Belinda Page 4

  “It’s not erotic.”

  “Then what’s the threat? What’s behind all the doors? Why are the girls always looking out of the corner of their eyes?”

  “I’m not the one chasing them,” I said. “I don’t want to lift their long dresses.”

  “You don’t?” she asked. “How come?”

  “I hate this,” I said gently. “I work six months on a book. I live in it, dream in it. I don’t question it. I spend twelve hours a day going over and over the canvases. Then somebody wants to explain it all in five hundred words or five minutes.” I reached out and took her hand. “I avoid this kind of discussion with people I don’t know. People I do know never do it to me.”

  “I wish you’d fall in love with me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re really someone worth falling in love with. And if we were in love, I wouldn’t be drifting. I wouldn’t be nobody. At least not while I was with you.” Pause.

  “Where do you come from?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “I keep trying to place your voice.”

  “You’ll never do it.”

  “One moment it’s just California. Then something else creeps in—a trace of an accent.”

  “You’ll never guess it.”

  She withdrew her hand.

  “You want me to sleep in the four-poster with you?” I asked.

  “Yes.” She nodded.

  “Then do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Wash off all this glamour,” I said. “And put on Charlotte’s nightgown.”

  “Charlotte’s nightgown? You have that here?”

  I nodded. “Several upstairs. White flannel. One of them is bound to fit you.”

  She laughed softly, delightedly. But there was more to it than delight. I was silent. I wasn’t admitting anything.

  “Of course,” she said finally. “I’d love to wear Charlotte’s nightgown.” So gracious. Flash of black fingernails as gracefully she ground out the cigarette.

  No wonder she had thought that the matchbook trick was such a comedy. She was old, polished and suave, and even a little angry. Then she was young and tender. She was shifting back and forth before my very eyes.

  And it was very disturbing to me. I wondered: Which did she want to be? “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  “You think so?” she asked. “You wouldn’t prefer a darker, more mysterious older woman?”

  I smiled. “Been married to two of them. It was interesting. But you’re something else.”

  “In other words, you want me to know it’s not always little girls.”

  “Yes, I want you to know that. I want to remind myself too. But I can’t figure you out. You’ve got to give me a clue on where you came from. A clue on the voice.”

  “I grew up everywhere and nowhere. Madrid, LA, Paris, London, Dallas, Rome, you name it. That’s why you’ll never pin down the voice.”

  “Sounds marvelous,” I said.

  “You think so?” Little twist to her smile. “Someday I’ll have to tell you the whole ugly story. And you think Bettina has it bad in that old house.”

  “Why not start telling me now?”

  “‘Cause it won’t make a pretty picture book,” she said. She was getting uneasy. She blotted her lips again carefully and put the napkin back in her lap. She drank the last of the bourbon. This girl definitely knew how to put it down.

  Ears with the tiniest lobes. Pierced lobes, but no earrings. just the hurtful little mark. And the skin very tight around her eyes so that there was only a tiny seam running around the lashes. This is the kind of tightness you see in the face of very little children. It usually goes away in the teenage years as the face becomes more modeled. The eyebrows were soft, unshaped, just brushed lightly with gray to darken them. In spite of the paint, her face still looked virginal, the way only a blond face can. And the nose was most decidedly upturned. She would most certainly hate it when she really grew up. But I would love it forever, and the poochy, delicious, puckered little mouth with it. I wanted to touch the loose hair that made fine question-mark curls near her ears.

  “Where are your parents? You do have them, don’t you?”

  She looked startled. She didn’t answer; then her face went blank. And it seemed she swallowed. She looked stunned actually, as if I’d slapped her.

  And when her eyes began to water, I was stunned. I felt this stab inside as I watched her.

  “Thank you for everything,” she said. She was gathering up her bag. “You’ve been very nice.” She laid the napkin down beside the plate, and she stood up and went out into the hallway.

  “Belinda, wait,” I said. I caught up with her at the front door.

  “I have to go, Mr. Walker,” she said. She had her hand on the knob. About to burst into tears.

  “Come on, honey,” I said. I took her by the shoulders. No matter what else I felt, what else I wanted, it was unthinkable that she walk out the door at this hour, alone. That simply wasn’t going to happen.

  “Then don’t mention all that again,” she said, her voice thickening. “I mean it. Kick me our if you want, and I’ll go downtown and drop a hundred bucks for a room or something. I’ve got money. I never said I didn’t. But don’t mention parents and all that again to me.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right. Belinda has no parents. Nobody’s looking for Belinda.” I clasped her neck gently in both hands, tilted her face up. She was almost crying.

  But she let me kiss her, and she was pure warmth and melting sweetness again. The same yielding and the same heat. “Christ, have mercy.” I whispered. “Where’s the nightgown?” she asked.

  IN the morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, I knew she was gone.

  The phone was ringing, and I managed to mumble something into it as I saw the nightgown, hanging neatly on the hook on the closet door.

  It was Jody, telling that they wanted me on a talk show in Los Angeles.

  It was national coverage. They’d put me up at the Beverly Hills of course. “I don’t have to, do I?”

  “Of course not, Jeremy, but look, they want you everywhere. The sales reps say they want you for signings in Chicago and Boston. Why don’t you think it over, call me back?”

  “Not now, Jody. All wrong for me.”

  “Limos and suites all the way, Jeremy. First-class air.”

  “I know, Jody. I know. I want to cooperate, but it’s just not the time, Jody—”

  EVEN the collar of the nightgown had been buttoned. Perfume. Clinging to it was one golden hair.

  Downstairs I found the ashtray and the dishes washed, everything stacked on the drainboard. Very neat.

  And she had found the article on me in the Bay Bulletin, and that was spread out on the kitchen table, with me smiling in the big photograph they’d taken on the public library steps.

  WITH FIFTEENTH BOOK WALKER CONTINUES TO WEAVE MAGIC SPELL

  Forty-four, six-foot-one blond-haired Jeremy Walker is a gentle giant among his small fans crowded into the Children’s Reading Room of the San Francisco main library, a gray-eyed teddy bear of a man to the eager little girls who besiege him with questions as to his favorite color, favorite food, or favorite movie. The personification of wholesomeness, he has never given these young readers anything but old-fashioned and traditional images, just as if the garish world of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Dungeons and Dragons” did not exist—

  How she must have laughed at that. I threw it in the trash.

  There was nothing else of her left in the house. No note, no scribbled address or phone number. I checked and double-checked.

  But what about the rolls of black and white pictures we’d taken, still in the camera? Old-fashioned and traditional images. I made a phone call to break a dinner date for that night, and went to work in the basement darkroom right away.

  I had good prints by the afternoon. And I put the best of them along the walls of the attic and hung my favori
tes from the wire in front of my easel. They were a satisfying, tantalizing lot.

  But she had been right when she had said she was not one of my little girls. She wasn’t. Her face did not have the unstamped coin look of my models. Yet her features were so conventionally cure, so babyish.

  Like a ghost she looked, actually. Positively eerie. I mean, she suggested somebody who was apart from things around her, somebody who had seen things and done things that others didn’t know about.

  Precocity, yes, surely that was there, and maybe even a little cynicism. I saw that in the pictures, though I had nor seen it when I was taking them.

  She’d showered before she put on the nightgown. Her hair had been loose and full of wispy little tendrils, and in the photographs these caught the light. And she had played the light rather naturally. In fact, she had been extraordinarily relaxed before the lens; she would sink almost into a trance as I photographed her, responding just a little now and then as if she were actually feeling my eyes on her, feeling the click when I took the shot.

  There was something seductively exhibitionistic about her. And she knew things about how she photographed. Once in a while she’d made some little remark about an angle, about the light. But this was pretty unobtrusive. She had let me do what I wanted to do. And I had never quite had a subject like her. No stiffness, no posing; almost a deep and automatic surrender to the situation. It was distinctly wonderful and odd.

  The best picture was one of her sitting sidesaddle on the carousel horse in the living room, her naked ankles crossed beneath the hem of her gown. Key light from above. Then there was a very good shot of her on the four-poster bed with her feet drawn up under her, her knees to the side. These I enlarged and printed right up to poster size.

  Another excellent picture was of her on the living room floor kneeling beside the old doll house, her face beside the turrets and the chimneys and the lace-curtained windows, and all around her a scatter of other toys.

  Tb. is~ ~.~r~ ~i~b~ rhr~ rr~v:% F~irJy: wrJ L ~,~ f~ct. ir~ F~j-. mrs. ~ro dc~ll~ ~dlr~ to bed before we started. I wanted to make love to her right there on the living room carpet, but I didn’t want to frighten her, and maybe it wouldn’t have if I’d suggested it. But it was frightening me.

  The shots of her on the stairway with the candle were supposed to be pure Charlotte. I had gone up ahead of her, shooting as she came towards me. Minimal light. Here she really did look like a child, like a child I had painted a hundred times, except for something in the eyes, something .... We almost didn’t make it to the bed.

  But then taking her in the four-poster was too good to miss. She’d been more relaxed, less anxious to please and more ready to be pleased than at the hotel, which was perfect. The first time I don’t think she had enjoyed it really; this time I knew that she had. And it had been a big thing to me that she enjoy it. I had wanted to make her come, and she had, certainly, unless she was world-class at faking it. We’d done it twice actually. And the second time was better for her, though it really left me knocked out and just wanting to sleep after that, the night over too soon.

  Sleeping next to her, though, feeling her naked in that usually empty bed, the big cold bed full of faint memories of New Orleans childhood-ah, that was too good.

  Her face was smooth in most of these pictures. No smile, but she looked soft, receptive, open.

  And when I had them up on the wall, I really began to know the anatomy-the wide cheekbones, the slightly square jaw, and the childlike tightness of the skin around the eyes. I couldn’t see the freckles in these photographs, but I knew they were there.

  Not a woman’s face. Yet I had kissed her breasts, her nipples, her scant smoky pubic hair, felt her bottom in my open hand. Hmmmm. Pure woman.

  I thought of a joke I’d heard a few years ago in Hollywood. I’d gone down there to close a deal for a television remake of one of my mother’s novels—my mother had died years ago—and I was having a celebratory lunch with my West Coast agent, Clair Clarke, at the new and very fashionable Ma Maison.

  The whole town was talking then about Polish film director Roman Polanski, who’d just been arrested for allegedly carrying on with a teenage girl.

  “Well, you’ve heard the joke, haven’t you?” my agent said. “She might have been thirteen, but she had the body of a six-year-old?” I had died laughing.

  With Belinda it was the face that was six years old.

  I wanted to start painting immediately from these—a whole series was coming into my head—but I was too worried about her.

  I knew she’d be back, of course she would, she had to come back here. But what was happening to her now? I don’t think a parent could have been more worried about her than I was, even if that parent had known about me.

  LATE Saturday afternoon I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went down to the Haight to look for her.

  The heat wave had not let up, the fog had not rolled in, and I had the top down on my old MG-TD as I crawled through the streets from Divisadero to the park and back again, scanning the shoppers and the drifters, the street vendors and the strollers who made up the crowds.

  People say the Haight is coming back, that the new boutiques and restaurants are resurrecting the neighborhood that became a slum after the great hippie invasion of the late sixties—that a new era has begun. I cannot see it. Some of the finest Victorians are in this part of town, true, and when they are restored, they are magnificent, and, yes, trendy clothing stores and toy shops and bookstores are bringing the money in.

  But there are still bars across the front windows. The drugged out, the insane, still stand on the corners spouting obscenities. You see the hungry and the dangerous hovering in doorways, sprawled on front steps. The walls are scarred with insipid graffiti. And the young people who drift into the cafes and ice cream parlors are often soiled, disheveled, dressed in thrift shop rags. These places themselves have a desolate look. Tables are greasy. There is no heat. You see the evidence of pain and neglect still everywhere you turn.

  The place is interesting, I give it that. But no amount of vitality makes it hospitable. But then it never was.

  Back in the days when I had my first painting studio in the Haight, before the flower children flocked there, it was a hard, cold part of town. The merchants didn’t make conversation. You didn’t get to know the people downstairs. The bars were tough. It was a neighborhood of people who rented from out-of-town landlords.

  The downtown Castro District, where I eventually settled, was an entirely different place. The Castro has always had the feeling of a small town, the same families owning their homes for as long as a century. And the influx of gay men and women in recent years has only created another community within the community. There is a mellowness in the Castro, a sense of people looking out for one another. And of course there is the warmth, the sun.

  The day-to-day San Francisco fog often dies at the top of Twin Peaks just above the Castro. You can drive out of the chill of other neighborhoods and find yourself home under a blue sky.

  But it’s hard to say what the Haight might become. Writers, artists, students still seek it out for the low rents, the poetry readings, the thrift shops, and the bookstores. It does have a lot of bookstores. And to prowl there on Saturday afternoons can be fun.

  If you’re not looking for a runaway teenage girl. Then it becomes the proverbial jungle. Every bum is a potential rapist or pimp.

  ! didn’t find her. I parked the car, ate dinner at one of the miserable little cafes—cold food, indifferent service, a girl with sores on her face talking to herself in a corner—and I walked around. I couldn’t bring myself to show the pictures to the kids I saw, ask if they’d seen her. I didn’t feel I had the right to do that.

  WHEN I got home, I found that painting her was the best thing I could do to get my mind off her. I went up to the attic, looked over the photographs, and set to work on a full-scale painting immediately. Belinda on the Carousel Horse.

  Unlike many artist
s, I don’t grind my own pigments. I buy the best that is commercially available, and I use my paints right out of the tube, since there is usually more than enough oil in them already. I use a little turpentine to dilute, when I need it, but not very much. I like the stuff thick. I like the whole work to be dense and wet, yet moving only when I move it.

  As for the canvases, I work almost exclusively in large size with only a few small ones for taking to the park or the yard. And I have them stretched and primed for me. There is always a good supply on hand because I often work on more than one project.

  So setting to work on a full-scale painting meant squeezing out a full palette of earth colors—yellow ochre, burnt sienna, raw umber, Indian and Venetian red—and reaching for any one of a hundred prepared brushes. I might sketch a little first, but probably not. I’d go in alla prima, painting everything all at once, creating within hours a fully covered surface.

  Representing something exactly as it looks—that is automatic with me. Perspective, balance, the illusion of three-dimensional space, all that I learned before I knew what to do with it. I was able to draw what I saw when I was eight years old. By sixteen I could do a good oil portrait of a friend in an afternoon, or in one night cover a big four-by-six foot canvas with realistically rendered horses, cowboys, farm land.

  And speed has always been crucial. I mean, I work best when I work fast, on every conceivable level. If I stop to think about how I am rendering a trolley car crowded with people as it rattles downhill under windblown trees, I might get blocked, lose my nerve so to speak. So I plunge. I execute. In an hour and a half, voila, the trolley car.

  And then if I don’t like it, I throw it out. But time equals output with me. And one of the surest signs that I am doing something bad, that I am on the wrong track creatively, is that something takes too long to finish.

  An art teacher I once had—a failed painter himself who worshiped the severe abstract canvases of Mondrian and Hans Hofmann—told me I ought to break my right hand. Or start painting with my left exclusively.

  I didn’t listen to him. As far as I’m concerned, that was like telling a young singer who has perfect pitch that he has to learn to sing off key to get some soul into his voice. He doesn’t.