Belinda Page 52

  But the paintings, now the paintings, that was where my mind, half in sleep and half-awake, really wanted to go. The May Procession, The Mardi Gras, I envisioned them again. I could see every detail. But I could see other works, too. I saw those big shaggy police dogs sniffing at the dolls. Dogs Visit the Toys. And I saw Alex in his raincoat and fedora walking through Mother’s hallway, looking at the peeling wallpaper. “Jeremy, finish up, son, so we can get out of this house!”

  Got to paint a picture of Alex, terribly important to paint Alex, Alex who’d been in hundreds of movies, and never been painted right. The dogs would become werewolves sniffing through the porcelain babies and, yes, I’d have to deal with all that darkness again in that one, but it had an inevitable feel to it, and Alex walking through Mother’s house, too, all right. But Alex, important to move him out of the dark house. Alex at the garden gate on that morning twenty-five years ago when he had said:

  “You stay with me when you come out west.”

  III. THE FINAL SCORE

  THE long weekend at Alex’s quiet sprawling canyon house in Beverly Hills was dreamy and slow. Belinda and I made love often in the undisturbed silence of the bedroom. I slept twelve hours at a stretch, deeper than I had ever slept since I was a kid. The eternal southern California sun poured through the many French windows onto vistas of thick carpet, and down on gardens as well-kept as interiors, the stillness unbroken except by the noise of an Occasional car on the distant canyon road.

  Susan’s plane had gotten us back without incident. For the first twenty-four hours at least nobody had known we were here.

  And by Monday morning the tabloids had the story:

  BONNIE’S DAUGHTER MARRIES ARTIST.

  JEREMY AND BELINDA MARRY IN RENO.

  BELINDA ALIVE AND WELL AND MARRIED. And the video tape of the wedding had been shown by a thousand news outlets all over the world.

  The big local news, however, was Blair Sackwell’s full-page insert advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle and the national edition of The New York Times: BELINDA AND JEREMY FOR MIDNIGHT MINK.

  It was just about the first shot of us that Blair had taken. I was unshaven, shaggy headed, a little puzzled in expression, and Belinda, wide-eyed, babylips jutting slightly, had the unselfconscious seriousness of a child. Two faces, blankets of white fur. The lens of the Hasselblad and the size of the negative gave it a startling graven quality—every pore showed, every hair was etched. And that is what Blair had wanted. That was what Eric Arlington had always delivered to him.

  The picture transcended photography. We appeared more real than real. Of course, Blair knew he did not have to spend another cent to publicize his picture. By evening, newspapers all over the country had reprinted it. The news magazines would inevitably do the same. Everybody would see Blair’s trademark. Midnight Mink was news, the way it had been years ago, when Bonnie had been its first model with the coat half-open all the way down her right side.

  Nevertheless, the advertisement would appear in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar eventually as well as in a host of other magazines. Such was the destiny of those who posed for Midnight Mink.

  Dozens of long-stemmed white roses began to arrive on Monday afternoon. By evening the house was full of them. They were all from Blair.

  Meantime the news around us was comforting. The LAPD had dropped its warrant for Belinda. Daryl Blanchard claimed “profound relief” that his niece was alive. He would not contest G.G.’s consent to the marriage. The age-old power of the ritual was recognized by this plainspoken and rather confused Texas man. Bonnie wept heartrending tears on network and cable. Marty broke down again.

  The San Francisco police decided not to pursue their warrants for me. Quite impossible to press me for crimes against a delinquent minor who was now my legal bride. And I had not been under arrest at the time I had “flown” from San Francisco. So Susan could not formally be charged for her part in the escape.

  The lines continued outside the Folsom Street exhibit. And Rhinegold reported that every painting was now spoken for. Two to Paris, one to Berlin, another to New York, one to Dallas, the four to Count Solosky. I had lost track.

  Time and Newsweek, hitting the stands at Monday noon with a load of obsolete garbage about the “disappearance” and “possible murder,” nevertheless gave enormous coverage to the paintings, which their critics begrudgingly praised.

  As early as Monday afternoon Susan had a national distributor for Final Score. Limelight was taking it over, and the labs were working overtime on the prints, and Susan was in there with the cinematographer making sure that Chicago and Boston and Washington each got a jewel. The papers already carried their ads for a weekend opening in a thousand theaters nationwide.

  Susan also had the go-ahead from Galaxy Pictures for Of Will and Shame with her script and Belinda, if Belinda was willing, and Sandy Miller was back from Rio with the lowdown on locations. As of the first of the year, Susan was ready to go to Brazil.

  As for Alex, he was hotter than ever, as far as we could tell. His champagne commercials were running on schedule, and there was renewed interest in the television miniseries to be based on his autobiography. Would he consent, the producers were asking, to play himself?. He had two other television films in the works, and the talk shows were calling him, too.

  Susan wanted Alex for Of Will and Shame and was trying desperately to get the studio to meet his price, which was enormous, and he was promising to throw up the television offers for a real picture “if the agents could just work things out.”

  All Alex wanted to do at the moment, however, was lie on the sun-drenched redbrick terrace and turn browner and browner as he talked to G.G. And G.G. insisted he was having the time of his life. The work of opening the Beverly Hills salon would come all too soon, as far as he was concerned.

  When the word got out that G.G. was in Beverly Hills, friends of Alex started calling. G.G. could start free-lance any time he chose.

  The shadow in paradise was Belinda.

  Belinda had not said absolutely go ahead to the movie, which was making Susan a bit nervous, but Belinda was not entirely all right.

  There was something tentative about Belinda’s every gesture, something clouded and uncertain in her gaze. There were moments when she reminded me uncannily of Bonnie and the brief time I’d known Bonnie in that Hyatt Regency room.

  Over and over she asked me if I was certain that everything was OK with me. But I came to realize as I repeatedly reassured her that she was the one who was agitated and tense. She was the one who could not take a deep breath.

  She read every article in the papers about her mother. In silence she watched her mother and Marty scrambling to salvage their reputations and their positions on the evening news.

  The tabloids had not let up on Bonnie and Marty. There was talk of “Champagne Flight” being revived on cable, but nothing firm had been announced.

  Meantime Belinda had also spoken to her uncle briefly by phone on Sunday afternoon. Not a very pleasant call. The man had not believed her when she said she had called her mother at the hospital several days ago.

  Then I took the phone. I explained to Daryl that Belinda was all right now, we were married, and that maybe the best thing was to let all this simmer down. Daryl was confused, plain and simple. It was obvious Bonnie had been lying to him about everything, and so had Marty. He told me that he had pushed for the warrant for Belinda against their wishes, in a desperate effort to find his niece, if she was still alive. Now he didn’t know what to do exactly. He wanted to see Belinda. But she would not see him. The call ended with uncomfortable pleasantries. She would write to him. He would write to her.

  She was quiet and withdrawn after. She was not all right at all.

  She was happiest in the evening when we all sat around the supper table together and Susan was storyboarding Of Will and Shame in the air. Sandy Miller, Susan’s lover, was constantly with Susan now, throwing in little stories about her madcap adventures
in Rio, and Sandy Miller was indeed a voluptuous young woman, every bit as seductive as she had been on the screen.

  The Rio picture sounded terrific, I had to admit. The relationship between the teen prostitute, to be played by Belinda, and the female reporter who saves her, played by Sandy, was quite good. And I liked the idea of going with them on location. I wanted to see the majestic harbor of Rio de Janeiro. I wanted to walk the alien and frightening streets of that old city. I wanted to paint pictures by Brazilian light.

  But this was Belinda’s decision. And Belinda obviously could not make it. Belinda kept saying she needed to think it over. And so I waited, watched, tried to fathom what was holding Belinda back.

  Of course, there was one very obvious answer: Bonnie was holding Belinda back.

  Tuesday night we all piled into Alex’s black Mercedes and went down to Sunset for dinner at Le Dome. Susan was in black satin rodeo finery. Sandy Miller was the ripe starlet in beautifully draped white silk. Belinda, in the classic little black dress and pearls, picked up Blair’s floor-length mink coat and threw it over her shoulders and kept it on all night long, letting it hang off the chair like a rain poncho. Alex and G.G. went black tie again, because the black dinner jacket and pants were the only decent clothes I had, other than jeans and sweatshirts that Alex’s man had bought for me, and Alex and G.G. said we should all match.

  So there we all were together in the soft romantic gloom of Le Dome. And the wine was flowing, and the food was delicious and lovely to look at before we ate it. And nobody busted us or bothered us, and lots of people saw us. And Belinda looked gorgeous and miserable, the mink coat hanging on the floor, her hair a cloud of gold around her soft and tortured little face. Belinda just picked at the delicious food. Belinda wasn’t getting better. She was getting worse.

  So we bide our time. We wait.

  Early Wednesday when I awakened, I went out into the fresh air of the garden and saw Belinda slicing back and forth through the clean blue water of the long rectangular pool. She had on the tiniest black bikini in the Western world which Sandy Miller had brought her from Rio. Her hair was pinned up on the top of her head. I could hardly stand to watch her little bottom and silky thighs moving through the water. Thank God, Alex was gay, I thought.

  If the old familiar Los Angeles smog was there, I could not smell it or taste it. I smelled only the roses and the lemons and the oranges that grew in Alex’s garden all year round.

  I wandered into the green house off the cabana, a large cool empty place of whitewashed glass and redwood timbers where Alex had set up my easel for me, the same one I’d left with him twenty-five years ago. He’d had his man, Orlando, go all over Los Angeles to find really big and properly stretched canvases, with just enough give in them, and plenty of brushes, turpentine, linseed oil, paints. Alex had rounded up a lot of old china plates for me to use as palettes and given me the old silver knives—the ones banged up by the garbage disposer—to use as I chose.

  An artist never had it so good, it seemed to me. Except for the Muse being silently and uncomplainingly miserable. But that just had to change.

  Two days ago I had started The Mardi Gras on a huge eight-by-ten canvas. And the great shadowy oaks above the torchlighted parade were already painted in, along with two of the glittering papier-mâché floats crowded with revelers.

  Today was the day of the drunken black flambeaux carrier, and the torch tipping forward, its oily fire catching the garlands of papier-mâché flowers that skirted the high floor of the float.

  It felt so good to be painting again, to be racing over this utterly new and different territory, to be drawing in the simplest little things that I had never created in any form before. Men’s faces for one thing, almost never had I done them. It was as if I could feel parts of the circuitry of my brain flooded with life for the first time.

  The light poured gently through the opaque white panes of the glass roof. It fell on the purple flags and on the few potted geraniums and callas in this place that smelled of freshness and earth even in the months of winter. It washed over the white canvas, and fell on my hands, making them warm.

  Beyond the open doors I saw the low-pitched roof of the rambling white house, and the comforting sight of others talking, moving about. G.G. was just going out to swim with Belinda. Susan Jeremiah had come over from her place on Benedict Canyon Road. She was in beat-up jeans and blue work shirt, and the scuffed snakeskin boots and the dusty white hat that were her true clothes.

  I started right in to work. I started in big fast strokes of burnt sienna to do the head and the back of the flambeaux carrier. I was suddenly on “soul control,” trusting that somehow a man who could paint a little girl perfectly could do a grown man’s muscular arm and knotted hand.

  But even as I painted, another picture was obsessing me, something that had come to me in the night. A dark somber portrait of Blair Sackwell in the outrageous lavender tuxedo sitting on the jumpseat of the limo with his arms folded and his legs crossed. Incandescent Blair. If I could just get that mixture of vulgarity and compassion, that mixture of recklessness and magic—ah, this was Rumpelstiltskin, wasn’t it, but this time he saved the child!

  There were many pictures to be done. So many. Alex had to be done first, really, before Blair. I was certain of that, and then Dogs Visit the Toys—that one would haunt me till I finally gave in to it, and went back to the Victorian mentally, just long enough to get it done. Now for the flambeaux carrier, for the lurid glint of the flames against the trees above.

  I don’t think I looked up from my work until a good two hours had passed. The pool was empty, had been for some time. But Alex was walking towards me across the redbrick terrace, and smile or no smile, I could tell he had something on his mind.

  “Hate to break in on you, Jeremy,” he said, “but it’s time for a little conference with your little girl.”

  When I came into the living room with him, I knew by the look on Belinda’s face that something bad was happening. She sat there in her white tennis skirt and cotton pullover with her hands on her naked knees, not looking at anyone. Her hair was in braids, the way I especially loved it, but it left her face defenseless. She looked like someone had hit her one fine blow between the eyes. She resembled Bonnie when she had that expression, shocked and unable to react. G.G. was sitting beside her. He was holding her hand.

  “Ash Levine and Marty are on their way over here,” Alex said. “Marty has a deal for Belinda ... you know, how to make everything OK for Bonnie and him now. You know.”

  Did I? I think I was a little too stunned to respond. It wasn’t merely what Alex had just told me, it was the way he seemed to take it himself. Had everybody known this was going to happen? I had not.

  I turned and looked at Belinda. G.G. looked easily as unhappy as she was, but then he said: “Belinda, just see him. See what’s he got to say. Do that for yourself.” I understood what G.G. meant.

  Ash Levine and Marty arrived fifteen minutes later. Belinda wanted me to remain in the room. But G.G. and Alex disappeared.

  This was the first time Marty and I had laid eyes on each other, and I think I was unprepared for the unbroken assurance with which he grabbed my hand and smiled.

  “Nice to see you, Jeremy.” Was it? He was like a man running for public office rather than a man fighting for his job. The silver gray suit, the gold jewelry, it was all there, along with the jet black hair and the eyes that locked onto you with the feverish look of an addict. You could feel this guy all right when he was still two feet away.

  “Hi ya, sweetheart!” he said to Belinda with the same “spontaneous” affection. “So good to see you, honey!” Then he sat beside her, his arm on the couch behind her. But I noticed he did not touch her.

  Ash Levine—dark tan, navy blue suit, prematurely gray hair, reed-thin body—had settled in the leather chair by Alex’s desk, and he was the one, white teeth flashing, who began to talk.

  “Now, Jeremy, the important thing here is for
everybody to come out of this smelling like a rose. That’s what we’re all here for, right? You know how much we admire Alex. We really like Alex. I mean Alex is Hollywood, they don’t make stars like Alex anymore, right? But thanks to ‘Champagne Flight’ he is in the midst of a pretty damned exciting comeback and I think Alex would be the first to admit that what’s good for ‘Champagne Flight’ has been pretty damn good for us all, right—?”

  On and on he went as I looked at Belinda and Belinda slowly lifted her eyes and looked at me. A touch of a smile at the end of her lips for only an instant. Then it was lost. But not on Marty, I didn’t think. Marty was watching both of us, eyes darting back and forth.

  “—a couple of episodes of ‘Champagne Flight’ featuring Alex and Belinda,” Ash Levine was saying, “I mean, the publicity would be fabulous for Alex after all that’s happened, and for Belinda! It would be terrific for Belinda. I mean, they’ve heard about Belinda, and they’ve seen pictures of Belinda, and then, hey, they’d see Belinda—and not in some grainy foreign film, some glitzy mink advertisement, hey, prime time, it’s Belinda. And the focus is on her. We’re talking number-one show in the country and, when we go back on the air, hey, we’ll break all the records, I mean, the fan mail has been fabulous, simply fabulous, I mean, the fans are outraged that ‘Champagne Flight’ was preempted, the fans simply don’t understand. I mean, if the network won’t play ball, hey, we’re getting offers from cable, the independents, we can sit down and create our own network for this thing just with the independents, hey, Alex and Belinda in the same episode, give them back the man they miss and Belinda? I mean we’re talking not just number one, we’re talking special event!”

  Belinda’s face was changing. She wasn’t smiling, no, but her eyes had the old steadiness. She looked at Ash. She looked at him for a long time, and then slowly her eyes shifted back to me. That curl of a smile again. Bitter? Frankly amused? Was she ready to let out a high-pitched scream?