Belinda Read online

  “Even after this little meeting?” I asked. “Attempted blackmail’s a crime, so’s breaking and entering, didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”

  She gave me another one of those long slow takes. Then she said: “Mr. Walker, let me tell you something about this whole situation. The way it’s set up, no one really has anything on anyone else.”

  “I’m not sure you’re right, Miss Blanchard,” I said. “Maybe we’ve all got the goods on one another at this point.”

  She appeared to think that over—or merely to drift.

  “Take care of Belinda,” she said finally. “And don’t you show those paintings to a living soul.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to say any more either. I only knew I wanted to get down to Carmel before morning. I turned to go.

  “Mr. Walker.”

  “Yes?”

  “Call me if anything goes wrong. Night or day, if anything happens, if she leaves—”

  “Of course, Miss Blanchard,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I? I’m a very nice man, right?”

  [25]

  IT was just getting daylight when I climbed out of the van and went up the gravel walk to the little cottage in Carmel.

  The air inside was warm and full of the smell of the smoldering logs on the hearth. The milky light grew brighter as I watched, illuminating the flagstone floor, the comfortable old chairs, the cottage table, and the high dark beams above me.

  I climbed the wooden ladder to the loft bed. Smell of perfume, of Belinda.

  She lay curled on her side in a snarl of cotton sheets, her naked shoulders golden brown against the whiteness. Strands of yellow hair were caught on her cheek and on her moist lip. I brushed them aside, and she turned over on her back, the sheet slipping off her naked breasts, her eyes moving beneath her smooth closed eyelids.

  “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” I said. I kissed her. Her mouth was lifeless at first and then it opened slowly and I felt her body quicken under me.

  “Jeremy,” she whispered, and her arms went around my neck, pulling me close almost desperately.

  “Come on, little girl,” I said. “I’ve got everything in the van. Last night I called my housekeeper in New Orleans. She’ll have everything ready for us. If we start now and drive on through, we’ll be in my mother’s house day after tomorrow.”

  Her eyes were glazed. She blinked to drive away the layers of sleep.

  “You love me?” she whispered.

  “Adore you. Now come on down. I’ll make us breakfast. There are one or two things I want you to know, and then we’ll get on the road immediately.”

  I got the groceries out of the van, put on the eggs and bacon and the coffee, and when she came down to the table, I kissed her again. A lot of her long hair was gathered up in the barrette, flowing down her back like a shaft of light. And she had put on her white jeans and one of those baggy white cotton sweaters I especially loved. She looked like a long-stemmed white flower.

  “Sit down,” I said when she tried to help. I dished out the food, poured the coffee. “I’m never asking you anything again, like I told you,” I said, as I sat down across from her. “But I want you to know what I’ve done. I read the paperback trash I could find on you and your mother. I read the mags I could find. I even had somebody snoop into it down south. I know all about it. I’m confessing that now, up front.”

  Her eyes were staring past me. She had a listless expression too much like her mother. But underneath there was the threat of tears.

  I reached across the table and took her hand. No resistance.

  She looked as defeated as she had ever looked.

  “I want to close the book on all of it, just the way I promised we would,” I said. “No questions. Not a one. But there are some things you have to know. Susan Jeremiah’s been looking for you. She wants you to make a picture.”

  “I know that,” she whispered. “It can wait.”

  “You’re sure? You want to see her, I’ll help you. But your uncle Daryl, he’s watching her. He’s figuring on catching you if you try.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “OK. This is the last thing. The biggie. And I don’t want this to hurt you, and I don’t want this to make you hate me. But I have to tell you. There can’t be any more secrets or lies.”

  So much like the mother in her listlessness and silence, and I had not thought of it last night in that room, though I’d seen it in Belinda countless times.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Your mother came to see me,” I said.

  No response.

  “I don’t know how she found us—it may even be that my own lawyer snooping around actually tipped her off. But whatever the case, she came to see me, and she told me to take care of you. She’s worried about you, and she doesn’t want her brother to find you and make trouble for you. She just wants you to be all right.”

  She stared at me, as if she couldn’t absorb it, couldn’t respond.

  “I know this is a shock, an ugly shock, and I wish I didn’t have to talk about it, but you have to know. I told her I loved you, I told her I’d let her know from time to time that you were all right.”

  I could not read her expression. Had the sadness deepened? Was she on the verge of tears? She just remained the same, and she looked so old suddenly and tired and alone.

  I took her by the shoulders. She was so soft she might have fallen. But her eyes were fixed on me.

  “OK. That’s it,” I said. “And if you can forgive me for the snooping, Belinda, then you’ve got to see that the worst has already happened, and we’re OK.”

  She frowned a little, and her lip quivered, and, yes, she was going to cry. But even that seemed to take more will than she had.

  “Don’t, honey, everything’s fine, honest it is,” I said. “There are no more secrets to hurt us, Belinda. It’s going to be better than it ever was. We’re really free.”

  “I love you, Jeremy,” she whispered. “I would have never let them hurt you. I swear to God. It’s true.”

  It cut to my heart the way she said it, as if I were the one to protect.

  “Yes, honey,” I said, “and I won’t let them hurt you either. And we’re going far far away from them.”

  [26]

  I DON’T know when the doubts started. Certainly not in those first few weeks.

  WE drove straight through, one of us sleeping while the other took the wheel, so that we came into New Orleans late in the morning on the second day after we left California.

  I thought I was exhausted when I turned off the freeway onto Saint Charles Avenue, but the old landmarks—the giant sprawling oaks, even the rusted squalor of the dreary midtown stretch—brought me to life immediately.

  As we passed Jackson Avenue and moved into the domain of the Garden District, I felt an extraordinary sense of peace. Even the smell of the warm air was working on me.

  Then I saw the high iron fence of the old house stretching back the side street. I saw the garden growing wild as ever against the screen porches and the white Corinthian columns. I saw the old Rose of Montana vine lacing itself around the high shuttered windows. Home.

  I was in a daze when Miss Annie came out to meet us and to put the keys in my hand. The sense of the familiar was magical. I was overwhelmed by a flood of small sensation I had utterly forgotten.

  The enormous rooms were cool as we stepped inside. The overhead fans churned, the old window air conditioners grinding away in that sound which becomes in time a good substitute for silence. There was the awful old painting of Lafayette, which Alex had remembered, and the pirate’s head at the foot of the stairs, the worn oriental rugs still scattered about.

  I stood for a moment in the door of the library looking at the table where I’d studied, the shelves still full of the nineteenth-century books in which I’d first learned about the paintings and drawings of the masters. Belinda was quietly and obviously enthralled.

  I took her hand and led her to the
second floor. We went into Mother’s bedroom. The blinds were closed with their slats open on the surrounding trees, just as Alex had long ago seen them.

  I opened the French doors to the screened porch. I explained how we’d watched the Mardi Gras here unseen from the street. These porches were now a thing of the past, people thought they looked ugly on the old antebellum facades, but there was nothing quite like them for that feeling of fresh air and veiled privacy.

  She looked small and fragile as she drifted around, examining the old mahogany pieces, the giant four-poster.

  “Ah, Jeremy, this is a dream place,” she said. She flashed one of her exquisite smiles.

  “You like it, baby?”

  “Can we sleep in this bed?” she asked.

  My mother’s embroidered pillow cases were still there, and the crocheted bedspread, all the same.

  “Of course, we can,” I said. “Yes, this should be our room.” In the cool of the night we’d shut off the air conditioners and open the doors to the porch. We could hear the streetcar passing.

  SHE helped me unpack the van. We trudged back and forth down the flagstone path through the melting heat until we had brought all twelve paintings into the back porch studio where I’d worked for so many years.

  The porch was now enclosed in glass instead of screens. But the old green bamboo blinds were still there and I remembered Alex Clementine in his white linen suit lowering them all around as he said, “I’ll make love to you, you know.”

  My old easel was there, the stool, everything. Even the cot on which Alex and I had sat together that afternoon.

  But the garden had grown so high and wild that the light was only dappled. The roses grew in menacing arcs above the thick clumps of banana tree and the white and the pink oleander. Purple althaea on their stiff stems by the back steps. Morning glory climbing all the way to the roof.

  Ah, nothing grows in California the way it grows here. Not even love probably. The pink Rose of Montana ran out along the telephone wires that cut through the branches of the pecan tree. The calla lilies threw up their giant blooms against the brick foundations. Even the purple flags had their layer of velvet green moss. And far out in the overgrown grass the old iron lawn furniture was now half overturned amid the towering weeds and bracken.Home.

  She helped me with the luggage until we had it all upstairs. Carpet soft, as if it were growing into the polished risers. Smell of dust, mothballs, cedar when I opened the old armoires.

  An absolute silence fell suddenly. We were standing together on the edge of the Brussels carpet. “Love you, darling—”

  I shut the door and carried her to Mother’s bed. She let her head fall back as I unbuttoned her blouse. There were ribbons threaded in her braids.

  Her hand went down between the rise of her breasts and snapped the clip of the bra so that the cups fell open on either side of her like two white shells. Her hips rose slightly as I pulled the jeans off her, then the panties. I pulled the pink bows off the ends of the braids. I ran my fingers down the braids roughly, loosening them, so they fell apart, the hair in ripples.

  She slipped her arms around me, her lips pressed against my shoulder, my neck.

  On top of the counterpane we did it. I turned over after and fell into the deepest easiest sleep I’d ever known it seemed.

  California just slipped away into darkness. Out of California Gothic we go into Southern Gothic, I thought.

  I heard Alex at a crowded supper table: “And then who should show up in her black limousine right outside his house but Bonnie!” No. Stop it. Wake up. Shift gears. Down south. Drifting. Bonnie’s soft Texas slur: “I don’t care who started it. I don’t care whose fault it is. I don’t ever want to see her again.”

  SOUNDS of New Orleans outside. Five o’clock.

  The air conditioning was off. And the katydids were going—great sweeping choruses of grinding song from the trees. Ah, I’m home. I’m safe. I’m in New Orleans. Chimes in the house from one place and another, and then another. Mother always said, Set the clocks thirty seconds apart and the music will continue. Miss Annie must have known the trick. Belinda!

  She was sitting out on the porch in the white rocker. Breeze carrying the scent of dust and rain. She was wearing only a white silk slip and her feet were bare.

  “It’s so gloriously warm,” she said. Slight sheen on her face. Her hair was parted in the middle, sort of tangled over her shoulders, kink from the braids still there. “Ah, Jeremy, let’s never leave here. If we go off for a while, let’s come back. Let’s let this be home.”

  “Yes, darling baby, forever.”

  I stood at the edge of the railing looking down through the mesh of oak limbs at the silver streak of car track on the avenue. At Mardi Gras time they always came and clipped the branches back so the big papier-mâché parade floats could go by safely underneath. It hurt me to think of it.

  Now the deepening green of the grass melted into the green of the trees, and beyond there was no glare of sky, only the muted colors of the houses far across the way, flash of pink crepe myrtle glowing in the gloom, white magnolia, bits of shining glass, translucent blue, wrought iron. The world woven in a net. There was no end, no beginning. Sunset and cloud were no more than tiny burning pieces.

  “We’ll go out to the lake tonight,” I said. “Some old place at West End out over the water. Or the French Quarter downtown. What do you say?”

  “Anything you want.” Glisten of moisture on her breasts, her naked thighs under the lace border of the slip. Beautiful thing, the slip, all sculpted to her flesh, and such thick lace, and her feet on the dusty floor naked.

  But first the photographs.

  I turned on the lamps.

  “Lie on the bed,” I said to her gently. “On the embroidered pillows. No, keep on the slip.”

  “Now that’s a change,” she answered drowsily.

  No tripod unpacked but I could hold the camera steady enough. Very grainy these would be, light terrible, but good enough. The painting would come blazing out of them soon enough.

  Her legs were spread apart, the left knee raised to one side, her pink nipples clearly visible under the silk cloth.

  I saw her fall into the usual trance as the shutter clicked. I thought of all those films she’d made. And the last, those exquisite love scenes in the sand. But this was too this for thinking of that.

  Out of her suitcase I got one of her bras, a pink satin one with lace, and a tiny pair of pink bikini panties.

  “Put on these for me, would you?”

  I watched her peel off the slip. The bra closed in the front like the other. Ah, my teeth clenched seeing her tighten the clasp, breasts gathered like that. Then she smoothed the flesh into the cups, lifted each breast, dropped it, her fingers casual, rough. I got hard watching it. Then the panties came up stretched sheer over her pubic hair. I could see the silk seal itself over her secret lips. Little crack. Hair a dark shadow underneath.

  She sat down on the bed again, scooting back to the pillows, letting the counterpane catch under her heel. “Perfect.”

  I stood back looking at her, loving her. Knowing who she was—it changed nothing and it changed everything. It made all the difference in the world.

  THAT night we walked all over the old French Quarter.

  We caught the jazz at Preservation Hall, roamed the shops, the garish Bourbon Street clubs, drifted past the old historical places—Pirate’s Alley, Jackson Square, the cathedral.

  She talked softly about the things she missed about Europe. Not Saint Esprit. That had been a prison. She talked about Paris and Rome mostly. She had so loved Rome. She had ridden all over Rome on a Vespa with Susan Jeremiah when they were doing the postproduction work at Cinecittá on Final Score. Susan was six feet tall and always did wear her cowboy boots and her cowboy hat. The Italians had loved her.

  This place had those colors, she said. Stained walls, stone streets, the dark smells of Rome. Not like any place in America that she had seen.
New York, LA, San Francisco—that was America to her.

  I listened to all this quietly, sensing the change, that she could have her past now, that her life could extend backwards in time as well as forward with dreams and plans. Everything was going to be fine. It was going to be all right.

  But I didn’t push her. When we had coffee later in the Cafe du Monde, I asked about making Final Score.

  “Well, you know I’d made movies all my life,” she said. “I was in them before I can remember. I’ve seen films in which I was just a baby. And then the ads, too. I did some kind of baby shampoo ad when I was fifteen months, something like that. The pictures are somewhere. I’ll show you. But then we went to Saint Esprit and everything was over, dead. Well, no, that’s not true, there was one other picture maybe. I don’t remember. But it was like prison or something, Saint Esprit.”

  “But in Final Score you had a big part.”

  She nodded. Then she was uncomfortable. “There’s time for all that,” she said. “It’s OK, having to wait.”

  Afterwards, when we were walking back to Canal Street, she brought it up again:

  “You know, one thing I learned about actors and actresses—I mean the big stars. They can be the most ignorant people if they get caught up in it very young. Some of them are damn near illiterate. And emotionally they’re like people who have grown up in the penal system. I mean, they can not control their emotions at all. I want to make pictures—I know I’m going to do it—but it doesn’t hurt to live a little more life of some other kind before it starts.”

  Seemed like she was arguing with herself, trying to make it acceptable. It wasn’t clear.

  “Two years, honey,” I said. “Two years and nobody can do anything to either one of us then.”

  I thought of Bonnie threatening me with those negatives, I thought of some faceless creature making his way through my empty house. When had it happened? When we were in Carmel that last time, the stranger flashing his light on my paintings? Scalding anger. Let it go, Jeremy. She gave the negatives to you without the slightest resistance. The woman is tragic. “Leave her to heaven,” as the old poetry goes.