The Gold Diggers: A Novel

ORLANDO

1

Rita was a mess by the time she got to LA. It wasn’t enough that she hadn’t had a real meal in two and a half weeks. Since the day she gave up men for good, in fact. The very day she called Peter and announced she was coming West. Because she was too fat to go anywhere, for days she ate bran muffins and little cans of grapefruit sections until she couldn’t taste them anymore. Then she went on half-rations. The meal on the plane menaced her, it was so plentiful, and she handed it back untouched. The twelve lost pounds hovered in the air about her like stinging bugs. She’d seen the movie. Then, over the heartbroken mountains, the boy beside her lit up a joint and passed it to her. He looked about fourteen.

Not on a plane, she said, shaking her head.

But this is the safest place, he assured her. We’re in international waters. Besides, you get higher this high up.

Why?

It’s to do with the ozone, he said, going into something of a trance.

Interpol made no immediate move to eliminate them. She smoked away, if only to get her mind off the flaming nose dive into the Rockies. The boy, so seedy he looked as if he’d hitched the ride, apparently didn’t want to pick Rita up. Now and then he narrated bits of the movie in her direction, though he didn’t have the earphones and did a lot of guessing. He hadn’t seen the movie before, so he got it all wrong. Rita tuned out, glad to slump by the window and wonder if LA wasn’t a terrible mistake. She decided it was. Then the dope circled round from behind and socked her in the belly, and the next thing she knew, she was eating everything in sight. The boy had beef jerky in his pocket and a package of cloves Life Savers. That wasn’t enough. Rita pleaded with the stewardess for a second chance at her dinner and got it, the chicken congealed and the cake like a frosted cardboard box.

You shouldn’t eat, the boy said as they began their descent. You’ll just come down.

I’ve never met these people, she said. I have to be normal.

"If you get high enough, lady, you can act normal. Just don’t do anything that might attract their attention."

She stood now in the terminal feeling fat, attracting the critical attention, she sensed, of anyone pretty and tan and young. It wasn’t enough that she’d sunk without a trace in New York, she thought, her accounts closed and all the signs of her tenancy flung to the four winds. She had to get smashed in flight and land without a brain in a future that called for the hawk eyes of an Indian scout. Swell, she thought, opening her bag to look for her keys and then recalling with a pang that they were all gone. She hadn’t anything left that she needed a key to.

But she wasn’t fat. That was just nerves. Nick, who was the first to see her except for the driver, would be struck by the full moon of her face and a rosy body like a duchess at the French court, the lines soft as a watercolor. No angles, no edges. And thank God she knew how to wear clothes. A Kelly green shawl and wheat-colored sweater, a scarf and a watch and locket around her neck, and cocoa satin pants with billowing legs like parachutes. Her hair did what it wanted, but it knew what it was doing. She didn’t look ready for any one thing, not an office or a luncheon out or a lot of children. Because her time in New York had alternated between near careers and debilitating romance, she’d never been in one situation long enough to look like anyone else. She was almost forty, and she had the whitest skin. She had really gotten over not being thin long ago. The diet merely filled up the time before she left, and it impressed her as something constructive to do, now that she wasn’t going to fall in love anymore.

She was trying to remember how she and Peter had left it when a dark, exhausted man appeared in front of her. He was fifty, maybe, and in one hand he had a ring of keys that he shook like a bell. It was a toss-up whether or not it was a voluntary motion.

I’m here to get you, he said.

Even on easy days, Rita wasn’t good at transitions. A moment since, she was in midair, and part of her was back there still, bracing for the crash, her whole body rigid as the foot she held to the floor in a speeding car. Where did the boy with the dope go? The fear shot through her that she was caught now in a drug ring. The boy had planted little packets all about her person while she sat unguarded. She was the middleman, and she had to go and deliver. She wondered what to do about her luggage.

I have to wait for my friend, she said, clicking her locket and her watch together to drown out the jingle of keys. She tried to make the friend sound armed.

Peter sent me, he said, tense because he wasn’t getting through to her, and as if he couldn’t do a thing unless told to.

She suspected it all along because he didn’t look tough enough to traffic, in spite of an accent she couldn’t place. She was just making sure. She followed him out the door to a Mercedes parked in a tow zone, and he made her get in the back seat so she could be properly driven. Then he went back to the luggage bay, and at last she sank back and gave herself up to the woozy stage. The winter sky was milky here with haze, the air thick with the aftershock smell of gunpowder. But it came to her only faintly, because the bourbon smell of leather in the back seat knocked her over, too. She peered out a gray-tinted window that made things look separate and glazed, as though through a camera. After a bit, she heard behind her the reassuring thump of her suitcases being stowed in the trunk. Then the driver got in and turned the key. As the spark leapt, the car was filled with disco music and arctic air. There must have been extra speakers in the ashtrays and armrests.

They pulled out into traffic, and the phone rang. Or actually it buzzed. It was in a wooden case next to her on the seat, which she hadn’t touched at first because it looked like the box with the button that the President’s men carried around.

I’m sure that’s for you, the driver said.

It was like picking up the receiver in a random telephone booth. No one ever knew where she was, she thought. Assuming anyone ever looked. She said hello.

How was your flight? Nick asked. I’m sorry the weather’s lousy, but you can’t have everything.

I have everything I can think of right now, she said. Out the window she saw they were traveling fast along the flats. Bungalows all the way to the horizon on either side of the freeway. She knew Peter lived in the hills, though she couldn’t see that far in the chalk-white air. I feel as if I could take a bath in this car. All I have to do is find the right button. Are you Nick?

I am. Finally we meet.

Is Peter with you?

We’re going to meet Peter at the party. What party, she wondered. She hadn’t been invited to a party. He’s had to do everything himself, because he’s got photographers coming. So he won’t even talk to us. But a party’s a party, right? You’ll be here in about twenty minutes. Do you want anything?

Give me a hint, she said.

A drink. Or dope.

No thanks. What I’m going to need is a little advice, Nick. I mean, about how to proceed here, she said, deciding she sounded awful. She should be letting him know she could go to a party in her sleep. She was afraid she sounded as if she ought to be left at home.

Of course. You’ve come out to make your fortune, haven’t you?

Oh no. She felt the heat on her cheeks. I just meant I don’t know what people expect. At a party, I mean. When the truth was, she didn’t know what she meant. Would all the important things, she thought, have to be said from now on in cars? She had enough trouble with telephones that stayed in one place.

Don’t be sorry, Nick said. "It isn’t considered bad form out here. Always remember that—you can’t talk too much about money. She could barely hear him, and she had to raise her own voice unnervingly to get through. But the bad connection had done this for them—it heightened the moment, like a call across the ocean. Nobody ever died of talking about it. If they did, this whole place would go back to the desert."

She was putting the place together as fast as she could. The only time she’d ever seen palm trees before was when she’d fled to the Islands, to try to rest up after one thing and another. Then she’d liked best to sit underneath and listen to the branches flutter dryly in the Gulf breezes. Here they had them any old place, as if they were just trees. And already she had the sense—picking them out here and there as they drove by, because they looked so odd—that no one sat and listened. If she’d said it out loud, Nick would have had her remember something else, that everything in LA was as shimmering with meaning as the palms, and, more to the point, that people couldn’t help saying what the meaning was. If she’d thought about it, she would have said it wasn’t much different from New York, as far as that went.

Maybe on the way to the party, she said, "I’ll let you talk about money and see if lightning strikes."

It won’t, he said. The gods don’t care. I’ll see you.

She’s stoned, Nick thought as he hung up. But he was relieved too, because he thought he was going to like her; and they both knew they had to for Peter’s sake. He walked out onto the terrace now and lit a cigarette and stood on the lip of the pool. Below him, the hills of Bel-Air gentled down to the outside world; and he could look onto several houses tiered beneath his own. He also knew there was a line of houses at the very top that looked down on him, but he didn’t think about it. It was part of the process of living in the hills to look down on, not up to, unless you were in the market for something. Besides, his house was so old it hid in the trees, and so it was just as good as living further up. There were unspoken borders between old Bel-Air and new Bel-Air, and Nick held the jigsaw of it all in his head. He knew his place was as old as you could get.

What about Rita, he wondered. He supposed he’d always heard the nice things about her, since Peter was so loyal to his past; and he suspected Rita had mostly been told how he could be a bastard. Peter phoned the Upper West Side like clockwork whenever he and Nick were fighting. Rita was always there. Nick knew that, six years ago, Rita picked up Peter in a taxi at his lover’s apartment on Washington Square and raced him out to the airport. He was running away. And it was a secret. Nick was never sure whose idea it was, Rita’s or Peter’s. As Peter boarded the plane, the last words she said to him were, Always order veal. She thought Peter should be taken care of. Nick knew, too, that Rita was the one who had tried to coax Peter back to his grandfather, the only one in his family he spoke to then or admitted to now. In a way, Nick thought, Rita invented Peter. All he needed was someone to give him ideas. The rest was just money.

Nick thought about Rita only briefly, until the sound died out from the phone call. He didn’t have to think about her for twenty minutes yet. So he went back to Sam as if nothing else had happened all day. He had that morning sold a four-room house in the Hollywood Hills for a hundred and ninety thousand. He had sold it seven months before for a hundred and fifteen, and he scarcely paused to figure out what a good deal his day was turning out to be. All he knew was, he had to get over to Venice by one-thirty to meet Sam at the beach. The girl who lived in the house had cut a lousy album in November, and now she wanted something in the three hundred range. She would have liked to spend all day just telling Nick what to look for. He said he’d get back to her. She was on hold now, along with everyone else.

At least Sam was waiting at the café. He hadn’t wanted to come, and he’d warned Nick that he didn’t see anyone three times. It was forty dollars the first time and went up to sixty the second, but more and more money didn’t make the third time worth it. Sam said he wouldn’t need anything steady until he was twenty-eight or nine, and he was willing to make less now to stay unattached. He sat at an outdoor table, leaning back in his chair against the low stone wall, denim shirt open all the way to his waist and his face turned up to the feeble winter sun. His hair was black like Nick’s, and his body was slim and taut, no bulk to his muscles because he moved like a runner. He always seemed about to leap away, even now, balanced on the chair’s back legs and lost in the stars. It was as if he had enemies that preyed on more than him, that preyed on all his kind starting back in the caves, and they wanted him removed, but not for personal reasons. It was as if he didn’t know who they were until they sprang. He was twenty-five, so twenty-eight was still far off, at an impossible remove.

Nick didn’t know where to start. Until he got there, he hadn’t really believed Sam was going to show up. Then he was afraid he’d waste the whole time convincing Sam to see him again. Why am I doing this, he thought as he walked up to the table, and he realized the question came up only when they were together. The rest of the time in the last two weeks, all he thought about was being in bed with Sam. He felt the knot in his stomach lift as he let go and pulled away from the shore. He knew he wouldn’t have a moment to think until it was over. And he wished he weren’t wearing a suit. He was afraid it made him look like a fool.

They say this beach is littered with kids who want to be stars, he said, and sat down. I wonder where they are today.

Hey, coach, Sam said, stretching his arms in a yawn and rocking forward to face Nick at the table. Maybe they all went home to Iowa. Besides, this isn’t the beach anymore. The beach is up in Santa Monica.

Nick looked over Sam’s shoulder at the wide lawn fronting the beach, where someone was flying a kite and a woman walked her dogs. There was not enough sun for much else, and the ocean was hidden in haze. Sam meant State, the gay beach. But the beach at Venice, because he had known it all his life, was for Nick the true point where the city met the Pacific. From the café terrace on a clear day, he could see north to the range of the Malibu highlands, blue above the blue water. And the odd stucco houses and cast-iron arcades of Venice still moved him with their waterfront gentility and foreign airs. Rust streaked the peeling pastel walls, and the new Bohemians had painted some houses burgundy red and electric green. But something had lasted here. All up and down the front, the wooden, parasol-roofed pavilions marked the course of the promenade. On nice days, it was still the perfect place to walk. Nick used to coax Peter to come in the middle of a workday, but Peter didn’t want any part of Venice. Down on its luck. No money.

My mother and father rented a place here every summer. For just two weeks. I used to think about it all year.

That was in the forties, right? Sam asked a bit tightly, as if Nick were in his forties, too.

I was eight in 1950. It was more in the fifties.

Sam nodded. He wasn’t very interested. Because the café wasn’t open, they had nothing like coffee to turn to and no one other than themselves to watch. It was too late now to move somewhere else. Irrationally, though he knew Sam was going to care less and less, Nick felt he had to keep defending the old Venice. It had been years since he’d thrown in his lot with someone who always made him say the wrong thing. He knew he was going to ruin everything, and he went right ahead.

My first love was a lifeguard in Venice. I must have been ten, and he was about your age. He had hunky shoulders and a hairy chest, and I’d sit for hours and watch him. He’d be high up in his chair, putting on oil and rubbing it in. It was a one-way thing—he didn’t know—but I was so happy I could hardly breathe. Otherwise, I didn’t do anything but go in the water. I was in the water all day.

Do you live with someone? Sam asked.

Yes, Nick said, as if he hadn’t been interrupted. Perhaps he hadn’t been.

I thought so. Is he older?

No. We’re both thirty-five. Why?

You’re like hustlers I’ve met who’ve settled down with someone, he said, then shrugged because Nick didn’t prove the point. Usually they pick some old queen.

Nick, and it was not like him, had to pretend not to be wounded. Sam talked about hustling the way everyone else in LA talked about work, as if the queer course of life and all the human ironies were just like the ones that went through the office. It wasn’t that Nick questioned the notion that hustling was an image of life at large. Of course it was. But he didn’t, like Sam, get all cozy inside about the noble solitary work that whores pursued. Sam seemed to think he was something like Thoreau, except he did it in bed. Well, all right, but Nick didn’t want to be compared. He’d known the ones who ended up in silvery Ferraris too. They lived in Beverly Hills, the summer in Laguna, with gin-and-ice set designers, kept like human poodles. But he also saw others on the street, crow’s-feet and too much tan, a thousand days of T-shirts and baby blue Levi’s, who’d done it too long. Nick didn’t think it was pretty either way. So he knew how little time Sam had.

Have you ever been to the real Venice?

No, Sam said, still an edge on his voice—he would have gone there if he’d wanted to. I’m not into Europe. I want to see Hawaii first.

The reason I ask, Nick went on, but storing the remark about Hawaii, glad to have a thing they might do someday, "is when I went there, I’d had twenty-five years of seeing this as the real one. I fell in love with Venice, but the name never fit."

I don’t want to go to bed with you today, Nick.

That’s okay, he said, a second’s glance into the boy’s gray eyes. Don’t be so tense.

Well, I don’t know why we’re here. I ought to be working now, or else I’ll have to work all night. I don’t like to just talk.

Nick suspected as much. They couldn’t talk yet. He saw what he kept wishing for in men like Sam. Nick begged to be listened to in a particular way, because he was the only one he knew who was so enchanted by the destiny of things. Where other men were scared, or just confused, he noticed the course of things—the price drift from a hundred and fifteen to a hundred and ninety, the routing of the roads to plug into the freeways, the state of the royal palms along the street by his office. He felt an arc in almost everything he met, could tell where it would lead in the end, whether he saw a Caterpillar earth machine poised in a field or a wedding party milling at the door of a church. He’d never thought he could say it well because everyone else seemed dashed by the meanness of fate. Nick thrilled to the world in flux. His mind ran to pattern and process. If he really talked about it, he didn’t know where it might lead. What he needed, he’d always thought, was the right man to say it to.

You know, I’m not trying to play with you, Sam went on. I think you’re terrific, and you turn me on. But so do a lot of people.

It didn’t matter. Nick hadn’t risked much on an aimless talk at an outdoor café. He had a better plan ready, just in case.

You have the craziest idea of who you are, he said. He could feel Sam begin to freeze up, as if the muscles were about to take over and the feelings die away. He was ready to leave. The heart was best served if you treated it as just another muscle. I exasperate you, Sam, but you must want to hear what I have to say. Because here you are.

I came to tell you I’m not coming anymore.

I have an option on some land in the hills above Malibu. A ranch. He spoke as if Sam hadn’t; and as he did, he picked out on the lawn the figure of a woman gymnast stretching. She swung from one end of her body to the other, without a hitch. They’ve just shut it down, and I want to take a ride up and look it over. You want to come?

Now?

Later in the week. Friday. It was Monday. It’s real. They used to board horses for westerns. Some guys from Texas ran it, trail men, so it feels like a cowboy’s place. Nobody’s messed it up yet and made it pretty.

Are you a cowboy, Nick? Sam asked him. He was gentler now, and he’d calculated in an instant that they were onto more uncharted matters. Nick, he seemed to understand, was more than a free man with money and a taste for infatuation.

Put it this way. I’ve gotten more western since I’ve gotten gay.

We could poke around the bunkhouse, Sam said. He put one hand in his shirt and massaged a muscle in his chest. I’d need a new pair of boots.

Of course. How much would they set you back?

Two hundred. Two-fifty, maybe.

Nick took a fold of bills out of his pocket and peeled off three hundreds and laid them on the table. He thought: I’m not like this at all. And then wasn’t sure which role he was disavowing. It wasn’t the money. The act of making payment caused him no dislocation, because he’d had it for free ninety-nine times out of a hundred; and besides, he used to be poor and so saw money as a windfall, no matter how much work he did to make it. It was more the singlemindedness of the pursuit that had him shaking his head in wonder. He’d kept his word for four years now, that nothing would get in the way of him and Peter, and he’d kept it with special care because Peter wouldn’t promise. He’d never gone out of his way to go to bed with kids. They trusted sex too much, and they had a one-track mind about getting attention.

Somehow, Sam proved that Nick was never going to get over being poor and young, either one. It was nothing but the pursuit of pleasure that threw the last two weeks off kilter. It was not like love at all. The three bills lay on the table, fanned like a hand of cards; and the sun went in and out of the haze, as pale as a white-skinned melon. Nick felt the sweat in the fit of his suit. He’d be more himself, he thought, when they got to the ranch.

I’ve died and gone to heaven, Rita said, breaking into his reverie.

This was what kept happening to time. Traveling back to Sam again and again was beginning to seem like a series of seizures, amnesiac episodes in which real life gave up. Twenty minutes here, an hour there, Nick thought as he turned from the pool to face her across the terrace, and no wonder he got nothing done. In the pearl light of late afternoon, she looked, tented in her green cape and brown pants, like a stray spirit of the woods of another country. The garden around the pool didn’t seem various enough for such a wildfire pair of eyes. She was a gypsy, but that was only the beginning.

Welcome to Crook House, Nick said. He sounded to Rita like the governess in a Gothic novel.

What a name. Does it mean you stole it?

There are people in Bel-Air who’d call it stealing, but no. It’s tucked into the fold between two hills. Built right in. That’s why you enter down the stairs from the roof, and why you can’t see it from the road. The road is above us.

"I know. It’s like coming down the rabbit hole. And then this, she exclaimed as she spread her arms wide and capered up to the pool. She might have been about to burst into song, but in fact the moment struck her dumb. This" was the whole of Los Angeles. They could see the reach of it through the trees of the dark green garden, miles of a plain with no borders but the haze. There wasn’t an inch of it that didn’t appear peopled and built, yet what held her immediately was the brute fact of the land. Rita’s only previous fling at geography involved her perception at age four that Central Park had two sides, East and West. Yet already she knew the hills from the basin plain in LA, and she sensed that the contrasts were such that she could never go back to not knowing. Her head cleared.

Where’s the Pacific?

Straight out, he said, pointing west. You’ll see it one of these days. We have it almost all the time in the winter. How’s New York?

The same. Too damn cold. She was sure that it was dangerous to criticize New York. New York ought to be protected. In New York, she used to protect Europe. She cooked French and bought Italian shoes and read Jane Austen. She was sure, since Europe was double the distance away now, she had no skills for this city. That is why she worried about not being beautiful. It would have been something to fall back on.

Tell me about the house, she said, turning things to real estate because she’d heard it was what they talked about here instead of the weather. She was standing next to Nick, and when she looked up at him, they caught each other’s eye. Being who they were, they learned a great deal from the gesture. He looks too beautiful to look so sad, she thought. His hair was dark and covered his head with light, thick curls. He had a wide mustache and great, rocky features. He didn’t look gay in the least, she thought, mentally slapping her hand.

It’s Spanish, sort of. It was built for Rusty Varda in 1920. Then, because she didn’t make the connection, he started at the beginning. He was a Hollywood producer in the teens and twenties. Silents. You’ve never seen any of them. They were lousy. He got bought out by better people. But in his heyday, every time he finished a movie he acquired another hundred acres in Los Angeles County. This was the desert up here when he came. So we live in a monument, if you can have a monument to just plain money.

If there’s enough of it, you can, she said. J.P. Morgan’s house in New York is kept like a cathedral. I think it even has nuns.

Do you want to change for the party?

You mean my clothes? No. This is what I’d wear if I didn’t think about it, and I don’t want to think about everything. So what happened to Rusty Varda?

She could tell Nick knew what she meant. She’d wear what she wanted. She probably could have said what she was afraid of, too, that she couldn’t stand being alone any longer, and yet she had to if she gave up men, which she had to. But it wasn’t all put into words yet. She only knew she was jittery, and here was someone who must have been, not long before he was sad, scared to death. He had an ambushed look about his eyes, like the victims of natural disasters.

Nothing, Nick said. He died. He lived here forty-five years, collecting coins. When you’re rich enough, you get to collect money. He died without a will. No heirs. Enter the State of California.

Did he die here? she asked, looking down at the deep blue tiles, rimmed in gold, that paved the pool. She couldn’t imagine why she cared. It was a jumpy thing to want to know, the young bride’s line in the Gothic novel.

Yes, as a matter of fact. He gave up the ghost one night in front of ‘The Late Show’ in his den. The house was empty eight years while they traced his phantom cousins and the lawyers siphoned off the liquid assets. We bought the house intact at auction. All the furniture in place. We junked just about everything. But we kept Hey.

Who?

The houseboy. The one who picked you up at the airport.

We weren’t introduced, she said apologetically. Nick might get the wrong idea that she was snotty with servants. But he started to laugh.

Don’t worry, he said. It’s nothing personal with him. He has bad days when he can’t stand people and talks to his parrot. Those eight years, he lived here all by himself. As he leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper, she realized he was as conspiratorial when he told stories as she was. "Twenty-five years ago, he used to dance with Balanchine. Come on. We’d better get going."

They walked across the terrace to the house, passing tubs of flowering trees and the big old white wicker chairs that sit on the porches of northern islands. The stones underfoot were slate gray. The house was built in a U around the terrace, with wide, rough-beamed eaves and a terra-cotta roof. Casement windows, mahogany like a ship, and stucco walls. Spanish, sort of. All the windows faced in, toward the pool terrace and, beyond it, the garden and the city. There were no windows to speak of on the outer skin of the house, where the hillsides came down steeply. Seen from above or, even more, from the back, it would have looked like a fancy motel; but it was sited so as to mask that view. It was built on an idiotic principle, hugging the shape of the hills so that it cracked at the seams in earthquakes and shook all the glass into powder. Hey used to say they’d toted up a thousand years’ bad luck, just in cracked mirrors. Perversely, Rusty Varda loved the idea that the earth might swallow up him and his house and his sixteen thousand Greek and Roman coins at any moment. And these things equal out. It turned out that, when the fires swept down through Bel-Air, they tended to leap over Crook House, nestled as it was, burning the leaves off its trees as they passed and ripping into the houses on the bare hilltops.

It was like walking into an opera. The room at the center, airy and high—with the spiral stairway going up to a balcony, where the front door was—appeared to be swathed in peach silk. Waves of it draped the terrace window, and it wrapped around the sofas, the chairs, and the footstools. Close up, you could see it was embroidered here and there with exquisite little peach bees. But it wasn’t a room intended for close-ups. It was a living room where nobody lived, designed for the view from the balcony. Nothing like a newspaper or telephone would have fit on any of the table surfaces. Fit in both senses. They wouldn’t have been suitable, as having too much to do with people; and there wouldn’t have been room either, what with the bowls of camellias and crystal eggs and covered silver boxes. It was a room that had to do with other rooms, measured against the way people lived who lived above the fray. Surprisingly, Rita was more proud of it than put off, because it showed how pure Peter’s work had gotten to be. There were rooms elsewhere in the house, no doubt, where people could live.

Nick led Rita around behind the spiral stairs and opened a closet door which turned out to be a two-man elevator. As they rode up to street level, Nick ticked off the specifications of the house, but they didn’t register because Rita was reeling with the incongruity. The elevator was painted inside, trompe l’oeil, to look like the view from a balloon. The wicker of the gondola was painted waist-high, then the guy ropes, and above their heads the bottom of the great gas bag. For the view, they were supposed to be floating above an English park. Rita didn’t know what to say. Not wanting like a bumpkin to comment on everything, she let it pass. They got off at the balcony, walked out the front door and up a flight of steps shaded over by willowy trees, arriving at last at the driveway, high above the house. They took the Jaguar instead of the Mercedes. They drove down and down, out the east gate of Bel-Air to Sunset and left toward Beverly Hills. Nick tried to keep her posted on the lay of the land. She heard him all right, stone cold sober at last, but turned her mind to the string of vehicles. The DC-10, the Mercedes, the balloon elevator, and the Jaguar sedan. It was a very pricey game of musical chairs.

She was half in love with him already. It was just a manner of speaking, half in love, and she’d use it to caution herself about men she shouldn’t get involved with. The problem was, she more often than not went ahead and got involved, no one to blame but herself. Or worse, she’d fall all the way in love because the man in the picture didn’t look twice at her, and she’d end up half-dead from the misery. Rita admitted she wasn’t good at the matter of the heart. She’d had a bad run of married men, one after the other, as if she willfully refused to learn a lesson. What did she want? She’d never dreamed of asking, but it had to do with being alone. It simply never occurred to her that that was the very thing she might ask of a man. She thought that to ask it was to call the love off. Nick would say she was all wrong. For one thing, you can’t be half in love, he’d say. He was a boy idealist about love, earnest and wide open. Tom Swift and His Pounding Heart. That’s what Rita was half in love with, and they hadn’t talked about anything yet.

Have you lived here all your life?

In LA, yes. Not here, he said, taking his hands from the wheel for a moment and gesturing at the close-clipped lawns on either side of the boulevard. When you’re on your way up or down, you don’t live anywhere long.

Haven’t you always been on the way up?

More or less. Not as much as Peter. He’s the skyrocketing kind. He spoke without awe of the process, and seemed to relish it. He knew that Peter would never have become a decorator if it hadn’t been for Rita, and he was asking her now to share the marvel of it.

I don’t even understand what happened, she said. The leather smell in the Jaguar was a shade sweeter than the Mercedes, like the difference between two perfect tobaccos. She was always good at hairline distinctions. He got a job arranging pots and pans in a store window. Then it was antiques. The next thing I knew, he was decorating a yacht. The rest is history. My friend Peter, the star.

Superstar, you mean.

Is there a difference? she asked playfully. She had got Peter his first job, doing the flowers at a wedding. She made a thousand phone calls to get him the next one, but he couldn’t do it. His Village lover was jealous when he worked. Rita decided the Village lover had to go.

I thought you’d never ask, Nick said. I’m one of the handful of people who knows. With stars, history is the last three weeks. They have all the time in the world to get their hair done and go shopping. Time is what superstars give up. It doesn’t exist.

Peter doesn’t have any time?

None. I wish I could buy him some, but he has more money than I do, so it mustn’t be for sale.

He spoke evenly, the skin around his eyes crinkling with pleasure. Not because the news about Peter was pleasant. He seemed happy that he had a handle on the situation, that he knew Peter well enough to see him through the haze. She didn’t think there was anything wrong between Nick and Peter. What was sad, what was making Nick talk rueful and portentous, was a split in their rhythm. Nick seemed to have all the time on his hands that Peter gave up. He had time to kill. Rita didn’t know how she knew it, since she didn’t have any idea of what it took to do a day of real estate. Maybe because he’d taken time for her this afternoon, she thought, and then thought it didn’t say a lot about her self-image, if time with her was time killed.

So LA is a gold mine, she said. She meant there were veins of it, and some people tapped into it and some didn’t, and then it had to be mined, pick and shovel. It was a remark about how difficult it was, not how easy.

You know those old prospectors they used to have in westerns? Nick asked her as he turned into a driveway lined with freshly polished cars. They’re all grizzled, and they cuss and have rotten hats.

Yes, she said, as if they’d seen the same movie that very day, projected in the middle of everything else, like a movie on a plane. People who never make a strike. You wonder what they’d do with the money if it came to them now. After all that waiting.

My grandfather, Nick said, shaping the irony into one final photograph, sepia-toned and out of an album. He used to go off by himself to the middle of nowhere and hunt for minerals. I don’t know if it was a scheme about water or uranium or what; but when my father told me about it, I had a very clear picture of my grandfather putting a double handful of sand in a sifter. With a mule tied up nearby."

A boy who should have been in movies took the key to the car from Nick to park it, and the two of them made their way to the front of the house. It was an ordinary place, not so big, and Rita wasn’t in the mood to go overboard about it. But she forgot until she walked in, shying behind Nick and edging through the crowd in the front hall, all of whom seemed to be kissing good-bye, that she was here to see the latest piece of Peter’s work. If possible, there was more silk in this living room than in Peter’s own, pale as cream on every wall, upholstered to the room itself. The furniture was variously English, provincial French, and just a bit of wild-priced American, all of it old and perfect and brought together as if by an inner will to be beautiful in a well-protected place. This was what Rita said to herself, adopting the eye of a country-squire magazine, or, rather, its breathtaken voice. She turned to tell Nick she loved it, but he was gone to the bar to get them champagne. Peter appeared as she drew in her breath, before it turned into panic.

You look like you just blew in from the East, he said, grinning. I can always tell, because you look as if everything here had a price tag on it, and you can’t afford it.

It’s not that, Peter. I’m afraid they won’t take traveler’s checks, and I have to have that little chest of drawers under the window.

The lady has good taste, I see. He was full of mirth, but he was looking sleek, his yellow hair cut close. He always looked like he’d just finished posing for a portrait six feet by four, but today he was an Art Deco poster, cool-eyed and angular. Not too thin, like he used to be in New York. No hunger about him at all.

Maybe I could take it out in trade, Rita said, "because I see now I have to have it. I can dust and do ironing and run the