Belinda Read online

  You called me a liar that night when you hit me. You were right, that I am. But you can see now that I was lying before I could remember. Lie, keep secret, protect—that was life with Mom.

  And what about Dad? Did I have a right to go to him, to come between him and Ollie Boon? Dad lost Ollie after five years of being with him. Dad loved Ollie. And Ollie loved Dad.

  You decide. Have I harmed every grownup who ever had any dealings with me, from the day that Susan set foot on Saint Esprit? Or was I the victim all along?

  Maybe I had a right to be mad as hell about Final Score. And I did love Marty, that I will never deny. Did I have a right to expect Uncle Daryl and Mom to care about my life and what was happening? I was Mom’s daughter, after all. When they didn’t, was I right to run away from them, to say, “I will not be sent to Europe, I will strike out on my own”?

  If I only knew the answers to these questions, maybe I would have told you the whole thing before now. But I don’t know the answers. I never did. And that’s why I hurt you with the stupid blackmail trick. And God knows, that was a mistake all right.

  I knew it was long before you ever suspected what happened. I knew it when I called G.G. from New Orleans and I could not bring myself to tell him about it, to explain to him how things had worked out. I was too ashamed of what I’d done.

  But then we were so happy together, Jeremy. Those New Orleans weeks were the best of all. Everything seemed worth it. I knew in our last weeks that you’d won your inner fight. And I told myself the blackmail trick had saved us both.

  Well. It is a hell of a story, isn’t it, just as G.G. and Ollie Boon said it was. But just as I said, it was not my story to tell. The rights really do belong to the grownups. And you are one of them now. There will never be a day in court for me where all this is concerned. Escape was my only choice before. Escape is my only choice now.

  And you must understand this. You must forgive it. Because you know you had your own terrible secret, your own story, which belonged to someone else, which for so long you could never tell.

  Don’t resent me for saying it, but the secret was not that you wrote those last novels for your mother. It was the secret of the novels you wouldn’t write after her death. She didn’t just leave you her name in her will, Jeremy, she asked you for eternal life, and that you could not give. You know it’s true.

  And in guilt and fear you ran away from her and left her house like a tomb of olden times complete with every little thing that was hers. Yet you couldn’t get away from it. You painted the house in every picture in every book. And you painted your own spirit running through it, trying to get free of your mother and her hands that reached out in death.

  But if I’m right about all this, you are out of the old house now. You have painted a figure that finally broke free. With love and courage you opened the door of your secret world to me. You let me come not only into your heart but into your imagination and into your pictures, too.

  You gave me more than I can ever give you. You made me the symbol of your battle, and you have to go on winning the battle, no matter what you now think of me.

  But can’t you forgive me for keeping my mother’s secrets? Can’t you forgive me for being lost in my own dark house, unable to get out? I have made no art that can be my ticket to freedom. Since the day Final Score was sold out, I have been a phantom, a shadow compared with the images you painted of me.

  It won’t always be so. I am two thousand miles away from you already, I am in a world I understand, and we may never see each other again. But I will be OK. I won’t make the mistakes I made in the past. I will not live on the fringe again. I will use the money I have and the many things you gave me, and I will bide my time until no one can hurt me or hurt the people I love through me anymore. And then I will be Belinda again. I will pick up the pieces and I will be somebody, not somebody’s girl. I will try to be like you and Susan. I will do things, too.

  But, Jeremy, this is the most important part of all. What will happen to the paintings now?

  I want you so badly to show them for my sake that you must be wary of what I say. But listen just the same.

  Be true to the paintings! No matter how you despise me, be true to the work you’ve done. They are yours to reveal when you are ready, and so is the truth of all that has happened to you with me.

  What I am saying is you owe me no secrecy and no silence. When the time comes to make your decision, nothing and no one must stand in your way. Use your power then, just as Ollie Boon told me to do. You have made art out of what happened. And you have earned the right to use the truth in any way that you want.

  No one will get me to hurt you, of that you can be sure. This year, next year.

  RAIN falling. Great slanted sheets of rain. They hit the screens with such force the screens billowed, and the water swept the old floorboards, spraying off the legs of the rocking chair, spraying into the room. Dark puddle creeping into the flowers of the rug. Voices downstairs? No.

  I was lying in bed with the Scotch on the table beside me. Next to the phone. Been drunk since Rhinegold’s visit, since I’d finished the new Artist and Model. Would be drunk until Saturday. Then back to work again. Saturday deadline for this madness. Until then the Scotch. And the xxx.

  Now and then Miss Annie came with gumbo and biscuits. “Eat, Mr. Walker.” Flash of lightning, and a deafening crack of thunder. Then the echo of the thunder, which was just the streetcar rolling by through the storm. Water was coming in under the wallpaper in the upper-left corner. but the paintings were all safe, Miss Annie had assured me of that.

  Sound of people walking? Only the old boards creaking. Miss Annie wouldn’t call a doctor. She wouldn’t do that to me.

  I’d done all right till I’d finished the new Artist and Model, she and I fighting, my slapping her, her falling back against the wall. Then I’d started deceiving myself, one drink, two, it wouldn’t matter, just the background to finish. And the phone was not ringing. I was the only one calling: Marty, Susan, G.G, somebody find her! My ex-wife Celia had said, “This is awful, Jeremy, don’t tell anyone!”

  Bonnie’s private line disconnected. “Leave me alone! I tell you I don’t care, I don’t care!”

  I’d been drunk when Rhinegold left actually. He had wanted to start shipping the pictures immediately. “No,” I said. I had to have them here with me until it was all finished. One week from Saturday he would be back. One week to do the last one, to write the program notes, to fight out the final arrangements. No later than Saturday, sober up, begin.

  Call, Belinda, give it one more chance. Once-in-a-lifetime remember? Already two thousand miles away from you. Where? Across the Atlantic? A place I understand.

  Belinda in Final Score was done. Her profile and Sandy’s perfect. No cheating, as Susan Jeremiah would have said. And what a great voice that woman had, Texas ham and soft at the same time. On the phone from Paris she’d said, “Hang in there, old buddy, we’ll find her. She’s no nut case like Mama. She isn’t going to do that to all of us.”

  Yeah, Sandy and Belinda finished. And the block print one, Belinda, Come Back, in the same somber colors as all ~e ce~c, ~o do~›. A~d ,~rlisl and Model only needed a little more shading, a little more deepening. Put yourself on automatic pilot, soul control, you ought to call it, and go ahead, old buddy, and finish you hand hitting the side of her face right before she went down to the floor.

  “What more must you do?” Rhinegold demanded. “Belinda, Come Back is the finish. Can’t you see this yourself?.” Sitting there hunched over in his black suit, staring at me through Coke-bottle thick glasses, the specialist in understatement.

  I’d grabbed his sleeve as he was leaving, “OK, you’ve agreed to everything, but you tell me, what do you really think!” They were all lined up in the hallway, up the staircase, in the living room.

  “You know what you’ve done,” he said. “You think I’d agree to this lunacy if it wasn’t perfection?” Then he was gone. Flight to
San Francisco to look for the warehouse on Folsom Street. Madness, he had been ranting. “San Francisco is a place where you buy mountain bicycles and running shoes. We should be on West-Fifty-seventh Street or in SoHo with an exhibit like this! You are destroying me!”

  The Artist Grieves For Belinda. That’s what remained to be done. Blank canvas. And hour by hour in this unforgivable stupor I painted it in my mind as I lay here, Scotch or no Scotch. The artist with torch in hand and the toys blazing—trains, dolls, tiny lace curtains on plastic windows. The end of the world.

  OK. You can have your slothful misery until Saturday. You know the phone is not going to ring.

  “Listen, asshole, you want my advice?” Marty had said, and she was so right about the sincerity. “Forget her! I did it. You do it. You got off light, asshole, don’t you know it? Her mother was that close to hanging you up by the balls.”

  Thunder so low I could hardly hear it. The gods moving their wooden furniture around a giant kitchen up there. The oak scrapes the side of the house, everything in motion, leaves, branches, metallic light.

  G.G. in that soft boyish voice over the phone from New York: “Jeremy, [ know she wouldn’t do anything crazy. She’d call me if she wasn’t OK.” Time for hallucinations?

  I could have sworn I’d just heard Alex Clementine’s voice in this house! Alex talking to another man, and it couldn’t be Rhinegold because Rhinegold had left days ago for San Francisco as planned. The other man spoke very softly. And Miss Annie was talking to them, too.

  Got to be an hallucination. Had refused to give Alex my number, no matter how drunk I was. I’ll see you in San Francisco, I told him. I’ll be just fine, perfectly fine.

  It was only to G.G. and to Alex and to Dan that I told the whole story: her letter, Bonnie and the blackmail attempt, and how I had hit her and hit her and hit her. And that Marty and Bonnie would no longer look for xxx.

  Belinda, Come Back. This is not the end of our story. It can’t be.

  Dan had been so angry. “Where the hell are you! You’re drunk, I’m coming to get you!” No, Dan. No, Alex.

  Lightning again. Everything gorgeously visible for a fraction of a second. The settee and the petit point pillows. Framed cover of Crimson, Mardi Gras, letters faded under sported glass. This was the smoothest Scotch. After years of white wine or a beer now and then, it was like mainlining. I mean, the furniture was moving.

  Then Miss Annie said very firmly: “Please let me tell Mr. Walker that you are here!”

  Light spray of rain hitting my face and hands. Glistening on the arch of the telephone receiver. Call, Belinda. Please, honey. It’s going to take so long. Two weeks before I can even leave here, and then taking them all back across country and everything else that has to be done. I still love you. I always will.

  Goddamn it, that was Alex’s voice.

  The rain shook the screens. The wind was cold for only a moment, as though something else in the house had been blown open. The oak branches were really thrashing out there. Like the hurricanes I remembered, when the magnolia trees came up and the tin roofs flew off the garages or flapped in the wind like the covers of books. Paint the hurricane. Paint it! You can paint anything you want to now, don’t you know that?

  Seems I had had a freeze-frame of Final Score on the television set. But that was hours ago, wasn’t it? And when you leave it on freeze-frame for more than five minutes, the machine cuts off.

  “You just leave it to me, dear lady,” Alex was saying. “He’ll understand.”

  “Mr. Walker, this is Mr. Alex Clementine from Hollywood. He insisted on coming up here, and this is Mr. George Gallagher from New York.”

  And voila Alex. Just like that. How marvelous he looked, mammoth and gleaming as always as he came striding into the cool damp gloom. And right behind him a tall boy-man with Belinda’s eyes and Belinda’s blond hair and Belinda’s mouth.

  “Good lord, you’re both here,” I said.

  I tried to sit up. The glass was lying on its side on the table and the Scotch was spilling. Then G.G., this six-foot-four blond-haired boy-man, this god, this angel, whatever he was, came and picked up the glass and wiped at the spilled Scotch with his handkerchief. What an ingratiating smile.

  “Hi, Jeremy, it’s me, G.G. Guess this is kind of a surprise.”

  “You look just like her, really you do!” Dressed all in white, even the watchband was white leather, white leather shoes.

  “Christ, Jeremy,” Alex said. He was striding back and forth, looking at the walls and the ceiling, at the high wooden back of the bed. “Turn on the air-conditioning in this room and shut those damned doors.”

  “And miss this lovely breeze? How did you find me, Alex?” Thunder again. It broke violently over the rooftop. G.G. jumped. “I don’t like that.”

  “It’s nothing, doesn’t mean a thing,” I told him. “How the hell did you find—?”

  “I can find anyone when I have a mind to, Jeremy,” Alex said solemnly. “Do you remember the insane things you said to me over the phone? I called G.G., and G.G. said it’s a 504 area code. I see you trust G.G. with things like your phone number, though you don’t trust your older friends.”

  “I didn’t want you to come, Alex. I gave him the number in case Belinda called, that was all. Belinda hasn’t called, has she, G.G.?”

  “Then we get to the airport, and I tell these cab drivers, no, I want an old guy, somebody who’s been driving for a couple of decades, and finally they bring up this colored man, you know, the Creole quadroon kind with the caramel skin and gray hair and I said, ‘You remember Cynthia Walker, the woman who wrote Crimson Mardi Gras? She used to have a house up on Saint Charles, peeling paint, closed shutters, course they might have changed it.’ ‘Take you right to it, not changed at all.’ It was simple enough.”

  “You should have seen him in action,” G.G. said softly. “We had a whole crowd around us.”

  “Jeremy, this is sick,” Alex said. “This is worse than what happened after Faye died.”

  “No, Alex, looks deceive you. I’ve made a bargain with myself and everything is under control. I’m merely resting, storing up energy for the final picture.”

  Alex got out a cigarette. Flash of G.G.’s gold lighter. “Thank you, son.”

  “Sure, Alex.”

  I reached for the glass, but couldn’t reach it.

  Alex was staring at me, as if I were wearing a blindfold and couldn’t see it, the way he looked at my clothes, the Scotch, the bed. Dark spots from the rain all over his fedora and the cashmere scarf was white this time, hanging all the way down the front of the Burberry.

  “Where is that little lady? Madam! Can you fix something for this gentle’man to eat?”

  “Not till Saturday, damn it, Alex, I told you this is planned.”

  “Of course, I can, but can you get him to eat it, Mr. Clementine? I can’t get him to eat a thing.”

  ‘TI1 feed him if I have to. And some coffee, madam, a pot of coffee, too.”

  I tried to reach the glass again. G.G. filled it for me.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t give him that, son,” Alex said. “Jeremy, this place is exactly the way it was twenty-five years ago. There is an opened letter on the dresser, postmarked 1966, do you realize that? And a copy of The New York Times for the same year on this night table.”

  “Alex, you’re getting excited over nothing. Did you see the paintings? Tell me what you think.”

  “They’re beautiful,” G.G. said. “Oh, I love them all.”

  “What did you think, Alex? Tell me.”

  “What did Rhinegold tell you? That you’d go to jail if you did this thing? Or is he just out to make a buck off it?”

  “You’re not really going to do it, are you?” G.G. asked.

  “Jeremy, this is hara-kiri. What kind of a man is this Rhinegold? Get on this phone. Call it off.”

  “She hasn’t called you, has she, G.G? You would have told me the minute you walked in.”
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  “Oh, yes, Jeremy, I would have. But don’t worry. She’s all right. She wouldn’t let things get too bad without calling me. And the phones are covered night and day.”

  “Speaking of phones, do you realize you called Blair Sackwell two nights ago at two o’clock in the morning,” Alex thundered, “and you told him the whole thing?”

  “And there’re people at my place if she comes,” G.G. said. “They’re waiting for her.”

  “Not the whole thing, Alex,” I said. “Just who she was and who I was and that she was on the run and that I hurt her. I don’t have to tell the whole thing. I don’t have to hang anyone. But the truth’s got to come out, Alex. Goddamn it, she exists, she has a name and a past and those paintings are of her, and I love her.”

  “Yes,” G.G. said softly.

  “And that’s why I called Susan Jeremiah in Paris and Ollie Boon, too. I called that woman who wrote the Bonnie biography, I called my wives. I called Marty at United Theatricals after Bonnie disconnected her private line. I called my editor and my publicist and my Hollywood agent and I told them all what was going on. I called Andy Blatky my sculptor friend, and my neighbor Sheila. And I called all my writer friends who work for the papers, too.”

  And I should have stuck it out, finished the last painting, done the program notes. I’d be out of here by now.

  “Calling Blair Sackwell is like calling ‘CBS News,’ Walker!” Alex said. “What do you mean, friends who work for what papers, where? Do you think you can control what’s going to happen?”