Belinda Chapter 17

The house was still vibrating from his voice it seemed. I stood there holding

the brush. OK. One call. It had been almost three weeks.

I went in and called Clair Clarke. Break out the champagne. The deal was all

set with Rainbow Productions for the eight Angelica books to be made into two

feature animated films. They had agreed to all our terms. Movies to be

substantially based on the plot of the books, all character rights retained

by us. Contracts in a week.

"How's it coming by the way?" she asked.

"What's that?"

"The new book."

"Oh, I don't know about that, Clair. Let's celebrate this little turn of

events for a while, not rush things."

"Nothing's wrong."

"No! Everything's fine actually, better than ever." Over and out.

I went back to the attic and the six panels of number seven: Belinda in Brass

Bed.

Belinda, always seen through the bars, slept in a nightgown in the first. In

the second she had shifted position, nightgown pushed up. Third, nightgown

draped over her, breasts bare. Fourth, full nude. Fifth, close in on her

profile waist up. Six, very close full face turned to us, only framed by the

bars, asleep on the pillow.

My brush was moving as if my right hand had a mind of its own. I'd say, Do

it. My hand would do it.

Don't think about anything else.

Four o'clock in the morning. She was down in the kitchen again. I could hear

her faraway voice.

I went to the railing, the way I'd done that first time. I kept thinking of

the things Dan had said.

I could hear her laughing a little. Cheerful, intimate like before.

I made my way down slowly until I stood at the yule post at the bottom of the

stairs and I could see her through the kitchen door. She said something

quickly in the phone and then hung up.

"I woke you up again, didn't I?" she asked, as she came towards me.

"Don't tell him where you are," I said.

"Who?" A shadow falling over her face, her lip quivering slightly, look in

her eyes I've never seen before.

"The guy you were talking to, the oldest buddy in the world, the one in New

York. It was him, wasn't it?"

"Oh, yeah. I forgot I told you." Eyes dulling, distracted. If she is a liar,

she gets the Sarah Bernhardt award.

"Somebody could be looking, a private detective. He could question people.

They could tell."

"You're half asleep," she said. "You sound like a bear. Come on back

upstairs." She looked tired, as if her head hurt her, that kind of dullness

in her eyes.

"You didn't tell him the address, did you?"

"You're getting excited over nothing," she whispered. "He's my buddy, he'd

never tell what I told him."

"Just stay away from the street kids, will you? Don't see them anymore or

call them, OK?"

She didn't look at me. She was tugging, trying to get me to go back up the

steps.

"I don't want to lose you," I said. I took her face in my hands and kissed

her very slowly.

She closed her eyes, letting me kiss her, opening her mouth, her body

becoming limp in my arms.

"Don't be afraid," she said in the softest whisper, her eyebrows knitted.

"Don't be guilty and don't be afraid."

On August 15 I was out of stretched canvas. I took out the bucket of flat

white paint and went over the two I had started for the Angelica book.

Odd to see those images covered up by the thick white coat, to see Angelica

disappearing. I had to stop, stare at the whole process for a moment.

Angelica through a veil of white. Good-bye, my darling. Inventory of what has

been done.

One, two, and three, The Carousel Horse Trio.' Belinda in nightgown on the

horse; Belinda nude on the horse; Belinda with punk hair and makeup nude on

the horse.

Four, Belinda with Dollhouse. Five, Belinda in Riding Clothes. Six, Holy

Communion. Seven, Belinda in Brass Bed. Eight, Belinda with Dolls.

Nine, Artist and Model-small canvas, not good, work in progress. Artist can

not paint himself nude. Doesn't turn him on even minimally. Love scene is a

fake, besides, because artist could not do it with camera clicking away.

Belinda could.

("I don't understand your hang-ups about sex, just sex, you know. I wish I

could make it go away, that I could kiss you the way the Prince kisses

Sleeping Beauty and you would open your eyes and feel no more pain.")

Ten, Belinda Dancing-another small canvas, of her naked, hair in braids,

beads around her neck, whirling on the kitchen floor to rock music. Bratlet.

Very very good!

I'd continued painting in the titles themselves so that they were part of the

work. And now I was going back and putting in the numbers. The continuity

would be inseparable from the parts.

The miracle here wasn't merely the speed. I'd had bursts like this before,

right after I was first published, when I created so many books that I became

my own industry.

No, it was a deepening of the style. The pictures were cleaner, harsher, and

utterly free of the Jeremy Walker clichés that had encrusted everything

before this. The automatic cobwebs, the inevitable dirt, the expected decay

was not there.

Yet never had I painted anything as dark and frightening as these pictures of

her. She burned like an apparition amid solid objects. Pure fire exploding

suddenly in the claustrophobic gloom. She reproached the onlooker with her

frankness, her cleanness, that was it. In the First Communion veil, she

announced: This is the sacrament, this is clean; you don't like it, it's your

problem. All of these pictures, really, said this.

But what is the next step? I kept staring at Belinda Dancing. Braids and

beads. Bratlet, almost woman, except the braids pushed it in the other

direction-

I had half a mind to call up Andy Blatky, say: Look, come over here and look

at these damned pictures. Didn't.

But about an hour later I made another decision. Quit for the day and maybe

plan to go ahead and do a book party somewhere out there, accept an offer for

a signing. Yes, it was time to do that. Called Jody in New York.

"If they still want me at Splendor in the Grass in Berkeley, I'll do it." She

was delighted, would set up a date. We were still number seven on The New

York Times list.

"You know, if you went on tour right now, Jeremy, we could broaden that base

-"

"Start with Splendor in the Grass, I'm pretty busy. And I'll take the limo,

it's just so much easier-"

"Star treatment all the way."

I wasn't off the phone five minutes when Dan called from L.A. I almost didn't

pick up. But Belinda was out, had been since morning. And he was uttering his

usual threats into the answering machine. I picked up the receiver.

"Look," I said, "knock it off. I told you I don't want to play it this way. I

want to wait until she tells me herself-"

"Do you want to know what I found out or not?"

"OK, what?" I said.

"This whole deal is getting weirder still. This guy Sampson honestly doesn't

know who she is. He thinks the studio execs who sent him on this goose chase

are wacko, but the order has come from the very top at United Theatricals.

Find her and on the qt, no expense should be spared."

United Theatricals, a monster establishment. Old as Tinseltown. They'd done

three of the movies made from my mother's books. They did TV shows, released

foreign films, they did everything.

I'd been on the lots years ago with Alex, seen the famous Big City Street, a

set where they had shot a thousand New York scenes that I had thought were

done on location. And there was the tank where they did the boat scenes

against an endless blue sky.

"I'm trying to get the name of the top brass involved," Dan was saying. "But

even drunk this guy doesn't budge. The studio sends the check. He might not

even know who he's working for. It's crazy as hell."

"Jeremiah, does she work for United Theatricals!" I said. "Somewhere,

something I read."

"Yeah, but so do thousands of other people, and she isn't top brass, she's

the Monday-night movie right now, she's nothing. And besides, Sampson doesn't

know who she is, I ran that by him, on the sly, sort of. He never heard of

her. And I can't get to her because she's off shooting the Monday-night movie

in Europe. As for Sampson, he doesn't seem to have a clue as to where Belinda

is."

"How do you know that?"

"He's headed for New York with more pix next Friday, then down to Miami, if

you can believe it, Miami, and then up to Frisco again. He's canvassing LA

too, that much I can tell you, but he is real sly about LA. I mean he says

it's real hush hush down here. And he does not know why. I mean you don't

hear of him going up to kids on Sunset. He says LA is a special aspect of the

case."

"Meaning what, for God's sakes?"

"You want my guess? Her family's here. What else could it be?"

"But do they want to find her or don't they! I mean what is this?"

"Good question. Because I can assure you the LAPD knows nothing about a

runaway fitting that description."

"Makes no sense."

"Well, you don't either if you want my opinion."

"Look, Dan, I'm sorry about acting this way. I just... I'm fucking confused

if you want to know."

"Look, I'll be here at the Beverly Wilshire for the next few weeks. I'll call

again when I have something. But take my advice, will you, and get out of

this, before we figure it out?"

She came home later that afternoon. Lots of packages. I was sitting at the

kitchen table, kind of comatose. I'd been thinking about those videotapes in

her room. She'd never played them as far as I could figure. Never. The VCRs

went night and day with rental tapes. Those unmarked tapes were hidden behind

her sweaters. I knew because I had just checked. "I spent scads," she shouted

on her way up the stairs.

"I hope so," I said. And did I put the sweaters back properly? A few minutes

later she was back: "Like this?"

Oh, yes. Huge swallowing black wool sweater and little skirt, very dramatic.

High black boots disappearing under the hem. Barrette clasping her hair on

top of her head so it flowed down behind her ears to her shoulders. Corn silk

on the black wool. A starlet. United Theatricals.

"You don't have a wet paintbrush in your hand, you realize that?" she asked.

I nodded. Belinda Dancing. It was different from all the others, like the

punk carousel nude. Just not part-

"Let's go have coffee," she said. "Come on."

I shrugged. Sure. Would like that. My hand was cramped a little from painting

in those numbers up there, whiting out those canvases. I was feeling light,

crazy. Too many nights of no more than five hours sleep.

She stood in front of the hall mirror. She was putting on pearl earrings. Now

she reached into her purse, drew out a long silver wand, uncapped it, rolled

it under her eyelashes.

Ladylike, beautiful. Was she a starlet? Did they want her for the part of her

life?

I slipped on my jacket and went into my office and got the camera. I snapped

her there by the mirror.

"I want to take this with us, OK?"

She glanced at me. "Oh, yeah, sure," she said. "Something without the kiddie

things, you mean? Yeah, right on."

Yeah, right on. So immediate, thoughtless. Yet my heart was pounding.

We went down to the Café Flore on Market and Noe, and I photographed her at

one of the marble top tables with a cup of coffee. She had one of her Black

Russians between her uplifted fingers. Nothing affected. Quite natural. Quite

charming.

People were watching us of course. A couple of writer friends were in there,

good buddies, but a real nuisance. I didn't introduce her. They kept making

wisecracks to get her attention, making real fools of themselves. She was

civil enough, too civil. They finally gave up and split. I finished the roll.

"Do I take my clothes off now?" she whispered.

"Shut up." I said.

Of course, number eleven-Belinda in Cafe Flore did not have any clothes on.

Except for the high black boots. They matched the black cigarette.

I got that same fantastical, undeniable rush of energy when I started the

canvas. By midnight that night I knew it was the next step.

"Want to hear something funny?" I asked when she came up to the attic.

"Sure, tell me."

I gestured to the picture:

"This is the first time in twenty-five years that I have painted anything

that even faintly resembled a grown woman."
[17]

Splendor in the Grass was one of those dream bookstores for kids, full of

posters of white unicorns, and giant stuffed animals on which the toddlers

can play, and little tables and chairs for reading, and every book that could

conceivably be of interest to boys and girls from babyhood to twenty.

The limousine pulled up at three in the afternoon on the last Friday in

August.

The crowd would have been, under normal circumstances, absolutely terrific

for the ego. At least a hundred and fifty parents and children crammed into

the four connecting rooms of the store, which had once been the lower floor

of a private house and still retained fireplaces, wainscoting, window seats.

I sat down in the easy chair by the log fire in the first room and for an

hour straight just signed, and answered the quick, simple questions.

Berkeley children are in general brilliant children. Their parents teach at

the university, or they go there to study. Or they are merely the kind of

people who live in a world-famous radical community-people who prefer big old

gracious houses to new tract homes, and well-trafficked tree-lined streets to

the more remote and protected mountain roads of the suburbs of California's

Contra Costa County.

The kids asked wonderful things about the pictures in the books as well as

the stories. They had intelligent complaints about the Saturday morning

Charlotte show; they were suspicious of the up-and-coming animated movie.

Their bohemian parents, well scrubbed, in wash pants and sandals with babies

in back carriers, talked easily of Jung, and my little girls being my

feminine soul, and the "allegory" they found so delightful.

But it has gone on too long, my soul wandering through these dark rooms. It

has become a pattern that is a dark room in itself

"Sometimes, you know, I feel it has to come to an end," I heard myself say

aloud. "The old houses in the books have to fall down, and I have to stop

repeating this quest for freedom. I have to be outside at last."

Nods, patter, an attentive circle of the parents forming if I showed the

slightest tendency to hold forth.

"And what is outside?" Question from an art student, red hair, granny

glasses, jeans.

I thought for a moment.

"Contemporary life itself," I said. "Life, just life!" My voice was low, I

could hardly hear it.

"But you can be an artist all your life celebrating a particular step in

human development."

"True, very true, and that is what's here, of course. But it's not enough

anymore."

Questions pulling it this way and that.

But I knew now why I had wanted to do this party. I was saying farewell to

these kids. I was saying farewell to their proverbial shiny faces and their

unbounded trust and their innocent uncensored enthusiasm, farewell to their

parents who had read my works to them.

"-love the way you paint the hands, such detail to the hands."

"-and the way Angelica's shadow changes its size with each step up the stairs

to her father's attic."

"-Balthus, no, much more florid than Balthus, don't you think? But you must

have some response to his work-"

"Of course, of course." More coffee, thank you.

I have used you all these years as I hid behind my mask. And yes, this is

farewell. But what if now I am simply not good enough to make it as a

painter? Fear. But, above all, that thumping exhilaration. Go home, work. And

then looking at these kids I felt sadness. What if they were hurt by the

Belinda pictures? What if they felt betrayed? What if it made a darkness

inside them that someone they trusted had turned out to be bad and dirty? Did

I have the right to do that?

"Well, your work has always been erotic." Erotic, erotic, erotic.

Just the right dirt in the right measure.

Oh, it was so important that the world, whatever the world was, understand

what I did when I did it. But this was farewell to all the little girls to

whom I had said the right thing for so long, the little girls that I had

never never indecently touched or kissed or frightened.

Yeah, I'd come here to say good-bye, and I was frightened. Yet I felt better

than I ever had in my life.

She didn't get home till later that evening-she'd had so much fun out there

at the Marin stables. The trails took you high up into the green hills. But

she looked anxious, tired. She sat at the kitchen table braiding her hair,

fingers moving nervously as she did and redid the tight plaits.

Could we go to Carmel again, she asked me? Could we put even the wet

paintings into the rack in the van and go to Carmel, just run run run away

from here?

"Sure, baby darling," I said. That was what the rack in the van was for. Long

ago I'd rigged it to move the work in progress. But she had to help me get

the Cafe Flore canvas downstairs without a smudge.

She seemed calmer as we drove out of the city. She was resting against my

shoulder, her fingers curled around my arm.

After we'd been on the highway for a while, I asked:

"What's wrong, Belinda?"

"Nothing," she said in a low voice, her eyes on the road in front of us. Then

after a while she said, "Nobody knows about the Carmel house, right?"

"Nobody."

"Not even your lawyers and accountants and those people?"

"I call my accountant and I tell him the amount of the property tax and he

deducts it. I bought the house years and years ago. But why are you asking me

all this? What's the matter?"

"Nothing." Dull, listless tone. "Just romantic, you know, that it's so

secret. No phone, no mailbox."

She had laughed when I first told her that people in Carmel didn't have

street numbers, that you went to the post office every day, if you wanted to,

to get your mail. I had never collected anything at the post office that I

could remember.

"Yeah, it's a hideaway," I said. "Yours and mine."

I felt her fingers tighten on my arm. Her lips brushed my cheek.

Did I ever think of maybe going back down to New Orleans, to my mother's old

place, she asked.

I explained I really didn't want to do that, hadn't seen that house since

1966. Be a shock just to walk into it. It would be so far away, she said.

"Who are we running from, Belinda?" I asked her. I tried to make it sound

gentle.

"No one," she said, so softly it was like a sigh.

"Then we're not in danger of somebody just-"

"I wouldn't let anything like that happen," she said. Touch of annoyance, but

with whom?

Then she was quiet, sleeping for a while against my shoulder. The heavy

engine of the van made a dull roaring silence, the landscape barely visible

in the darkness beyond the endless road.

"Jeremy," she said suddenly in an eerie dream voice, her body tensing, "I

love you, you know that, don't you?"

"But something's wrong, isn't it?" I asked. "Something happened." And what

was I thinking? You keep your secrets from her and she's not supposed to keep

hers from you? But your secrets come from her secrets. If she would only

explain it all.

"Don't worry," she said in a whisper.

"But you're afraid of something. I can feel it."

"No, you don't understand," she said. Was there a catch in her voice or was

it my imagination?

"Can't you trust me enough to tell me? I'm not breaking the rules, am I, just

to ask why you're afraid?"

"It isn't fear," she said, and she was almost crying. "It's just sometimes...

sometimes I feel really really sad."

She was in wonderful spirits the next morning. All that week we made the

local concerts, movies, plays in the evening. We dined at the little

candlelight restaurants, walked on the clean white Carmel beach each morning

at sunup. The house smelled of the wood fire that was always going on the

hearth.

We did a lot of talking, too.

I told her all about the New Orleans house when she asked me, how I'd kept it

like a museum or something, more out of paralysis than anything else. My

wives had never seen it, neither had my friends, except my good friend, the

actor Alex Clementine, who had known my mother all those long years ago.

And I almost told her the old secret, about the books I'd written under

Mother's name.

But when it came to the crunch, I didn't, just didn't. Alex had certainly

been right about all that.

She said that the New Orleans house would be a wonderful place to hide.

"Someday," I said.

The Cafe Flore painting was done by the time we went back north.