Belinda (51 page)

"G.G. ever tell you how he got started," she asked, "hustling the old queers for money on his way up? Ever tell you how he lies to those old ladies when he curls their hair? That's what you are, aren't you, a liar like G.G. And you're hustling Mr. Walker, aren't you? Got him tied up in ribbons and bows. I was a fool not to think that G.G.'s blood would come through."

I was boiling inside. I think I looked out the window. I'm not sure. My mind wandered, that much I remember. She was talking still and I could hardly follow what she said. I was thinking to myself how hopeless this all of it. The truth will never be known. And all my life I have lived with this kind of confusion, everything mixed up, just giving up over and over again that anything would ever be understood.

She and I might never see each other again after this. She'd go back to Hollywood and live on drugs and lies until she finally did do it with a gun or pills, and she'd never know what had driven us apart. Did she even remember Susan or the name of our movie? Would anyone ever get through to her about those times when she had almost killed me in trying to kill herself?.

But then a terrible thought came to me. Had I ever tried to tell her the truth myself?. Had I ever tried for her sake to reach her, to make her see things, just for a moment, in a different light? Everybody had lied to her ever since I could remember. Had I gone along for reasons of my own?

She was my mother. And we were going our separate ways in hatred. How could I let that happen without even making an effort to talk about what had gone on? Good God, how could I leave her like this? She was like a child really. Couldn't I even try?

I looked at her again. She was still looking at me. And that ugly smile was there just like before. Say something, Belinda. Say something, and yet if it goes wrong and you lose Jeremy-And then she spoke instead.

"What are you going to do, little bitch," she asked, "if I don't blackmail your friend, Mr. Walker? Tell me, what you're going to do to us all, G.G.'s daughter? Bring us all down?"

I was staring at her, kind of on hold, and stunned like she had hit me, and then I said:

"No, Mom. You're wrong about me, all wrong. All my life I've protected you, taken care of you. I'm still doing it. But, so help me God, you hurt me and Jeremy Walker, and I will look out for myself and him."

I got out of the car, but I stood there with the door open. And then after a long time I leaned back inside. I was crying. I said:

"Play this last role for me, Bonnie. I promise you, I'll never darken your door again."

The look on her face then was terrible. It was heartbroken. Just heartbroken. And in the most tired voice with no meanness at all she said:

"OK, honey. OK. I'll try."

I talked to her one time after that. It was close to midnight and I went out to the phone booth in Carmel and I called her private line, as we had planned.

She was the one crying then. She was stammering and repeating herself so badly I could hardly make out what she said. She told me something about how you took the negatives from her, that she hadn't pulled it off. But the awful thing was that she'd tried to turn you against me. She said she didn't mean it, really she didn't, but you kept asking her questions and she had said the meanest things about me and Marty and all that.

"Don't worry, Mom, it's OK," I said to her. "If he still wants me after all this, then I guess it's just really fine."

Then Marty came on the line. "The bottom line is this, honey. He knows we're on to him. He won't use those pictures if he's got a brain in his head."

I didn't even answer that one. I just said, "Tell my mom I love her. Tell her now so that I can hear it." And after he did, I heard him say, "She loves you, too, honey, she says to tell you she loves you." I hung up.

But, you know, after I left the phone booth, I went walking on the beach, letting the wind just sear me to the bone. And I kept seeing her when she said: "OK, honey, OK. I'll try." I wanted so to run the tape back and be in that moment again and just to hold her in my arms.

"Mom!" I wanted to say. "It's me, Belinda, I love you, Mama. I love you so much."

But that moment would never come again. I'd never touch her or hold her again ever. Maybe never even hear her voice speaking to me. And all the years in Europe and on Saint Esprit were gone away.

But there was you, Jeremy. And I loved you with my whole heart. I loved you so much you can not imagine. And I prayed and prayed for you to come. I prayed to God you would not ask me anything else ever, because if you did, I might spill everything and I could never never tell it and not hate you for making me tell.

Please, Jeremy, just come. That was my prayer. Because the truth was, I'd lost Mom a long time ago. But you and me-we were forever, Jeremy. We really were once-in-a-lifetime. And the paintings would live forever. Nobody could ever kill them the way they killed Susan's movie. They were yours, and someday you'd have the courage to show them to everyone else.

Well, now you have it, Jeremy. We have come to the finish. The story is finally told. For two days straight I have sat in this room writing in this notebook, filling every page both sides. I am tired and I feel the misery I knew I'd feel when all the secrets were finally revealed.

But you have now what you always wanted, all the facts of my life and past before you, and you can make the judgment for yourself that you never trusted me to make.

And what is your judgment? Did I betray Susan when I went to bed with Marty the very night after he killed her picture? Was I a fool to want his love? And what about Mother in those crucial weeks in Los Angeles? All my life I'd cared for her, but I was so in love with Marty that I stood by and did nothing as she starved herself, got hooked on the medications, the plastic surgery, and all the other things that turned her life into sleepless nights and bad dreams. Should I have gotten her out of it somehow to some place where she could have taken stock? And was I guilty all along of a worse betrayal of her, of never trying, for her sake and mine, to break through the games we all played?

You called me a liar that night when you hit me. You were right, that I am. But you can see now that I was lying before I could remember. Lie, keep secret, protect-that was life with Mom.

And what about Dad? Did I have a right to go to him, to come between him and Ollie Boon? Dad lost Ollie after five years of being with him. Dad loved Ollie. And Ollie loved Dad.

You decide. Have I harmed every grownup who ever had any dealings with me, from the day that Susan set foot on Saint Esprit? Or was I the victim all along?

Maybe I had a right to be mad as hell about Final Score. And I did love Marty, that I will never deny. Did I have a right to expect Uncle Daryl and Mom to care about my life and what was happening? I was Mom's daughter, after all. When they didn't, was I right to run away from them, to say, "I will not be sent to Europe, I will strike out on my own"?

If I only knew the answers to these questions, maybe I would have told you the whole thing before now. But I don't know the answers. I never did. And that's why I hurt you with the stupid blackmail trick. And God knows, that was a mistake all right.

I knew it was long before you ever suspected what happened. I knew it when I called G.G. from New Orleans and I could not bring myself to tell him about it, to explain to him how things had worked out. I was too ashamed of what I'd done.

But then we were so happy together, Jeremy. Those New Orleans weeks were the best of all. Everything seemed worth it. I knew in our last weeks that you'd won your inner fight. And I told myself the blackmail trick had saved us both.

Well. It is a hell of a story, isn't it, just as G.G. and Ollie Boon said it was. But just as I said, it was not my story to tell. The rights really do belong to the grownups. And you are one of them now. There will never be a day in court for me where all this is concerned. Escape was my only choice before. Escape is my only choice now.

And you must understand this. You must forgive it. Because you know you had your own terrible secret, your own story, which belonged to someone else, which for so long you could never tell.

Don't resent me for saying it, but the secret was not that you wrote those last novels for your mother. It was the secret of the novels you wouldn't write after her death. She didn't just leave you her name in her will, Jeremy, she asked you for eternal life, and that you could not give. You know it's true.

And in guilt and fear you ran away from her and left her house like a tomb of olden times complete with every little thing that was hers. Yet you couldn't get away from it. You painted the house in every picture in every book. And you painted your own spirit running through it, trying to get free of your mother and her hands that reached out in death.

But if I'm right about all this, you are out of the old house now. You have painted a figure that finally broke free. With love and courage you opened the door of your secret world to me. You let me come not only into your heart but into your imagination and into your pictures, too.

You gave me more than I can ever give you. You made me the symbol of your battle, and you have to go on winning the battle, no matter what you now think of me.

But can't you forgive me for keeping my mother's secrets? Can't you forgive me for being lost in my own dark house, unable to get out? I have made no art that can be my ticket to freedom. Since the day Final Score was sold out, I have been a phantom, a shadow compared with the images you painted of me.

It won't always be so. I am two thousand miles away from you already, I am in a world I understand, and we may never see each other again. But I will be OK. I won't make the mistakes I made in the past. I will not live on the fringe again. I will use the money I have and the many things you gave me, and I will bide my time until no one can hurt me or hurt the people I love through me anymore. And then I will be Belinda again. I will pick up the pieces and I will be somebody, not somebody's girl. I will try to be like you and Susan. I will do things, too.

But, Jeremy, this is the most important part of all. What will happen to the paintings now?

I want you so badly to show them for my sake that you must be wary of what I say. But listen just the same.

Be true to the paintings! No matter how you despise me, be true to the work you've done. They are yours to reveal when you are ready, and so is the truth of all that has happened to you with me.

What I am saying is you owe me no secrecy and no silence. When the time comes to make your decision, nothing and no one must stand in your way. Use your power then, just as Ollie Boon told me to do. You have made art out of what happened. And you have earned the right to use the truth in any way that you want.

No one will get me to hurt you, of that you can be sure. This year, next year.

RAIN falling. Great slanted sheets of rain. They hit the screens with such force the screens billowed, and the water swept the old floorboards, spraying off the legs of the rocking chair, spraying into the room. Dark puddle creeping into the flowers of the rug. Voices downstairs? No.

I was lying in bed with the Scotch on the table beside me. Next to the phone. Been drunk since Rhinegold's visit, since I'd finished the new Artist and Model. Would be drunk until Saturday. Then back to work again. Saturday deadline for this madness. Until then the Scotch. And the xxx.

Now and then Miss Annie came with gumbo and biscuits. "Eat, Mr. Walker." Flash of lightning, and a deafening crack of thunder. Then the echo of the thunder, which was just the streetcar rolling by through the storm. Water was coming in under the wallpaper in the upper-left corner. but the paintings were all safe, Miss Annie had assured me of that.

Sound of people walking? Only the old boards creaking. Miss Annie wouldn't call a doctor. She wouldn't do that to me.

I'd done all right till I'd finished the new Artist and Model, she and I fighting, my slapping her, her falling back against the wall. Then I'd started deceiving myself, one drink, two, it wouldn't matter, just the background to finish. And the phone was not ringing. I was the only one calling: Marty, Susan, G.G, somebody find her! My ex-wife Celia had said, "This is awful, Jeremy, don't tell anyone!"

Bonnie's private line disconnected. "Leave me alone! I tell you I don't care, I don't care!"

I'd been drunk when Rhinegold left actually. He had wanted to start shipping the pictures immediately. "No," I said. I had to have them here with me until it was all finished. One week from Saturday he would be back. One week to do the last one, to write the program notes, to fight out the final arrangements. No later than Saturday, sober up, begin.

Call, Belinda, give it one more chance. Once-in-a-lifetime remember? Already two thousand miles away from you. Where? Across the Atlantic? A place I understand.

Belinda in Final Score was done. Her profile and Sandy's perfect. No cheating, as Susan Jeremiah would have said. And what a great voice that woman had, Texas ham and soft at the same time. On the phone from Paris she'd said, "Hang in there, old buddy, we'll find her. She's no nut case like Mama. She isn't going to do that to all of us."

Yeah, Sandy and Belinda finished. And the block print one, Belinda, Come Back, in the same somber colors as all
e ce
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›. A~d ,~rlisl and Model only needed a little more shading, a little more deepening. Put yourself on automatic pilot, soul control, you ought to call it, and go ahead, old buddy, and finish you hand hitting the side of her face right before she went down to the floor.

"What more must you do?" Rhinegold demanded. "Belinda, Come Back is the finish. Can't you see this yourself?." Sitting there hunched over in his black suit, staring at me through Coke-bottle thick glasses, the specialist in understatement.

I'd grabbed his sleeve as he was leaving, "OK, you've agreed to everything, but you tell me, what do you really think!" They were all lined up in the hallway, up the staircase, in the living room.

"You know what you've done," he said. "You think I'd agree to this lunacy if it wasn't perfection?" Then he was gone. Flight to San Francisco to look for the warehouse on Folsom Street. Madness, he had been ranting. "San Francisco is a place where you buy mountain bicycles and running shoes. We should be on West-Fifty-seventh Street or in SoHo with an exhibit like this! You are destroying me!"