Belinda (17 page)

White wicker tables, overhead fans, good food. I kept trying to make conversation. She was stony.

And Dan, what the fuck had he been saying about a photograph of her? Another photograph of her?

"Who was that who called?" she asked suddenly. She had just lighted another cigarette. She hadn't touched the scampi.

"My lawyer, I told you. Taxes or something." I could feel the heat again in my face. I knew I sounded like a liar. I put down the fork suddenly. This was just too ugly.

She was eyeing me downright coldly.

"I have to go down, see him at noon, I hate it."

She didn't respond.

"All these things in the works, Disney thinking about buying the Angelica books. Rainbow Productions wanting them. It's a tough decision to make." OK, good, latch onto that little misplaced speck of truth. "Don't much want to bother with it right now. My mind's on you, it's a million miles from those things."

"Big bucks," she said with a slight lift of her eyebrows. "Rainbow's a new company. They do exquisite animation."

Now how would she know that? And the tone, all the California girl had dropped away. There was that crisp articulation I'd noticed the first time I met her.

Her eyes were strange. The wall had come down again.

And what did I look like to her?

"Yeah, Rainbow ... they did a-" I couldn't think.

"Knights of the Round Table. I saw it."

"Yeah, exactly. So they want to do two films of Angelica."

But this wasn't working. She knew something was out of whack.

"But then Disney is Disney," I said. "And whoever does it has to make sure the animation is true to the drawings. You know, if they want to add characters, they have to fit."

"Don't you have agents and lawyers that handle all that?"

"Sure. That's who called me. The lawyer. I have to sign on the dotted line finally. Nobody can do that but me."

Her eyes were frightening me. She was drunk. She really was.

"Are you really happy with me?" she asked. Small voice. No drama. She crushed out her cigarette in the uneaten food on her plate. She never did things like that.

"Are you happy?" she asked again.

"Yes, happy," I said. I looked up at her slowly. "I'm happy, probably happier than I've ever been in my life. I think I could write a new definition of happy. I want to go home and develop the pictures. I want to stay up all night and paint. I feel like I'm twenty-one again, if you want to know. Do you think I'm a fool for that?"

Long pause. Then the smile, tentative, then growing brighter, like a light coming down a dark passage.

"I'm happy, too," she said. "It's all happened just like I dreamed it could."

To hell with Dan. To hell with all of it, I thought.

I DID the whole roll of Communion shots before I went to bed. For a little while she came into the basement darkroom with me, a cup of coffee in her hand.

I explained everything I was doing and she watched carefully. Asked if she could help next time. She seemed tired from all that Scotch earlier, but otherwise OK. Almost OK.

She was fascinated by the process, the pictures coming clear magically in the developing tray. I told her how a real photographer might do it, take more time with every step. For me it was like squeezing out oil onto the plate, cleaning brushes, it was mere preparation.

I made three enlargements, and we took these up to the attic.

I knew this was going to be the best picture of all. Holy Communion or Belinda with Communion Things. Just the veil and the wreath, no other clothing, of course. And the prayer book and rosary in her hands. Formal as the riding picture, as the little black-and-white photographs that the mothers would take of the little girls on that day outside the church before the procession. The trick was the background.

At first glance you had to think you saw cloisters or Gothic arches. Maybe the flowers of an altar with candles. Then you would realize you were seeing a bedroom, a four-poster bed, wallpaper. Had to make this illusion seamless: it was a matter of texture as well as lighting. And I was going beyond the practiced applications of my craft here into a new depth of illusion.

I wanted to start then; keep the pace going. But she said she wanted me to come to bed with her, really snuggle with her. Desperate, her eyes. Her voice. "OK, darling baby," I said.

She was stiff when I put my arm around her.

"You know there's a place we could go," I said suddenly. "I mean, we could get away from San Francisco for a little while. House in Carmel I have, rarely use it. We'd have to clean it up, but it's small, wouldn't be hard. Just a block from the ocean."

"But we are away, aren't we?" she asked me in a strange cold voice. "I mean, who would we be running from?" she asked.

ABOUT four in the morning I woke up and realized that she was crying. She had been shaking me, trying to wake me up. She was standing by the bed and she was sobbing, wiping at her eyes with a Kleenex. "Wake up," she was saying.

"What's the matter?" I said.

I switched on the small light by the bed. She was wearing only a cotton slip. She was really drunk now. I could see it, smell the Scotch on her. She had a glass in her hand, full of ice and Scotch, and her hand holding it was a woman's hand.

"I want you to pay attention to me," she said. She was gritting her teeth, and her eyes were all red. She was really frantic. The thin little triangles of white cotton barely covered her breasts, and they were heaving.

"What is it?" I said. I took her in my arms. She was actually choking, she was so upset.

"I want you to understand this," she said.

"What?"

"If you call the police on me, if you try to find out who I am, if you find my family and you tell them where I am, I want you to know, I want you to know, I'll tell them what we've been doing. I don't want to do it, I could die first, to do something like that. But I mean it, if you ever betray me, goddamn it, if you ever do that to me, if you ever betray me like that, if you ever ever do that to me, I will, I swear I will I will tell them-"

"But I wouldn't, I wouldn't ever-"

"Don't you ever betray me, don't you ever do it, Jeremy."

She was sobbing in spasms. I was holding her tight and she was just writhing against my chest.

"Belinda, how could you think I'd do that?" That wasn't it at all, not at all.

"I don't want to say horrible things, it kills me to say I'd hurt you. It kills me to say I'd use these things to hurt you, twist it all around for them and their filthy morality, their stupid idiotic morality. But I would, I would, I would, if you betrayed me-"

"You don't have to say it, I understand." I stroked her hair, held her tighter. I was kissing the top of her head.

"But, so help me God, if you betrayed me-"

Never, never, never.

WHEN she was finally calmed down, we lay there curled in each other's arms. It was still dark outside. I couldn't sleep anymore. It was going round and round in my head that what I was actually doing was not betraying her. Lying, yes, betraying, no.

She whispered, "I don't ever want to talk about it. I don't ever ever want to think about it. I was born the day you saw me. I was born then, and you and me were born then." Yes, yes, yes.

But I only wanted to know what happened, so that we could both put it behind us, both know it was OK, OK, OK ...

"Jeremy, hold on me. Hold on to me."

"Come on," I said finally. "Let's get up, get dressed, get out of here." She seemed numb. I pulled the little wool skirt and blazer out, dressed her. Buttoned the white blouse myself up to her neck, kissed her. Got the cashmere scarf and put it around her neck. Put the little leather gloves on her.

She was a doll all dressed up, a little English girl. I brushed her hair even, put it back in the barrette so I could see the flawless plane of her forehead. I loved to kiss her bare forehead.

She watched silently as I gathered up the photographs of Holy Communion, carried the canvases down to the basement, opened up the back of the van, slid the canvases into the rack. I helped her up into the high front seat.

I DROVE south out of San Francisco in the early morning darkness, down the clean silent stretch of highway towards the Monterey Peninsula, the morning coming slowly through the gray clouds.

She was sitting beside me looking very stately with her hair blown back from her face and her arms folded. The lapel of her jacket flapped silently in the wind, just touching the hollow beneath her cheekbone.

An hour, an hour and a half, and the sky was brightening behind the clouds. The sun coming suddenly through the high windshield. Blessed warmth on my hands.

I made that turn into the wind, towards the ocean, into Monterey, then south through the piney woods to Carmel.

She didn't know where we were, I don't think. She'd never seen this strange still little beach town, like a stage set before the day's tourists, never seen the little thatched cottages behind their white picket fences beneath the towering gray Monterey cypresses with their gnarled limbs.

I lead her along the gravel path to the rounded door of the cottage. The earth was sandy, the brilliant yellow and red primroses scattered in the clumps of green grass.

In the little house of raw redwood beams and stone floors the sun spilled through the little windows. Green leaves high against the leaded glass.

I climbed the ladder to the loft bed with her, and we sank down together in the musty down covers.

The sun was breaking in shafts through the webbing of branches above the skylight.

"Dear God," she said. She was shuddering suddenly and the tears came back and she looked past me into the light overhead. "If I can't trust you, there is no one."

"I love you," I said. "I don't care about any of it, I swear. I love you."

"Holy Communion," she said squeezing her eyes so the tears came out. "Yes, Holy Communion, my darling," I said.

[12]

"WHAT this requires is a decision," she said. "I mean, a commitment. That you want this, you want me here and I want to be here. That we are going to do this now, live together, be together. And then it's settled."

"It's settled, then, it's decided."

"You have to see me as someone who is free, who is in control of what is happening to her-"

"But let's be absolutely frank. You know what's bothering me. That someone is grieving, that someone is going crazy, worrying about you. That they think you're dead-"

"No. This will not work. This will not work. You have to understand that I have walked away from them. I made the decision to go. I said to them and to myself this will not continue. And I decided that I would leave. It was my decision."

"But can a kid your age make that decision?"

"I made it," she said. "This is my body! This is me. I took this body and I walked with it." Silence.

"You got it? Because if you don't, I walk again."

"I got it." I said. "You've got it."

"What?"

"The commitment. The decision."

[13]

ON the third day in Carmel we started arguing about the cigarettes:

What the hell did I mean, die of cancer, all that rot, would I listen to myself the way I sounded, like somebody's father for God's sakes, I mean, did I think she was born yesterday? And it was not two packs a day and she did not chain smoke or smoke on the street that much. Didn't I know she was experiencing things, this was a time of life for going overboard, making mistakes, didn't I understand she wasn't going to puff like a stove pipe all her life, she didn't even inhale most of the time?

"All right, then, if you won't listen, if you want the prerogative of making the same stupid mistakes everybody else makes, then there have to be ground rules. I won't watch you poison yourself on a routine basis in either the kitchen or the bedroom. No more smoking in the rooms where we take our meals or take each other. Now that is fair, isn't it?"

Red-faced glare, almost slammed the kitchen door, obviously thought better of it. Stomp of feet going up the ladder to the loft. Tape of rock queen Madonna suddenly thumping through the cottage at deafening level. (Did I have to buy her a Carmel machine as well as a San Francisco machine?)

Tick of cuckoo clock. This is awful, awful.

Creaking sound of her coming back down the ladder.

"OK, you really don't want me to smoke in the bedroom or the kitchen."

"Really don't. Really-"

Lower lip jutting deliciously, back to the door frame, cutoff jeans very tight on her brown thighs, nipples two points in the black T-shirt with ghastly logo of the rock group Grateful Dead on it. Quiet voice:

"OK, if it makes you happy."

Silk of inner arms around my neck, hair coming down me before the kiss like a net.

"It makes me very happy."

THE Holy Communion canvas was exploding. The whole living room of the cottage was the studio, the easel sprawled on the rumpled drop cloth. New air, new sky, even new coffee cup exhilarating. Nothing stood between me and this picture. I painted until I literally could no longer hold the brush.

The argument about the booze erupted on the seventh day:

OK, now I was really getting out of hand, who did I think I was, first the smoking and now this, did I think I was the voice of authority that I could just tell her what to do, did I talk this way to Cecilia or Andrea or whatever their names were?

"They weren't sixteen and they didn't drink half a bottle of Scotch for breakfast on Saturday morning'. They didn't drink three cans of beer while driving the van to Big Sur."

That was outrageous, that was unjust, that was not what happened. "I found the cans in the van! The cans were still cold! Last night you poured half a pint of rum into your Cokes while you were reading, you think I don't see this, you're putting down quarts of booze a day in this house-"

I was uptight, puritanical, crazy. And if I wanted to know, it was none of my business what she drank, did I think I owned her?

"Look, I can't change being forty-four, and at my age you don't watch a young girl-"

Just hold it right there. Was she supposed to join Alcoholics Anonymous just because I didn't know the difference between two drinks and dipsomania? Well, she knew the difference. She'd lived all her life around booze and people who poured it down, boy, what she could tell me about booze, she could write the book on booze, on cleaning up vomit and dragging drunks up to bed and lying to bellhops and room service and hotel doctors about drunks, don't tell her about drunks-She stopped, staring at me.