7

“But I like clutter,” Peter snapped into the phone. “Clutter is what I do. If you want a lot of empty spaces, honey, you want someone else.”

And he put the receiver back in the cradle neatly, not making a noise, as if he wasn’t going to be pushed into a temper. He turned to Rita, who looked up at last from her own worktable. She had just pulled the two oddest colors out of a photograph of a Pakistani rug they’d bought at an auction in La Jolla to put in a house on Mulholland Drive. A purple dark as eggplant and a green like celery. The rug was mostly rust and yellow. You couldn’t even see Rita’s two colors in the photograph, but Rita had been down on all fours on the rug itself, on the day of the sale, and she knew what knots of color made up the dark medallions in the pattern. Peter, who meant to go right on complaining about the heiress in Manhattan Beach he’d just hung up on, took a deep breath and said, “Holy shit,” by way of transition. But when he saw the two squares of fabric in her hand—chintz, for God’s sake, and purple and green—he flew to her side for a different tantrum.

“What the hell are you doing? Everything has to be beige in Teddy’s house, Rita. Colors make him depressed. His parents used to feed him crayons when he was naughty or something. Let me do it.”

“Do what, Peter?” she asked sweetly. Then she appealed to reason, her voice like Valium, but all the same she made it do a parody of Peter’s rattled state. “So Miss Bank Account thinks you’ve bought things too big for her little rancho, but is that a good excuse to butt in on my room for Teddy Dray?”

“But you’re not listening, Rita. He thinks brown is too much color.”

“I know. He’s putting all that behind him. We reached an understanding.”

No question about it, they’d had nothing but trouble in the three days Peter had been back. During all the time he was cooped up in his bedroom, Rita had made a daily report, and together they’d succeeded in putting the lion’s share of the current projects into suspended animation. Most of Peter’s clients were so cowed by his ruthless search for the truth in their living rooms and so well-trained for delays that they were half grateful to the snake for giving them a respite. Those others who could not live without Peter turned on Rita as if she were the snake. They professed to be lost in their own homes like a maze, reduced to tea and toast because they couldn’t get around alone. Somehow, though, they gathered the necessary strength to shriek at Rita daily over the phone, demanding things they wouldn’t have dreamed of bothering Peter with. And now that Peter was back, he had to have lunch three times a day, from twelve till nearly four, to accommodate the most well-heeled, whose houses were all they had.

Peter complained that they tore him apart, and he always reserved the right to give it all up and go be a shepherd, but Rita knew he really preferred it mad in the shop. He’d dug his own grave this week, after all, by having the party, because he’d made a hundred promises in one night’s revels. There were people who wouldn’t have known the difference if he’d started back gradually and given himself a couple of weeks to make his rounds. But Sunday night, stoked on the speed of things in Crook House, they had to shout to be heard above the beat from the speakers, and what they wanted was Peter now. Rita got out of the way. It was a relief to pick up the second fiddle again. And yet, as she could see this morning, taking her stand on eggplant and celery, nothing ever went back to being just the same. Inevitably, some of the clients were comfortable with Rita in the house, and they saw no reason to keep pleading for time with Peter and leaving their names and numbers. They decided to forego the master and the chance of media coverage and make do with the winsome shopgirl in the Joan Crawford suits. And Peter was furious.

He didn’t say so. He may not even have known it. Rita didn’t think he was jealous, didn’t see how he could be, since he’d been turning people away at the door for months. It wasn’t that he wanted more, or even that he had to have it all, like a king who can’t delegate power, driven to drink by details. Mostly, she decided, Peter suffered here from the difference in their attitudes. She kept as madly busy as he—they both required it instead of sleep, which they did only if there was nothing left to do, and they dropped—but being busy didn’t enervate Rita or test her temper. Peter, who generally couldn’t cope if he wasn’t knee-deep in refinements, wasn’t toughened by things going wrong with people’s upholstery. He raged at the loss of quality in first-class life like an old nobleman who’d lived too long at court. Rita considered it a miracle—well, a victory at least, of money over time—when anything worked all the way to the end. So she was very philosophical about the minor squabble and disarray. She was just the person Peter needed.

“Am I a bitch,” he asked with some distaste, “or am I a bitch? You’re right, you mustn’t put up with me. My mind is cluttered.”

“Oh, but I like clutter,” she said, surprised to hear him so much bothered. She hadn’t picked up the one other thing from his nagging and hovering that would have raised her protective instinct. The very people who wanted her working for them, who threw out their beiges for her like dowdy old clothes, were Peter’s first customers, the people who’d taken their chance on him before he made it. The stars who hired him now, hiring one of their own, took no chance at all.

“I don’t deserve you,” Peter said, moving to the refrigerator between their two heaped-up tables where they pushed their work around. Hey sent down provisions from Crook House on Mondays and Wednesdays, cheese and fruit and rolls, smoked salmon, a jug of iced coffee. Peter poured out a glass of coffee, creamed and sugared it, and stirred it with a glass rod as he talked on. “Remind me to give you a raise. We also have to hook you up with a retirement plan. You’ve got to get your perks, Rita. You’re almost forty, and you don’t have any perks. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” she said politely, looking off through the shop and out the window at the traffic. It was not precisely true. She wanted a call from West Covina, way off in the middle of nowhere.

“You’ll think of something,” he said, as if she hadn’t answered at all. The stirrer clinked against the glass. “Don’t you want a promotion?”

“You mean a title?” she asked, coming back into the room again, leaning back in her Italian chair. “Sure. Vice-president in charge of consumer affairs.”

“I mean we could put our names together,” he said, “with a slash down the middle. Put up a sign and everything.” It sounded almost like a dare. They knew they weren’t ready to be partners yet, but it was his way of telling her he’d given up some territory. Neither his nerves nor his ego, he promised between the lines, were going to jeopardize her future. Stars ate up little stars for breakfast, as they both were well aware. But not us, Peter was saying.

“Why don’t we see,” she said, “when the time comes?” A little too evasive, perhaps, but she turned quite pink at the same time. Peter was satisfied.

“Now I have something to show you,” he said, “so close your eyes. It’s sort of a present, except you can’t keep it.”

Everything he did had a set of formalities. She winked at him and swung the chair a hundred and eighty degrees and faced the wall. Faced an Andy Warhol poppy, in fact, framed in yellow chrome. Her mind went like the click of a switch to the big Monet she’d crated up, a field of red flowers done in 1919, when everything but color had gone out the window. He gave it to the doctor who took care of his eyes, whose children sold it to a French racketeer for a song before he was cold. The racketeer sold it to one of Rusty Varda’s agents, so it was the first thing Rita had turned up that was legitimate. They could keep it. But she’d right away tracked down the little museum in the Sixteenth in Paris where the mass of the late work went, and she was mailing it to them. As for the poppy, she hardly saw it. She couldn’t look at anything much without making connections back to the secret room. It had come to be her memory bank.

“Peek,” Peter commanded her. And she let the whole construction of this against that fly out of her head as she spun around again. Propped on her table, wildly out of place, was the Fabergé frame. And the picture inside, snapped out of time by a stray and accidental lens, was as real as a held breath, more so because of the gold and jewels around it. Peter and Rita and Nick were standing in a circle laughing. At first she thought it must be the party Sunday night, because people were milling around, but it took only a moment for her to have the horrors about her clothes. When, she thought in a tailspin, had she looked as bad as that?

“Don’t you remember, Rita? It’s the party at Jennifer’s. The day you arrived.”

“Oh, my God,” she said, her heart going out to all of them. “What are we laughing at?”

“Everybody else, of course.” And for a moment they stared at it in silence, heads to one side, pensive as people must have been when the frame was filled with a Grand Duchess, long ago in the old world. Peter spoke up again. “They certainly look like three of a kind, don’t they?”

“Yup. And they don’t look like they’d hurt a fly. Someone ought to let them run a small country.”

“But they already do,” he said.

And they left it at that. It made them feel more emotional things as well, with music they could dance to cheek to cheek, but they steered clear of putting it into words. They always had, about loving each other at least. Peter left the photograph on Rita’s table and drifted off into the shop, killing the time before his first lunch. Rita put the chintz and the picture of the rug in an envelope, marked it “Teddy,” and dropped it on the nearest pile. It would be lost in the shuffle in a matter of hours. But it was the closest thing to filing Rita could manage, even if it meant a furious search in a few days when she needed it. What next? She attacked a folder of out-of-stock memos from manufacturers, dreading the calls she would have to make to clients, who had to be told they’d have to find something else. But she wasn’t getting her paperwork done to be saintly. She was waiting, one eye on the clock and one line open, for the call from the hospital in West Covina. When Peter left, she thought, she’d transfer the photograph over to his table. It wasn’t in her way. She wasn’t afraid of it. But as with the Varda treasure, she was shut in with something else just now. It was touch and go, in fact—as the hands of the wall clock came together at noon like tweezers, pinching time, she knew that the call she expected and Peter’s leaving for lunch were neck and neck.

The phone rang. Lose one turn, she thought. She picked it up and strangled the ring in the middle. When she said hello, she noticed Peter turn his head to listen, looking up from moving a chair closer to a potted plant by fractions of an inch. “Yes, it is,” Rita said quietly. Peter stopped listening as soon as he could hear that it wasn’t for him, but he still might finish fidgeting and come within earshot before she was done. “I understand, Mr. Webber,” she said. “I know just what to expect.” Suddenly Peter was calling her over as if he didn’t even remember she was on the phone. He was standing at the chair, peering at it as if there was something spilled on the silk. “Of course,” Rita said, “fifteen minutes will be fine.” Peter called louder and looked up angrily. When he saw she was still busy, he picked up the chair in one hand and headed in her direction. “Please understand, Mr. Webber, it’s my last chance. I’ll take what I can get.” She spoke as neutrally as a disembodied voice in an airline terminal. “I’ll be there at three,” she said, and then hung up.

“Rita, why is this chair only four twenty-five? People will think they’ve wandered into Sears. Change the tag to seven fifty.”

“Okay, Pete,” she said, reaching for a pen. “I know we have to do our part in the fight against inflation.”

“Who was that?”

“On the phone? Nobody.”

“Oh. I have to go now. You know what I was just thinking? The first time I was ever really happy was the night we had dinner at ‘21.’”

“You’re kidding,” she said as she made out the tag. She remembered it as if it were yesterday, mostly because it was awful. Ten or twelve years ago. She and Peter and a man named Jerry, whom she couldn’t recall beyond the smug little smile he wore in fancy places. It was going very badly, anyway, but she figured to set herself up with a really swanky dinner before she finished him off. Somehow she’d arranged to have Peter included. She looked up now from tying the tag on the chair’s spine, wondering if the past had played another joke. She ticked off the facts. “All I remember is that he wouldn’t let us order for ourselves. He sent the wine back. He made a remark about how we didn’t have much to compare the place with and he did. And he didn’t leave a tip.”Then she shrugged as if to say: How do you get happy out of that?

“Really?” Peter said, smiling in disbelief. He either didn’t recall what she was saying or didn’t use the past in quite the same way. “They could have served us tuna fish, for all I cared. I just kept thinking how I’d arrived. I hadn’t, of course, not for keeps. I had to go back to eating on earth with everyone else the next day. But I sat there and looked around at all those classy people, and I finally got over my grandfather’s curse. He thought everything after Russia was shit. But I finally saw that for some people things were better than ever. That was the night I decided that money could make you happy.”

“It sounds like a religious experience,” she said. She stood up, and they carried the chair between them back into the shop proper, where everything gleamed and posed, ready at the drop of a hat to double in price. It was very still and very clean, as if the furniture itself found the thought of customers distasteful. They came well-screened, by appointment only. Rita plunked the chair down next to the plant, and Peter eyed it suspiciously, ready to fidget again. But he made no move. Apparently Rita had put it just where it ought to be.

“Well, does it?” she asked him.

“Does what?”

“Money make you happy.”

“Oh, who knows,” he said, dismissing it now. It was only a road through a boy’s small town. Rita walked him to the door and decided to drop it and let him go. Money wasn’t really what he meant. She knew it was more the feel of the best. Peter would have been just as glad if going first-class were free, and he didn’t care if everyone had a piece. Money to him was not the means of protection and isolation, and thus it never crossed his mind to want a room like Scrooge McDuck’s. What made him happy was nice things, and as for money pure and simple, that was all in people’s heads.

“Happy I don’t trust,” Peter said, opening the door and closing it again, because he wasn’t finished. It was as if he’d followed her train of thought. “That’s what people used to be in my grandfather’s day, and it made them dopey and got them pumped by a firing squad. What I want to be is”—and he widened his eyes and held his breath for a philosophical breakthrough, then went on—“okay. That’s all.”

“Well,” she said, “don’t worry. You’re okay.”

“Nick’s come back, you know.”

“I’m glad.”

“I still don’t know where he’s been. And whoever it was, they must have gone easy on him, because he doesn’t seem to hurt.”

She felt a little woozy for a second, but held her ground. She didn’t hurt, either, she would have said. What was strange was knowing more than Peter, about Sam first, and then about her and Nick on Saturday. Peter didn’t know it, but she’d come back, too. Not all the way yet, and not from the same place, and not to him, but she was three days full of her own free world and getting better and better.

“Nick’s okay, too,” she said.

“We all are. I have the pictures to prove it.” He winked. He opened the door for real and slipped out, and she watched him bound across the curb to his car like Gene Kelly, wild with anticipation, as if a slew of lunches were a polo match or a fox hunt. But he stopped in his tracks. Something had dawned on him, and he sang out, “Rita!” She stuck her head out. He turned around again, and he looked forlorn and caught short, as if he were going to ask for carfare. His big gray Russian eyes, she thought, are so transparent. “I forgot to ask you,” he said, “do you need me to do anything?”

“No. I’m taking the afternoon off.”

“Terrific. Let the answering service run the place for a while. They’ll get more done if we leave them alone. Go buy yourself something.”

“Oh, do I have to,” she said. And waving vaguely, she shut the door without even finding out. He thinks I work too hard, she thought as she walked back to her table and her list of things to do. Maybe she did, but she didn’t mind. Four or five hours a day, eight or nine in a pinch like Peter’s accident—those were the hours she had to spare, and if she gave over another couple or three to Varda’s room, even then she had enough time. She’d be better off in West Covina at three, she knew, because she was going to work till she had to leave, eating Hey’s food right out of the tinfoil.

She moved the picture and gave it a last long look before turning away, and it still reminded her more of the party Sunday night than it did the far past when she’d first arrived. Luckily for this brief image, the three of them were laughing like old friends, but as a matter of fact they weren’t then, not all three. Sunday night they were. All through the party, they darted back and forth like the Marx Brothers, aloft on a separate level of buzz and jazz from the eighty honored guests. They mugged each other from the middle of different conversations. And when they came together to huddle, they teased one another with the gossip they’d picked up, like kids with trading cards. Peter had it harder than Rita and Nick, because he was the star, so a lot of what went on among them privately was to keep him feeling easy. Hey, ordinary-looking except for a black sliver of eyeliner, glided up to them with a tray of canapés, and said, “If the three of you don’t start behaving, you’re not going to get invited out anymore.” They chorused back, “Who cares?” And Peter said, “It only means more for us.”

He gave a party like the Queen of Hearts. The delivery men had been in and out all day, bribed with steelworkers’ wages to do it all day Sunday. The living room was reconceived in brilliant reds, with lacquered furniture and screens and lattices and, facing each other across a white sand garden, a pair of opium beds pillowed in peacock silk. What was taken out to make room had been redistributed around the house, adding to the clutter Peter did for a living, and some other things had found their way back to the shop. From where she sat now at her worktable, Rita could pick out chairs and sofa, a chest and a garden seat that had shaken off the air of home and taken on, along with prices that could bring on a nosebleed, the polish of custom goods. Nobody cared if a chair had done time in Crook House. Or no, Rita thought, that’s not quite right. They cared like crazy. It was that they didn’t consider it secondhand, a thing that had lost its newness and first-bloom flash. Because Peter had actually sat in it, included it once in the floor plan of his life, it got priceless fast, like Cardinal Richelieu’s bed, or Carole Lombard’s.

She wasn’t all the way over Nick. Not the way he’d said he was over Sam, as if it were something not just done in the past and faded but done as well by someone he used to be for a little while who’d passed like a fad. Rita didn’t push herself. It worked, thank God, in the secret room, and their making love, such as it was, took away a layer of poses that had run their course and at the same time called a spade a spade. She wasn’t going to stop being drawn by certain types—she expected as much, and, if pressed, she took a little to be polite, a lot more if the type was human, too. But she didn’t think love had anything to do with it. So all she had to do was get over wanting Nick. She could love him as much as she wanted, as long as she didn’t mix him up with the class of lover that, take it or leave it, ended up in her bedroom.

And what about Rusty Varda and Frances Dean? Hadn’t she cut out a valentine to put around their picture? Somehow it didn’t seem like a contradiction to Rita. She still believed in the usual thing, to a point. Two people who were struck by the moon at the same time, maybe in the same dance hall, or like Garbo coming off the train through the steam, when she catches her first glimpse of the count—two people like that still went through love like visionaries on a quest. Rita allowed a little room just in case, with an attitude not unlike Pascal’s wager about the slim chance for true love. It was Paradise enough if you could get it. Nevertheless, she declared herself through with being taken in by what her lovers said, this after so many years of men who thought they were telling the truth and always being nice. Rita wasn’t looking now. Getting the wrong idea about Nick was a warning she didn’t ignore. She’d fooled herself and gotten a knock and a couple of bruises and then come out the other side in one piece. She meant to stay that way.

Gee, she thought as she peeled off a couple of slices of red roast beef, I’ve gotten as hard as nails. She wondered if she even had it in her still to sob at the drop of a hat in a movie. Maybe she’d have to make do with less, with a lump in her throat and an aura of prickly heat behind the eyes. Now that she preferred her feelings in a different key, she was as partial as Hey to the notion of the three of them. And she had to admit, stealing a glimpse, that the picture was right for what they did best, standing in a circle laughing, clustered about with pearls and jewels. All the same, she knew she couldn’t stay on much longer at Crook House. She would have found a place of her own already if it hadn’t been for the work to do in the treasure room. The three of them, she thought, had a fifty-fifty chance of remaining what they were, but only if the pressure was off from too much forced togetherness. She didn’t have the same good cheer about desert islands as she did about country houses looming in English parks—with the latter, at least, you often got a town house thrown in in Belgravia, so that Monday to Friday you lived in the world, and weekends alone in Utopia.

What do you suppose we are? she asked herself idly, arranging raw vegetables on a bed of lettuce as if it were going to be photographed. Not a family. The mere idea made her queasy. Not a ménage à trois, she was pretty sure, though here she wasn’t certain how broad the term might be. She thought all three had to fuck with the other two to qualify, and, technically, didn’t they mostly do it in the same bed at the same time? If Peter and Rita and Nick were something else again, it got its character from what they broke down to, which was two plus one. Looked at that way, she reasoned, Peter and Nick were the title bout, the star-crossed pair, the group of two that Freud, in the dryest remark of the twentieth century, called a marriage. Rita had nothing to do with it. Part of what they were as a trio, then, was as the bearers of a sort of irrelevance one to another. Or are there three of us, she thought flippantly, because you need at least three to keep one honest? Not that anyone cared if you were honest, and knowing that, you had to either laugh or cry, and you needed three to laugh as well. One to tell the joke and two to hold their sides and whinny. Two because an audience of one was not enough for comedy. One would always laugh to be polite.

But who knows for sure, she wondered at last, staring at the plate with a sudden loss of appetite. She might be all wrong about the three of them, in which case she’d better work it all out tomorrow and make it make sense. Right now she couldn’t be bothered. Rita was down to the wire. She still had dozens of major works to get rid of out of the room behind the mirror, but she had a thing to do at three that superseded everything else. It had come out of nowhere and pulled the last three days right out from under her. But she’d known as soon as she made the connection that she couldn’t back out of it. It called for hair-trigger timing. She’d pulled apart Aladdin’s cave, and now she had to face the genie.

Hey had let it out. When the party was all over and the caterers had left and Nick and Peter had staggered up to bed, she stood in the kitchen and did a double check while Hey counted the silver and tied it up in black felt pouches. When did Frances Dean get bundled out of Crook House for good? she asked him. Forty-three, forty-four, he wasn’t certain which. And where did they take her? West Covina. Where was that? Out Route 10, in the middle of nowhere. Why so far? Publicity. They both were talking to pass the time. She wouldn’t even have said that Frances Dean was on her mind, though she must have been, what with the party and all. As she and Hey chatted, Rita had begun to think Frances Dean would have fit in nicely in a catered crowd in evening dress, lying back in a vamp’s repose on an opium bed—white skin, skimpy dress, no makeup except a smear of red on the lips, the blue-gray circles under the eyes. No one would have guessed it, but a part of Rita identified with the tale of Frances Dean. The helpless girl with the saucer eyes and needle tracks was at the mercy of things, like Rita used to be when she was in love. Listless, given to dreaming, caught without past or future. Frances Dean had engineered her very own silent film to live in. So had Rita, and the only difference was that hers at least had been a serial, an episode at a time, with breathing room in between. Frances’s went on and on, the theater darkened day and night.

“When did she die?”

“Hmm,” Hey said, as if it was less and less familiar ground. “In the mid-fifties, I think. Yes, that’s right.” After a certain point, he seemed to say, his memory got sketchy. That didn’t register to Rita. She pressed on because she assumed he had to know the whole story. Anyone in Hey’s position, she knew, would automatically have been splicing together the inches of film that Varda told from time to time about his grandest passion. Besides, she knew Hey didn’t miss a trick. Just like her.

“Where’s she buried?” Rita asked. It went one of two ways, she was thinking as she sorted two dozen demitasse spoons into slots of felt. They either freighted a movie star back to his old hometown to lie in a grassy yard with a picket fence, or they consigned him to oblivion in a corner of Forest Lawn or Hollywood Memorial, where the big names got the same top billing as ever. Rita was just asking. She wasn’t a visitor of graves. She didn’t care, which is why she was taken aback by the turn in Hey’s mood.

“Why do you want to know so much?” he asked in a sort of quiet fury. “Can’t you leave it alone?”

Her mouth dropped open. It was all so safely far in the past, she’d thought, that she couldn’t imagine anyone wounded by it still. But a picture popped into her head of Varda and Frances Dean, buried side by side in a corner of LA nobody went to, and only Hey to mourn them and leave an occasional bunch of violets. Under a freeway or something. She looked over at him, and she wondered at last about the secrets he kept. He always seemed to tell everything.

“I’m sorry, Hey,” she said, putting out a hand and touching him lightly on the arm. “I go on and on about Rusty Varda, and I forget that for you it’s not just a story.”

“It’s not that, Rita,” he said with a shake of his head. “You don’t want to know it all. I’d tell you, but you know what would happen? All those pretty movies you have of the two of them would disappear”—and he snapped his fingers an inch from her nose—“like that! It’s not a story at all. People change.”

Oh, my God, Rita thought, she’s still alive. And before she could say a thing, she begged the powers that be not to kill her off before Rita got to her, just for the sake of irony. I’m the one she’s been waiting to talk to, Rita thought, the only one since Varda who knows who she is. Hey was saying what they always say when the stakes double: Be satisfied with what you’ve got. And Rita thought: I will be, once I’ve seen her.

People change, she warned herself as often as she thought of it after that. She said it again in the shop. She pushed away the lunch she’d only scratched the surface of. She picked up the phone and dialed the man who did their indoor plants. She’d be twenty minutes with him, then ten apiece with the three or four clients who needed daily care. That left her a half hour to stop off at a post office on the way with the Goya etchings on the folly of war. Don’t expect a thing in West Covina, she told herself. Just go on with what you’re doing. Hey had told her how bad it was, but she went ahead and set it up anyway, trying not to care too much. She was feeling too good after Saturday afternoon and Sunday night not to risk it. From where she sat at the table, she could hear the three of them laughing behind her in the picture. Not at her. They were trying to keep her spirits up, because at three she had to go visit a kind of grave. As she said hello to the plant man, she swung her chair around again and saw what it was like when it was easy. It suddenly seemed a million miles away.

The dealer’s rep delivered the green MG to Nick’s office in Beverly Hills at nine o’clock. He wasn’t meeting Sam till twelve, but pretty soon he couldn’t stand it, sitting at his desk and staring out the window at it gleaming by the curb. While he cradled the telephone with his shoulder, he lobbed the ring of keys back and forth between his two hands and, without paying any attention, talked out a mortgage problem with a buyer, a seller, and a bank. At ten he chaired his Wednesday meeting with his staff. The four of them exploded into his office, deals coming out of their ears. Compared with them, Nick was calm as a Sufi, and he looked on them all benignly while the properties flew about the room, traded off and pyramided. The agents ran around the Monopoly board with ever greater speed and begged for the chance to set a price on anything with walls. Any of them could have sold the Brooklyn Bridge in a morning’s work. Nick gave here and there a word of advice and privately thanked his stars he’d got them all working for him and didn’t have to compete. And every few minutes he’d lose himself in the green MG that beckoned him out for a spin.

“Listen, Nick,” said Charlie Burns, putting his hands down flat on the desk and leaning too far into Nick’s airspace. “I’ve got a firm one-three on Lookout Grove.”

“Not a chance,” Nick said, steely-eyed for the moment. Charlie was the agent Nick kept on to remind him real estate was shitwork. He gave off an odor like the rusted underside of rotten cars. Peter refused to be in the same room with him. “One-eight is final.”

“You’ll never get it.”

“Never is a long time, Charlie,” he said, still tossing the keys. He kept Charlie Burns around for another reason too, so he could talk tough. The name’s Lew Archer, lady—I’ve been in this town thirty-five years, and I never yet ate an orange off a tree. A million three, a million eight, it was all such hoodlum’s language. “That’s the top of the world up there,” he said expansively. It was the top of Coldwater Canyon, anyway. “We don’t dicker for the big ones. They want a grown-up’s house, they got to pay a grown-up’s price.”

When it was over and they’d picked each other’s pockets to find out who was winning, they tumbled out again to the four corners of the county, their blood up. Nick was free, and with a whole hour to kill, he headed out early. Free, he thought as he walked to the car, was not the right word. He’d taken off more time in the last month or six weeks because of Sam and then Peter than he had in the whole three years before. He knew he had to stop coasting and go out hunting, and he’d wondered for days if he still had it in him to hustle the same as ever. He had to, didn’t he? Money cost more and more, after all. For the first time in his life, he considered taking stock. But not today. He wanted to finish it up right with Sam, and he wasn’t going to skimp and try to fit it all in during his lunch hour. A new car had always been for Nick the perfect symbol for starting fresh, and before he gave this one away, he wanted some of the new rubbed off on him. He couldn’t go back to a mere MG himself anymore, the LA status system in the four-wheel division being what it was. So he slung himself into the bucket seat to be innocent again, and the smell alone sent him back twelve years to the feel of his first new car. He looked down at the mileage, 3.6, and laughed out loud. Free was the word, all right.

He drove out Sunset to the beach, and though the Jag and the Mercedes could have probably passed him in third, it felt like eighty when he did forty-five. As he took the last long curves through Pacific Palisades, he realized he was on the route he always took for the maiden ride in his own cars. Sunset, with its turns and its country club terrain, was a very showy road, and the show was cars. Nick was twenty-three when he traded a ’58 Chevy, two-toned, blue on white like a Chinese jar, for a ’63 silver Tempest just off the line. He drove it around for days in a trance of pride, sending out a psychic beam up and down the roads he traveled: Look at me, look at me. Probably nobody did. For one thing, there were always more riveting cars on the road than this year’s Tempest. Soon enough he came to see that that included the Jaguar and the Mercedes, too, all the way up the line. In any case, everyone was most possessed by only two cars, the one he had and the one he wanted next. Which, once Nick understood it, sent his innocence up in a cloud of smoke. But he’d say this much for cars: For a moment, at least, for the first long ride out Sunset, they gave it back to you again, which was more than he could say for the kind that disappeared with sex.

He turned north toward Malibu on the Coast Highway. The beach pads hung between the road and the water, elbow to elbow, and Nick could practically watch the prices going up like the rolling dollars on a gas pump. He’d had a place himself for a couple of years before he met Peter, and since it was only a few miles further along, he went faster. He just had time to take a quick look at it before he turned back to meet Sam in Santa Monica. The old house crossed his mind as a pair of numbers: sixty-five, the purchase price, and ninety, what he sold it for. As always, he shook his head and kicked himself, because he knew it went a year ago for two-oh-five. I wonder, he thought, if I’ve gotten as sleazy as Charlie Burns and don’t even know it. Since when, for instance, did he start to see the whole bloody coast as pots of gold, as if he’d forgotten the broken hills and the ocean? Mile after mile, the houses lined up like the numbered lots at an auction. He didn’t need a bit of it. He had the windows open, and the wind was in his hair. Buttoning up his lip like Gary Cooper, he thought with only half a smile: The thing about a cowboy is, wherever he rides, he owns it all. No call to act like a worry wart clerk whose head is stuffed with numbers. He convinced himself of everything. So he rose above the rut of money as he zipped along. Forgot, for the sake of the moment’s innocence, that numbers turned him on.

It was up ahead. He signaled and made a turn in the driveway. They’d added a deck upstairs, he noted, and faced the wall on the highway with redwood planks, taking the windows away. Nick couldn’t see in at all, and he didn’t care. He literally only wanted a glimpse. He’d lived in fifteen different places in LA, moving like everyone else whenever the mood struck. If he was in the neighborhood, he touched bases at this one or that one. For him it was just like keeping a diary. In a moment he was heading back south to Santa Monica, all settled in for the flashbacks. He was straight when he bought into Malibu, gay when he sold out. He might have kept it forever, or at least until two-oh-five, except Peter got edgy so close to the ocean. Flipping the pages of an album in his head, Nick hardly recognized himself swinging back and forth—at the beginning, between a steady girl and a hustler once a week, and later on, Monday a man, a girl on Tuesday, and so on. Nobody left a name and number. Nobody was asked to.

And look at me now, he thought with equanimity. Now that I’m with Peter, I’ve stayed the same for the longest time so far. He used the past exclusively at times like this to congratulate himself. He knew it was bullshit. The lulling smell of newness in the car and the kick of it that took the years away were whistling in the dark. What was really going on all morning was his fear of Sam. He wouldn’t own up to it because it was crazy. He’d said good-bye a hundred times before. And he used the car to mush around in the past because he didn’t want to think too hard about why he found it suddenly expedient to say good-bye with flashy toys. He wasn’t free or innocent at all. He wished he could have said he’d gone too far with Sam and gotten in too deep, but the dread he’d felt about today had nothing to do with second thoughts. It seemed as if it didn’t matter what he did. The course of things had a mind of its own now. It wasn’t going to stop till it was finished.

He left the highway and climbed the hill straight up to the cliffs that bordered Santa Monica at the ocean. They were meeting in a shelter in the park along the rim, and Nick wanted to leave the MG in plain sight so as to point it out, Exhibit A, at the right time. No hard feelings, Sam, okay? He saw the wooden shelter just ahead, an alley of royal palms going off on either side, no sign of Sam, and at that moment a van pulled out of a parking space, right where he wanted to be. So far, so good. He got out and locked it fast so he wouldn’t start to practice what to say. But he took a last look over his shoulder as he walked away, to possess, one more time while it was still his, the past it reminded him of. When he sauntered across the grass to the shelter, an elaborate thing of two-by-fours that held up a shingled roof over a cluster of benches, he noticed the shuffleboard couples padding about, retired and arm in arm. They were all in civilian clothes, and they stared at him openly, probably because he was dressed to the teeth. He wore a pearl gray gabardine suit, Hong Kong shirt, Bond Street tie, and Gucci shoes—deliberately, it almost seemed. He was a long way away from the day he shucked his office clothes in the car to come to Sam on equal terms. Power, not sex, was what he was dressed for now.

He went through the shelter’s arch to the ocean side, and there was Sam, leaning forward on his folded arms, on a fence post at the edge. The fence was chicken wire and sagged in places, but the drop-off was so sheer, the distance down so far, that it made its point.

“In the old days,” Nick said, and all of a sudden Sam tensed and began to listen, but he didn’t turn around, “when they needed to drive a car off a cliff in a movie, this is where they drove it.”

“Did you used to come here and watch them when you were a kid?” Sam asked, in some ways the only nice thing he said the whole time, and then he turned around. The look on his face was so far off, so uninvolved, he might have been watching the ocean for hours and hours. “You should have been going to baseball games.”

“It was before my time,” Nick said. “I just heard about it.”Varda was who he was thinking of, but Sam might not remember who that was. “How are you?”

“Fine. I’m always fine.”

“Good. You want to go for a walk?”

“Why not?” Sam said with a shrug. “We’ve never done that before.” Sparring now with everything he said, the look on his face was one thing. He sounded as if he wouldn’t look at an ocean if you paid him. Nothing there. “So,” he went on, “are you getting much?”

“I’m all right,” Nick said, sidestepping the reference. “I’m too fucking busy is what it is. Sometimes I think we ought to start over out here and not let the land be owned at all. Squatter’s rights. I get so sick of houses I want to live in a tent. In the mountains or something.”

“Or on a ranch,” Sam said. “With the boys. I bet you’re so busy you haven’t got time to get laid anymore. Isn’t that right?”

Oh, please, Nick thought, not yet. Sam was upping the ante in irony, and Nick caught himself wanting time out, to change the tune before they said another thing. He was hit broadside by a wave of the pain he’d bought the MG to neutralize. He called it pain. Guilt was more like it. And irony was fine, he wanted to say, but couldn’t they have it subtle and more ambiguous? Like a man being bested in a bargain, Nick had already given up the mood he thought they’d be able to do this in. He wouldn’t admit it now, but he’d seen the two of them as if from the air, a couple of melancholy men on the cliffs, high above the lordly ocean, worlds apart. Like the clear-eyed lieutenant and the Polynesian girl in South Pacific. He scrapped it like a comic routine at a wake. Today is all we’ve got, he thought hopelessly, so why doesn’t he see that what we do now is what we’re left with? He’d never, like Rita, read Henry James straight through, but instinctively Nick fell into social forms and complicated manners. He favored ways of saying things that said at the same time: I love you, I hate you, don’t leave me, good-bye forever. Who the hell did he think he was? Sam would have demanded if he’d known. He made it clear that the situation at hand wasn’t designed to follow Nick’s instincts.

“I know I should have called you,” he began, but Sam interrupted before he got his excuses going.

“Like I always said, Nick, you don’t have to call me at all. Unless you want to fuck. You get off on all these secret agent meetings, but for me it’s just a run of red lights between here and West Hollywood.”

“I just want to talk, Sam.”

“Oh, I know. That’s what I mean. I don’t.”

“I can’t see you anymore.”

“So what else is new?” He turned to Nick, and in the same motion he cuffed Nick’s shoulder with the back of his hand so that Nick turned to him, too. We can’t fight here, Nick thought sensibly, or if he jumps me, a cop at least will break it up. And Sam snapped out, “I can’t see you either, baby. Get it?”

“Sam, I don’t want it to be this way.”

“Oh? Just how do you want it to be?”

Fair enough. They stood face to face, and Nick wondered as he looked into Sam’s angry eyes, and then away, if they’d ever locked eyes since the moment they met. They’d had to then, if only to telegraph the terms of the contract, that they wanted to fuck, that one would get paid. Essentially, from that point on, there was no reason to. Nick didn’t know what Sam used to look at, but for weeks his own eyes, hungry for the whole of the cowboy’s body, had taken a million pictures of Sam in motion, roused by everything he did. Nick hadn’t had the leisure to get lost in the meantime, fishing the deeps of the boy’s black looks. He was just as able to fall in love without it.

“I still care what happens to you,” he said—staring over Sam’s shoulder out at the ocean, as a matter of fact. “I’d do things for you, or I would have, but I knew you’d feel pushed if I said something.”

“Like what?”

“I could have gotten you a job.”

“I got a job already,” he said fiercely, as if he was being patronized.

“So you do,” Nick said. “But that’s what I mean. You don’t want to be intruded on.” He thought, I didn’t pick it to be like this, and I won’t fight dirty, but I won’t lose. It was something he’d learned from Peter, to be ready on no notice at all to counterattack. But Peter always smothered it out at the first spark, before it ate up so much as a handful of grass. Nick came in late, when the fire was already out of control, exploding the trees like popcorn. He wondered, finally, if Sam knew how much a man might give away gladly, without a fight. There must have been those who were left without nothing when Sam ran off, but since it wasn’t money, Sam would have called it a fair deal every time. Weeks ago, he’d told Nick he wasn’t the most expensive. But only to tell him money was cheap. He could get a price to choke horses. And his notion of what things were worth placed no value on someone’s caring. So you care what happens, Sam must have thought, well that’s your problem.

“You can’t tell me you don’t wonder where you’ll be in ten years,” Nick said. He was surprised Sam let him keep talking. Peter would have locked him out of the bedroom. “You may not worry about it at all, but everyone has an idea.”

“What’ll I be in ten years?” he asked, as if he’d need a hint. “Your age, right? Well, I don’t intend for it to matter. Either I’ll be dead inside, or I’ll be dead, period.” And then he grinned, as if he’d had an afterthought. “How do I know? I might be just the same.”

“What do you want?” Nick asked him bluntly. At least we’re talking, he thought, and more than we did when we had no clothes on.

“Didn’t I just tell you? I want to be where I am now.”

“You’ll need money.”

“I got what I need,” he said, but something changed. He went back to walking and seemed to coax Nick to come along and fall into step. He had the balls to tear up checks in people’s faces, probably, but Nick could see that he looked them over first. Make me an offer and I’ll laugh till I’m sick. But make me an offer.

“Don’t you get tired of the street?” Nick asked. “All that waiting?”

“No,” he said quietly, but not trying to cut Nick off. He’d talk about it some, he seemed to say, except he didn’t know where to start. “I like it. I never wanted to live in a house. Or a tent or anything. The street’s where I live, and my room is just a place to keep stuff in. It’s like an airport locker.”

The Gray Line bus pulled up, and the door hissed open as they went by. The tourists filed out—looking like they all lived in the same town in Iowa, so that you could practically tell who was the grocer, the fire chief, and so on—and they straggled across the grass to the fence, cameras aimed at the Orient. Nick, the tireless LA booster, silently wished them all a happy trip. If he could have stepped out of the three-act play with Sam for a minute, he would have tried to tell them all how it would break their hearts if they saw it at sunset. Which was not to disparage the glorious view trumpeting out even now on every side—a DeMille production of a view, really, because it looked from the top of the cliff like it was twenty or thirty miles across. The ocean, GI green and rough, was probably the biggest thing the Gray Line had. Nick couldn’t say himself how far it went, from Long Beach or something at the southern verge, all the way to Zuma on the north. Ahead of Nick and Sam, through the still tall palms, the spring had turned everything very green, and they could see the Santa Monica Mountains and the Malibu Hills both. They’d seen them last from the empty café in Venice, the third time they met. Unlike them, the mountains seemed a good deal closer here, and today they were the deeper blue to which the water aspired. To Nick, when he was feeling the way he wanted to, the coastal ranges were a mystery that ended a long way off. They connected him up with holy places, the Sierras and then the Rockies, and as a result the West took place in his head, all of it. That was when he thought it was heaven on earth.

But why was he thinking it now?

“I guess I knew you’d be all right. You don’t need me,” Nick said. He was suddenly flying, and it wasn’t the Gray Line folk, innocent as they were, radiating niceness, that had picked him up like a helicopter trailing a rope. It was this: He finally knew he was off the hook. He didn’t have to keep working at a happy ending. Or not the one he’d envisioned, where they smiled and clapped each other on the shoulder, and Sam drove off grateful, changed, and ready to go to law school. Sam had let him know he didn’t care. He hadn’t given Nick the time of day since the day at the ranch. And Nick had to admit he was giddy with relief. If he’d thought all along he wanted to be someone to Sam, to salvage out of a meaningless ending a moment for them to ache with all their missed chances, he didn’t want it anymore. It was a happy ending because it was meaningless. What’s more, he found he didn’t want to be understood. He always had before. I have a lot of commitments, see, and it doesn’t mean it wasn’t great, but I gotta go. No apologies from now on, Nick vowed. And no more fretting for sympathy.

“I’d just drive you crazy if I tried to hang around,” he went on when Sam said nothing. It didn’t seem like an ominous nothing, since he took his cue from Sam’s own love of distance. “It’s better if it’s over altogether. We can say good-bye right here. No big deal.”

So this is the last time I’ll ever see him, he thought, moving off at the slightest angle as he walked, so that they veered again toward the fence. For the sake of decorum, he let the air out of his balloon and came back to earth. It wouldn’t do to seem so overjoyed. Like a fancy overcoat, he put on instead the melancholy mood he relished. It’s not us, he thought nicely of him and Sam, it’s time itself that brought us here. They came up short against the cliff edge, and he looked down at all the little naked people on the beach. If Sam had continued to just shut up, Nick might have given a speech, the parting lover’s equivalent, say, of the Gettysburg Address. He didn’t seem to know he was hysterical, any more than he did when he drove along in the MG with a sap’s lens on his Instamatic. He was a whole lot more narrow-eyed than Iowa. The people who would have done anything for Nick—Peter and Rita at present—would have sworn he never went too far with sentiment. He went farther than Peter, not as far as Rita. They were none of them tacky about it, though, with the possible exception of Nick when he was fixed on cowboys. The question, then, was why today he was getting his feelings off greeting cards. Unless it was that he was as scared as ever. But now he didn’t even seem to know it. The fear had made over the world.

“You know,” Sam said, “I used to keep count of the times I’d fucked.” Nick didn’t hear him right away, because he was lost still in his melancholy reverie, where love lasted only long enough to make men fools, and then exiles. “It wasn’t hard to keep track, because I did it every day. But I used to try to remember what they looked like, too. Even now I see faces sometimes from back when I started. They float into my head like people I used to know, and it’s funny, because I know more about them now.”

Nick wasn’t sure what to say. Sam didn’t seem to be asking if the same thing happened to him. In fact, it didn’t. He felt apologetic, as if he’d been found out letting his life run out without a second look. He couldn’t recall the face of anyone he’d sold a house to longer than a year ago. Meanwhile, he’d never heard Sam say anything half as complicated. He would have welcomed it a month ago and drawn him out and held on tighter. Now he only thought: What about us? It was almost one o’clock, and if they were going to say good-bye, then someone had to say it.

“How do you know them better if you never see them again?”

“I know the type,” Sam said. “The reason I stopped counting, I realized after a while how everyone was a type. But I still remember the first ones.” He laughed, and he put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and hunched his shoulders as he let out the punch line. “It’s the ones I fuck now that I can’t remember.”

“Sam, there’s something I want to give you,” Nick said soberly, changing the subject as soon as Sam seemed finished. He didn’t want to talk about Sam. He was even a little sick of it. After all, he’d fucked a cast of thousands himself, and he could be just as jaded about it as Sam if he felt like it. He hadn’t really been listening. It seemed as if Sam was only bragging.

“The reason I’m telling you—you know what your type is?” He turned and met Nick’s eyes as he asked the question. They’d get to the settlement in a minute. He had a point to make first. He paused for effect, as if Nick might really hazard a guess what type, and then like a schoolmarm he gave out the answer. “You think I’ll turn on you. I’ll go tell Peter how you like it, maybe. Or make a scene in your office. You’re scared it might cost you an arm and a leg to buy me off.” And then another moment’s silence. Nick pretended it wasn’t worth answering, returning a level gaze as best he could. What did it matter how much Sam knew? It was over with. It didn’t have five minutes left. “I bet you got another envelope on you. Should I guess how much is in it?”

“It’s not more money,” Nick said with a shake of his head. “After all, I’m all paid up, aren’t I? The seven hundred was a sort of retainer. And what I’m going to give you now is just because I like you. You’ve been good for me.”

Even to Nick it didn’t sound true, but he was damned if he’d admit Sam was right. He wasn’t right. He’d made it sound like Nick had a horror of blackmail. But it was violence he feared, though he couldn’t make it coalesce and make a picture. He wasn’t scared for his body. Even at the edge of a cliff, where a lunge and a body block could send him hurtling over like a coupe in a grainy old thriller. He was frightened instead for the life he lived, that Sam would overrun it like an army. But since he couldn’t imagine how, it was another reason to shrug it off, pretend it wasn’t there.

They both understood it was time to go. They headed back the way they’d come, both suddenly quiet. As if on cue, the Gray Line tourists, signaled by their driver, began to make their way back to the bus, some of them lingering and looking over their shoulders, not ready yet to go back forever to fields of corn with nothing more than a snapshot. This time Nick and Sam had to thread their way through the crowd as they gathered in line. For a moment, the two of them were quite outnumbered, and Nick was struck by the strangest thing. Silence. He’d expected to hear the din of down-home chatter. But as they passed in front of him like a veil, he couldn’t tell if they were speechless out of awe or they were talked out and sick of seeing sights. He wanted terribly to know, because he’d begun to get the feeling that everything he’d said about everything all day was dead wrong. If the tourists, after all, didn’t act as they were meant to, like the simple folk in a Currier & Ives, then perhaps he was misperceiving more than he knew. He and Sam were down to the final minutes, and Nick couldn’t be sure, even as the countdown ticked away, that they wouldn’t go through another reversal. More than ever, today they were holding different scripts.

“Is that woman still staying with you?” Sam asked as they reached the shelter. No reason, it seemed. He was just making conversation.

“Rita,” Nick said guardedly. “Yes, she is.”

“What does she do for a living?”

“She works in a store. Why?”

“No reason,” he said easily. And they passed through the arch to the shady lawn under the palms. The MG was in sight, not a hundred feet away, and now was the right time. No hard feelings, Sam, okay? But Nick held back, stymied by the turn toward Rita. What was the hidden motive in it? No, he told himself firmly, he was only getting paranoid. Sam’s world was a hundred percent men, in bed and out. Women didn’t even exist. So Nick decided to get on with it, and then Sam spoke again. “Does she want to be rich?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” he answered, trying to warn Sam off. “How would I know? She doesn’t seem to care that she never had it before, and she isn’t killing herself to get it now either. Why? What do you want to know for?”

“I was just thinking,” he said, as if it was nothing, “what it must be like to live high up like that. You and Peter are loaded, right? It makes you wonder if Rita wants some of her own.”

“Well, that’s Rita’s business,” Nick said, ending it once and for all. He decided Sam was doing it for the hell of it, to make Nick worry that everyone would take him for a ride. It was as if Sam was trying to prove he had more morals than anyone else, and Rita might be a high-price hooker underneath it all. As if she was pawning his cuff links. And if that’s what Sam meant, then he was more deluded and out of it than he seemed. He didn’t know shit. And Nick said roughly, “Here,” pulling the key ring out of his jacket pocket at last. He held it straight out and dropped it. On a reflex, Sam snatched it out of midair, and as he stared at it and put two and two together, Nick decided he needn’t have gone to this extreme at all. The remarks about Rita showed Sam’s style up for what it was, a punk kid’s teasing. If his talk had been a little less foul-mouthed, it would have been nothing, like a dirty book with the sex crossed out. Smut was all talk. It couldn’t hurt a fly.

It was Nick’s show now, and he didn’t give Sam the chance to get his breath. The moment he raised his eyes to question what it was about, Nick looked away at the car, at the same time pointing. Not with a straight arm quivering, like a sorcerer whipping it up out of the dust. The gesture was as casual, as indifferent even, as one of Sam’s. He didn’t cheat either and try to watch the shock of it out of the corner of his eye. Let it go. He took no pleasure in a punk kid’s toys. He put his mind to higher things, like Peter and Rita and him.

Sam snorted. “Thanks, anyway,” he said. “I’ve got a car, too.”

“You got a piece of junk,” Nick threw back at him. “Go ahead and take it. You think I’m trying to hold on, but I’m not. It’s just a car. Let me say good-bye my way.”

“Listen,” Sam said, icy cold, and Nick stayed turned away to hear him out. His own cool attitude, aloof and very calm, did not survive the first few words Sam spoke. But he didn’t dare look at Sam now because the fear would have shown. All his denials of it died at once. Sam said, “No matter what happens, remember this: I don’t want anything of yours. From here on in, I only want what’s mine.” But what’s going to happen, Nick thought in a panic—I don’t have anything of his, do I? And then the keys flew up past his face in an arc, but he made no move, and they fell to the ground. Sam said, “Starting now, you don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who you are. Good-bye, Nick.”

“Wait!” Nick said, but he didn’t. He was already striding away across the lawn. It wasn’t fair. Nick bent down to get the keys but couldn’t see them right away in the deep grass. He had to stoop and run his hands around, and his mind raced: He can’t have it all, he’s got to go halfway with me, he has to take the car. Then he saw the keys and pounced, but when he stood up, Sam was out of sight. He broke into a run to the MG, but he knew it was no use. There was a ten dollar ticket tucked under the wiper. It was one o’clock on the nose.

The corridors of the Desertside Convalescent Hospital reminded Rita of an air-raid shelter. Cement blocks on either side, painted a shade of beige that must have colored the domes of Limbo, seemed to pressurize the air. She walked behind the day nurse, but because the uniform was closer to a nun’s, gray and hooded and bodiless, she could have come from another planet—or, as Hey would have said, another plane. But planet was more to the point, wasn’t it, Rita thought, looping back on herself—anything to keep from imagining what would come at the end of the hall—because it was just like an underground passage in a sci-fi movie, too, leading to a rocket ringed with flickering lights. It smelled like—what?—insecticide, she thought, or raw petroleum. It smelled like they were trying to cover up the smell of death. And all the doors were ajar, but not so open that she could see in. They walked and walked to the very end of the west wing. Rita wondered, when they finally stopped at the last door, if Frances Dean had been pushed farther and farther off as the years went by.

“Thank you,” she said in a saccharine voice, playing as dumb as she could. “And Dr. Webber. He’s been very kind.”

“Mr.,” the nurse corrected her. She had the wrinkled brow and the bad skin of a believer, but Rita couldn’t guess the sect. She seemed too overwrought to read a thermometer and so on. “I know he wanted to interview you first, Miss Varda, but if he can’t get back from lunch on time, well, you shouldn’t be the one to suffer. Please watch the hour. We are very strict about the fifteen-minute limit on coma patients.”

“I understand.”

“For the family’s own good. The patient doesn’t care, of course, but we ought to spend our life with the living.”

“But she is living,” Rita said, bristling in spite of herself. “That’s the whole point of why it’s sad.”

“Sad is another word for doubt,” the nurse replied. “Where she is now, it’s between her and her God.”

The last was accompanied by a sanctimonious grip on Rita’s arm, and Rita took it with a weak-tea smile, trying to look as if she was undergoing a renewal of her faith. The anger boiled in her guts like an ulcer, but since she was on a special forces assignment, she hid it well and wouldn’t indulge it. And then the moment passed. The nurse turned away and walked off in triumph, apparently feeling she’d given Rita the requisite strength with the laying on of a hand. Rita rubbed her arm and chalked up one for her side. She’d assumed all along that they wouldn’t let her go in alone, that she’d have to listen to a recitation of medical bullshit at the foot of the bed, and that, to get the moment she needed, she’d be called upon to think quick like a terrorist. And here instead was a free ride. Maybe the standards had dropped all over the place at Desertside. If Mr. Webber wasn’t back from lunch at three, for instance, then Mr. Webber must be a drunk.

She pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside, surprised at first by the daylight after the ghost lights that ran along the ceilings in the hall. Corner room, two windows. Otherwise, it was all as Hey had explained, the gunmetal gray steel furniture, the life-support equipment, and—on the low bureau under the window—a dozen roses in a Lalique vase. The roses were part of the contract. Rita wondered, since she was the first to visit in eight years, if they’d kept it up to Varda’s specifications: roses, Tuesday; Friday, white carnations. With no witnesses, it was an easy enough corner to cut. And by that time she’d looked at everything else but Frances Dean, so she braced herself and went ahead. She walked over to the bed.

And even then she only glanced at the little body beneath the sheet, letting her eyes run up the tubes to the feeding bottle on one side, the waste bottle on the other. The respirator mask covered so much of the face that Rita couldn’t even read it as a face. More sci-fi. The eyes had been closed so long, they looked like the blanks in a skull. And just a few wisps of hair. She looked away at the respirator beside the bed, the tank and dials so foreign to her they could have run anything, from a dentist’s drill to a 707. But it was breathing, all right. The sound—it was the machine’s sound—was like someone very deep asleep, far below the plane of dreams, and with something a little asthmatic about it, too, as if it needed better air to breathe itself. Rita wasn’t interested. She cased it only until she saw where the cord came out of one side and snaked along the floor.

She followed it over to the baseboard and yanked out the plug.

She wasn’t entirely sure just what would happen. Well, one of two things. Either the lungs would take over, or they wouldn’t. But she didn’t know about right then, the first few seconds, whether there might be a kind of convulsion as the light went out, or a rattle or a gasp. She stared down at the empty socket for a little, shaken to think she might be a coward after the fact. This was the girl who walked into a store and spotted the very thing she wanted, zap, who knew the moment she entered a room what ought to be moved and where. So go on, she told herself, because now is not the time to get like everyone else and play it over and over, because it’s done. She was aware of the silence as she turned around. But it didn’t feel dark like death, since it signified only the stop of the machine. Frances Dean was inert—no more, no less than when Rita walked in. Now she went right up to the bed, once and for all to dry up the fear, to promise she knew just what she was doing, and not for an instant to mourn. Though I suppose I’m here to say good-bye, she thought, so she said it, simple and direct, by way of last rites: Good-bye. She stopped short of adding the name. Frances Dean—any Frances Dean that made sense—was long gone, which was why she’d had to dispose of this impostor. The rightness of the hour caught Rita at last, and she felt as if she’d pushed a boat off the sand where it was beached. Standing ankle-deep in the shallows, she saw it float free, out to the open water. The room was full of relief.

She went to one of the windows. She still had to wait out the next twelve minutes, of course, and once again she could only guess what was happening. As far as she was concerned, it was a corpse already. She just knew. But officially, didn’t it take the brain six minutes or something to run down all the way? She couldn’t remember. What kind of a measure was it, though, for a woman who’d gone under in a stroke twelve or thirteen years ago? Maybe it had to do with the heat of the blood, she thought, its dipping below a certain point. It didn’t matter, as long as things were going in that direction. When it came to splitting hairs, it turned into a question for priests and doctors. Every few seconds, she took a look back to see if the sheet had started to rise and fall at the chest, because she might get cheated yet. But the stillness held. If anyone had asked Rita’s opinion, she would have measured death in just that way, by the keeping still. Clever of her, really, because she could argue then that the woman she’d killed was already dead for years and years. I could plead my own case, she thought, staring out the window at the parking lot, and then I could write a book and make a million bucks. She could, except she’d developed such a fierce protective attitude toward the privacy of Rusty Varda and Frances Dean. She was just like a bodyguard, only it wasn’t their lives that had to be protected now, but their deaths.

She’d forced Hey to go over it a dozen times, but she couldn’t get a handle on the money. Nick would know, but she would have had to tell him she was coming here today, and she didn’t want anyone else involved. The point was—reluctant as she was to admit it—everyone else would have told her not to. They’d say it was because of the risks she would be running, but she had a feeling it was the other thing they’d be thinking, that they thought it was wrong. Not wrong-evil. More like wrong-why-make-trouble. Hey had briefed her for hours between Sunday and now, and he must have guessed from the questions alone, but he didn’t want to know in so many words. He didn’t know enough about money himself, didn’t have the feel for it, like a baker who can’t get the hang of dough, so he couldn’t remember all that he’d heard. Apparently, Rusty Varda set up a trust fund for Frances Dean the year she went into Desertside. Very generous, from twenty-four hour care to hothouse roses. Hey was sure of one thing: It was worded so that the principal went, upon her death, to Desertside itself, since neither of them had heirs. Varda was trying to insure the best for her if she should outlive him, though he didn’t expect her to.

Why a separate trust? Rita had asked herself. Now she thought she knew, putting it together with something else. He’d cared enough to keep Frances Dean in West Covina to keep her anonymous. The publicity back in the twenties that tore her apart when she was already down and out on dope was the very thing that led her to Crook House. So he must have had a vivid need to cushion it for her. She was terrified of the media, of the papers and cheap-shot magazines of her own bad press, but she nearly jumped out of her skin as well when she first saw TV, as if she knew how much more helpless people were when the film was turning and the guy with the mike held it only an inch away, no matter how much the victim squirmed. Varda was probably afraid that if he paid her bill out of petty cash and left her the big bucks in his will, the story would get out when he died, and they’d come down on Frances Dean like jackals, no matter how sick she was.

What he couldn’t know, Rita thought bitterly now, was how the money would trap the last of Frances Dean. She was worth so goddam much to Desertside that they spared no effort to keep her going. How did they know they weren’t being monitored by a posthumous spy for Rusty Varda? So they gladly jailed her in the most expensive system they could find, and to be safe, they probably went ahead with the flowers, too, in case they were ever audited. They’d keep her alive till she was a hundred and ten if they had to. It was worth a couple of million in the end if they did it right. Mr. Webber could lunch from twelve till four. Rita could see as she made her way through the place that Desertside wasn’t spending its liquid assets on medical research or geriatric recreation. In spite of the presence of the nonaffiliated sisters, it was clear that money would come to no good here.

Varda may have preferred it that way. He certainly didn’t get his kicks from charity. Rita had begun to think that his dying without a will was no accident—he’d already provided for Frances Dean, after all, and otherwise, he may have thought the State of California deserved to have the rest, since he’d made it off California land. Outside of himself and Frances Dean, he wasn’t interested in people, so why would he want to bequeath the feeding of orphans and the curing of cancer? And having filled a treasure room in the crook of two hills with a trove the likes of the Valley of the Kings, he probably didn’t care about having a library named in his honor, or an indoor pool at a college, or a new wing of anything. Rita didn’t really approve of his attitude, and if she’d known him way back when and could have sat him down like she used to do Peter’s grandfather, she might have made some headway in bringing him around. It wasn’t as if the money ever got to the poor people’s pocketbooks intact, or even to the asphalt trucks pouring out a new freeway interchange. Rita would have explained how it all was eaten up by bureaucracy. Twelve million was hardly enough to buy the red tape to tie up a single bill in the Senate.

But Varda wasn’t around to have his consciousness raised, and Rita had to make do with the Varda and Frances Dean she’d got. It wasn’t just the cavalier way with money, anyway. If Rita could have written it as a script, she would have cured Frances Dean, dried her out, and let them marry. Stop it, she said to herself, think nothing. She looked at her watch. Seven minutes. Then she went to the other window, which still looked onto the parking lot, but from here she could see Highway 10 in the distance—LA one way, Palm Springs the other. Well, she thought, no need to go into it here—suffice it to say Rita’s script would never have ended at Desertside. It was just that if Frances Dean had gotten sober, they would have lived like kings.

And the images came through, whether Rita liked them or not, and they had the feel of Harlow in a satin wrapper, eating her chocolates in bed in Dinner at Eight. Rita could see the two of them whizzing by this very spot in a Packard, off on a desert lark to a weekend house in Rancho Mirage. They wouldn’t stop in West Covina unless they had a flat. And while a man in livery fixed it—the spitting image of Hey—in the parking lot of Desertside, Varda and Frances Dean would have their picnic in the backseat. That is, if they were hungry, because otherwise they’d fuck. West Covina wouldn’t even register. Their heads would be too full of grand hotels to make room for it—the Connaught, the Pierre, here and there a Ritz. And what else? Horse races, certainly, and couturiers, topiary gardens and auctions of minor Impressionists. Rita loved to make lists for the two of them to live in. She probably had to today, to counteract the awful room she was waiting in, to her more awful than somebody dead.

She might even have advised Rusty Varda, in the event of a junk-free Frances Dean, to use his secret cave for wine alone. He wouldn’t need it for anything else. Rita wondered if it was like telling the Shah not to build the Taj Mahal for a wedding gift, but then right away she saw the difference. The problem lay in the secrecy. It was like mining a mine in reverse, to give it all over to hiding treasure. Like putting the gold back in. Once they’d pulled together and got their health back—Rita had a list of what they ought to eat for breakfast, and a regimen of laps in the pool and sun and steam—then they owed it to themselves to pull all the gold out into the light. Put up a Taj Mahal in LA, or another one, anyway—it was a city where certain neighborhoods had them on every block. Not that one ought to go public for the public’s sake, though the wars might all dry up in the fields if the Cézannes and Matisses were hung so everyone could see them. Rather, it was to give them a method for mining the heart that they must dig up and live above ground with their dearest things. If they didn’t, then they didn’t deserve any of it. Rita’s fantasy life had moral laws, all of which tested people in clover as to whether they were worthy. It wasn’t all ice cream and cake.

In Frances Dean’s prison-gray room, faced with an emptiness that mocked the dreamed-up world in her head, where she figured out the way things should have gone, Rita knew she had to come clean. She wasn’t satisfied at all with the Varda and Frances Dean she’d ended up with. She was glad to go this far for them—that is, let out the one of their souls still trapped in Limbo so they could meet, as per Varda’s note, in a room where Beauty was held without ransom. But something stuck in Rita’s throat whenever she tried to get excited about the reunion of two ghosts. She just didn’t buy the idea of afterlife. She was raised a nothing by long-lapsed Catholics, and so she didn’t even have a New York Episcopal vision of heaven as an oak-paneled library where the people stare a lot into a crackling fire in a fireplace, while the hansom cabs clop up and down the snow-lit avenue outside. Rita couldn’t see it. She’d gone ahead with the killing today so that Varda and Frances Dean would still exist somewhere the way they’d always wanted, but the somewhere was—take it or leave it, Varda—only Rita’s head. She blew life into them by her rage at what had become of them. In the secret room she didn’t want them insubstantial as a dream, but they were.

She looked at her watch. A little less than four minutes left. She wished there was something outside the window she could remember this by, a tree or a couple of little girls with a jump rope, but the parking lot was relentless, the cars in rows, the sun on a hundred windshields. Rita was all that was happening at Desertside, she thought. It didn’t have a shred of self to give back in exchange. She turned around again to the little thriller she’d set up. She went behind the respirator, scooped up the plug, and connected it into the wall. Mission accomplished. It wasn’t as if the technical part had been all that taxing, but since, like Peter, she was all thumbs except when arranging flowers, she hummed with satisfaction as if she’d just bugged a political caucus or done a brain implant. She gave the room a once-over as she turned to go, but she knew it was clean because she’d brought nothing in and put nothing down. She hovered an instant over the roses, debating one as a souvenir. They wouldn’t miss it. But she held back, since the flowers, at least, were what they ought to be, and she figured they had a right to go on as long as they could.

At the door she paused to pat herself on the back, because in a minute it would be still as death, as if she’d never been here at all. And then she gasped. The machine wasn’t going. It hadn’t started to breathe again when she plugged it back in, and she hadn’t even noticed. She’d fallen in love with the silence. And now she started to shake. She suddenly knew how people could write their names all over a crime and, by force of silence alone, not know it. She darted over to the body of the machine, but it wasn’t any use. She couldn’t, for Christ’s sake, fix the picture on a color TV. And while she’d gotten to think in the fifteen minutes that nobody cared enough to burst in on her and catch her red-handed, as if the act itself wasn’t worth a followup chain of events, now she was almost choked with panic. The posse was galloping down the hall even as she turned the dials and, when that did nothing, tried to turn them back to where they’d been. It either had a starter she couldn’t pin down, or it held its breath when the patient died. Get out, she told herself, because now they’re going to know it’s you and not a prettily timed coincidence. As if the roof had suddenly been lifted off, she felt the sear of the desert sun. It wasn’t LA at all. They lynched their criminals way out here.

Fixing a rapturous look on her face—my dear Aunt Frances and I, we talked old times and the years fell away—Rita slipped out into the hall and hurried off. Luckily for her, it must have been the dead man’s ward, because no door moved and no one made rounds. As far as Rita could gather, it was all done with machines now. The last anachronism was the heart-sleeved visitor, she thought with some small shiver of self-respect, even in the midst of the dread at hand. Striding hard, she might have made it all the way out if she’d kept her eyes straight ahead as she passed through the last swinging door to the lobby. But a man came through the adjoining door from the other side, and she stared full at him and froze as they held ajar their respective doors, in the act of propelling through. “Oh, you must be Mr. Webber” was suddenly written all over Rita’s face. He smelled as if he’d had a bath in Jack Daniels, and he smiled and tipped his head in a manner exaggeratedly courtly. He would have gone right by without making the connection if Rita hadn’t stared. She saw it dawn on him. I must be such a hardened criminal, she thought, that I want to be caught and put away, in a room as dreary as Frances Dean’s.

“Miss Varda, isn’t it? I was just coming to get you.”

“What for?”

“So we could talk. I’m Alec Webber.” They were both still holding doors on springs, and if Rita had let hers go, they would have had to have their talk in the hall. She pushed on through to the lobby, figuring it would be quicker, and Webber let his door go. “Tell me,” he said, “how you found Frances.”

For an instant, she thought he meant: How did you track her down to West Covina? But, no. He was asking how she thought Frances Dean was doing. Was she looking well? The question, perfunctory though it was, gave Rita the creeps. The use of the first name got her mad.

“Frankly, Mr. Webber, it makes me want to scream.” She knew she’d never pull off the nice-lady act she’d done with the nurse. She was a wreck from the stopped machine, so she had to admit to something.

“Don’t take it hard,” he purred, putting a hand on her arm a moment, on the very spot the nurse had gripped. Things were standardized at Desertside. “It’s just another part of life. Who knows if what we’re living is more real than the world she’s in?”

“I know,” Rita said. But how long, she wondered, would she hold to her convictions if she had to keep coming? Or if it was her own mother lying there tied to machines like a smothered puppet? She didn’t want to know. The scream was pressing against the inside of her skull like a migraine. Rita wanted out. “But I had to see for myself,” she continued, stumbling on, casting about for a way to ingratiate so she could end it. “And I know she’s getting the best of care, Mr. Webber. That’s going to give me a lot of comfort whenever I think of her now.”

“So you’re his daughter,” he said, with an oily shift of gears. “I didn’t know he’d ever been married.”

“He wasn’t,” she said, glad for the chance to go into her story, where she felt safe. “I took his name when I grew up. My adoptive parents finally told me.”

“And the mother?”

“I don’t really know,” she said feelingly, “but if you think about it long enough, you start to make an educated guess. You understand?”

“Ah,” he said, and looked away. She had him on the run. She’d told him on the phone she’d never made contact with her father, what with one thing and another, and then he died, and now Frances Dean was all that was left of Varda, so since she was visiting here in LA, couldn’t she come and see? It’s something I’d like to do for my father, she’d said. She backed Mr. Webber right into a corner. But now she’d doubled it into a two-hanky tearjerker, and it became so poignant and intimate that even a nosy, jaded drunk like Alec Webber had to draw back discreetly. “I didn’t have any idea,” he said.

“If it’s true,” Rita went on, “then the two of them were even more unlucky than they seemed. They could have used me. I could have taken care of them.”

“Were they so unlucky, do you think? At least they were stars for a while,” he said, so unctuously she could tell it was one of his pet subjects. For a moment she was crushed, since she would have enjoyed a long talk about her orphaned state and her lonely mum and dad. “You know, we have a lot of movie people in Desertside, and generally they’re pretty happy. Everyone lives in the past if they live long enough, and the stars have it all over the others.” It sounded as if he still had a tumbler of bonded and branch in his hand.

“You’d think they’d be bitter because it’s all gone,” Rita said. To her, the image of a corridor of sleepy, broken refugees from silent films was insupportable. Everyone used to be young, too, but with movie stars there was proof of it on film, yellow and jumpy itself with age, but there they were. The silent ones from Varda’s time especially were young as kids, their gestures big and amateur—for a few years yet, not surrendered to studios and salaries and the fall of ancient Rome. If they ended up here together, then Hell was a place like this. To get by, Rita thought, you have to pretend at some level that the old have always been old. But Desertside took away that, too.

Webber said, “They love to talk, and people want to hear it. The others go into themselves, because all they have is pictures of their families and the homes they’ve given up. I’m not saying some are better than others,” he hastened to add, “I just said happy. You have to have a story people have to know.”

“I see your point,” she said with a lot of cool, but in her heart relenting, since she saw what he meant. “But Frances Dean’s not happy.”

“Ah,” he said again, and he seemed to relent himself. There was a pause in which Rita measured the distance, ten feet, to the main door. Why was he keeping her? So the day nurse could check on Frances Dean? Then he told her, more or less. “Rusty Varda left you well provided for, did he?”

“I’ve got more than I know what to do with, Mr. Webber,” she said reassuringly, and knew right away she’d made the right move. She thought: He’s scared I’ll sue to break the trust. He wants me too rich to care.

“Will we be seeing you again?” he asked, steering her solicitously toward the door.

“I don’t think so. I spend most of my time in Europe. I’m in art,” she said—but airily, so he wouldn’t think she was an artist.

“Have you left us an address, Miss Varda?”

“Why?”

“One never knows. I’d like to be the first to tell you—when the time comes.”

“Oh,” she said, the wind knocked out of her. “I’ll send you one as soon as I can. I’m between places right now.”

“As you wish,” he said ironically. He didn’t believe her. He’d seen her kind before. All fired up for a saintly visit, and then they get punched in the stomach by it, and they never show up again. For her part, when she heard him sound so superior, Rita had an irrational wish to protest how tough she was. You’ll see, she thought grimly as she turned to say goodbye. It shocked her. The point of doing what she’d done for Frances Dean was to do it so no one would see. If she tried to fight something bigger, the way of things at Desertside or the look on Alec Webber’s face, she’d lose. But she had the feeling he wanted to be first with the word of a death because he liked to feed on trouble. Just as he liked to say Desertside was just another part of life, so everyone went away doomed. Oh, Jesus, what if this is all it’s going to amount to in the end—that, Rita thought, was what everyone must wonder as they floated across the parking lot on a thin thread of freedom.

Not this time.

You can’t hurt me, she thought ferociously, and she pushed the bar on the door. It groaned open, and the frail little breeze off the asphalt was as sweet as a dive in the ocean. She made a solemn promise not to remember any of this. And in that instant she might have done anything, because life was so large outside and Webber was only a speck of darkness. At the end of its arc, the door paused a beat before it swung shut, holding its breath to let her through. She called the last remark over her shoulder as if she were flinging the end of a scarf.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Webber, she’s dead and buried already.” And the door slammed. “Don’t call us,” Rita said coyly, “we’ll call you.”

But with the door between them now, he couldn’t have heard that last, even if he could have read lips. Because she said it out to the parking lot, like a proclamation to all things ugly and fruitless. She walked to the car and didn’t look back, the fear all gone, knocked out by the saving shot of anger. Anyway, she thought, he was too preoccupied keeping the skeletons safe in the closets to notice what Rita had gotten away with. She clicked herself into the seat belt and started the car. She locked eyes with the rearview mirror. Now, she said firmly to herself, forget it.

And she did, just like that. She’d done it time and again—with the past when she boarded the plane in New York, with every Varda masterpiece the moment it dropped in the mailbox. She got out of there fast. She’d never be traced because Desertside had too much else to hide. Some things she couldn’t forget, of course, because she didn’t know them yet. She could kill only what she knew and couldn’t be blamed if she didn’t see that it wasn’t enough. If the past had been in only one place, in fact, she would have been home free. But it wasn’t. She sailed up the ramp to Highway 10 and, flushed with a triumph over time, couldn’t take in what she was heading back to. Today she’d stopped going cautiously, and the past still had a back door.