Belinda Read online

The big old carousel horse, fixed on its brass pole between ceiling and floor, had generated The Celestial Carnival. The mechanical clown, the old leather rocking horse with the glass eyes—these had sparked the series called Charlotte in the Attic. Charlotte at the Seaside had followed, and I’d bought the rusted bucket and pail for that, and the antique wagon. Then a string of books called Charlotte in a Glass Darkly had involved almost everything I owned, recycled in new color and juxtaposition.

  Charlotte was my biggest success to date, with her own Saturday morning cartoon show. And the toys were always accurately rendered in the background. My grandfather clock was in the background, too, as it was in all the books, along with the antique furniture scattered through this house. I lived inside my pictures. Always had, I suppose, even before I ever painted any.

  There were plastic replicas of Charlotte here too in the dust somewhere, drugstore dolls that sold briskly along with packages of tacky little period clothes. But this stiff little creation couldn’t compare with the nineteenth century beauties piled in the wicker baby carriage or lining the top of the square grand in the dining room.

  I didn’t like to look in on the Saturday morning show. The animation was excellent, the detailing rich—my agents had seen to all that—but I didn’t like the voices.

  Nobody on that show had a voice like Belinda, a low buttery voice that made its own soothing music. And it was sad. Charlotte ought to have a good voice, because Charlotte was the one who had really made me famous with just a little help from Bettina and Angelica and all my other girls.

  Many another children’s book artist had redone fairy tales as I had done with Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin. Many another had created lavish illustrations, suspenseful stories, amusing adventures. But my singular gift was for inventing young heroines and shaping every illustrated page around their personalities and emotions.

  In the early days my publishers had urged me to put little boys in the books, to broaden the audience, as they said, but I had never yielded to that temptation. When I was with could give it the full passion. I kept critics who now and then ridiculed my girls, I knew where I was, and I the focus tight. And to hell with the me for it.

  When Charlotte stepped into the picture, things began to happen that surprised me completely. Charlotte actually grew older in the books. She went from a tender waif of seven years old to adolescence. That never happened with the others. My best work was Charlotte, even though she too finally stopped at age thirteen or so about the time I signed that television contract.

  I could never paint her after she went on the air, no matter how great the demand for books with her. She was gone. She was plastic now. And Angelica might go that way too if this animated movie deal went through. I might never finish the Angelica book I had started a couple of weeks ago.

  Tonight I did not care much about it. Bettina, Angelica—I was tired of them. I was tired of it all, and this booksellers convention was only making me face it. The exhaustion went way back. Looking for Bettina, what did that mean? I couldn’t find her myself anymore?

  I SMOKED another one of the Gauloises. I relaxed all over.

  The party, the dinner, the noise and bustle were losing their hold at last. And the dingy stillness of the room was comforting, as it was meant to be. I let my eyes drift over the faded wallpaper, the dusty crystal baubles of the chandelier, the fragments of light caught in the darkened mirrors.

  No, nor ready to throw it all in the street. Not this lifetime anyway. Need it after hotels and bookstores and reporters—

  I pictured Belinda on the carousel horse, or sitting cross-legged beside the oval of the toy train track, her hand on the old rusted locomotive. I pictured her slumped on the sofa amid all the dolls. Damn, why did I let her get away like that?

  In my head I took her clothes off again. Saw the lattice of marks on her tanned calves left by the ribbed socks. She had shivered with pleasure when I ran my nails lightly over those marks, grabbed the soft mid part of each naked foot. The light hadn’t mattered to her. I was the one who had turned it off when I started unbuttoning my shirt. The hell with it!

  You’ll be lucky you don’t end up in jail someday for this kind of thing, and you’re mad at her for skipping out on you. And with the street brats you kid yourself that it’s OK because afterwards you give them so much money. “Here, use this for a bus ticket home. Here, this will even make plane fare.” What do they buy with it, pot cocaine, booze? It’s their problem, isn’t it?

  Look, you got away with it again, that’s all.

  THE grandfather clock chimed ten. The painted plates along the dining room mantel gave a faint musical rattle. Time to try to paint her.

  I poured another cup of coffee and went upstairs to the attic studio. Wonderful the familiar smells, the linseed oil, the paints, the turpentine. The smells that meant home, safe in the studio.

  Before I turned on the lights, I sipped the coffee and looked out the big uncovered windows in all four directions. No fog tonight, though there would be tomorrow. It had to follow the heat. I’d wake up cold in the back bedroom. But for now, the city was shining with an eerie, spectacular visibility. It was no mere map of lights. There was a muted color to the thick rectangular towers of downtown, to the peaked-roof Queen Anne houses spilling down the Noe Street hill into the Castro. The canvases stacked all about seemed faded, shabby.

  I changed that by turning on the lights. And I rolled up my sleeves and I put a small canvas on the easel and started sketching her.

  I don’t often sketch. When I do, it means I don’t know where I’m going. And I don’t do it with a pencil. I do it with a fine brush and just a little oil paint squeezed out on the plate, usually raw umber or burnt sienna. Sometimes I do it when I’m tired and don’t really want to get going. Sometimes I do it when I’m afraid.

  This was an example of the latter. I couldn’t remember the details of her.

  I just couldn’t see the features of her rice. I could not get the “there there” that had made me do it with her. It wasn’t just her availability. I am not that morally rotten, that stupid, no, not that contemptible. I mean

  I’m a grown man, I could have fought my way out of there. Cotton panties, lipstick, and sugar. Hmm.

  No good. I had the pyramid of hair all right, thick soft nest of hair. I had the clothes of course. But not Belinda.

  I decided to go back to the big canvas I was doing for my next book a jungle garden in which Angelica roamed searching for a lost cat. Back to the fat glossy green leaves, the bulging branches of the oaks, the moss hanging in streaks to the high grass through which the cat came to reveal its hateful grin—beware Angelica—like Blake’s tyger.

  It all looked like clichés to me, my clichés. To fill in the background, the ominous sky, the overhanging trees—it was like setting myself on high-speed automatic pilot.

  When the doorbell rang around midnight, I almost didn’t answer. After all, it could have been any one of half a dozen drunken friends, and more than likely a failed artist who wanted to borrow fifty dollars. I wished now I had just left fifty dollars in the mailbox. He would have found it. He was used to finding it.

  The bell rang again, but not hard and long, the way he always did it. So it could be Sheila, my next door neighbor come to tell me her gay roommate was having a fight with his lover and they needed me to come over at once.

  “For what?” I would say. But I’d wind up going if I answered. Or, worse yet, having them in. Getting drunk, listening to them argue. Then Sheila and I would wind up in bed together out of habit, loneliness, compulsion. No, not this time, not after Belinda, out of the question, don’t answer.

  Third ring, just as short and polite. Why wasn’t Sheila cupping her hands around her mouth and screaming my name by now so that I could hear it all the way up here?

  Then it occurred to me: Belinda, she’d gotten my address from my wallet. That’s why it had been lying on top of my pants. I ran down the steps, both flights, and
opened the front door, and she was just walking away, that same leather pouch hanging from her shoulder.

  She had her hair up and her eyes were rimmed in kohl and her lips darkly red. If it hadn’t been for the mail pouch bag, I wouldn’t have immediately known her.

  She looked even younger somehow—it was her long neck and her babycheeks. She looked so vulnerable.

  “It’s me, Belinda,” she said. “Remember?”

  I FIXED some canned soup for her and put a steak in the broiler. She was in a mess she said, somebody broke the padlock on the door of her room. She was afraid to sleep there tonight. It was scary somebody busting into her room, and it wasn’t the first time it had happened. They’d taken her radio, which was the only damn thing worth taking. They almost stole her videotapes.

  She ate the bread and butter with the soup as if she was starving. But she never stopped smoking or drinking the Scotch I’d poured for her. This time it was black cigarettes with gold bands on them. Sobranie Black Russians. And she was looking around all the time. She had loved the toys. Only hunger had got her to the kitchen.

  “So where is this padlocked room?” I asked.

  “In the Haight,” she said. “You know, it’s a big old flat, a place that could look like this if somebody wanted to save it. But it’s just a place where kids rent rooms. Full of roaches. There’s no hot water. I have the worst room because I came in last. We share the bath and the kitchen, but you’d have to be crazy to cook in there. I can get another padlock tomorrow.”

  “Why are you in a place like that?” I asked. “Where are your parents?” Under the light I could see the pink streaks in her hair. Her nails were done black. Black! And all that since this afternoon. One costume follows another.

  “It’s a hell of a lot cleaner than one of those skid row hotels,” she said. She laid her spoon down properly, didn’t drink the dregs in the bowl. The nails were long enough to look deadly. “I just need to stay here tonight. There’s a hardware store up on Castro, where I can get the padlock.”

  “It’s dangerous living in a place like that.”

  “You’re telling me? I put the bars up on the window myself.”

  “You could get raped.”

  “Don’t say it!” Visible shudder. Then her hand up demanding silence.

  Was it panic behind the paint? Cloud of smoke from the cigarette. “Well, why the hell—”

  “Look, don’t lose any sleep over this, OK? I want to crash here for one night.”

  That clipped quality was almost gone. Pure California voice. She could have been from anywhere. But it still sounded like butter. “There’s got to be someplace better than that.”

  “It’s cheap. And it’s my problem. Right?”

  “Is it?”

  She broke off another piece of French bread. The makeup job wasn’t bad at all, just outrageous. And the soft black gabardine dress was vintage thrift shop. Either that or she got it from her grandmother. It fit snugly over her breasts and under her arms. A few sequins fallen off the tight neck band.

  “Where are your parents?” I asked again. I turned the steak over.

  She chewed the bread, swallowed it and her face set in a rather stern expression as she looked at me. The heavy mascara made her look even sterner.

  “I’11 go if you don’t want me here,” she said. “I’11 understand perfectly.”

  “I do want you here,” I said, “but I just want to know—”

  “Then don’t ask me about my parents.” I didn’t respond.

  “I’11 leave if you mention that again.” Very gentle. Very polite. “It’s the easiest way you could get rid of me. No hard feelings. I will just go.”

  I took the steak out of the broiler and put it on the plate. I turned off the broiler.

  “Are you going to mention it again?” she asked.

  “No.” I set the plate down for her with a knife and fork. “Want a glass of milk?”

  She said no. Scotch was good enough, especially good Scotch. Unless of course I had bourbon.

  “I have bourbon,” I said in a small voice. This was criminal. I got down the bourbon and fixed her a weak drink. “That’s enough water,” she said.

  In between rapid bites of the steak she was looking around the kitchen at the sketches I’d tacked up, the few dusty old dolls that had found their way to a shelf here. One early painting hung above the cabinets. It wasn’t so good, but it was of the house where I grew up in New Orleans—my mother’s house. She studied that. She looked at the old black wrought iron stove, the black-and-white tile.

  “You have a dream house here, don’t you?” she said. “And this is real good bourbon, too.”

  “You can sleep in a four-poster bed if you like. It has a canopy. It’s very old. I brought it out here from New Orleans. I painted it in my Night Before Christmas.”

  She seemed immediately delighted.

  “It’s where you sleep?”

  “No. I sleep in the back room with the door open to the deck. I like the night air. I use a pallet on the floor.”

  “I’ll sleep where you want me to sleep,” she said. She was eating incredibly fast. I leaned against the sink and watched her.

  Her ankles were crossed and the straps of the little shoes looked very pretty going over her insteps. The napkin was a perfect white square on her lap. But her neck was the exquisite part. That and the gentle slope of her shoulders under the black gabardine.

  She probably thought she looked grown-up. But what the nail polish and the paint and cocktail clothes did, really, was turn her into kiddie porn.

  I was thinking it over.

  Seeing her got up like this, gulping bourbon and puffing that cigarette, was like watching little child star Tatum O’Neal smoke cigarettes in the movie Paper Moon. Children didn’t have to be naked to look sexual. You could carnalize them by simply turning them out like adults, having them do adult things.

  The problem with this theory was, she had looked just as sexy when I first saw her in the Catholic school uniform.

  “Why don’t you sleep with me in the four-poster?” she asked. Same simple and earnest voice she had used in the hotel suite.

  I didn’t say anything. I reached into the refrigerator and took out a beer and opened it. I took a long drink. There goes painting anymore tonight, I thought, rather stupidly since I knew I wasn’t going to paint. But I could still photograph her.

  “How have you managed to stay alive this long?” I asked. “Do you only pick up famous writers?”

  She studied me for a long moment. She blotted her lips very fastidiously with the napkin. She made a little cast-off gesture with her right hand, ripple of slender fingers. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Somebody ought to worry about it,” I said.

  I sat down opposite her. She was almost finished with the steak. The paint on her eyes made it very dramatic when she looked down, then up. Head like a tulip.

  “I have pretty good judgment,” she said, carefully trimming the fat from the meat. “I have to. I mean I’m on the street, room or no room. I’m ... you know .... drifting.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you like it.”

  “I don’t,” she said. Uneasy. “It’s limbo. It’s nothing—” She stopped. “It’s a big waste of everything, drifting like this.”

  “So how do you actually make it? Where does the rent come from ?”

  She didn’t answer. She laid her fork and knife carefully across the empty plate and lighted another cigarette. She didn’t do the matchbook trick. She used a small gold lighter. She sat back with one arm across her chest, the other raised, curved hand holding the cigarette between two fingers. Little lady with pink streaked hair, blood red mouth. But her face was absolutely opaque.

  “If you need money, you can have it,” I said. “You could have asked me this afternoon. I would have given it to you.”

  “And you think I live dangerously’.” she said.

  “Remember what I said about photographing you,”
I said. I took one of the cigarettes out of her pack. I used her lighter. “Strictly proper stuff. I’m not talking about nude shots. I’m talking about modeling for my books. I can pay you for that—”

  She didn’t answer. The stillness of her face was a little unnerving.

  “I photograph little girls all the time that way for my work. They’re always paid. They come from reputable agencies. I take pictures of them in old-fashioned clothes. And I work with these photographs when I make my paintings upstairs. A lot of artists work this way now. It doesn’t exactly fit the romantic idea of the artist painting from scratch but the fact is artists have always—”

  “I know all that,” she said softly. “I’ve lived around artists all my life. Well, sort of artists. And, of course, you can photograph me and you can pay me what you pay the models. But that’s not what I want from you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You. To make love to you, of course.” I looked at her for a long moment. “Somebody’s going to hurt you,” I said.

  “Not you,” she said. “You’re just what I always thought you’d be. Only you’re better. You’re actually crazier.”

  “I’m the dullest guy in the world,” I said. “All I do is paint and write and collect junk.”

  She smiled, a very long smile this time. Bordering on an ironic laugh.

  “All those pictures,” she said, “of all those little girls wandering through dark mansions and overgrown gardens, all those secret doors—”

  “You’ve been reading the critics. They love to go to town on a hairy-chested man who does books full of little girls.”

  “Do they talk about that, too? How sinister it all is, how erotic—”

  “It’s not erotic.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “You know it is. When I was little, it used to put me in a spell to read your books. I felt like I was leaving the world.”

  “Good. What’s erotic about that?”

  “It’s got to be erotic. Sometimes I didn’t even want to start, you know—didn’t want to slip into Charlotte’s house. It would give me these funny feelings just looking at Charlotte creeping up the stairs in that nightgown with the candle in her hand.”