Belinda (67 page)

The car was gone. Then she turned to me, and the old Belinda was suddenly looking right at me out of her face.

"Hey, Jeremy, let's do the Rio thing," she said suddenly, "I mean, you're coming to Rio with us, aren't you? I'm going to call Susan. I mean, this picture is really truly on, isn't it? We're going to go!"

"You bet, baby darling," I said.

I watched her turn and all but dance up the driveway, snapping her fingers, braids swinging.

"I mean, after, you know-what, two episodes with Mom and Marty?-then we're off." And she vanished into the shadows of the house.

LATE that afternoon came the inevitable press conference. It had to be announced, didn't it? She had to sit in the den with G.G. beside her and give a statement before the inevitable video cameras and lights. They were asking as many questions about G.G.'s new salon in Beverly Hills as they were asking about the show.

Susan had come over with Sandy Miller "to watch the circus." And Alex sat with them out on the bricks by the pool. In pearls and summer lace Sandy sat there with her long fingers curled around Susan's arm. A tomato, is that what Belinda had called her? Sandy was a tomato, all right. And did she ever play up to Alex. Susan just watched the whole thing with a patient smile.

Alex was having a wonderful time entertaining her with stories, and then Susan kept chiding him about upsetting her "price scale" with his demands for Of Will and Shame. He teased her back, telling her she hadn't been in this business long enough to get him to make a deal without his agent at a poolside table in his own backyard.

"You want to be remembered for 'Champagne Flight'? I'm offering you a movie, Clementine, a bona fide movie like they used to make in the old days, remember, plot, character, style, meaning, one hour and forty-five minutes without a commercial break, you get my drift?"

I went into the living room and stood for a long time looking up at the portrait of Faye Clementine that I had painted twenty-five years ago. It still hung above the fireplace where I had put it myself before I left for San Francisco on that last day. Over the years the little mistakes I'd made in perspective had always tormented me when I saw them. But I liked the painting. I felt good about it. I always had.

And now, as I studied it-Faye's dimpled cheek, the way her carefully modeled hand rested on the pink fabric of her dress-I felt a gentle surge of excitement that no one around me need know of, or try to understand. This wasn't a great painting. It didn't have the hallucinatory vibrancy of the Belinda works. But it had been a true beginning, one that I was only fully understanding now that I had come full circle to stand in front of it again.

I didn't hear Alex come up behind me. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and when I turned, he smiled.

"Go ahead," he said. "Say I told you so. You've got a right."

"You mean our old argument? Some little old talk we had about art and money and death and life?"

"Don't leave out the word, truth, Walker. When you don't throw the word truth into every second sentence, I get afraid."

"OK, it was about art, money, death, life, and truth. And now you're telling me I was right."

"I just didn't know how you were so sure it was all going to turn out the way it did."

"Sure? Me? I wasn't sure at all."

"I don't believe you," he answered. "That was Clair Clarke, your agent, on the phone right now. She's talking to me 'cause you won't take her calls."

"Right now," I said, "I don't need her calls."

"-and you know what she wants, don't you?"

"Belinda as a client. I told Belinda. Clair can wait till Belinda decides."

"No, dear boy, though she'll want that in the bargain, too, obviously, if she can get it. She's getting offers for your story from all over. She wants to know if you want to sell the rights."

"To my story!"

"Yours and Belinda's-the whole kit and caboodle. She wants you to think it over. She doesn't want somebody to rip it off because you're public figures now. You know, the quickie TV movie. They can do that, using your names and all. She wants to scare them off with a major package, seven-figure deal."

I laughed. In fact, I really came apart.

I had to sit down, I was laughing so hard. I wasn't laughing all that loud. It was a different quality of laughter. It went way deep down inside me and it was bringing the water up into my eyes. I sat there staring at Alex.

He was grinning at me, hands in the pockets of his blue-wash pants, his pink cashmere sweater tied over his shoulders, his eyes full of mischief and pure delight.

"Tell your wife about it, Walker," he said. "Rule of thumb in Tinseltown. Always tell your wife before turning down a major package, seven-figure deal."

"Of course, it's her story, too," I said, when I was finally able to catch my breath. "Oh, you bet I'll consult her. Just wait."

"It worked out just like you predicted, gotta hand it to you. It really did. Must have been the right dirt in the right measure after all, don't you think?"

But then his face darkened a little. The worried look. And it was hardly for the first time.

"Jeremy, are you really doing all right?"

"Alex, don't worry about me, seven-figure deal or no seven-figure deal, I am just fine."

"I know you keep saying that, Jeremy, but I'm just keeping an eye out, OK? You remember Oscar Wilde, when he'd go around with the tough young hustlers in London, he called it 'feasting with panthers.' Remember that, hmmm? Well, you know what this town is, Jeremy? It's 'phone calls from panthers, and lunching with panthers, and cocktails with panthers and "catch you later," from panthers'-you have to watch your step."

"Alex, you're being deceived by appearances," I said. "It's not like I'm here suddenly instead of up in San Francisco with all that Victorian trash. I haven't swapped the kiddie books for Tinseltown, it's not like that at all. I've come back to some fork in the road I never should have passed up the first time around. And it hasn't got much to do with Hollywood really. It's got more to do with time and what's directly in front of you and the way you use it, which is why I'm perfectly all right."

"Now that sounds like the old Jeremy," he said, "I have to admit. Throw a little truth into it for me and I'll be convinced."

He gave my shoulder a squeeze, and then he started back out to the patio, where G.G. was sitting with the ladies by the pool. The reporters were gone now. Belinda had come out, peeled off her jeans and shirt to reveal nothing but that wicked little Brazilian bikini before she carefully aimed her sleek breathtaking little body, arms first, into the pool.

Just me and Faye again. OK. I love you, Faye.

I looked up at her, and I was thinking pictures again, my kind of pictures, full of incandescent power and gradations of darkness, burning studies of Alex, Blair, G.G., and Belinda, yes, Belinda in some wholly new context, some new adventure utterly transcending what had gone before.

The contour of glitz, yes, I wanted to get it, and the discovery of the shadows that the spotlight always washed away. The color and texture of California, all that I had to do.

But these gilded images were but a small part of what was yet to come for me. The fact was, my world was now filled with a thousand beings of all ages, shapes, attitudes, a thousand settings, patterns of past and present and future unexamined and unseen before. For the first time I could do anything I wanted.

I had passed-thanks to Belinda-out of the world of dreams into the brilliant light of life itself.

The End

Anne Rampling writing as Anne Rice, California, 1986