Belinda Page 37

  Ollie was very quiet, and then he said that I was a strange case. What did he mean, I asked him.

  “You don’t really like having power over others, do you?”

  “No, I guess not,” I said. “I guess all my life I watched people play with power—Mom, Gallo, then Marty and other people I hardly remember now. I think power makes people act badly. I guess I like it when nobody much has power over anyone else.”

  “But situations like that don’t exist, darling,” he said. “And you are dealing with people who have used their power over you shamefully. They aborted your career, darling. And they did it at a pivotal moment, and for what—a prime time soap? If you do go out on your own, you had better toughen up. You had bctter be ready to use their tools against them right from the start.”

  Well, by that time I was too exhausted to say anymore. This night for me had been a terrible ordeal. Confiding in them left me feeling awful. I was drained.

  But I think G.G. could see it. He went to get a jacket for me and to get his own coat.

  Then he and Ollie had a sort of conference, but I could hear them because there were no rooms in this place. Ollie reminded G.G. what the last legal battle with Mom had cost him. He’d left Europe flat broke. G.G. said, So what, he’d been mobbed by offers to endorse products as soon as he hit New York.

  “This woman could get the studio lawyers on retainer to handle this! Your costs could run you ten thousand a month.”

  “This is my daughter, Ollie!” Dad was saying. “And she’s the only kid I will ever have.”

  Then Ollie really got mad. He told Dad that for the last five years he had done everything he could to make Dad happy. And Dad started to laugh.

  In other words a real fight was coming on. Dad started sticking up for himself in his own mild-mannered way.

  “Ollie, I can’t even work anymore without your getting mad about it. If I’m not at the theater before the show and after the show, you throw a fit.”

  But understand, with these two men even this was highly civilized and mellow, like they did not know how to scream at each other and never had.

  “Look,” Ollie said, “I want to help your daughter. She’s a precious darling. But what do you expect me to do?”

  Nice words, I thought to myself, and he means them. But he’s smart, and he’s right.

  And they had forgotten all about Mom’s brother, Uncle Daryl, who was himself a lawyer, for Crissakes.

  Next thing I heard was Dad on the phone making a call. Then he came and put a coat over my shoulders, a real fancy mink-lined trench coat that Blair Sackwell had given him, and he told me the plan.

  “Now listen, Belinda. I’ve got a house on Fire Island,” he told me. “And it’s winter now and everybody is gone. But the house is insulated, it’s got a big fireplace and a big freezer, and we can lay in everything that you need. It’s going to be lonely over there. It’s going to be spooky. But you can hide there till we find out just what Bonnie’s doing, whether she has called the police, or what.”

  Ollie was very upset. He gave me a big kiss good-bye. And Dad and I left in Ollie’s limousine immediately and we spent the rest of night getting stuff together for me to take. We went to the all-night markets and bought the food we needed and then Dad wrote down all my measurements and promised to bring me clothes. Finally at about three A.M. we were cruising through the dismal dark Astoria section of Queens out of New York City towards the town where you take the ferry to Fire Island, and I remembered something and sat up with a start. “What day is this, Daddy? Is it November 7?”

  “Gee, Belinda, it’s your birthday,” he said.

  “Yeah, but what good does it do me, Daddy? I’m still only sixteen.” We nearly froze on the early-morning ferry. And Fire Island was spooky with not a soul anywhere, except the workmen who had come over with us, and the wind howling off the Atlantic as we followed the boardwalks to Dad’s house.

  But once we were inside everything was all right. There was lots of stuff still in the freezer, all the wall heaters were working, there was a lot of wood for a fire. Even the television was OK. And there were books in the shelves and lots of records and tapes. There was also a copy of Crimson Mardi Gras right by the fireplace, and it was full of Ollie Boon’s notes.

  I enjoyed that first day there. I really slept OK. And at evening I went out on the end of the pier. And I watched the moon over the black ocean and I felt kind of safe and glad to be alone. I mean, maybe it was like being on Saint Esprit or something.

  But I tell you, this joy did not last.

  I was entering one of the strangest periods of my life. G.G. brought back lots of supplies the following day, he brought some nice warm winter clothes for me, pants, sweaters, coats, that kind of thing. But he also brought the news that there was absolutely nothing in the papers about my disappearance, and he had not been contacted. Nobody was saying anything about my running away.

  I got that cold feeling again when I heard it. I mean, I was happy they weren’t looking for me, right? But it should have bothered me, shouldn’t it, that they were not worried enough to look?

  Ah, I was so mixed up. And then with all my doubts and fears about it, with the pain of missing Marty and wondering what Mom had told him, with the pain of wanting so bad to see Susan, with all those pains I settled into the Fire Island house for three months.

  When the bay froze in December, Dad couldn’t get there. And at times even the phones sometimes went out.

  And in this strange world of ice-cold glass and falling snow and burning fires and loud tape-recorded music, I was more alone than I had ever been in my life.

  In fact, I realized I had never been alone really. Even at the Chateau Marmont there was the hotel around me, the world of Sunset Boulevard down there any time of night or day. And before that, the world had been a womb or something with Mom and Trish and Jill and all that.

  Well, no more. I could walk round this house talking out loud to myself for hours. I could stand on my head. I could scream. Of course, I read a lot, went through novels, histories, biographies, everything Dad had brought. I read the libretto of every Broadway play ever written, since they were all in the bookshelves, and I listened to so much Romberg, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim that I could have answered the sixty-four-thousand-dollar quiz on Broadway musicals after that.

  I read Crimson Mardi Gras twice. Then I read all your mother’s other books that Ollie had, and—guess what?—some of your books were there, too. Lots of adults have your books, as I’m sure you realize, but I never realized it until I saw all of them at Ollie’s place.

  I drank a lot, too, on Fire Island. But I was careful. I didn’t want Dad to call when I was drunk or, worse yet, to see me that way. So I kept it kind of level, but at the same time I put it away. I drank the bar Dad had on Fire Island. One week it was Scotch and the next few days gin and then rum after that. I had a real party on Fire Island, and, you know, the funny thing was, it made me think a lot of Mom. I understood Mom better when I was drinking and listening to music and dancing the way I had seen Mom so often do.

  The earliest memory I ever had of Mom is that way—Mom in the flat in Rome dancing barefoot to a record of a Dixieland band playing “Midnight in Moscow” with a glass in her hand.

  But to return to the story, I went through a kind of hell on Fire Island. I mean, when you are that alone, it is like solitary confinement and things happen in your head.

  Meantime Dad reported that the columns said Mom and Marty were lovebirds, and no one, absolutely no one, had called him from the West Coast. “You think they’d at least ask if I had seen you,” he told me. But then he shut up when he saw the look on my face. “Come on, we don’t want them looking,” I reminded him.

  Then Dad got a furious call from Blair Sackwell. All Blair wanted to do, he said, was send me a Christmas present, for God’s sakes, and he could not get through to Bonnie and that pig Moreschi would not give him the name of my school. “I mean, what is
all this!” Blair raged. “Every year I send Belinda a little something, a fur hat, fur-lined gloves, that kind of thing. Are these people crazy? All they’ll tell me is she isn’t coming home for Christmas, and they won’t give me an address.”

  “I think they are,” Daddy told him, “because I can’t get the name of the school myself.”

  By Christmas I was in a terrible way.

  New York was under a terrible snowstorm, the bay had frozen, as I said, the phones were down. I hadn’t heard from Dad in five days.

  On Christmas Eve I made a big fire and lay there on the white bearskin rug beside it thinking of all the Christmases in Europe, midnight mass in Paris, the bells ringing in the village at the foot of the cliffs on Saint Esprit. I am telling you, this was my darkest hour. I didn’t know what my life was supposed to mean.

  But at eight o’clock who should come banging on the door but Dad, with his arms full of presents. He had hired a jeep to bring him onto the island at the far end, and he had walked all the way on the wooden boardwalk through the freezing wind to the house.

  Till my dying day I will love Dad for getting to Fire Island that night. He looked so wonderful to me. He had on a white ski cap and his face was ruddy from the cold wind and he smelled so good when he took me in his arms.

  We cooked a big Christmas feast together, with the ham he had brought and all the wonderful delicacies, and afterwards we listened to Christmas carols until midnight. And I guess it was one of the best Christmases I ever spent.

  But I could tell something was going wrong for Dad with Ollie. Because when I asked if Ollie would miss him, Dad’s face got dark and he said, To hell with Ollie. He was sick of spending every holiday backstage through a matinee and an evening performance just so he and Ollie could drink a glass of wine in his dressing room. He said his whole life had revolved around Ollie before my arrival and maybe I’d done him a big favor and I should know.

  But this was bravado. Dad was miserable. He and Ollie were breaking apart.

  By February I couldn’t stay on Fire Island a day longer. There was still no word from Mom or Marty about me. When Dad had made a call around New Year’s, they’d given him the Swiss school spiel.

  I told Dad I had to start living again. I had to move into New York, get a place in the Village, get a job, something like that.

  Of course, Dad helped me. He picked the place for me, paid the huge bribe you had to cough up just to get a New York apartment, and then he got me some furniture and plenty of clothes. And I was free all right, I could walk through the streets and all and go to movies and do things like a human being, but it was snowing in New York and I was scared to death of the city every moment. It was bigger, uglier, and more dangerous than any place I’d ever been.

  I mean, Rome is dangerous, but I understand Rome. Paris I know very well. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but it seems I’m safe in those places. New York? I don’t know the basic rules.

  Even so, the first two weeks were OK. Dad picked me up all the time to take me to musicals. We made every show in town. He took me to see his apartment salon, which was really unbelievable, I mean, like another world inside.

  Now in a very deep way Dad hates being a hairdresser. I mean, he hates it. And if you could see this salon in New York, you’d understand what he has done.

  It looks like anything but a beauty salon. It is full of dark woodwork and faded oriental rugs. There are parrots and cockatoos in old brass cages, and there are even European tapestries and those old dusky landscapes from Europe by people no one even knows. I mean, it looks like a gentlemen’s club, this place. It is Dad’s defense, not only against being a hairdresser but being gay.

  For all Dad’s gentleness, for all his sweetness, Dad really hates being gay. All the men in Dad’s life, even Ollie Boon with his kind of British theatrical voice, are like this place. Dad would smoke a pipe if he could stand it. Ollie does smoke a pipe.

  Anyway, everything in the salon was authentic, except maybe the combination. The ladies get tea on old hotel china and silver, the kind you use in your New Orleans house. I mean, it is somber and beautiful, and the other hairdressers are European, and the ladies do book six months ahead of time.

  But there is no place to sleep there. I mean, Dad had long ago squeezed himself out. And suddenly Dad was talking about getting another flat in the same building and he and I living there together, and I realized, when he started spending every night at my place, that Ollie Boon had thrown him out.

  This was crashing news to me, absolutely crashing. I mean, was I poison? Did I destroy every adult I touched? Ollie loved Daddy. I knew he did. And Dad loved Ollie. But over me they had broken up. I was sick about it. I didn’t know what to do. Dad kept pretending he was happy. But he wasn’t happy. Just mad at Ollie, and being very stubborn, that’s all.

  Then it happened. Two men showed up at the salon and showed the other hairdressers a picture of me and asked if I’d been around. Dad was furious when he came in. These men had left a number and he called it. He told them he had recognized his daughter in the picture. What the hell was going on?

  The way he described them they were very smooth. They were lawyers. They reminded him he had no rights over me. They said if he interfered with their private investigation, if he even dared to discuss it with anybody or make it public that I was missing, he was in for very expensive trouble indeed.

  “Stay put in your apartment, Belinda,” Dad said. “Don’t you set foot out of the door till you hear from me.”

  But it didn’t take long for the phone to ring. And this time it was Ollie. These lawyers had been to see him at the theater. They told him I was mentally disturbed, had run away, might hurt myself, and that G.G. couldn’t be trusted to do what was right for me. If Ollie heard or saw anything of me, he was to call Marty Moreschi directly, and by the way Marty admired Ollie. He would fly out soon himself to discuss the upcoming Crimson Mardi Gras production. He did think it was a better prospect for a film deal than Dolly Rose had been.

  What bullshit, as if Marty had time to fly to New York City over a movie deal! It was a threat and Ollie knew it and I knew it.

  “Darling, listen to me,” Ollie said in his most theatrical voice. “I love G.G. And if you want the bottom line I do not think I can live without G.G. My little experiment of late of no G.G. has not worked out. But we’re in over our heads. These people are probably following G.G. They may already know he’s seen you. For God’s sakes, Belinda. Don’t put me in this role. I’ve never played the villain in any play in my life.”

  Good-bye New York.

  And where do you go when you’re a kid on the run? Where do you go when you’ve had enough of the snow and the icy wind and the dirt of New York City? What was the place the kids on the street called paradise, where the cops didn’t even want to bust you because the shelters were full?

  I called the airlines immediately. There was a flight out of Kennedy in two hours for San Francisco. I packed one bag, counted up my money, canceled phone service and utilities on the apartment, and split.

  I didn’t call Dad until I was ready to board. He was horribly upset. The lawyers, or whoever they were, had been to Ollie’s house in SoHo. They’d been questioning neighbors. But when I told him I was at the airport and I had only five minutes, he really came unglued.

  I’d never heard Dad cry before, really cry I mean. But he did then. He said he was coming. I was to wait for him. We’d go back ro Europe together, he didn’t give a damn. He would never forgive Ollie for calling me. He didn’t care about the salon. He was really coming apart.

  “Daddy, stop it,” I told him. “I am going to be all right, and you’ve got more at stake here than Ollie Boon. Now I will call you, I promise, and I love you Daddy, I can never never thank you enough. Tell Ollie I’m gone, Daddy. Do that for me.” Then I was crying. I couldn’t talk. The plane was leaving. And there wasn’t time to say anything except, “I love you, Dad.”

  San Francisco was beyond my wildest
dreams.

  Maybe it would have looked different had I come there direct from Europe, from the colorful streets of Paris or Rome. But after New York in the middle of winter it was the loveliest city I had ever seen.

  One day I’d been in the snow and the wind and the next I was walking those warm and safe streets. Everywhere I looked there were brightly painted Victorians. I rode the cable car down to the bay. I walked through the misty woods of Golden Gate Park.

  I had never known there were such cities in America. Compared with this, the smoggy stretches of Los Angeles seemed hideous; and Dallas with its towers and freeways was hard and cold.

  Immediately I met kids who would help me. And I got the room in the Page Street commune the first night. I felt like nothing could hurt me in San Francisco, which of course was a delusion, and I set about cooking up my false identity and hanging out on Haight Street to meet other runaways and roaming Polk with two gay hustlers who became my best friends.

  The first Saturday we got a jug of wine and walked across the Golden Gate to have a party at Vista Point. The sky was clear, and the blue water was full of tiny seemingly motionless sailboats, the city beyond looked pure white. Can you imagine how it looked to me? Even when the fog rolled in, it was like white steam pouring down over the bright towers of the Golden Gate.

  But, you know, the happiness didn’t last. I got mugged about three weeks after I arrived. Some guy hit me in the doorway on Page Street and tried to steal my purse. I held onto it with both hands, screaming and screaming and, thank God, he ran away. All my traveler’s checks were in there. I was terrified, and after that, I hid them under the floorboards in my room.

  Then there was the drug bust upstairs on Page Street when the narcs tore up every single thing that belonged to the kids who lived there, I mean ripping the stuffing out of the furniture, pulling the wires out of the TV set, tearing up the carpets, and leaving the doors with the locks broken as they dragged the occupants out in handcuffs never to be seen again.