eyes I saw it and when I opened them it was there. I knew what it was. It was the soul of the little baby who had started in my belly. It was trying to decide whether to come in or stay out. I know in my heart that’s what it was. I tried to pray, but I didn’t think God would listen to the prayers of a girl who didn’t want her baby. It felt like the prayers got to the ceiling, bumped against it, and then, like dried leaves, crumbled and drifted back down on me. Maybe I could talk directly to the little baby’s soul. “Dear sweet little baby. I want you, I do. Just not right now. Could you come back later? Is that possible? Can you come back when I meet someone I love who would be a good daddy for you and we could be a family? I selfishly, so selfishly, want to go to Moscow and Europe and be famous and make a lot of money. Enough money to make life easier for you and to get Mama, your grandma, wonderful designer clothes and bring her to New York so she can be part of your life. She would love you so much. My daddy would love you, too, although he wouldn’t take any money from me. He griped about the cashmere sweater I got him for Christmas and said I spent way too much, although Mama said he wore it. Oh, my sweet baby, I’m so wicked. I know it’s wrong. I do want you. I do. Can’t you wait just a little while?’