I wanted to start then; keep the pace going. But she said she wanted me to come to bed with her, really snuggle with her. Desperate, her eyes. Her voice. “OK, darling baby,” I said.
She was stiff when I put my arm around her.
“You know there’s a place we could go,” I said suddenly. “I mean, we could get away from San Francisco for a little while. House in Carmel I have, rarely use it. We’d have to clean it up, but it’s small, wouldn’t be hard. Just a block from the ocean.”
“But we are away, aren’t we?” she asked me in a strange cold voice. “I mean, who would we be running from?” she asked.
ABOUT four in the morning I woke up and realized that she was crying. She had been shaking me, trying to wake me up. She was standing by the bed and she was sobbing, wiping at her eyes with a Kleenex. “Wake up,” she was saying.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
I switched on the small light by the bed. She was wearing only a cotton slip. She was really drunk now. I could see it, smell the Scotch on her. She had a glass in her hand, full of ice and Scotch, and her hand holding it was a woman’s hand.
“I want you to pay attention to me,” she said. She was gritting her teeth, and her eyes were all red. She was really frantic. The thin little triangles of white cotton barely covered her breasts, and they were heaving.
“What is it?” I said. I took her in my arms. She was actually choking, she was so upset.
“I want you to understand this,” she said.
“What?”
“If you call the police on me, if you try to find out who I am, if you find my family and you tell them where I am, I want you to know, I want you to know, I’ll tell them what we’ve been doing. I don’t want to do it, I could die first, to do something like that. But I mean it, if you ever betray me, goddamn it, if you ever do that to me, if you ever betray me like that, if you ever ever do that to me, I will, I swear I will I will tell them—”
“But I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t ever—”
“Don’t you ever betray me, don’t you ever do it, Jeremy.”
She was sobbing in spasms. I was holding her tight and she was just writhing against my chest.
“Belinda, how could you think I’d do that?” That wasn’t it at all, not at all.
“I don’t want to say horrible things, it kills me to say I’d hurt you. It kills me to say I’d use these things to hurt you, twist it all around for them and their filthy morality, their stupid idiotic morality. But I would, I would, I would, if you betrayed me—”
“You don’t have to say it, I understand.” I stroked her hair, held her tighter. I was kissing the top of her head.
“But, so help me God, if you betrayed me—”
Never, never, never.
WHEN she was finally calmed down, we lay there curled in each other’s arms. It was still dark outside. I couldn’t sleep anymore. It was going round and round in my head that what I was actually doing was not betraying her. Lying, yes, betraying, no.
She whispered, “I don’t ever want to talk about it. I don’t ever ever want to think about it. I was born the day you saw me. I was born then, and you and me were born then.” Yes, yes, yes.
But I only wanted to know what happened, so that we could both put it behind us, both know it was OK, OK, OK ...
“Jeremy, hold on me. Hold on to me.”
“Come on,” I said finally. “Let’s get up, get dressed, get out of here.” She seemed numb. I pulled the little wool skirt and blazer out, dressed her. Buttoned the white blouse myself up to her neck, kissed her. Got the cashmere scarf and put it around her neck. Put the little leather gloves on her.
She was a doll all dressed up, a little English girl. I brushed her hair even, put it back in the barrette so I could see the flawless plane of her forehead. I loved to kiss her bare forehead.
She watched silently as I gathered up the photographs of Holy Communion, carried the canvases down to the basement, opened up the back of the van, slid the canvases into the rack. I helped her up into the high front seat.
I DROVE south out of San Francisco in the early morning darkness, down the clean silent stretch of highway towards the Monterey Peninsula, the morning coming slowly through the gray clouds.
She was sitting beside me looking very stately with her hair blown back from her face and her arms folded. The lapel of her jacket flapped silently in the wind, just touching the hollow beneath her cheekbone.
An hour, an hour and a half, and the sky was brightening behind the clouds. The sun coming suddenly through the high windshield. Blessed warmth on my hands.
I made that turn into the wind, towards the ocean, into Monterey, then south through the piney woods to Carmel.
She didn’t know where we were, I don’t think. She’d never seen this strange still little beach town, like a stage set before the day’s tourists, never seen the little thatched cottages behind their white picket fences beneath the towering gray Monterey cypresses with their gnarled limbs.
I lead her along the gravel path to the rounded door of the cottage. The earth was sandy, the brilliant yellow and red primroses scattered in the clumps of green grass.
In the little house of raw redwood beams and stone floors the sun spilled through the little windows. Green leaves high against the leaded glass.
I climbed the ladder to the loft bed with her, and we sank down together in the musty down covers.
The sun was breaking in shafts through the webbing of branches above the skylight.
“Dear God,” she said. She was shuddering suddenly and the tears came back and she looked past me into the light overhead. “If I can’t trust you, there is no one.”
“I love you,” I said. “I don’t care about any of it, I swear. I love you.”
“Holy Communion,” she said squeezing her eyes so the tears came out. “Yes, Holy Communion, my darling,” I said.
[12]
“WHAT this requires is a decision,” she said. “I mean, a commitment. That you want this, you want me here and I want to be here. That we are going to do this now, live together, be together. And then it’s settled.”
“It’s settled, then, it’s decided.”
“You have to see me as someone who is free, who is in control of what is happening to her—”
“But let’s be absolutely frank. You know what’s bothering me. That someone is grieving, that someone is going crazy, worrying about you. That they think you’re dead—”
“No. This will not work. This will not work. You have to understand that I have walked away from them. I made the decision to go. I said to them and to myself this will not continue. And I decided that I would leave. It was my decision.”
“But can a kid your age make that decision?”
“I made it,” she said. “This is my body! This is me. I took this body and I walked with it.” Silence.
“You got it? Because if you don’t, I walk again.”
“I got it.” I said. “You’ve got it.”
“What?”
“The commitment. The decision.”
[13]
ON the third day in Carmel we started arguing about the cigarettes:
What the hell did I mean, die of cancer, all that rot, would I listen to myself the way I sounded, like somebody’s father for God’s sakes, I mean, did I think she was born yesterday? And it was not two packs a day and she did not chain smoke or smoke on the street that much. Didn’t I know she was experiencing things, this was a time of life for going overboard, making mistakes, didn’t I understand she wasn’t going to puff like a stove pipe all her life, she didn’t even inhale most of the time?
“All right, then, if you won’t listen, if you want the prerogative of making the same stupid mistakes everybody else makes, then there have to be ground rules. I won’t watch you poison yourself on a routine basis in either the kitchen or the bedroom. No more smoking in the rooms where we take our meals or take each other. Now that is fair, isn’t it?”
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Red-faced glare, almost slammed the kitchen door, obviously thought better of it. Stomp of feet going up the ladder to the loft. Tape of rock queen Madonna suddenly thumping through the cottage at deafening level. (Did I have to buy her a Carmel machine as well as a San Francisco machine?)
Tick of cuckoo clock. This is awful, awful.
Creaking sound of her coming back down the ladder.
“OK, you really don’t want me to smoke in the bedroom or the kitchen.”
“Really don’t. Really—”
Lower lip jutting deliciously, back to the door frame, cutoff jeans very tight on her brown thighs, nipples two points in the black T-shirt with ghastly logo of the rock group Grateful Dead on it. Quiet voice:
“OK, if it makes you happy.”
Silk of inner arms around my neck, hair coming down me before the kiss like a net.
“It makes me very happy.”
THE Holy Communion canvas was exploding. The whole living room of the cottage was the studio, the easel sprawled on the rumpled drop cloth. New air, new sky, even new coffee cup exhilarating. Nothing stood between me and this picture. I painted until I literally could no longer hold the brush.
The argument about the booze erupted on the seventh day:
OK, now I was really getting out of hand, who did I think I was, first the smoking and now this, did I think I was the voice of authority that I could just tell her what to do, did I talk this way to Cecilia or Andrea or whatever their names were?
“They weren’t sixteen and they didn’t drink half a bottle of Scotch for breakfast on Saturday morning’. They didn’t drink three cans of beer while driving the van to Big Sur.”
That was outrageous, that was unjust, that was not what happened. “I found the cans in the van! The cans were still cold! Last night you poured half a pint of rum into your Cokes while you were reading, you think I don’t see this, you’re putting down quarts of booze a day in this house—”
I was uptight, puritanical, crazy. And if I wanted to know, it was none of my business what she drank, did I think I owned her?
“Look, I can’t change being forty-four, and at my age you don’t watch a young girl—”
Just hold it right there. Was she supposed to join Alcoholics Anonymous just because I didn’t know the difference between two drinks and dipsomania? Well, she knew the difference. She’d lived all her life around booze and people who poured it down, boy, what she could tell me about booze, she could write the book on booze, on cleaning up vomit and dragging drunks up to bed and lying to bellhops and room service and hotel doctors about drunks, don’t tell her about drunks-She stopped, staring at me.
“So you’re going to go through it all, too? What is that, loyalty or something to this drunk whoever it was? Is this person dead that he or she deserves that kind of loyalty?”
Crying. Saying nothing. Foxed.
“Stop it!” I said. “Stop all of it, the Scotch, the wine with dinner, the goddamned beers you think I don’t see you putting down.”
ALL RIGHT GODDAMN IT! THIS WAS THE BARRICADES. IS THAT WHAT I WANTED? Was I telling her to get out of my house, was I?
“No, and you won’t leave either, because you love me and you know I love you and you will stop, I know you will. You will stop the drinking now!”
“You think you can just order me to stop!”
Out the front door. Off towards the ocean. Or to the highway to hitchhike to GONE FOREVER?
I threw on the overhead light and looked at Holy Communion. If this isn’t the breakthrough of my career, then I don’t have one. Everything I know about reality and illusion is there.
But what the hell damn difference does this make? Never felt so much like getting drunk myself.
Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, she’s gone forever. I’m leaving notes for nobody when I walk on the beach. Not a single figure approaching in the sugar white sand is Belinda.
Ten thirty. The loft without her, lying there on the giant floppy mattresses and comforters.
Front door opens down there.
Then she is at the top of the ladder, holding onto the sides, face too dark to see.
“I’m glad you’re home. I was worried.”
Smell of Calandre, cold fresh air. Her cheek would smell like the ocean wind if she came over and kissed me.
She sat near the top of the ladder, profile against the little window. Light from the skylight milky and chilling. I can see the red of the cashmere scarf. One of her black leather kid gloves as she pulls on the end of the scarf.
“I finished the Holy Communion canvas today.”
Silence.
“You have to understand that nobody ever paid that much attention to what I did,” she said. Silence.
“I’m not used to taking orders.”
Silence.
“To tell you the honest fucking truth, nobody ever cared, I mean, they just figured I could handle whatever I was doing, you know, they just didn’t give a fucking damn.” Silence.
“I mean, I had teachers and all the clothes I could want and nobody bugged me. When I had my first affair, well, they took me to Paris to get me on the pill, you know, just nothing to it, like don’t get pregnant and all. Nobody—”
Silence. Hair white wisps in the moonlight.
“And it’s not like you’re saying I can’t handle it, because I can! I can handle it perfectly. I always handle it. You’re just saying it would make you feel better if I didn’t drink so much and then you wouldn’t feel so guilty.”
Silence.
“That is what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“I’ll settle for that.”
Soft crush of her against me suddenly, smell of cold salt wind, her luscious mouth, just like I knew it would be.
Eight A.M. the next morning.
Slices of apple, orange, cantaloupe on a china plate. Scrambled eggs, a bit of cheese.
“This must be an hallucination. Are you actually eating real food for breakfast? Where’s the Coke and potato chips?”
“Honest to God, Jeremy. Get off my case. I mean, nobody can live on Coke and potato chips. “Don’t say anything.
“And there’s something else I want to talk to you about, Jeremy.”
“Yes?”
“How about letting me buy you a couple of tweed jackets that actually fit?”
AN innocent little remark like that in a place like Carmel can turn into a shopping marathon. Which it did.
As soon as we came back into the San Francisco house, I had another picture. Next step from Holy Communion. I knew it when I went into the living room and looked at the dolls. Belinda with Dolls.
The mailbox was full of crap from Dan, New York, Hollywood. I dumped it on the desk unopened, unplugged the answering machine, turned down the bell on all the phones, and went back to work.
“Take off your clothes, will you?” I said to Belinda. We’d do it right here in the living room on the Queen Anne sofa, the one that had been in all the Angelica books. She laughed.
“Another one of these magnificent pictures never to be seen by anybody!” she said, as she stripped off her jeans and sweater.
“Bra, panties, all off, please,” I said snapping my fingers.
That brought another little riff of laughter. She pitched all the clothes into the hallway, then pulled the barrette out of her hair.
“Yes, perfect,” I said, adjusting the lights and the tripod. “Just sit in the middle of the couch and I’ll pile the dolls around you.” She stretched out her arms to receive them. “Do they have names?” she asked.
“Mary Jane and Mary Jane and Mary Jane,” I said. I told her which were French, German. This was the priceless Bru, and this smiling child, what they had called the character baby. That made her smile, too.
She was playing with their matted wigs, their faded little dresses. She loved the big ones, the girls with their long locks. Such serious expressions they had, dark painted eyebrows. Stockings and shoes were missing here and the
re. She’d have to fix them up. Get them new hair ribbons.
Actually they were just fine without their shoes and stockings, most of them, rather bashed and ancient-looking in wilted tulle, but I didn’t tell her.
I watched her delicate fingers struggle with the tiny buttons.
Yes, this was what I wanted.
I started snapping. She looked up startled. Got it. Now the big blue-eyed long-hair Bru doll pressed to her naked breasts, both of them staring at me, yes. She gathered them all onto her lap, got it. Then rolled over slowly, stretching out on the couch, the dolls tumbling around her, little bonnets and feathered hats fluttering, her chin resting on her elbow sunk into the puce velvet, her naked bottom baby-smooth, got it.
She rolled over on her back, knee raised, picking up the biggest doll, the German Bebe with the red curls and the high-button shoes. And all the dolls around her glared with their brilliant glass eyes.
I saw her fall into the usual trance as the shutter kept clicking.
And then, as she eased down off the couch onto her knees and turned to the side with the Bru in her arms, the others all heaped behind her, I knew we had the picture. It was in the dreamy expression of her face.
This and the brass bed picture were the future. Go away, world.
[14?]
SHE popped up early the next afternoon, on her way out to see a new Japanese film. “Nothing is going to get you away from these pictures that nobody will ever see, right?”
“I can’t read all those subtitles. Go on.”
“You’re incredible, you know it? You fall asleep during the symphony, you think Kuwait is a person, you can’t follow foreign movies, and you worry about me getting an education. Good grief.”
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
She zeroed in on the doll photos.
“The one where you’re kneeling,” I told her. “And the brass bed series, I’m going to do six panels, like the page of a comic book, all different angles of you through the bars.”