Belinda Read online

  “Lawyer-client privilege, Dan.”

  “Disney is bidding right now against Rainbow for the rights to Angelica?’

  “Oh, you reminded me. Belinda’s interested in movies, very interested. Cahiers du Cinema, magazines like that. Film buff stuff.”

  “She’s sixteen, she wants to be a star, so did Lolita. Get rid of her, the little bitch.”

  “Come on, Dan. Don’t talk like that about her. I mean, she reads serious film things. And she has a special interest in a woman director, someone named Susan Jeremiah.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Up-and-coming Texas woman. Did a TV film in April for United Theatricals. There just might be a connection.”

  “I’11 get on this all right, you better believe I’ll get on this, just to show you how dangerous this is!”

  “Be careful, whatever you do, when you call me. She’s there all the time.”

  “No shit.”

  “If you leave a message on the machine, make it sound like book business.”

  I STOPPED in the lobby long enough to take a deep breath. I felt like an absolute traitor. Please, let it be something rotten. Let them be corrupt. Let her belong to me.

  I WENT to a phone booth on Market Street and looked up the address of a riding apparel shop. It was on Divisadero.

  I knew her sizes from the day before, and the woman assured me I could bring back anything she didn’t like. So I bought her everything. A red wool hacking coat, and a black hunting jacket, and two beautiful black velvet hard hats with chin straps. Breeches, gloves, a couple of quirts. Some very pretty little shirts and things. I knew it was the sort of thing people didn’t use everyday for riding. It was for shows. But I wanted to see her in it, and I hoped she would like it.

  Then I went home, put all of this out on the bed, and went upstairs. The palette was still loaded with wet paint from last night, and the brushes were still wet, too, so I went right to work instantly. Last bit of gold on the lettering of the last picture: the punk-waif picture.

  I scarcely looked at the work I’d done. I got paint all over my wool pants, but it didn’t matter.

  Only when I looked at the shadowy little V between her legs did I have to stop, have to detach. She was too alive for me. I stood back, and when I saw the amount that was done—the size of the three canvases, the detail all finished—I was a little overawed. Even for me this pace was wondrous.

  ABOUT four I went out for some beer, milk, the dumb little things I needed from the corner market. I got her five different brands of foreign cigarettes. Jasmine, Dunhill, Rothmans, anything unusual that she might like. I also got plenty of apples, oranges, pears, good things she might eat on the run instead of garbage. I mean, here I was buying a kid cigarettes. I doubled up on the milk, grabbed a few boxes of dry cereal. The car was in the drive when I came back.

  When I shut the front door, I saw her standing at the top of the staircase.

  There was only a weak light from the stained-glass window there, and my eyes had to get used to the shadows before I could really see her.

  She had on the black velvet riding hat and the high leather boots. And she was posed like an old-fashioned portrait, with one hand on her hip and the other holding the black leather riding quirt. She was otherwise naked. She smacked the side of the boot with the quirt.

  I went down on my knees at the bottom of the stairs. I shoved the groceries aside.

  She held the pose for as long as she could, but then she was shaking with half-repressed giggles. I doubled over with laughter before I got to her.

  I climbed on top of her at the top of the stairs and started kissing her. “No, in the bed,” she said. “In the bed. It’s too good in the bed.”

  I picked her up and carried her. She was still laughing when I set her down. I kissed her, cradling her chin with the little leather strap, and feeling her boots against my legs—the hard leather and the soft thighs.

  “Tell me you love me, you little witch,” I said. “Come on, tell me.”

  “Yes,” she said, kissing me back. “It’s going to be just perfect, isn’t it?”

  Just before I stopped thinking altogether of anything rational, I thought: I have my next picture.

  [9]

  IT was all right with her in the attic, too.

  For three nights, as I worked on the riding portrait, she was quiet, reading French Vogue or Paris Match, dozing off, then watching me. She wore tight jeans, cotton T-shirts, liked keeping her hair in braids, made it much easier to care for. She had laughed when I bought the little plastic barrettes in the dime store for the ends of her braids. But she wore them.

  (Don’t look at the taut wrinkles of cloth between her legs, or her nipples showing through the sheer bra under the shirt. When she rolls over on her stomach on the polished wooden floor and her breasts hang down, don’t go crazy. She kicks her feet a little, crosses her ankles. Crushes out a cigarette, drains the Coke, which, thanks to my nagging, has no slug of Scotch in it. Don’t look. The brand of lipstick is Bronze Bombshell.)

  With and without this inspiration, I was actually finishing before midnight of the third night.

  And it was just the way she’d suggested when she posed at the top of the stairs. Boots, hat, hand on hip, nude, of course, with riding crop. Splendid.

  I’d taken half a roll of film for it. In spite of her narrow hips there was something about it that could only be described as voluptuous. But the face, always the face, that was the issue. Bud mouth, upturned nose, yet so much maturity in the eyes.

  Midnight. The grandfather clock sent its chimes up through the old floors.

  My right arm ached. The light glaring off the canvas was getting to me. I was getting tired of painting the details with a tiny stiff camel’s hair brush. But I wouldn’t quit. Wanted to deepen the color of the drapery behind: essential to get the rough texture of antique velvet there. Little prestidigitation there, and the gleam of the light on her right boot. Some fool would stand in the gallery later—the gallery? later?—and say, why it looks just like she’s going to reach out and touch you!

  Kiss you. Take you in her arms, crush your face to her breasts like she does mine. Right. Exactly.

  She lay on her back looking at the ceiling. Yawned. Said she had to go to bed. Why didn’t I come too? “Soon.”

  “Kiss me.” She stood up, pounded on my chest with her fist. “Come on, stop just long enough to kiss me.”

  “Do this for me,” I said. “Sleep in the brass bed in the middle room. I want to take pictures there ... later.” It had those side rails that could be raised, like a baby bed, only lower.

  OK, she said. As long as I came to bed there with her afterwards.

  I went downstairs with her.

  There was an old brass lamp there, an oil lamp wired now with a little bulbs—very gentle light to photograph her by.

  I put the nightgown on her myself and buttoned the tiny pearl buttons to her throat.

  I watched her undo the braids and brush out her rippling hair. Something about the white fabric and the pearls, it was deja vu—a swoon almost-having to do with churches, candles.

  For a moment I couldn’t attach it to anything—then a lot of forgotten things came back, those long lush church ceremonies I’d witnessed a thousand times when I was a little boy in New Orleans. Banks of white gladiolas on the altars, the satin vestments so carefully embroidered, sometimes even painted it seemed. Watered silk. Purple, deep green, gold. Every color had its liturgical meaning.

  I didn’t know whether they even did elaborate things like that anymore in the Catholic church, whether they’d ever done them in California. I’d passed a Catholic church here one evening and they had been singing “God Bless America.”

  What I heard now was Veni Creator Spiritus. And these were children’s voices. And it was intimately of the past, of the big moldering old houses of the Garden District streets, of the giant Gothic and Romanesque churches built lovingly by immigrants to the old Euro
pean scale, full of imported stained glass, marble, finely carved statues.

  Miles from there to here, yet some elusive point of convergence in the light as it fell on the tight, virginal skin of her face, her babylips.

  Her hair spilled down on the white flannel. The brush lifted it, seemed to stretch it and straighten it, then let it go, the tight rippling waves eating up the strands immediately.

  I could almost feel those moments in church—all the little girls in white lace and linen lined up in the cloister outside waiting to go in. We had on white suits. But it was the girls I remembered, the girls with their little cheeks and lips rouged. Rustle of taffeta. Finger curls. Satin ribbon.

  Processions, little girls strewing rose petals out of little white papier-mâché baskets, all down the marble aisle of the church before the priest passed under the swaying canopy. Or the ranks in the dusk as the May Procession moved through the narrow back streets of the old parish, class after class marching together, all dressed in white, our Hail Marys rising in a chant, the people out on their front porches to watch, and the little altars to the Virgin with flickering candles set in the little front windows of the narrow railroad-flat duplexes. Women in pale shapeless flowered dresses walking beside us on the sidewalks as they said their rosaries.

  No, I think it was something else, something very distinct in the church itself and there was this light: Holy Communion.

  AN idea was coming to me, another tableau. And it seemed more bizarre than anything yet—the carousel horse, the &o~r~r~e, x~ ~d,~v,g k~3ots. But I knew, if I could do it, it would be extraordinary, rapturous.

  And it probably wouldn’t frighten her. Not her. She lay down on the pillow, and I raised the brass sides of the bed. Thin bars on all sides. Like an old hospital bed or a gilded cage. Like a crib truly.

  She was giving me that soft dreamy pacific smile. This extraordinary awareness of happiness came over me. This certainty of happiness and completeness.

  Her hair was all out on the pillow, pale yellow. She said she didn’t mind falling asleep with the lamp on. I wouldn’t wake her when I came in to photograph her.

  “Good night, my darling dear,” she said. My little girl. Her mouth, the lipstick wiped away, was irresistibly puckered, succulent. Never would be a woman’s mouth. Promised a lifetime of felonious kisses.

  SHE was asleep by one o’clock.

  I spent an hour photographing her through the brass bars of the bed. The awareness of happiness was still there—an acute awareness.

  I don’t think that happens often in life, at least it has not happened to me very often. The awareness of happiness comes after, in memory, with the belated appreciation of the moment.

  This was close to joy, this feeling. Loving her, painting her—it made a cycle and shut out the world beyond completely.

  The world seemed even less real than the poster faces all over these walls—her actors and actresses. Just for one moment I studied them through the gloom. Susan Jeremiah up there now in her white cowboy hat—one of those quickie blowups from the Newsweek picture. Susan Jeremiah squinting into a Texas sun?

  She disappeared as I looked down into the light from the lamp, adjusted the camera.

  No, I wasn’t a traitor for what I’d done, trying to find out who she was. Rather I felt a certainty that nothing I found out would separate us. I’d discover things about her that would make me want to keep her close to me forever.

  I tiptoed around the bed, kneeling down to catch her through the bars, get the feeling of a big brass crib. All I had to do was touch her, lean over and kiss her lips or her eyes, and she would stir in her sleep, move, shift into another languid and yielding position. I brushed her hair down over her face once so that only her eyes were uncovered. I lifted it back and turned her head and got her profile perfectly.

  When the pearl buttons would catch the light, that strong positively haunting sense of the church would return. Flowers, incense, white dresses. It was First Communion or Confirmation, and what had they called Confirmation then? Big Communion. We wore white suits again, probably for the last time. And the girls looked like little brides, breathtaking. The bishop put oil on our foreheads, spoke Latin. We were all now, boys and girls alike, soldiers of Christ. What a mad mixture of imagery, metaphors.

  I pulled up her nightgown very gently, very gently, until the soft flannel was gathered in my hands and her breasts were uncovered. Then I kissed them, watching the nipples get small, stiff, erect. They seemed to darken slightly.

  “Jeremy,” she said in her sleep. She pulled on my arm, reached up groggily without opening her eyes and pulled my head down towards her.

  I kissed her mouth very lightly, then felt her gliding back into sleep again.

  I wasn’t ready to sleep yet.

  I went back down to the basement and opened one of my trunks from New Orleans. It was the one in which I kept old personal things. I hadn’t opened it in years.

  The smell of camphor was rather unpleasant. But I found what I wanted. My mother’s prayer book. It was the Latin missal she’d used when she was a little girl—the cover was simulated pearl, and there was a golden crucifix on it. Pages edged in gold. Her rosary was in a little white jewelry shop box with it. I took it out and held it up to the light. The blue paper had kept the silver links from tarnishing. The Hail Mary beads were pearls, the Our Fathers rhinestones, each capped in silver.

  My mother hadn’t much loved these things. She’d told me once that she wished she could throw them all out, but it seemed wicked to throw away rosaries and prayer books. So I saved them.

  My father’s picture was in the trunk, too, the last one he had taken before going overseas. Dr. Walker in uniform. He had volunteered the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, died in the South Pacific. That was two months after I was born, and I don’t think my mother ever forgave him. We lived in Dr. Walker’s big Saint Charles Avenue house. But I never knew him.

  I put him back, closed the trunk, and took the rosary and prayer book upstairs with me. The exhilaration was there again, the sense of being alive. Connected.

  [10]

  SHE was ready to go riding when I woke up, looking absolutely adorable in the red coat and breeches. Said she’d found a stable in Marin that would rent her a jumper.

  Sure, rake the car. Be back for dinner.

  I watched her drive away. Positively dashing as she nestled down in the old black leather seat of the dark-green MG-TD. The gears were screaming for mercy by the time she shifted into third. Kids, I thought. The kitchen was totally fogged in with cigarette smoke. And the clutch would fall out in a week.

  And I had five paintings upstairs. I felt absolutely marvelous.

  I drove downtown in the van, taking one of her shoes with me.

  I had this plan in mind, which had to do with the white cloth and pearl buttons. But I wasn’t sure I could carry it off. Didn’t know where to find everything.

  But as soon as I wandered into the bridal department of one of the downtown stores, I saw some of what I needed. Not only sheer white bridal veils on sale, but delicate white floral wreaths. Too perfect. I stood looking at these things in one of those dimly lit utterly private corners that exist all over big stores—all the noise was swallowed up by the carpets. The atmosphere of the church came back with bittersweet power. Things utterly lost, gone forever.

  I bought a veil and wreath immediately, but the dresses were all wrong for my purposes. And the ones in the little girls’ department would never fit her.

  In the lingerie department, quite by surprise, I spotted exactly what I wanted: lovely European nightgowns of white linen, all done up with white lace and ribbons. There were many different lengths, styles. And all achieved the same general effect. Very fancy, pure, old-fashioned.

  I chose a short full gown with no waistband or gathering. It had an exquisitely stitched yoke and, yes, the pearl buttons, the very thing I wanted, pearl buttons. And the sleeves, the sleeves were too good to be true. They were short puffed
sleeves, trimmed with tiny ruffles of satin ribbon. Ribbon on the hem. It was the thing all right. A little dress.

  I bought the two smaller sizes to be safe. And I bought a number of other gowns, too. Gowns would never go to waste in my house.

  For the shoes I did have to go to the little girls’ department. And apparently there are little girls with very long feet. Size 7 triple A. I got what I wanted. A plain white leather shoe with an instep strap. Rather wide I thought, but she really didn’t have to walk in it.

  The white stockings were no problem. I bought some lace ones, but that was not right. Plain white was what I remembered.

  Then I called up the florist on Eighteenth Street around the corner from my house and ordered the flowers. I’d be there in my van to pick them up myself. Just have them ready. I wanted lilies, gladiolas, roses, and everything white. Carnations OK too, but principally the church flowers.

  I had a light lunch in the upstairs restaurant at Saks, bought the wax candles I needed, and was about to catch a taxi when I thought perhaps I should call Dan.

  I didn’t really want to do it, but I thought that I should.

  Luckily, Dan was in court. Wouldn’t be back till tomorrow. But his secretary said that he’d been eager to reach me. My message machine hadn’t been on. Did I realize that?

  Yeah, I guess I did. I was sorry. Did she know what Dan had to say? “Just something about remember his warning.”

  Which meant what? I had half a mind to tell her to tell him to drop everything. But I didn’t.

  I hung up. And on a hunch I tried to reach Alex Clementine.

  He had checked out of the Stanford Court and gone on with his book tour to San Diego.

  I called Jody, the publicist, in New York. She said Alex had a packed schedule. She’ll tell him I wanted to get in touch with him. “It’s not important, don’t bother him.”

  “You know his book’s number eight this week on the list,” she said.