Belinda (8 page)

"She knew a gentleman when she saw one," I said under my breath as I looked at him.

He smiled as he let out the smoke. He looked immensely attractive even now in his late sixties. His white hair was still full, sculpted in a flawless Cary Grant style. And he carried what little extra weight he'd gained over the years with authority, as if other people were just a little too light. Perfect teeth, perfect tan.

"It was right after the premiere of Crimson Mardi Gras," he said, eyes narrowing, his hand on my shoulder. "You remember we had wanted to fly her out to California and she couldn't come, it was impossible the way she was then, but you came, and then later I flew down to New Orleans to call on her."

"Never forget."

"Jeremy, you don't know how Gothic it all was, that trip south."

"You have my sympathy."

"My car pulls up to this gigantic old rose-colored house on Saint Charles Avenue with all the dark olive green shutters bolted, and the picket fence just holding back the oleanders so they don't fall right down on the front pavements. It took two of us just to push in that front gate."

"No place like home," I said.

'"And then I enter this dark cold hallway with the grim bronze pirate's head on the yule post, and a big shadowy oil painting of what was it, Robert E. Lee-?"

"Lafayette," I said.

"-Those ceilings must have been fifteen feet high, Jeremy, and those old cypress floorboards, enormous. I went up and up that Scarlet O'Hara staircase. The old gas light fixtures were still in the walls!"

"They didn't work."

"-And just a tiny little chandelier dangling in the upstairs corridor-"

"It was murder changing the light bulbs."

"-And there she was, the Cynthia Walker, in that cavern of a front bedroom. That wallpaper, Jeremy, that old gold-leaf wallpaper! A set designer would have given anything to get his hands on that old paper. Yet even so, it was like being in a tree house when you stood there and looked through the open slats of all those blinds. Nothing but the oak branches and the green leaves. If you peeped out the front, you could barely see the traffic moving down there, just little specks of color and that old wooden streetcar rocking past. It gave off a roar, like the sound m a sea shell."

"Write another book, Alex, a ghost story."

"And there she was in her big old-fashioned bed with the oxygen tanks beside it, the oxygen tanks right in the middle of all this gold wallpaper and mahogany furniture. Big highboy-wasn't it?-with the curly Queen Anne legs, and one of those old French armoires with the mirrored doors ?"

"Full of moth balls."

"You can't imagine how it looked to me, that room. And the book jackets and photographs and the mementos everywhere, and those tinkling wind chimes, those dreary brass wind chimes-"

"They were glass, actually-"

"-And this tiny little woman, this mite of a woman, sitting up against all these embroidered pillows."

"Silk."

"Yeah, silk. And she was wearing a lavender silk negligee, Jeremy, beautiful thing, and cameos. She had cameos on her neck and on her fingers, and on her bracelets. I never forgot those cameos. Said they came from Italy."

"Naples."

"And a wig, a gray wig-I thought she had a lot of class to have a wig like that made, natural gray and with a long braid of hair, nothing modern or false for her. And she was so gaunt, I mean, there was nothing left of her."

"Eighty pounds."

"Yet she was so lively, Jeremy, so sharp, and you know she was still pretty!"

"Yes, still pretty."

"She had me sit down and drink a glass of champagne with her. She had the silver ice bucket right there. And she told me how on Mardi Gras days the king of the Rex parade would stop at every house along Saint Charles Avenue in which a former king lived, and the former king would climb up a ladder to the new king's throne on the float, and they would drink a glass of champagne together while the entire parade waited."

"Yeah, they did that."

"Well, she said that it was like having the king of the Rex parade come to drink champagne with her to have me come to New Orleans to see her. And, of course, I told her what a great writer she was, and what a privilege it had been to play Christopher Prescott in Crimson Mardi Gras and how well the premiere had gone and all. She laughed and she said right out that you'd written every word of it. She didn't even know who Christopher Prescott was! Oh, how she laughed. She said she hoped he was a gentleman, this Christopher Prescott, and that he drank champagne with the king of Rex during the Crimson Mardi Gras. She said you'd done the last two books under her name and you'd be doing others, lots of others. Cynthia Walker was alive and well in your hands. Cynthia Walker would never die. She was even leaving you her name in her will. You'd be doing Cynthia Walker books forever, saying you'd found the manuscripts in her files and her bank vaults, after her death."

"Well, I didn't do them," I said.

He sighed and crushed out the cigarette. Blessed silence. No sound but the roar of the Saint Charles car in my ears. Two thousand miles away, but I could hear it. Smell of that room.

"I got the call in New York when she died," he said. "That must have been-what?-two months later? We toasted her that night at the Stork Club. Real genuine article she was."

"Undoubtedly. Now get out of my car, you drunken bum," I said. "And next time you write a book, put the story in it."

"I'd like to see you do that," he said.

I thought for a moment.

"And what if I did?" I asked. "Somebody would come along and make a TV movie of just that story. And sales of all her books would go up-"

"But yoga wouldn't tell it."

"-And so would the sales of my books, and all because people got a little truth. Truth makes art and people know it. Now go on in, you bum, some of us have to work for a living."

He looked at me for a long moment, gave me one of his easy, wide screen smiles. So well kept he looked as if somebody had gone over him with a magnifying glass to remove every blemish, every line, every unwanted hair.

I wondered if he was thinking about the other part of the story, if he even remembered it.

On his way out of the house that afternoon, he'd come by my back porch painting room, and I had invited him in, and he had shut the door and casually slipped the bolt. When he sat down on the cot, he gestured for me to sit beside him. We had made 1ovc-I guess you could call it that, he had called it that for fifteen minutes, more or less, before the big limousine had taken him away.

He had been the leading man then in all his glory, graceful of build with curly jet black hair. I remember he had on a white linen suit with a pink carnation in the buttonhole and a white raincoat over his shoulders which faintly suggested the capes he always wore in his costume roles on the screen. Effortlessly charming. That part had not changed at all.

"You stay with me when you come out west," he'd said. He'd written his private number inside a matchbook for me.

I had called that number three months later when I decided to leave the house.

And there had been the brief affair, a week at most in his splendid, clean Beverly Hills house before he'd said: "You don't have to do this for me, kid. I like you just fine the way you are." I hadn't believed it at first, but he had meant it.

Sex he could get anywhere, and he didn't care if it was the cute little Japanese gardener or the new waiter at Chasen's. What he really wanted around the house was a nice-looking straight kid who could fit in like a SOIl. When his wife, Faye, had come home from Europe, I'd understood it a little better, staying on with them for weeks after, loving both of them, and pretty much having the time of my life.

Parties, movies, late-night cam playing, drinking, talking, afternoon walks, shopping trips, we did all those things easily and comfortably, and the sex was utterly forgotten as if I'd imagined the whole thing. I didn't leave till I had finished a portrait of Faye, which hangs over the living room fireplace down there to this day.

She had been one of those pretty comic starlets that nobody remembers now, her career and her life were swallowed by Alex, but no matter how many "sons" or lovers he had had over the years, she was his one and only true leading lady. He'd gone through absolute hell after her death.

I'd never been to bed with a man after that, though now and then I'd felt a powerful temptation to do it, at least when I was very young. And though many of Alex's "sons" had outgrown his interest, we had become enduring friends.

We'd shared some pretty dramatic moments since those times and would probably share others as the years passed.

"Don't worry, kid," he said now. "I'll never tell that New Orleans tale or any other. The truth is just not my business. It never was."

"Yeah, well," I said bitterly, "maybe you've got a point."

He laughed a little uneasily. "You're cranky tonight. You're crazy. Why don't you get out of the fog for a while, come down south with me?"

"Not right now," I said.

"Go home and paint little girls then."

"You got it."

I SMOKED one of those horrible little Gauloises because they were all I had left, and I drove down Nob Hill and out to the Haight to look for Belinda.

But I couldn't shake Alex's story. He was right about me not being able to tell that old tale. Neither of my former wives had ever heard it. Nor had my closest friends. And I would have hated Alex had he put it in his book. I wondered what he would think if he knew I'd never set foot in Mother's house since the day I'd left on the plane for California. It was still exactly as he had just described it, as far as I knew.

For a few years I'd rented out the lower floor for wedding receptions and other gatherings through a local agency. You could do that with a Saint Charles Avenue mansion. But when they'd insisted on redecorating, I'd stopped.

The place was kept alive now by an old Irish housekeeper, Miss Annie, whom I knew only by voice on the phone. It wasn't in the guide books anymore, and the tour buses no longer stopped in front. But now and then, I was told, some elderly lady would ring the doorbell asking to see where Cynthia Walker had written her books. Miss Annie always let them in.

FINALLY these dark recollections started to lift as I cruised through the late-night Haight. But other thoughts, just as dark, began to intrude.

Why the hell had I left Alex and Faye so soon to go to San Francisco? Over and over they had asked me to settle down south near them.

But I had to be independent, to grow up, of course. I'd been terrified of the love I felt for Faye and Alex, of the sheer comfort I knew in their home. And how had I become independent? By painting little girls in drafty moldering San Francisco Victorians that reminded me of Mother's old New Orleans house?

It was right here in the Haight, in a Victorian on Clayton Street, that my mother's, editor, trying in vain to persuade me to write more Cynthia Walker, had discovered my paintings and signed me up for my first children's book.

The portrait of Faye I'd left on Alex's wall was the last picture of a grown woman that I'd ever done.

Forget it. Drive it all out of mind as you've always been able to do. And think on the exhilaration you feel when you paint Belinda. Just that.

Belinda.

I CRUISED down Haight slowly from Masonic to Stanyon looking for her on both sides of the street, sometimes blocking the little stream of traffic till someone honked at inc.

The neighborhood tonight seemed uncommonly forlorn and claustrophobic. Streets too narrow, houses with their round bay windows shabby and faded. Garbage in the gutters. No romance. Only the barefoot, the lost, the crazy.

I made my way back to Masonic again. And then back down to Stanyon and along the park, studying every passing female figure.

I was cold sober now. I must have made the circuit six times before an absolute fright of a kid dashed right up to me at the stoplight on Masonic and leaned into the car to kiss me.

"Belinda!"

There she was under a mess of paint.

"What are you doing down here?" she asked. Blood red lips, black rings around her eyes, gold mascara. Her hair was a shower of magenta-gelled spikes. Perfectly horrible. I loved it.

"Looking for you," I said. "Get in the car."

I watched her run around the front. Horrid leopard skin coat, rhinestone heels. Only the purse was familiar. I could have passed her a thousand times like that and never seen her. '

She slipped into the leather seat beside me and flung her arms around my neck again. I shifted gears, but I couldn't really see anything. "This car's the greatest," she said. "Bet it's as old as you are."

"Not quite," I mumbled.

It was a 1954 MG-TD, the old roadster with the spare on the trunk, a collector's item like the damned toys, and I did get a kick out of her liking it.

In fact, I couldn't believe I had her again.

I turned sharply onto Masonic and headed up the hill towards Seventeenth.

"So where are we going?" she asked. "Your place?"

The perfume must have been Tabu, Ambush, something like that. Real grownup scent. Like the big rhinestone earrings and the beaded black dress. But she was working hard on a wad of gum that smelled deliciously like Doublemint.

"Yeah, my place," I said. "I have to show you some pictures I did. Why don't we swing by your room and get your stuff so you can stay for a while? That is, if you don't get mad about the pictures."

"Bad news back there," she said. She popped her gum suddenly, then two more times. (I winced.) "The guy and his lady in the back room are having a fight. Somebody's liable to call the cops if they don't stop it. Let's just wing it, OK? I've got my toothbrush. I was by your place a couple of hours ago, you know. Five dollars cab fare. Did you get the note I left you?"

"No. When are you going to give me an address and phone number?"

"Never," she said. "But I'm here now, aren't I?" She popped her gum again three times in succession. "I just learned how to do that. I still can't blow a bubble."