Belinda Read online

  “You sound like you regret the breakups.”

  “I don’t. That’s the tragedy. I’m just as selfish as the rest of them. I never gave my wives an emotional fifty percent. So how can I blame them for walking out? Besides, I’m a painter.” She smiled.

  “Such a mean guy,” she said.

  “But look,” I said, “I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about you. I don’t mean about your family, all that. I’ve got the rules down, relax on that.” She waited.

  “But what about you right now?” I asked. “What do you want besides wearing punk clothes and not getting busted?”

  She looked at me for a moment, almost as if the question excited her. And then a shadow passed over her face.

  “You talk in big crayon-style print, you know it?”

  I laughed. “I didn’t mean to sound so harsh,” I said. “I mean, what do you want, Belinda?”

  “No, it wasn’t harsh. I like it. But it doesn’t make much difference what I want, does it?” she asked. “Of course, it does.”

  “Isn’t making you happy enough?” She was teasing. A little.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Look, what I mean is, I can’t do what I want till I’m eighteen. I can’t be anybody. You know, I’d get caught if I really did anything.” I thought about that for a moment. “What about school?” I asked.

  “What about it?”

  “You know there are ways we could fix it. I mean, get you into some private school. There have to be ways, names, lies, something—”

  “You’re crazy,” she laughed. “You just want to see me in one of those pleated skirts again.”

  “Yeah, I’ll cop to that. But seriously—”

  “Jeremy, an education I have, can’t you tell that? Nannies, tutors, the works, I had it. I can read and write French, Italian, and English. I could get into Berkeley now, or Stanford, just by passing an examination.” She shrugged, stole another drink of my wine. “Well, what about Berkeley or Stanford?” I asked.

  “What about them? Who would I be? Linda Merit, my fake person, she’d rack up the credits?”

  Her voice trailed off. She looked very worn out. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and take her home to bed. The long day was obviously telling on her.

  “Besides,” she said, “even if I wasn’t on the run, I wouldn’t go to college.”

  “Well, that’s my question. What would you do? What do you want? What do you really need right now?”

  She looked at me in a slightly distrustful way. And I sensed a defeat in her again, as I had in the car on the way to Union Street. It was a sadness bigger than being just tired, bigger than not knowing me very well.

  “Belinda, what can I give you besides pretty clothes and a roof over your head?” I asked her. “Tell me, honey. Just tell me.”

  “You crazy guy,” she said. “That’s like the moon and the sky right now.”

  “Come on, honey, this whole thing is a little too convenient for me. I’m getting what I want and what I need but you—”

  “You still feel guilty about me, don’t you?” She looked as if she was going to cry, but then she smiled in the sweetest, gentlest way. “Just ... love me,” she said. She shrugged and smiled again, her freckles showing for a moment in the light, very pale, very cute. I wanted to kiss her.

  “I do love you,” I said. Catch in the throat. Catch in the voice. Did she think it was like some sixteen-year-old telling her?

  We looked at each other for a long private moment, oblivious to the crowded, brightly lighted room, the waiters moving among the white-draped tables. Candles, chandeliers, reflected light—it was all melded around us.

  She formed her lips into a silent little kiss. Then she grinned and cocked her head.

  “Can I listen to rock music real loud and put posters on the walls of my room?”

  “Sure, you can have all the bubble gum you want, too, if you’ll lay off the Scotch and cigarettes.”

  “Oh, boy, here it comes.”

  “Well, wasn’t it bound to sooner or later? You want a lecture on nutrition and the needs of the teenage female body?”

  “I know what this teenage body needs,” she purred, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek. “Why don’t we get out of here?”

  HALFWAY home I remembered I had to send Celia five hundred dollars right away—that phone message I’d never answered. We drove back downtown to Western Union.

  As soon as we got in, she hit the Scotch. Just one drink, she said. Half a glass, going down her gorgeous young throat as I watched. Well, bring it up to bed, I said.

  AFTERWARDS I made a fire in the grate and went downstairs for a bottle of sherry and two crystal glasses. I mean, if she had to drink, at least it wouldn’t be the Scotch. I poured her a glass of sherry and we sat snuggled up against the pillows in the four-poster, watching the fire in the darkness.

  I told her again she could do anything she wanted with the room down the hall. We should have taken her movie posters out of the Page Street dump.

  She laughed. She said she’d get some more. She was all soft and warm and drowsy beside me.

  “You want a stereo, go get one,” I said. I’d set up a bank account for her, for Linda Merit. She said quietly that Linda Merit had one. Good, I’d put money in it for her.

  “You got a VCR?” she asked. She had some videotapes, hadn’t been able to watch them in a long time. Yes, two, I said, one in the back den up here, one down in my office. What were the tapes? Just old things, odd things. I told her about the big rental places on Market.

  We sat there quiet for a while. I was running a mental tab of all the things she had said about herself. Quite a puzzle it was.

  “You have to tell me something,” I asked. I was reminding myself to be gentle.

  “What?”

  “What you meant last night when you said you’d bombed as an American teenager.”

  She didn’t answer for a while. She drank another half glass of sherry. “You know,” she said finally. “when I first came—to America, I mean—I thought that just being an American teenager for a while would be wonderful. Just being with kids here, going to rock concerts, smoking a little grass, just being in America—”

  “And it wasn’t like that?”

  “Even before I ran away, I knew it was a crock. It was a nightmare. Even the shiny-faced kids, you know, the rich brats who were going on to college, they’re all criminals and liars.”

  Her voice was slow, no teenage bravado.

  “Explain.”

  “Look, I had my first period at nine. I was wearing a C-cut bra by the time I was thirteen. The first boy I ever slept with was shaving every day at fifteen, we could have made babies together. And I found out the kids here are just as developed. I wasn’t any freak, you know? But what is a kid here? What can you do? Even if you’re going to school, even if you’re a goody-two-shoes who hits the books every night, what about the rest of your life?”

  I nodded, waited.

  “You can’t legally smoke, drink, start a career, get married. You can’t even legally drive a car till you’re sixteen, and all this for years and years after you’re a physical adult. All you can do is play till you’re twenty-one, if you want to know. That’s what life is to kids here—it’s play. Play at love, play at sex, play at everything. And play at breaking the law every time you touch a cigarette or drink or somebody three or four years older than you.”

  She took another sip of the sherry. Her eyes were full of the red light of the fire. “We’re all criminals,” she went on. “And that’s the way it’s set up, that’s the way people want it. And I’ll tell you this much, you play by the rules and you’re a shallow person, a real, real shallow person.”

  “So you broke them?”

  “All the time. I came here breaking them. And all I saw when I tried to join in and be one of the crowd is that everybody else was breaking the rules. I mean, to be an American kid you had to be a bad person.”

&nb
sp; “So you ran away.”

  “No. I mean, yes, but that’s not why.” She hesitated. “It just ... came to that,” she said tentatively. “It all blew up. There was just no place for me.”

  I could feel her stiffening, drawing away. I took another drink. Ought to hold off, I thought, take it very easy. But she started to talk again.

  “I’ll tell you this,” she said. “When I first hit the streets, I did think, well, it would be an adventure. I mean, I thought I’d be with the really tough kids, the real kids, not those rich slick little liars. That was stupid, let me tell you. I mean the rich kids were adults pretending to be kids for their parents’ sakes. And the kids on the streets are kids pretending to be adults for their own sakes. Everybody’s an outcast. Everybody’s a faker.”

  Her eyes shifted anxiously over the room, and she bit a little at her fingernail again, the way I had seen her do last night.

  “I didn’t belong on the street any more than I did with the others,” she said. “I mean, guys who stole car radios every day to score food and dope, girls selling themselves in the Tenderloin, and the hustlers, my God, convincing themselves it was a big deal if some gay guy took them to a fancy hotel for an hour and bought them dinner. It was the world, sixty minutes in the Clift Hotel, imagine! Same as the rich kids, everything unreal. Unreal. And the cops, they don’t really want to bust you. They don’t have any place to put you. They hope you’ll up and disappear.”

  “Or Daddy will come—”

  “Yeah, Daddy. Well, all I want is to grow up. I want my name back. I want my life to begin. I want this shit to be over.”

  “It is over for you,” I said. She looked at me.

  “Because you’re with me,” I said. “And you’re OK now.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not over. It just means you and I are criminals together.”

  “Well, why don’t you let me worry about that part of it?” I bent forward to kiss her.

  “You crazy guy,” she said. She lifted her glass. “Here’s to your pictures in the attic.”

  t:i~’~. ^.~,i. I saw the glowing numbers on the face of the bedside clock before I was even awake. Now the grandfather clock was chiming the hour, and in the vibrating silence that followed I heard her voice very far away. Downstairs. Talking to someone on the phone?

  I got up slowly and went to the top of the stairs. The hall light was on down there. And I could hear her laughing, an easy cheerful little laugh. “Prince Charming,” she was saying, and then the words were lost. Car passing in the street, even the ticking of the grandfather clock came between us. “Just don’t let them hurt you!” she said. Anger? Then the voice went down to a murmur again. And I heard her say: “I love you, too.” And she hung up the phone.

  What was I doing? Spying on her? Should I sneak back to bed as if I hadn’t come this far?

  I saw her come into the lower hallway, and then she saw me.

  “Is everything all right, baby darling?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure!” She came up towards me with her arms out, slipped them around my waist. Her face was open, full of simple affection. “I was just talking to an old friend of mine, had to tell him I was OK.” “It’s so early,” I said sleepily.

  “Not where he is,” she said, offhandedly. “But don’t worry, I made the call collect.”

  She led me back to bed, and we climbed under the covers together. She was nestled in my arms.

  “It’s raining in New York City right now,” she said, her voice low, already drowsy.

  “Should I be jealous of this friend?” I asked her in a whisper.

  “No, never,” she said. Slight scoffing tone. “Just my oldest buddy in the whole world, I guess ....” Voice trailing off.

  Silence.

  The warmth of her; and then finally her deep, even breathing.

  “I love you,” I said softly.

  “Prince Charming,” she whispered, as if from the deepest sleep.

  [8]

  BY noon the next day she had posters all over the guest room walls: Belmondo, Delon, Brando, Garbo, as well as the new faces, Aidan Quinn, Richard Gere, Mel Gibson. The radio blared Madonna by the hour. She played with all the new clothes, neatly stacking sweaters on the closet shelves, ironing blouses, polishing old shoes, experimented with new bottles and jars of expensive makeup.

  I only looked in now and then on my way down from the attic to the coffee maker in the kitchen. The three carousel pictures were almost complete, and I was lettering in the titles at the bottom of the canvases, as I’d done years ago with my first paintings: Belinda on the Carousel Horse One, Two, and Three. The effect of the trio, set up to dry, was making me giddy.

  I cooked dinner for us around six—steaks, salad, red wine—the only meal I know how to cook. She came down with her hair braided and the braids tied across the top of her head. I kissed her a lot before we started eating.

  “Why don’t you watch those videotapes tonight?” I asked. I told her she could have the den to herself. I almost never went in there. Maybe, she said. She’d watch some TV, if I was going to work, or read some of my books on painting.

  She went down to the basement library after we cleaned up, and I could hear the click of the pool balls down there as I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee letting the wine wear off, gearing up to go to work again. Last bit of background, then done on those three up there.

  The whole house smelled like her perfume.

  SHE was sound asleep in my four-poster when I came down. She had taken off the flannel gown and pushed the covers away, and she lay on her face, her mouth only a little open, her long slender hand limp beside her face on the pillow.

  Her naked bottom was small, almost boyish, a glint of gold pubic hair showing there. I touched the silky backs of her knees, the little crease that was so sensitive to touch when she was awake. I touched the silky soles of her feet. She didn’t move. She slept with the perfect trust of childhood. “Who are you?” I whispered. I thought of the all the things she’d said. At dinner she’d mentioned something about a trip to Kashmir, traveling by train across India with two English students, her companions for that summer. “But all we talked about was the States. Imagine there we were in one of the most beautiful spots on earth, Kashmir, and all we talked about was LA and New York City.”

  I bent down and kissed the back of her neck, the little bare patch of skin that showed through her thick hair. Sixteen.

  But how can you give me permission. And how can I give myself permission? If only them was no one else, no one who cared. But then you wouldn’t be running, would you?

  Dark in the hallway.

  The guest room, her room. All these new faces staring at each other across the dark, the brass bed glimmering, her purse open, things spilled out. A hairbrush.

  Closet door open.

  Videotapes. ‘x~h� ~o~e them xh~x~gh ~h~ ‘~ ‘~ s~ ~ad so l~ttl› else? A sack, a suitcase. Something to do with a past life? What was in the suitcase?

  I was standing in her doorway. Of course, I wouldn’t pry a lock, wouldn’t even lift a suitcase lid. I mean, these were her things. And what if she woke up, came down the hall, discovered me here?

  Just look in the closet. Crammed now with new clothes.

  But there was the suitcase on the floor, and it was locked. And the videotapes now stood in a neat stack on the shelf behind an empty purse, folded underwear, a hair dryer.

  I examined them in the light from the hall. Strange labels on these cassettes. Only the name of a dealer in New York: Video Classics. And on one a check mark had been scratched in the black plastic as if with a ballpoint pen or a bobbie pin. Nothing else to say what they were or why she would want them.

  Her magazines: quite a stack. And many of them foreign. Cahiers du Cinema on top, L’Express, copies of German Stern, more French, some Italian. And film the theme always. What she had in English was Andy Warhol’s Interview, Film Arts, American Cinematographer.

  Fairly sophisticated for a girl
her age it seemed. But then with her background, maybe it wasn’t so unusual.

  Many of these journals were old. In fact, they had second-hand store price labels on them. Only the Film Arts was new, with a picture on the front of “Up-and-Coming Texas Film Director Susan Jeremiah.”

  Inside was tucked an article torn out of Newsweek, also on Ms. Jeremiah—“Thunder in the Southwest”—a tall, lean dark-haired Houston woman with deep-set black eyes, who actually wore a cowboy hat and boots. I didn’t think Texans really did that.

  As for the older mags, there was no immediate clue to why she had bought them. Film and film and film. Some went back ten years. No marks anywhere that I could see.

  I put all of this back carefully. And only then did I notice an old TV Guide under the tapes. And when I pulled it out, I saw Susan Jeremiah again, smiling under the shadow of her white cowboy hat. Handsome woman. The issue was two months old. I scanned quickly for the article.

  Ms. Jeremiah’s first television movie, something called Bitter Chase, had premiered in April. The article was short, said she was one of the new generation of talented women in film. Her first theatrical feature, Final Score, had gotten a standing ovation at last year’s Cannes festival. She’d grown up on a Texas ranch. Ms. Jeremiah believed American film was wide open for women.

  There was more, but I was getting nervous. Suppose Belinda woke up. I thought I heard a noise, and that was it. I put the magazine back and closed the closet.

  The key to the suitcase might be in her purse. Her purse was on the brass bed. But I had done enough. And I could not bring myself to snoop in her purse, no, there had to be a limit to this.

  But these little discoveries were tantalizing. Just like her chatter about Europe. Just like her, whoever she was.

  No surprise that a girl her age was interested in film, no surprise that her tastes would be good. But why this focus on a female film director?

  Of course, it was just the sort of thing to interest a modern girl—the strong independent Texas woman not out to be an actress but a filmmaker. Rather irresistibly American. The press certainly liked the hat and the boots, that was obvious.