Belinda Read online

  Yet never had I painted anything as dark and frightening as these pictures of her. She burned like an apparition amid solid objects. Pure fire exploding suddenly in the claustrophobic gloom. She reproached the onlooker with her frankness, her cleanness, that was it. In the First Communion veil, she announced: This is the sacrament, this is clean; you don’t like it, it’s your problem. All of these pictures, really, said this.

  But what is the next step? I kept staring at Belinda Dancing. Braids and beads. Bratlet, almost woman, except the braids pushed it in the other direction—

  I had half a mind to call up Andy Blatky, say: Look, come over here and look at these damned pictures. Didn’t.

  But about an hour later I made another decision. Quit for the day and maybe plan to go ahead and do a book party somewhere out there, accept an offer for a signing. Yes, it was time to do that. Called Jody in New York.

  “If they still want me at Splendor in the Grass in Berkeley, I’ll do it.” She was delighted, would set up a date. We were still number seven on The New York Times list.

  “You know, if you went on tour right now, Jeremy, we could broaden that base—”

  “Start with Splendor in the Grass, I’m pretty busy. And I’ll take the limo, it’s just so much easier—”

  “Star treatment all the way.”

  I wasn’t off the phone five minutes when Dan called from L.A. I almost didn’t pick up. But Belinda was out, had been since morning. And he was uttering his usual threats into the answering machine. I picked up the receiver.

  “Look,” I said, “knock it off. I told you I don’t want to play it this way. I want to wait until she tells me herself—”

  “Do you want to know what I found out or not?”

  “OK, what?” I said.

  “This whole deal is getting weirder still. This guy Sampson honestly doesn’t know who she is. He thinks the studio execs who sent him on this goose chase are wacko, but the order has come from the very top at United Theatricals. Find her and on the qt, no expense should be spared.”

  United Theatricals, a monster establishment. Old as Tinseltown. They’d done three of the movies made from my mother’s books. They did TV shows, released foreign films, they did everything.

  I’d been on the lots years ago with Alex, seen the famous Big City Street, a set where they had shot a thousand New York scenes that I had thought were done on location. And there was the tank where they did the boat scenes against an endless blue sky.

  “I’m trying to get the name of the top brass involved,” Dan was saying. “But even drunk this guy doesn’t budge. The studio sends the check. He might not even know who he’s working for. It’s crazy as hell.”

  “Jeremiah, does she work for United Theatricals!” I said. “Somewhere, something I read.”

  “Yeah, but so do thousands of other people, and she isn’t top brass, she’s the Monday-night movie right now, she’s nothing. And besides, Sampson doesn’t know who she is, I ran that by him, on the sly, sort of. He never heard of her. And I can’t get to her because she’s off shooting the Monday-night movie in Europe. As for Sampson, he doesn’t seem to have a clue as to where Belinda is.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s headed for New York with more pix next Friday, then down to Miami, if you can believe it, Miami, and then up to Frisco again. He’s canvassing LA too, that much I can tell you, but he is real sly about LA. I mean he says it’s real hush hush down here. And he does not know why. I mean you don’t hear of him going up to kids on Sunset. He says LA is a special aspect of the case.”

  “Meaning what, for God’s sakes?”

  “You want my guess? Her family’s here. What else could it be?”

  “But do they want to find her or don’t they! I mean what is this?”

  “Good question. Because I can assure you the LAPD knows nothing about a runaway fitting that description.”

  “Makes no sense.”

  “Well, you don’t either if you want my opinion.”

  “Look, Dan, I’m sorry about acting this way. I just ... I’m fucking confused if you want to know.”

  “Look, I’ll be here at the Beverly Wilshire for the next few weeks. I’ll call again when I have something. But take my advice, will you, and get out of this, before we figure it out?”

  SHE came home later that afternoon. Lots of packages. I was sitting at the kitchen table, kind of comatose. I’d been thinking about those videotapes in her room. She’d never played them as far as I could figure. Never. The VCRs went night and day with rental tapes. Those unmarked tapes were hidden behind her sweaters. I knew because I had just checked. “I spent scads,” she shouted on her way up the stairs.

  “I hope so,” I said. And did I put the sweaters back properly? A few minutes later she was back: “Like this?”

  Oh, yes. Huge swallowing black wool sweater and little skirt, very dramatic. High black boots disappearing under the hem. Barrette clasping her hair on top of her head so it flowed down behind her ears to her shoulders. Corn silk on the black wool. A starlet. United Theatricals.

  “You don’t have a wet paintbrush in your hand, you realize that?” she asked.

  I nodded. Belinda Dancing. It was different from all the others, like the punk carousel nude. Just not part—

  “Let’s go have coffee,” she said. “Come on.”

  I shrugged. Sure. Would like that. My hand was cramped a little from painting in those numbers up there, whiting out those canvases. I was feeling light, crazy. Too many nights of no more than five hours sleep.

  She stood in front of the hall mirror. She was putting on pearl earrings. Now she reached into her purse, drew out a long silver wand, uncapped it, rolled it under her eyelashes.

  Ladylike, beautiful. Was she a starlet? Did they want her for the part of her life?

  I slipped on my jacket and went into my office and got the camera. I snapped her there by the mirror.

  “I want to take this with us, OK?”

  She glanced at me. “Oh, yeah, sure,” she said. “Something without the kiddie things, you mean? Yeah, right on.”

  Yeah, right on. So immediate, thoughtless. Yet my heart was pounding.

  WE went down to the Café Flore on Market and Noe, and I photographed her at one of the marble top tables with a cup of coffee. She had one of her Black Russians between her uplifted fingers. Nothing affected. Quite natural. Quite charming.

  People were watching us of course. A couple of writer friends were in there, good buddies, but a real nuisance. I didn’t introduce her. They kept making wisecracks to get her attention, making real fools of themselves. She was civil enough, too civil. They finally gave up and split. I finished the roll.

  “Do I take my clothes off now?” she whispered.

  “Shut up.” I said.

  OF course, number eleven—Belinda in Cafe Flore did not have any clothes on. Except for the high black boots. They matched the black cigarette.

  I got that same fantastical, undeniable rush of energy when I started the canvas. By midnight that night I knew it was the next step.

  “Want to hear something funny?” I asked when she came up to the attic.

  “Sure, tell me.”

  I gestured to the picture:

  “This is the first time in twenty-five years that I have painted anything that even faintly resembled a grown woman.”

  [17]

  SP~.E:’,’OOR in the Grass was one of those dream bookstores for kids, full of posters of white unicorns, and giant stuffed animals on which the toddlers can play, and little tables and chairs for reading, and every book that could conceivably be of interest to boys and girls from babyhood to twenty.

  The limousine pulled up at three in the afternoon on the last Friday in August.

  The crowd would have been, under normal circumstances, absolutely terrific for the ego. At least a hundred and fifty parents and children crammed into the four connecting rooms of the store, which had once been the lower floor
of a private house and still retained fireplaces, wainscoting, window seats.

  I sat down in the easy chair by the log fire in the first room and for an hour straight just signed, and answered the quick, simple questions.

  Berkeley children are in general brilliant children. Their parents teach at the university, or they go there to study. Or they are merely the kind of people who live in a world-famous radical community—people who prefer big old gracious houses to new tract homes, and well-trafficked tree-lined streets to the more remote and protected mountain roads of the suburbs of California’s Contra Costa County.

  The kids asked wonderful things about the pictures in the books as well as the stories. They had intelligent complaints about the Saturday morning Charlotte show; they were suspicious of the up-and-coming animated movie.

  Their bohemian parents, well scrubbed, in wash pants and sandals with babies in back carriers, talked easily of Jung, and my little girls being my feminine soul, and the “allegory” they found so delightful.

  But it has gone on too long, my soul wandering through these dark rooms. It has become a pattern that is a dark room in itself

  “Sometimes, you know, I feel it has to come to an end,” I heard myself say aloud. “The old houses in the books have to fall down, and I have to stop repeating this quest for freedom. I have to be outside at last.”

  Nods, patter, an attentive circle of the parents forming if I showed the slightest tendency to hold forth.

  “And what is outside?” Question from an art student, red hair, granny glasses, jeans.

  I thought for a moment.

  “Contemporary life itself,” I said. “Life, just life!” My voice was low, I could hardly hear it.

  “But you can be an artist all your life celebrating a particular step in human development.”

  “True, very true, and that is what’s here, of course. But it’s not enough anymore.”

  Questions pulling it this way and that.

  But I knew now why I had wanted to do this party. I was saying farewell to these kids. I was saying farewell to their proverbial shiny faces and their unbounded trust and their innocent uncensored enthusiasm, farewell to their parents who had read my works to them.

  “—love the way you paint the hands, such detail to the hands.”

  “—and the way Angelica’s shadow changes its size with each step up the stairs to her father’s attic.”

  “—Balthus, no, much more florid than Balthus, don’t you think? But you must have some response to his work—”

  “Of course, of course.” More coffee, thank you.

  I have used you all these years as I hid behind my mask. And yes, this is farewell. But what if now I am simply not good enough to make it as a painter? Fear. But, above all, that thumping exhilaration. Go home, work. And then looking at these kids I felt sadness. What if they were hurt by the Belinda pictures? What if they felt betrayed? What if it made a darkness inside them that someone they trusted had turned out to be bad and dirty? Did I have the right to do that?

  “Well, your work has always been erotic.” Erotic, erotic, erotic.

  Just the right dirt in the right measure.

  Oh, it was so important that the world, whatever the world was, understand what I did when I did it. But this was farewell to all the little girls to whom I had said the right thing for so long, the little girls that I had never never indecently touched or kissed or frightened.

  Yeah, I’d come here to say good-bye, and I was frightened. Yet I felt better than I ever had in my life.

  SHE didn’t get home till later that evening—she’d had so much fun out there at the Marin stables. The trails took you high up into the green hills. But she looked anxious, tired. She sat at the kitchen table braiding her hair, fingers moving nervously as she did and redid the tight plaits.

  Could we go to Carmel again, she asked me? Could we put even the wet paintings into the rack in the van and go to Carmel, just run run run away from here?

  “Sure, baby darling,” I said. That was what the rack in the van was for. Long ago I’d rigged it to move the work in progress. But she had to help me get the Cafe Flore canvas downstairs without a smudge.

  SHE seemed calmer as we drove out of the city. She was resting against my shoulder, her fingers curled around my arm.

  After we’d been on the highway for a while, I asked:

  “What’s wrong, Belinda?”

  “Nothing,” she said in a low voice, her eyes on the road in front of us. Then after a while she said, “Nobody knows about the Carmel house, right?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Not even your lawyers and accountants and those people?”

  “I call my accountant and I tell him the amount of the property tax and he deducts it. I bought the house years and years ago. But why are you asking me all this? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” Dull, listless tone. “Just romantic, you know, that it’s so secret. No phone, no mailbox.”

  She had laughed when I first told her that people in Carmel didn’t have street numbers, that you went to the post office every day, if you wanted to, to get your mail. I had never collected anything at the post office that I could remember.

  “Yeah, it’s a hideaway,” I said. “Yours and mine.”

  I felt her fingers tighten on my arm. Her lips brushed my cheek.

  Did I ever think of maybe going back down to New Orleans, to my mother’s old place, she asked.

  I explained I really didn’t want to do that, hadn’t seen that house since 1966. Be a shock just to walk into it. It would be so far away, she said.

  “Who are we running from, Belinda?” I asked her. I tried to make it sound gentle.

  “No one,” she said, so softly it was like a sigh.

  “Then we’re not in danger of somebody just—”

  “I wouldn’t let anything like that happen,” she said. Touch of annoyance, but with whom?

  Then she was quiet, sleeping for a while against my shoulder. The heavy engine of the van made a dull roaring silence, the landscape barely visible in the darkness beyond the endless road.

  “Jeremy,” she said suddenly in an eerie dream voice, her body tensing, “I love you, you know that, don’t you?”

  “But something’s wrong, isn’t it?” I asked. “Something happened.” And what was I thinking? You keep your secrets from her and she’s not supposed to keep hers from you? But your secrets come from her secrets. If she would only explain it all.

  “Don’t worry,” she said in a whisper.

  “But you’re afraid of something. I can feel it.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” she said. Was there a catch in her voice or was it my imagination?

  “Can’t you trust me enough to tell me? I’m not breaking the rules, am I, just to ask why you’re afraid?”

  “It isn’t fear,” she said, and she was almost crying. “It’s just sometimes ... sometimes I feel really really sad.”

  SHE was in wonderful spirits the next morning. All that week we made the local concerts, movies, plays in the evening. We dined at the little candlelight restaurants, walked on the clean white Carmel beach each morning at sunup. The house smelled of the wood fire that was always going on the hearth.

  We did a lot of talking, too.

  I told her all about the New Orleans house when she asked me, how I’d kept it like a museum or something, more out of paralysis than anything else. My wives had never seen it, neither had my friends, except my good friend, the actor Alex Clementine, who had known my mother all those long years ago.

  And I almost told her the old secret, about the books I’d written under Mother’s name.

  But when it came to the crunch, I didn’t. just didn’t. Alex had certainly been right about all that.

  She said that the New Orleans house would be a wonderful place to hide.

  “Someday,” I said.

  The Cafe Flore painting was done by the time we went back north.

  [1
8]

  “I DON’T understand,” I said. “I thought you’d like to meet him. He isn’t just famous, he’s charming. And besides, he’s my best friend.”

  “I’m sure he’s terrific, I’ve seen him on television, I’ve seen him in the movies, but I don’t want to go.” Temper rising. “And I wanna make this concert, I told you I wanna make this concert, you won’t go to rock concerts with me, you absolutely refuse, and so I have to go by myself.”

  “I don’t like it. I don’t want you going. And you’ve never done this before, besides!”

  “But I wanted to! Look, I’m sixteen, aren’t I?”

  “Look, are you angry that I’m going to dinner with a friend?”

  “Why would I be angry!”

  “Look, you wouldn’t go to the museum reception, you skipped out when Andy came to set up the sculpture, you disappear into your room if Sheila comes. You never pick up the phone when it rings. And here we’re talking about Alex, one of the most famous stars in the history of the movies, and you don’t even—”

  “And what the hell are you going to tell all these people? I’m your niece from Kansas City who just came to visit? I mean, Christ, Jeremy, get some sense! You’re hiding the best work you ever did in the goddamned attic, and at the same time you want to show me off to your friends?”

  “But the point is Alex Clementine is the one person I don’t have to explain anything to! Alex never tells the truth about anybody. He just wrote an entire book in which he didn’t tell the nit-grit truth about a single person he knew.”

  But he’ll tell everybody over dinner and cocktails forever, won’t he? “You should have seen the little jailbait Jeremy had with him in S.F.—yes, Jeremy.”

  No, not if I tell him not to. “Go without me—”

  “Look,” I said. “All you care about is movies and—”

  “Film, Jeremy, film, not movies and not movie stars either.”

  “OK, film. But he knows plenty about film. Not just gossip column stuff. He’s worked with the best, you get him talking on—”