Belinda (32 page)

But first the photographs.

I turned on the lamps.

"Lie on the bed," I said to her gently. "On the embroidered pillows. No, keep on the slip."

"Now that's a change," she answered drowsily.

No tripod unpacked but I could hold the camera steady enough. Very grainy these would be, light terrible, but good enough. The painting would come blazing out of them soon enough.

Her legs were spread apart, the left knee raised to one side, her pink nipples clearly visible under the silk cloth.

I saw her fall into the usual trance as the shutter clicked. I thought of all those films she'd made. And the last, those exquisite love scenes in the sand. But this was too this for thinking of that.

Out of her suitcase I got one of her bras, a pink satin one with lace, and a tiny pair of pink bikini panties.

"Put on these for me, would you?"

I watched her peel off the slip. The bra closed in the front like the other. Ah, my teeth clenched seeing her tighten the clasp, breasts gathered like that. Then she smoothed the flesh into the cups, lifted each breast, dropped it, her fingers casual, rough. I got hard watching it. Then the panties came up stretched sheer over her pubic hair. I could see the silk seal itself over her secret lips. Little crack. Hair a dark shadow underneath.

She sat down on the bed again, scooting back to the pillows, letting the counterpane catch under her heel. "Perfect."

I stood back looking at her, loving her. Knowing who she was-it changed nothing and it changed everything. It made all the difference in the world.

THAT night we walked all over the old French Quarter.

We caught the jazz at Preservation Hall, roamed the shops, the garish Bourbon Street clubs, drifted past the old historical places-Pirate's Alley, Jackson Square, the cathedral.

She talked softly about the things she missed about Europe. Not Saint Esprit. That had been a prison. She talked about Paris and Rome mostly. She had so loved Rome. She had ridden all over Rome on a Vespa with Susan Jeremiah when they were doing the postproduction work at Cinecittá on Final Score. Susan was six feet tall and always did wear her cowboy boots and her cowboy hat. The Italians had loved her.

This place had those colors, she said. Stained walls, stone streets, the dark smells of Rome. Not like any place in America that she had seen. New York, LA, San Francisco-that was America to her.

I listened to all this quietly, sensing the change, that she could have her past now, that her life could extend backwards in time as well as forward with dreams and plans. Everything was going to be fine. It was going to be all right.

But I didn't push her. When we had coffee later in the Cafe du Monde, I asked about making Final Score.

"Well, you know I'd made movies all my life," she said. "I was in them before I can remember. I've seen films in which I was just a baby. And then the ads, too. I did some kind of baby shampoo ad when I was fifteen months, something like that. The pictures are somewhere. I'll show you. But then we went to Saint Esprit and everything was over, dead. Well, no, that's not true, there was one other picture maybe. I don't remember. But it was like prison or something, Saint Esprit."

"But in Final Score you had a big part."

She nodded. Then she was uncomfortable. "There's time for all that," she said. "It's OK, having to wait."

Afterwards, when we were walking back to Canal Street, she brought it up again:

"You know, one thing I learned about actors and actresses-I mean the big stars. They can be the most ignorant people if they get caught up in it very young. Some of them are damn near illiterate. And emotionally they're like people who have grown up in the penal system. I mean, they can not control their emotions at all. I want to make pictures-I know I'm going to do it-but it doesn't hurt to live a little more life of some other kind before it starts."

Seemed like she was arguing with herself, trying to make it acceptable. It wasn't clear.

"Two years, honey," I said. "Two years and nobody can do anything to either one of us then."

I thought of Bonnie threatening me with those negatives, I thought of some faceless creature making his way through my empty house. When had it happened? When we were in Carmel that last time, the stranger flashing his light on my paintings? Scalding anger. Let it go, Jeremy. She gave the negatives to you without the slightest resistance. The woman is tragic. "Leave her to heaven," as the old poetry goes.

BY midnight she was asleep in Mother's bed-our bed-and I was painting downstairs in the old place again. I was racing, trying to finish the last rough spots in the old canvases. Tomorrow I'd get the darkroom supplies, use the servants' bathroom by the kitchen. Everything would be perfect.

When I finally knocked off, I went outside and felt that embrace of motionless night you never never know in San Francisco.

The great hulk of the house seemed to list like a ship in the dark, its twin chimneys swallowed in ivy. And scents of the flowers rose-the thick dizzying perfume you encounter everywhere here. Oh, why did I ever leave? I just took it with me in all the work I did. Charlotte and Angelica, even Sleeping Beauty, yes, especially Sleeping Beauty under her gauze of spiderwebs. But now everything is different. The past is alive. I am alive.

I looked up. She'd come to the back screen door. She wore just the slip again. And the kitchen light behind her burned through her hair.

Not a child. A woman standing there.

BY the weekend she was getting around just fine in the van, she knew the whole city. She went out to the shopping centers just to feel America down here-sometimes hard to do. And the Quarter she loved, of course. And there were several good movies in town we hadn't seen. We had to see those, she said. And from what she gathered, the list of restaurants was endless.

I had started Belinda in Mother's Bed two canvases that I was working on simultaneously. One was silk slip, the other bra and panties. And these were clearly the most erotic works I'd done so far.

I'd known the new direction would present itself, just as it had when I did the Cafe Flore painting, but now the mystery deepened. I was a man in the middle of a waking dream.

I could hardly keep at it when I was painting in her breasts and the panties. I'd knock off, go out into the yard, and let the heat lay me out flat. September in New Orleans. Summer still.

BUT it was working out, oh, so fine. Continuation of the grown-woman series. And if I'd doubled my usual speed in California, well, I was at hurricane speed here. I was back to five hours sleep a night at the most. Sometimes only three.

But the afternoons were perfect for napping. Miss Annie slept then. Belinda went riding in Audubon Park, hung around Tulane catching a class or two. She started a diary and sometimes wrote in it for hours in the library. I dozed on Mother's bed.

She was busy and content just the way she'd been before. The books were piling up. The new television sets and the VCRs and the cassettes were proliferating. We were set up in the bedroom and her room down the hall and the library downstairs.

ON Wednesday night she watched "Champagne Flight." I was soaking in the bathtub. The door was open. She never said a word to me about it. She just sat on Mother's settee, in a pair of tight white shorts and a pink halter-the kind of casual clothing she had never worn in San Francisco-and stared at the screen. I heard Bonnie talking. Then Alex. Then Bonnie. This must have been Alex's big bow-out for the young punk lover. Bonnie crying. Loathed the sound of it. I don't ever want to see her again.

A FEW more days passed before I remembered Dan. I had to call Dan! Everything else was going splendidly. I'd checked with New York from a pay phone downtown.

Rainbow Productions had paid the $350,000 for the rights to Angelica. My accountant was already allocating taxes, investment. Rainbow wanted me to come to LA for lunch, but that was out. No phone calls either. Take her away, gentlemen, please.

And now Dan. And having to tell him the last chapter, the awful chapter, that woman in the sterile room at the Hyatt with the cigarette like a prop in her hand.

But Dan deserved a call. Probably going crazy.

I went to a phone booth up on Jackson and Saint Charles. And I got his personal answering machine in San Francisco. "Leave a message of any length." Well, for the first time in my life I could take advantage of that. I began recounting the whole thing in veiled terms. "Not two hours after I talked to you I look out the window and-" I think that's when it started. The doubts. That moment when I was telling it.

I was standing in the booth and I was watching nothing outside, just the long brown wooden streetcar gliding by, the domed top all wet from rain uptown that wasn't falling here.

And I heard myself saying: "-like I was being kidnapped in a black limo, if you can believe it-" and "somebody had broken into the house, got the negatives and-" It hit me right then that it sounded preposterous.

"Well, this is really the capper," I went on, "but I got them back from her, the negatives, and-" No, that didn't make a whole lot of sense either, did it?

And the dream came back, the one I'd had the first afternoon in Mother's bed, of Alex telling everybody the story. What had been the feeling in the dream? I don't believe it.

"Well, Dan-" Mumble mumble. I found myself recounting how I'd checked the locks when I got back home in San Francisco. I could not figure out how the bastard got those negatives, even knew how to sort them out of the rest and-"You know, these guys are professionals, crack professionals, I guess." Is that true? "And the lengths these people will go to."

Better wrap this up.

"But you see, whatever happened with her and the stepfather put the cards in little B's hands. I mean, they didn't dare have the police pick her up, naturally-" Hmmmm!

"And that's what it's like, a house of cards. Because everything is so precariously balanced. They screw me. Little B screws them. We all go down. Nobody's going to do anything to us until I decide to show those paintings-"

Had I told Dan about the paintings? "Later on the paintings, old buddy. I'll call again."

GLAD to be finished with that. Very glad. I hadn't told him where I was. Nobody would know that.

Whenever the phone rang in the old house, it was Belinda calling me or it was for Miss Annie-her son, the drunken cab driver, or her brother Eddie, the wraith of an old man who hammered nails in rotting boards on the side of the house.

I WENT down to the bar of the Pontchartrain Hotel and bought a drink. Had to get out of this muggy green weather for a little while.

Disgusting to have to backtrack like that even for Dan. But I couldn't cut Dan loose without a word, that was unfair.

But the story. It didn't make sense, did it?

[27]

SLLOXV dreams. I checked the lock on the darkroom again. The negatives were in the metal file cabinet in the darkroom. That's where I put things when I'm finished. Don't want them to burn if the house burns. Did I put them there? Thousands of sets of negatives in white envelopes. Marked what? Don't remember.

I was trying to pry loose the dead bolt and the oak door wouldn't even splinter. Like chipping at stone. No marks on the door. None.

Wake up. Eyes wide. Heart racing. The dream gone totally. And Mother's bedroom with the gold wallpaper, stained from the dampness, stains gleaming like snail tracks in the moonlight.

The streetcar passed outside. Smell of the jasmine coming through the French doors. Flash of headlights from Saint Charles Avenue. Where was she?

I went downstairs. Light in the kitchen. Sound of the ice box. She was sitting at the white metal table eating ice cream right out of the carton. Barefoot. Shorty baby-doll nightgown, V of violet panties underneath. "Can't sleep?" She looked up at me. "Rather paint for a while."

"It's four o'clock in the morning."

"You still feel that way, that when you're eighteen, I can show the paintings and you don't care?"

"I love you. You're insane. You never talk like other people. Other people sidle into their subjects. You just come right out with it. Like chalk strokes on a blackboard."

"I know. You said it before. My friends call it naiveté. I call it stupid-

"Show the paintings when you're ready. And for your information, Jeremy, I care passionately because I love the paintings, and I can't bear to think of waiting two years if you want to know it. In November, however, on the seventh, to be exact, I will be seventeen. One year from then, Jeremy. Or sooner, if you decide to just take it on the chin-" Big spoon of strawberry ice cream. "Think I should?"

Eyes hard for a moment.

"What would they do?" she whispered. Then she shook her head, shuddered, closed her eyes for a second. "Leave them out of it. You do what's right for you."

Another spoon of strawberry ice cream. Teenage shrug. "I mean, you know, be careful and all." Pure teenager. "I mean, you know, down here-" She looked around the high-ceiling kitchen. "I mean, down here you think you've just got God to worry about or something. The world's just gone."

"Yeah, God and ghosts, and truth and art," I said.

"Chalk strokes again!" She giggled. Then serious. "Those two In Mother's Bed are going to drive them crazy."

"What's so good about them?"

"Come on! You want some ice cream?"

"No."

Talking with another mouthful: "You realize I grow up in the pictures, don't you? I go from Charlotte's nightgown and the First Communion and-"

"Yes, of course. But you're not the one who grows up. I am."

She broke up. Soft laughter. Shaking her head.

"I'm living with a madman. And he's the only sane person I ever met."

"That's got to be an exaggeration."

I went out onto the glassed porch. Turned on the overhead bulb. Good God, these canvases. Something-what? In the first few seconds I always see new things. What?

She was standing behind me. Shorty top so sheer and short it wasn't even a garment really. Violet panties trimmed in lace. Good thing nobody from the outside world could have ever seen through the domestic jungle around us.