Belinda Page 27

  “And you felt you didn’t belong to anyone.”

  “No. It was an invented life. Used to dream I was poor, if you could believe it, and that I lived back here in one of these little houses. At Christmastime the kids talked of giving King parties. You baked a cake, there was a ring in it; whoever got the ring gave the next party. I wanted to be part of all that. I told my mother I wished we were rich enough to live in the government housing project.”

  We were walking at sunset past rows of the double cottages, the front porch divided by a wood partition so that each family can sit in privacy and peace. The little gardens burst with four-o’clocks. And the cracked pavements were alive with grass and the green moss that grows over everything. And the sky above was shading to a deep magenta. The clouds were tinged with gold.

  “Even this is beautiful here,” she said with her arm around me. She pointed to the white gingerbread eaves on each house and the long green shutters that covered the front doors.

  “You know, one of the things I wanted to do in painting was to create a narrative of it—the Irish-German life that had been here. You know how I believe in narrative painting,” I said. “I don’t mean the exhibits where people write up long diatribes about the photographs or the pictures. I mean where the narrative is in the work itself. I believed that realism—representationalism—could embrace all this. And yet there would be remarkable sophistication.”

  She nodded, squeezing my hand lightly.

  “I mean, when I look at the realists of our times, the photorealists, for example, I see such disdain for the subject matter. Why did it have to take that path? Why did the exact rendering have to focus upon vulgarity and ugliness? With Hopper, of course, it is coldness, utter coldness.”

  She said, yes, you always felt that. And even with Hockney you felt it.

  “American artists are so embarrassed by American life,” I said. “So contemptuous of it.”

  “It’s as if they’re afraid,” she said. “They have to be superior to what they represent. They are embarrassed even that they do it so well.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s like a dream, American life. It frightens you. You feel you have to make fun of it, no matter how much you secretly love it. I mean, here is everything you want. You have to say it’s horrible.”

  “I want the freedom of the primitive painters,” I said, “to focus with love on what I find inherently beautiful. I want it to be hot, disturbing. Yet gorgeous always.”

  “And that’s why they call you baroque and romantic, like that church back there,” she said gently. “When I looked at the murals on the ceiling, I saw your work in them, your colors and your skill. And your excess.”

  “Ahh! Well, I’ll make them think of better words than that with the Belinda paintings.”

  She laughed the softest, most delighted laugh. Her arm tightened around me.

  “Make me immortal, Jeremy.”

  “Yes, darling dear. But you have things to do yourself, you know, you have films to make, roles to play.”

  “When you show the pictures, you should be really sure, really sure—” she said, suddenly serious. “It’s easy in a place like this to be carried away.”

  “Yes, you’ve told me that. But isn’t it why we came here?” I asked. I stopped and took her face in my hands and kissed her.

  “You know you’ll do it now, don’t you?” she asked. “No doubts at all anymore.”

  “Haven’t been for a long time. But if we don’t wait that full year until your eighteenth birthday—”

  Her eyes clouded. She frowned, closed her eyes, opened her mouth to be kissed. Ah, heat and softness.

  “You know, you’ve changed towards me,” she said.

  “No, honey, no, I haven’t,” I protested.

  “No, I don’t mean for the bad,” she assured me. “I mean, you hardly ever talked to me like this before.”

  It was true. I didn’t say so, but I knew it.

  “Why did you leave here, Jeremy? Why did you let the house stay the way it was all these years?”

  We went on walking hand in hand. And then I started to tell her. The Big Secret. The whole thing.

  I told her about writing the last two books for Mother, I told her about those heady days the last spring of Mother’s life when Crimson Mardi Gras was made into a movie and I had gone out to Hollywood in Mother’s place for the premiere.

  “It was so strange, you know, knowing I wrote it and no one else even guessing. And the party afterwards, I mean not the big one at Chasen’s but the little one at Alex Clementine’s house, with Alex taking me up to all those people and introducing me. They would look right through me, thinking just for one split second before they turned away, how nice, her son.”

  She was staring at me silently.

  “Alex didn’t know then. But she told him later, when he came down to visit her, and he’s known all these years. But it wasn’t Crimson Mardi Gras that drove me away. It was what happened after, when they read Mother’s will. She’d left her name to me. She fully expected me to go on using it. She expected me to write Cynthia Walker novels forever. She did not see why her death should be made known. And in the event it did become public knowledge I was to say the novels had been found in filing cabinets, that they were all finished by her before the final illness, that kind of thing—”

  “That’s ugly,” Belinda said.

  I stopped, startled by her word.

  “Oh, she meant it with the best intentions. She thought I could use the money. She wanted me to have it. She’d even made arrangements with the publisher, gotten me guarantees. Her editors knew all about it. She’d exacted promises. It was really for me she did it. She didn’t know anything about painting. I guess she’d thought I’d be broke all my life.”

  “So that’s what all the little girls in your paintings are running from,” she whispered. “And we’re in the old house they can never escape.”

  “Are we?” I asked her. “I don’t think that’s true now, do you?”

  We had come to the riverfront, and we were walking slowly over the deserted railroad tracks to the empty wharf. Evening stillness. Thump of juke box from a darkened barroom doorway. Smell of hemp.

  My heart was tripping. I tightened my grip on her hand as we neared the edge of the wharf right over the river.

  “I don’t believe she meant well,” Belinda said to me gently. She was watching me, almost with alarm. “I think she wanted to be immortal, no matter what it meant to you.”

  “No, honest. She just never thought I’d do much on my own. She was always frightened for me. And I was a dreamer, you know, one of those really absentminded kids.”

  “It was annihilating what she did.” Touch of protective anger. Flame in her cheeks.

  The breeze came strong across the broad expanse of brown water. It lifted the curling edges of her hair.

  “You are so lovely,” I said to her.

  “You didn’t write any more of the books, did you?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “But, you know, it all happened because of her in the end really.”

  “How so?”

  “Because when her editor came out to San Francisco to argue with me—you know, to get me to reconsider—well, she saw the Sleeping Beauty canvases. And she offered me a contract for a children’s book on the spot. I’d never even thought about a children’s book. I just wanted to be a painter, a weird, crazy, unclassifiable painter. And there it was in all the windows on Fifth Avenue by the end of the year.”

  Just a trace of a bitter smile crossed her face. Something fragile in her expression.

  “We’re well matched, aren’t we?” she said. And the smile turned to full bitterness, the worst bitterness I’d ever seen in her until now.

  She turned and looked off to the far side of the river, at the great steel gray ship that was gliding south, the wind carrying away all sound.

  “How so, baby darling?” I asked her. I felt a strange intensi
ty, as if a light had touched something deep within me.

  “We keep their secrets,” she said, watching the progress of the ship. “And we pay the price.” Her eyes flashed on me with uncommon vibrancy. “I hope you show the paintings, Jeremy! But don’t you let me push you into it. I’m warning you. Don’t you let me hurt you. You do it when it’s right for you.”

  I was watching her, and the feeling of closeness to her I knew at this moment was greater than any I’d ever known. It was everything. It was everything to live for and die for. And I found myself thinking, as if I had forever to do it, how truly beautiful she was. Youth itself had always seemed so irresistible in her that she could have been homely and still beautiful—but she wasn’t homely; she was as beautiful as Bonnie in her own way.

  [29]

  I WORKED until four a.m. That’s how to fool the nightmare—paint, not sleep, at the usual time that it comes. I sketched Belinda standing on the wharf, her back to the river. I got the wind in her hair. I got the white shoes she’d been wearing and the little seersucker jacket and skirt. I got the bit of cotton lace at her neck. I did not try to remember the details. I just looked up and made the photograph of her appear in the air. I told my hand “Do it!” And by four o’clock she was standing on the edge of the wharf looking at me, and the river was a great flood of dark brown behind her beneath the charcoal sky, and she was saying, “Don’t you let me hurt you.”

  “Don’t you let me hurt you.”

  I LAY back exhausted on the cot, Mother’s clocks chiming, one after another. The insects circled the naked bulb beyond the screen door.

  I saw it all clearly from the nightgown picture on the carousel horse to this figure standing on the edge of the river: twelve paintings from child to woman. The nudity was no longer important. She could have her clothes now.

  Four thirty.

  I got up, began working again, filling in the brown that was the river, the charcoal gray that was the sky.

  When the sun came shafting through the green leaves, she was glowing against the river, and the great sweeps of darkness behind her seemed menacing in the way the dolls and the toys and the wallpaper and the Holy Communion veil had never never been.

  Miss Annie brought me coffee. The traffic was roaring along the avenue. “Turn on the cool air, Mr. Walker,” said Miss Annie. She went round the room, reaching carefully behind each canvas, to shut the glass windows, and then the silence came in a flood of coldness. And I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand.

  Now that’s one way to fox a nightmare, I thought, staring at the picture.

  Outside in the tall grass Belinda sat in one of the wrought iron chairs writing in her new diary.

  “Come here and see this,” I said.

  THE next night the nightmare came again. I found myself staring at the clock.

  I was thinking I locked the attic and the darkroom doors instinctively when I knocked off work. I locked up everything.

  “Since you tracked her to my doorstep, why shouldn’t Daryl do it?”

  “Well, let’s just say I have connections Daryl doesn’t have.”

  “Like what?”

  What connections? How did he get in?

  Had he jimmied a window? What window? I’d checked them all again before I left San Francisco. Every lock in place and no scratch marks.

  Paintings in the attic, she said she knew. How? But the negatives in the darkroom, that was still the toughest. Good Lord, what did he do, examine everything with a magnifying glass? “Where are you, baby darling?”

  “In Carmel.”

  “I want to come get you.”

  “No, not tonight. Promise me not tonight.”

  In the white envelope marked A and M for Artist and Model. Nothing more on it than that. A and M. In the manila folder marked B. She’d been standing there with me in the darkroom. I’d been showing her how I did it. Filed everything. A for the Angelica photographs. B for Belinda. How did he find it? I mean her detective, whoever it was, whoever the stranger was who came into my house. She was a stranger.

  “Promise me you’ll wait until morning.”

  Black limousine out there at the curb, one, two, three hours. “—before my daughter comes along.”

  Her face across the breakfast table in Carmel, her eyes when I said, Your mother came to see me. Her eyes. Not a flicker.

  I got up, half asleep, went down to the back porch studio and started to work. Her face was perfect.

  “Don’t you let me hurt you.”

  “I would have never let them hurt you, Jeremy.” Was that what she had said to me in Carmel?

  I’m not that drunken woman, honey, that grand overblown Hollywood cliché of a woman, you don’t have to take care of me, I will take care of us both.

  THE next night it came sooner. Three a.m.

  Saint Charles Avenue like a stage set down there. Streetlamps in the heavy lace of the tree branches. Rain turning the flagstones out front purple under the light.

  “I want to talk to you before my daughter comes along.”

  The limo was parked right in front of the damned house for three hours. Belinda would have seen it if Belinda had not—

  “—stranger.”

  I WENT down to the library and turned on the TV. Not a chance she could hear it upstairs over the air conditioner. Some old black-and-white film was what I needed. And there was a good one, too, with Cary Grant talking very fast and saying wonderfully clever things. Lovely patterns of light and shadow.

  Before I’d left the house in San Francisco, I’d checked the spare keys. Still in the spice jar. Jar dusty. How clever was the son of a bitch?

  Early in the morning before I’d left to go downtown and read that paperback bio of Bonnie in the Saint Francis Hotel, she had come down and asked me to run away, no, begged me.

  “Promise me you won’t come down to Carmel tonight.”

  Nobody broke into that house! You know it! Nobody picked that dead bolt on the darkroom door!

  My head was pounding. The people on the television screen were chattering. Slick black hair of Cary Grant like the slick black hair of Alex Clementine. “People don’t want the truth, they want lies. They think they want the truth but they want lies.” I shut off the TV. I went upstairs.

  She was sound asleep. Light from the hall on her face. I shook her.

  Shook her again. Her eyes opened. “You did it, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You called her! You gave her the negatives!”

  “What?”

  She sat up, shrank back against the pillow. The sheet was covering her breasts, as if she was hiding from me.

  “It had to be you,” I said. “Nobody could have found them but you, gotten into the darkroom but you. The keys were in the spice jar, and nobody knew they were there but you. You did it!”

  She was shaking. Her mouth was open. Not a sound coming out. She moved across the bed away from me.

  “You did it. You told your mother where you were!”

  Her face was white with fear. My voice was rising over the air conditioner.

  “You did it. Answer me.”

  “I did it for you, Jeremy!” Her lips were quivering. Tears, yes, tears, of course, streaming down her face, her arms thrown up to cover her breasts under the pajama top.

  “For me! Oh, my God!”

  “You wouldn’t stop worrying! You wouldn’t stop asking! You wouldn’t stop feeling guilty, damn it! You wouldn’t just trust me!” Pillows filling off the bed, her heels dug into the rumpled counterpane. “You went into my things and found out who I was!”

  “Oh, my God, you really did it. You really did. You called her and you got her to come up there and do this to me!”

  She was sobbing as she got out of the bed and backed into the French door.

  “Goddamn you, how could you do that!” I came around the bed towards her. She screamed when I grabbed her arm.

  “Jeremy, let me go!”

  “I di
dn’t care about you and that man, her husband. I didn’t care about anything she said. I just wanted to protect you! And you pulled this one on me—that woman in that room and those negatives, you did this to me!”

  “Stop it!” She was screaming loud enough for them to hear her outside.

  She was shrieking. She was scratching at my fingers, trying to get loose. “How could you do it!” I was shaking her, shaking her. “Stop it, stop it!”

  “Get away from me then,” I said. I shoved her against the dresser. Clatter of bottles. Something spilled, something broken on the marble. She stumbled, as if she was going to fall. Her hair was covering her face and a low choking sound was coming out of her, as if she couldn’t breath. “Get away from me!”

  She ran around the foot of the bed and past me into the hallway. Then she stopped at the head of the stairs. She was crying uncontrollably. I watched her slide down till she was sitting on the top step. She went to the side, curling up against the wall. Her crying echoed down the long hall, like a ghost crying in a haunted house.

  I stood there helpless looking at her. The sound of the air conditioner was like a whine, an ugly grating whine. My body felt hot and shaky and the inevitable headache had started pounding inside my skull. I wanted to move, to say something. I could feel my mouth working, nothing coming out.

  She was crying and crying.

  I saw her getting up, steadying herself, her shoulders bent, hair fallen away from the nape of her neck.

  “No, don’t come back in here, don’t come near me!”

  “Oh, God,” she said, the tears just spilling off her cheeks.

  “I don’t care who started it ... whose fault it was, I don’t ever want to see her again.”

  “Keep away from me!”