“Take it easy, Blair,” GG. said. His voice seemed to capture exactly anxiety I saw in Belinda’s face.
“I’m scared for you, Jeremy,” she said. “I was scared for you all the way back on the plane from Rome. I was scared for you every moment till saw you tonight, and even now I’m scared scared scared. I tried to call from every phone booth between here and Los Angeles, you know that. don’t you? I’d never expected you to do it, Jeremy, not really, and been scared ever since I found out you did.”
“Belinda, this is the happiest day of my life. It’s the happiest day I can ever remember,” I said. “I might break into laughter and never be able stop.”
“You wouldn’t have done this,” she said, “if I hadn’t run out on like that.”
“Belinda, it is too late for this foolishness!” Blair said.
“Be quiet, Blair,” G.G. said.
“Belinda, what do I have to say to get that expression off your face? Belinda, I did this for both of us. Both of us, don’t you see? Now you have to believe me, and don’t you ever forget what I’ve said. The first time I ever painted you, I knew I was using you. I told you so. Now what do you think has changed? The fact that now you need me, too?”
I think my smile was convincing her. My manner was convincing her, the fact that I was sitting there so calmly, holding her and trying to drain the anxiety away. But I could see she couldn’t quite understand it. She couldn’t quite accept that I knew what I was doing and saying and that I was all right. Either that or she was simply too frightened herself.
“There’s one thing that bugs me,” I said. I stroked her hair away from her face. She didn’t look bad with brown hair. She looked beautiful actually. But I couldn’t wait to see it washing off.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Marty and Bonnie being hurt so much. The tabloids are crucifying them, the program’s nixed. G.G. didn’t want them ruined. Neither did I.”
“You’re out of your head, Rembrandt,” Blair bellowed. “I can’t listen to this madness. Turn up that radio, Susan.”
“Blair, just pipe down!” G.G. said. “Susan, we’ve got ten minutes to find a liquor store. Everything shuts down at two a.m.”
“OK, gang, we aren’t even out of the fucking Bay Area and I’m stopping for liquor, can you believe it?”
She rolled off the freeway into downtown Oakland—or something that looked like downtown Oakland. Then we stopped at a real dirty little place on a corner, and G.G. went in.
“Belinda,” I said, “I want you to know I told who you were and who I was, I told our story as best I could without bringing them into it, without slinging any mud.”
She looked amazed, absolutely amazed. I don’t think I’d ever seen her look so taken off guard.
G.G. came back out with a sackful of bottles and some plastic glasses. He climbed back into the middle seat.
“Take off,” Blair said. Back on the freeway, back on to 580 rolling out of Oakland.
I sat back, taking a deep breath, waiting politely for G.G. to open one of those bottles, whatever they were. Belinda was watching me. She still looked absolutely amazed.
“Jeremy,” she said finally, “I want to tell you something. When I got off the plane at LAX yesterday, the first paper I picked up had my picture on the front page and the news that Mom was in the hospital. I thought, What is it this time, pills, a gun, razor blades? I ran to the phone, Jeremy, I ran. Even before I tried to call you, I called Mom. I called Sally Tracy, Mom’s agent, and I got her to call the hospital, to get me through to the phone right by Mom’s bed. And I said, ‘Mom, this is Belinda, I’m alive, Mom, and I’m OK.’ Do you know what she said, Jeremy? She said, ‘This is not my daughter,’ and she hung up the phone. She knew it was me, Jeremy. I know she did. She knew. And when she checked out the next morning, she told the reporters she believed her daughter was dead.”
Nobody said a word. Then Susan made a long low sound like a disgusted sigh. Blair gave a little ironic laugh, and G.G. just smiled sort of bitter and looked from Belinda to me.
We were out of Oakland now, going north through the beautiful rolling hills of Contra Costa County under a dark yet cloudy sky.
G.G. leaned over and kissed Belinda. “I love you, baby,” he whispered.
“You want to open one of those bottles, G.G.?” Blair said.
“Right on. You hold the glass there for me, Jeremy,” he said, as he lifted the bottle out of the sack. “I think this flight calls for a little champagne.”
[9]
IT was six a.m. when we rolled into Reno, and everybody was asleep or drunk by that time, except Susan, who was neither. She just kept pushing on the accelerator and singing to the country-and-western music on the radio.
Then Blair checked us into the MGM Grand, into a two-bedroom suite that had the right colored walls so that he could take our pictures after Belinda had washed the dye out of her hair.
G.G. went to help her with the shampooing, and Blair started setting up his Hasselblad camera and tripod and draping sheets over things to make the light absolutely right.
Belinda had to wash her hair five times to get all the brown out, then G.G. went to work on it madly with the hair dryer, and finally we shot the first roll of film against a perfect dark background, Belinda and I both in full-length white mink coats.
I felt perfectly ridiculous, but Blair assured me that merely standing there, looking blank-faced, exhausted, and slightly annoyed worked out just fine. Twice he called photographer Eric Arlington—the man who took most of the Midnight Mink pictures—at his house in Montauk to get advice from him, then he plunged ahead himself.
Meantime Susan was on the phone to her daddy in Houston, making sure his Learjet was on the way. Her daddy was a high-roller in both Las Vegas and Reno, and his pilot made the run all the time. The plane ought to be at the Reno airport anytime.
G.G. then called Alex in LA. Alex had remained at my house in San Francisco until Dan assured him that the police were no longer in “hot pursuit,” that we had apparently gotten out of San Francisco without incident and only then did Alex get on the plane for home.
They had issued a warrant for my arrest, and therefore we ought to get married this minute, Alex said, and then why not all come to his house down south?
When I heard about the warrant, I agreed with Alex. Let’s get out of this room and get married right now.
The wedding was a scream.
The nice little lady and her husband in the twenty-four hour chapel had never heard of us obviously, though we were on the front pages of the papers just down the street. The nice lady thought G.G. looked awfully young to be Belinda’s father, however. But G.G. had the certificate which proved it. And then the lady and her husband were all too pleased to do the wedding with organ music and flowers in less than twenty minutes. Just step right in.
And then we all got a little surprise. Not only would the chapel sell us a nice pack of polaroid pictures of the ceremony, they would videotape it for ninety dollars more. And we could have as many copies of the videotape as we were willing to buy. We ordered ten.
So while Blair shot more film with the Hasselblad, Belinda and I, up to our earlobes in white mink, said the words to each other while the camera rolled.
But when the moment came, when we exchanged the vows, nobody else was there. The little chapel faded, Blair and Susan faded—even G.G. faded. The ugly artificial lights faded. There was no little man reading from the Bible to us, no little lady smiling from behind her polaroid camera as it made its strange spitting and grinding sounds.
Just Belinda and I stood there in the moment, and we were together the way we had been in the loft in Carmel with the sun shafting through the skylight and in New Orleans with the summer rain coming through the French doors as we lay on Mother’s bed. Even the weariness gave a lovely luster to her eyes, a sharpness to her expression that was faintly tragic. And the sadness of the separation—the sadness of the violence and the misunderst
andings—was there too, woven into the moment, giving it a softness and a slowness and mingling the happiness with pain.
We looked at each other in silence when it came time to kiss. Her hair was streaming down over the white fur, and her face was naked of all paint and indescribably lovely, her eyelashes golden as her hair.
“Holy Communion, Jeremy,” she whispered. And then I said, “Holy Communion, Belinda.” And when she closed her eyes and I saw her lips open and I felt her rise on tiptoe to kiss me, I took her in my arms, crushing her in all this white mink fur, and the world was gone. Simply gone.
SO it was done. And now she was Belinda Walker, and we were Belinda and Jeremy Walker. And nobody was going to take her away from me. Then I saw G.G. crying. Even Blair was moved. Only Susan was smiling, but it was a very beautiful and understanding smile.
“OK, it’s a wrap,” she said suddenly. “Now out of this place. Y’all need a director, you know it? And this director’s starving to death.”
We had a wonderful eggs and bacon breakfast in a big shiny American restaurant while _t_h_g? g9pj~e~J ~tJlg yjgk_eo~t~,~% ~tJX~n ~,~e ~ ~/9~e Ol~œ~e 0~ ~: riohal Courier and sent the tapes by messenger to the three networks in Los Angeles, and to local stations in New York, San Francisco, and LA. Belinda sent a tape to Bonnie’s house in Beverly Hills and another to her uncle Daryl’s private secretary in Dallas. The polaroids we sent to newspapers in the three important cities, too. I sent a copy of the tape along with a polaroid shot to Lieutenant Connery in San Francisco, with the hasty note that I was sorry for all the inconvenience and I thought he was a nice man.
These things would arrive at their destinations within several hours. So there wasn’t much more we could do.
We got a bottle of Dom Perignon and went back to the MGM Grand. G.G. fell asleep before anybody could decide where to go, what to do next. He was suddenly sprawled out on the sofa and completely unconscious with the empty champagne glass still in his hand.
The next to go was Susan. One minute she was pacing back and forth with the phone in her hand, talking a print of Final Score into the right theater in Chicago. Next time I looked, she was sprawled out on the carpet with a pillow mashed under her face.
Blair got up, packed his things and told us all to stay as long as we wanted on his nickel. Nobody on the hotel staff had even seen us. Just relax. As for him, he had to be in a darkroom in New York with Eric Arlington right now!
I helped him pile his stuff in the hallway for the bellhop so that nobody need come into the room. Then he came to kiss Belinda good-bye.
“Where’s my hundred Gs,” Belinda said softly.
He stopped. “Where the hell’s my checkbook?”
“The hell with your checkbook, good-bye.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him.
“Love you, baby,” he said.
He took the film and left.
“Does that mean we don’t get the money?” I asked.
“We have the coats, don’t we?” she said. She scrunched down in the white mink and giggled. “And we’ve got the Dom Perignon, too. And I’ll betcha Marty’s making a fat deal for ‘Champagne Flight’ with cable television—‘The story continues uncensored ... blah, blah, blah.’”
“You really think so?”
She nodded. “Just wait and see.” But then her face went dark. A shadow fell over her soul.
“Come here,” I said.
We got up together, taking the champagne and glasses with us, and crept into the bedroom and locked the door.
I closed the heavy draperies till there was only a little sunlight coming through. Everything pure and quiet here. Not a sound from the streets below. Belinda put the champagne on the night table. Then she let the white mink coat drop to the floor.
“No, spread it out on the bed,” I said softly. I laid mine out beside it. The bed was completely covered.
Then we took off our clothes and laid down on the white mink.
I kissed her slowly, opening her lips, and then I felt her hips against me, and the white fur of the coat was stroking me and so were her fingers, and I could feel her hair all over my arm. Her mouth opened, became hard and soft at the same time.
I kissed her breasts and pressed my face into them and rubbed my rough unshaven beard against them, and I felt her move closer under me, arching her back and pushing against me, her little nest of nether hair prickling and moist against my leg, and then I went in.
I don’t think we had ever made love this fast, the heat rising to combustion this quickly, not even the very first time. I felt her rocking under me and then I was coming, and I thought, This is Belinda, and when it was done, I lay there entwined with her, her cheek against my chest, her hair flowing down her naked back, and high above the noise and bustle of Reno in this warm silent room we slept.
It was late afternoon when Susan knocked on the door. Time to blow this town. They were showing the videotapes of the wedding on TV.
All I had to wear was the dinner jacket and rumpled boiled shirt, so I put all that on again and came out into the living room of the suite. Belinda came after me, hastily dressed in jeans and sweater and looking as beautiful as any tousled bride ought to look.
G.G. was on the phone to Alex, but he hung up when we came in. Susan told us her daddy’s jet was ready to take us to Texas. And Susan said that was absolutely the safest place to go. We could wait out the storm there and nobody, absolutely nobody, was going to hassle us on the Jeremiah ranch.
But I could see by Belinda’s face that this was not what she wanted to do. She was biting at one of her fingernails, and I saw the shadow again. I saw the worry.
“Running again? All the way to Texas? Susan, you’re trying to cast a movie in Los Angeles. You’re trying to get a distributor for Final Score. And we’re going to hold up in Texas? What for?”
“The marriage is legal,” I said. “And everybody knows about it by this time. Plus there was no warrant out for me when I split, you know. There’s no question of aiding and abetting.”
“It would be kind of interesting,” Belinda said, “to see what they’d do.”
“We can go to LA,” G.G. said. “Alex is ready for us. He says he’s got your regular room ready for you and Belinda, Jeremy. You know Alex. He’ll let the cops and the reporters in and serve them Brie on crackers and Pinot Chardonnay. He says we can stay in Beverly Hills forever if we want.”
“Either way you want to play it,” Susan said. “We got a Lear jet waiting for us. And I got plenty of work in LA to do.”
Belinda was looking at me. “Where do you want to go, Jeremy?” she asked. Her voice was fragile and scared again. “Where do you want us to be, Jeremy?” she asked.
It hurt me, the expression in her eyes.
“Honey, it doesn’t make any difference,” I said. “If I can buy some canvas and some Windsor and Newton oils, if I can settle into a place to do some work, I don’t care if we’re in Rio de Janeiro or on a Greek island or a satellite out in space.”
“Way to go, Walker!” Susan said. “Let’s high out of here for LA.”
I FELL into a half-sleep when we were way up there in the clouds. I was sitting back in a big leather recliner, and the champagne was working on me, and in a half-dream I was thinking of paintings. They were developing in my mind like pictures in a darkroom. Scenes from my entire life.
Belinda was telling G.G. in a soft voice about being in Rome again and how lonely it had been but that working at Cinecittá had been OK. She had a nice room in Florence just a block from the Uffizi, and she’d gone there just about every day. On the Ponte Vecchio when she saw all the glove stores she thought of him and how he’d bought her her first pair of white gloves there when she was four years old.
Then G.G. was assuring her it didn’t matter about his New York business closing. He could have stayed, fought it out, probably won. He never would know how the rumors started. Maybe it was not Marty, but Marty’s men. But now he and Alex “had something,” something that wa
s better than it had been with Ollie, and maybe G.G. would set up shop on Rodeo Drive.
“You know, I’m forty years old, Belinda,” he said. “I can’t be somebody’s little boy forever. My luck should have run out before now. But I’ll tell you, it’s wonderful having one last go at it with Alex Clementine, with the guy I used to watch up there on the screen when I was twelve years old.”
“Good for you, Daddy,” she said.
It was a real possibility, a Beverly Hills G.G.’s, why not? He had really cashed out in New York, rumors or no rumors. If he sold the Fire Island house, he would have a small fortune. “Oh, but you know,” he laughed, “G.G. on Rodeo Drive would make Bonnie sooo mad.”
The clouds were just like a blanket outside the window. The late-afternoon sun hit them in a fan of burnt golden rays. The rays came through the window. They struck Belinda and G.G. together, their hair seeming to mingle as it became light.
I was half-dreaming. I saw my house in San Francisco like a ship cut adrift. Good-bye to all the toys, the dolls, the trains, the dollhouse, goodbye to all the roach and rat paintings, good-bye to the china and the silver and the grandfather clock and the letters, all the letters from all the little girls.
Awful to think that the little girls felt hurt. Awful to think they were disappointed in me. Please don’t let them feel a dark feeling of betrayal and unwholesomeness. Please let them come to see that the Belinda paintings were supposed to be about love and light.
I tried to think of something I wanted from home, something I would ache for later. And there was nothing at all. The Belinda paintings were going all over the world. Only four were not going to museums—they would go to the august Count Solosky, which was almost the same thing.
And nothing called to me from the house in San Francisco. Not even Andy’s wonderful sculpture, because I knew Dan would move it to the right place. Maybe Rhinegold would take it with him when he went back to West Fifty-seventh Street. Now that was a fine idea. I hadn’t even shown it to Rhinegold. What an inexcusably selfish thing.