Belinda

Anne Rice

Writing As Anne Rampling

1986

Spell-checked. A few short corrupt passages.

Anne Rampling's Exit to Eden was hailed as a literary odyssey into a world of

forbidden lust...the same kind of skillful writing that brought

respectability to the works of Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and D.H. Lawrence..."

(UPI). The Vampire Lestat, written under her real name, Anne Rice, was on The

New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks. Now, here is a stunning new

work from this remarkable best-selling novelist. A contemporary Lolita,

Belinda is the sensual story of a postmodern nymphet and her provocative

relationship with her considerably older lover.

Jeremy Walker is 44, handsome, refined, and world famous for his lavishly

illustrated children's books. He would seem to have it all when he is

suddenly seduced by a beautiful and precocious sixteen-year-old runaway named

Belinda. Innocent as the little girls he paints, yet passionate as any woman

he has ever known, Belinda becomes his elegant muse and lover. Turning away

from the children's art that has made him rich, Jeremy begins to fill his

studio with nude portraits of Belinda. Shocking and erotic, they are without

question the finest work he has ever done-yet to reveal them would destroy

his career forever. As he considers this risk, Jeremy is obsessed with the

mystery she refuses to reveal. Terrified of losing with her silence as he

finds himself in Belinda's world

THIS NOVEL IS DEDICATED TO ME.
Bend down, bend down.
Excess is the only ease, so bend.
The sun is in the tree.
Put your mouth on mine.
Bend down beam & slash, for
Dread is dreamed-up-scenes of what comes after death.
Is being fled from what bends down in pain.
The elbow bends in the brain, lifts the cup.
The worst is yet to dream you up, so bend down the intrigue you dreamed.
Flee the hayneedle in the brain's tree.
Excess allures by leaps.
Stars burn clean.
Oriole bitches and gleams.
Dread is the fear of being less forever.
So bend. Bend down and kiss what you see.

-"Excess Is Ease", Stan Rice
I. THE WORLD OF JEREMY WALKER

"Who was she?" That was the first thought that came into my mind when I saw

her in the bookstore. Jody, the publicist, pointed her out. "Catch your

devoted fan over there," she said. "Goldilocks."

Goldilocks, yes, she had hair like that, absolutely right, down to her

shoulders. But who was she really?

Photographing her, painting her. Reaching under her short little Catholic

school plaid skirt and touching the silk of her naked thighs, yes, I thought

of all that, too, I have to admit it. I thought of kissing her, seeing if her

face was as soft as it looked-babyflesh.

Yes, it was there from the start, especially once she gave me the age-old

inviting smile and her eyes became for a moment a woman's eyes.

Fifteen, maybe sixteen-she was no older than that. Scuffed oxfords, shoulder

bag, white socks pulled up over the calves-a private-school kid who had maybe

drifted into the line outside the bookstore just to see what was happening.

But there was something strange about her that made me think she was

"somebody." I don't mean her poise, the cool manner in which she stood with

arms folded just watching all the goings on at the book party. Kids these

days inherit that poise. It's their enemy, the way ignorance was the enemy of

my generation.

It was a high gloss she had, almost a Hollywood look in spite of the rumpled

Peter Pan blouse and the cardigan tied loosely around her shoulders. Her skin

was too evenly tanned all over (consider the silky thighs, the skirt was so

short), and her hair, though long and loose, was almost platinum. Careful

lipstick, could have been done with a brush. All this made the school clothes

look like a costume. And a very well chosen one.

She might have been a child actress, of course, or a model-I had photographed

a lot of those-young things who will market the teenage look till they're

twenty-five, even thirty. She was certainly pretty enough. And the mouth was

full, but small, puckered, real babymouth. She had the look all right. My

God, she was lovely.

But that didn't seem the right explanation either. And she was too old to be

one of the little girls who read my books, the ones crowded around me now

with their mothers. Yet she wasn't old enough to be one of the faithful

adults who still bought every new work with slightly embarrassed apologies.

No, she didn't quite fit here. And in the soft electric daylight of the

crowded store she suggested an imaginary being, an hallucination.

Something prophetic in that, though she was very real, more real perhaps than

I ever was.

I forced myself not to stare at her. I had to keep the pen going as the

copies of Looking For Bettina were put into my hand, see the little upturned

faces.

"To Rosalind, of the lovely name," and "For Brenda, of the beautiful braids,"

or "To pretty Dorothy, with special best wishes."

"Do you really write the words to the stories, too?" Yes, I do.

"Will you do more Bettina books?" I'll try to. But this is number seven.

Isn't it enough, perhaps? What do you think?

"Is Bettina a real little girl?" Real to me, what about you?

"Do you do all the cartoons yourself for the Saturday morning Charlotte

show?" No, the TV people do all that. But they have to make them look like my

drawings.

The line went all the way out the door and down the block, they said, and it

was so hot for San Francisco. When San Francisco gets hot, no one is prepared

for it. I glanced back to see if she was still there. Yes, she was. And she

smiled again in that same calm secretive way, no mistaking it.

But, come on, Jeremy, pay attention to what, you're doing, don't disappoint

anybody. Smile for each one. Listen.

Two more college kids appeared-oil paint on the sweatshirts and jeans-and

they had the big coffee-table book left over from Christmas, The World of

Jeremy Walker.

Confusion every time I saw that pretentious package, but oh, what it had

meant, the grand imprimatur after all these years, the text full of lofty

comparisons to Rousseau and Dali and even Monet, with pages of dizzying

analysis.

Walker's work has from its very beginnings transcended illustration. Although

his little girl protagonists at first glance suggest the saccharine sweetness

of Kate Greenaway, the complex settings in which they find themselves are as

original as they are disturbing.

Hate to have someone pay fifty dollars for a book, seems obscene.

"Knew you were an artist when I was four years old... cut out your pages and

framed them and put them on the walls-" Thank you.

"-worth every penny. Saw your work in New York at the Rhinegold Gallery."

Yes, Rhinegold's always been good to me, showing me when people said I was

just a kid's author. Good old Rhinegold.

"-when the Museum of Modern Art will finally admit-" You know the old joke.

When I'm dead. (Don't mention the work in the Pompidou Center in Paris. That

would be too arrogant.)

"-I mean, the trash they call serious! Have you seen-?" Yes, trash, you said

it.

Don't let them go away feeling I wasn't what they expected, that I hadn't

listened when they murmured about "veiled sensuality" and "light and shadow."

This is an ego-booster all right. Every book signing is. But it's also

purgatory.

Another young mother with two battered copies of the old editions. Sometimes

I wound up signing more of those old books than the new one from the stacks

on the front tables.

Of course, I took all these people home with me in my head, took them with me

into the studio when I lifted the brush. They were there like the walls were

there. I loved them. But to meet them face to face was always excruciating.

Rather read the letters that came from New York in two packets every week,

rather tap out the answers carefully in solitude.

Dear Ginny,

Yes, all the toys in the pictures in Bettina's House are in my house, it's

true. And the dolls I draw are antiques, but the old Lionel trains can be

found in many places still. Perhaps your mother can help you to find, etc...

"-couldn't go to sleep at night unless she was reading Bettina to me-" Thank

you. Yes, thank you. You don't know what it means to hear you say it.

Yes, the heat was getting unbearable in here. Jody, the pretty publicist from

New York Whispered in my ear: "Just two more books and they're sold out."

"You mean I can get drunk now?"

Scolding laugh. And a little black-haired girl on my right, staring up at me

with the most blank expression-could have been horror or nothing. Squeeze of

Jody's hand on my arm.

"That was just a joke, honey. Did I sign your book?"

"Jeremy Walker doesn't drink," said the nearby mother with an ironic but

good-natured laugh. Laughter all around.

"Sold out!" The clerk had both arms up, turning right to left. "Sold OUT!"

"Let's go!" said Jody, squeeze on the arm tightening. Lips to my ear: "That

was, for your information, one thousand copies."

One of the other clerks was saying he could send around the corner to

Doubleday for more, somebody was already calling.

I turned around. Where was she, my Goldilocks? The store was emptying.

"Tall them not to do that, not to borrow the books. I can't sign any more-"

Goldilocks was gone. And I had not even seen her move out of the corner of my

eye. I was scanning everywhere, looking for a patch of plaid in the crowd,

the corn silk hair. Nothing.

Jody was tactfully telling the clerks that we were late already for the

publishers' party at the Saint Francis. (It was the big American Booksellers

Association party for the publishing house.) We couldn't be late for it.

"Party, I forgot about the party," I said. I wanted to loosen my tie but

didn't. Before each book came out, I swore to myself I'd do the signings in a

sweater and a shirt open at the neck, and everybody would like me just as

much, but I never could bring myself to do it. So now I was trapped in my

tweed coat and flannel pants in the middle of a heat wave.

"It's the party where you can get drunk!" Jody whispered pushing me towards

the door. "What are you complaining about?"

I shut my eyes for a split second, tried to see Goldilocks just as she'd

been-arms folded, leaning against the table of books. Had she been chewing

gum? Her lips had been so pink, pink as candy. "Do you have to do this

party?"

"Look, there'll be lots of other authors there-"

That meant Alex Clementine, this season's movie-star author (and my very good

friend), and Ursula Hall, the cookbook lady, and Evan Dandrich, the spy

novelist-in sum, the megasellers. The respectable little authors and short

story writers would be nowhere in sight.

"You can just coast."

"Like coast home, for instance?"

It was worse outside, the smell of the big city rising from the sidewalks,

the way it never does in San Francisco, and just a stale wind gusting between

the buildings.

"You could do it in your sleep," Jody said. "Same old reporters, same old

columnists-"

"Then why do it at all?" I asked. But I knew the answer.

Jody and I had worked together for ten years on this kind of thing. We'd gone

from the early days, when nobody much wanted to interview a children's book

author and promotion was just a signing or two in a kiddy's bookstore, to the

madness of late, when each book brought demands for guest spots on television

and radio, chatter about the animated movies in the works, the long

intellectual write-ups in the news mags, and the endlessly repeated question:

How does it feel to have children's books on the adult best-seller list?

Jody had always worked hard, first to get me publicity and now to protect me

from it. Wasn't fair to back out if she wanted me to do this party.

We were crossing Union Square, weaving through the usual scatter of tourists

and derelicts, the pavements filthy, the sky a colorless glare overhead.

"You don't even have to talk," she said. "Just smile and let them eat the

food and drink the booze. You go sit on a sofa. You've got ink all over your

fingers. Ever hear of ballpoint pens?"

"My dear, you're talking to an artist."

Sad panicky feeling when I thought of Goldilocks again. If I could go home

now, I might be able to paint her, get her sketched at least before the

details melted in the dazzle. Something about her nose, little upturned nose,

and the way the mouth was full but small. Probably be that way all her life,

and she'd hate it soon enough because she wanted to look like a full-grown

woman.

But who was she? The question again, as if there ought to be a very specific

answer. Maybe an allure that strong always creates a feeling of recognition.

Some one I ought to know, have known, dreamt up, been in love with forever.

"I'm so tired," I said. "It's this damned heat. I didn't expect to be so

tired." And the truth was, I was drained, smiled out, eager to just shut the

door on everything.

"Look, let the others have the limelight. You know Alex Clementine. He'll

keep them mesmerized."

Yes, good to have Alex aboard. And everybody said his Tinseltown life story

was terrific. If only I could get away with Alex, hit some corner bar and

breathe easy. But Alex did love this kind of thing. "Maybe I'd get a second

wind."

A flock of pigeons broke for us as we headed toward Powell Street. A man on

crutches wanted "spare change." A wraith of a woman in a preposterous silver

helmet with Mercury wings attached to it crooned a frightening song through a

homemade amplifier. I looked up at the charcoal gray facade of the hotel, the

old building stolid and grim, the towers rising cleanly behind it.

Some old Hollywood tale of Alex Clementine's came back, something about the

silent film star Fatty Arbuckle accidentally injuring a young girl in this

hotel, a bedroom scandal that wrecked his career, all before our time. Alex

was probably telling that story now upstairs. Wouldn't miss that opportunity

surely.

A jam-packed cable car clanked at the taxis that barred its way. We darted in

front of it.

"Jeremy, you know you can lie down for a few minutes, prop up your feet, shut

your eyes, then I'll get you some coffee. I mean there's a bedroom up there,

it's the presidential suite."

"So I get to sleep in the president's bed." I smiled. "I think I'll take you

up on that."

Would like to have gotten the way her "goldilocks" came down to her shoulders

in a triangle of ripples. I think she had some of it tied back, but it was so

heavy and thick. Bet she thought it was too curly and that's what she would

have said if I had said how beautiful. But that was the surface. What about

the tempest in my heart when I saw the look in her eye? Empty faces to the

right and to the left, but there had been somebody home there is those eyes-

how to get that.

"-a good presidential nap and then you'll be fine for dinner."

"Dinner, you didn't tell me about dinner!" My shoulder ached. So did my hand.

One thousand books. But I was lying. I had been told about dinner. I had been

warned about everything.

The lobby of the Saint Francis swallowed us in a golden gloom, the inevitable

noise of the crowd interwoven with the faint strains of an orchestra. Massive

granite columns soaring to gilded Corinthian capitals. Sounds of china and

silver. Smell of an ice box full of expensive flowers. Everything, even the

patterns in the carpet, seemed to be moving.

"Don't do this to me," Jody was saying. "I'll tell everybody you're beat,

I'll do the talking-"

"Yes, you say it all, whatever it is-"

And what is there to say anymore? How many weeks has the book been on The New

York Times best-sellers list? Was it true I had an attic full of paintings

nobody had ever seen? Would there be a museum show any time soon? What about

the two works in the Pompidou Center? Did the French appreciate me more than

the Americans? And talk about the coffee-table book, of course, and the gulf

that divided it from the Saturday morning Charlotte show and the animated

films that might be made by Disney. And of course the question that irritated

me the most: What was new or different about the latest Looking For Bettina?

Nothing. That's the trouble. Absolutely nothing.

The dread in me was building. You cannot say the same things five hundred

times without becoming a windup toy. Your face goes dead, so does your voice,

and they know it. And they take it personally. And lately careless statements

had been coming out of my mouth. I had almost snapped at an interviewer last

week that I didn't give a goddamn about the Saturday morning Charlotte show,

why the hell would I be embarrassed by it?

Well, fourteen million little kids nationwide watch that show, and

Charlotte's my creation. What was I talking about?

"Oh, don't look now," Jody said, "but there's your devoted fan-"

"Who?"

"Goldilocks. Waiting for you right by the elevators. I'll get rid of her."

"No, don't!"

There she was again all right, leaning against the wall as casually as she

had against the book table. Only this time she had one of my books under her

arm and a little cigarette in the other hand, and she took a quick drag off

the cigarette in a rather casual way that made her look like a street kid.

"Goddamn, she stole that book, I know she did," Jody said. "She was hanging

around all afternoon and she never bought anything."

"Drop it," I said under my breath. "We are not the San Francisco police."

She'd crushed out the cigarette in the sand of the ashtray and she was coming

toward us. She had Bettina's House in her hand, a new copy but an old book.

I'd written it probably around the time she was born. Didn't want to think

about that. I pushed the elevator button. "Hello, Mr. Walker."

"Hello, Goldilocks."

A low voice, that made me think of caramel or melted chocolate, something

delicious like that, almost a woman's voice coming out of her little girl

mouth. I could scarcely stand it.

She drew a pen out of her leather mail pouch bag.

"I had to get this at another store," she said. Unbelievable blue eyes. "They

sold out at the party before I realized it."

You see, she's not a thief. I took it out of her hands, took the pen. I tried

to place the voice geographically, but I couldn't. Words almost British crisp

but it wasn't a British accent.

"What's your name, Goldilocks? Or may I just write Goldilocks?" There were

freckles on her nose, and a touch of gray mascara on her blond lashes. Skill

again. Lipstick bubblegum pink and perfect on her poochy little mouth. And

what a smile. Am I still breathing?

"Belinda," she said. "But you don't have to write anything. Just sign your

name. That will be plenty." Poise all right. Slow, even-spaced words for all

the clear articulation. And the steadiness of the gaze, amazing.

Yet she was so young. Just a baby up close, if there'd been any doubt at a

distance. I reached out and stroked her hair. Nothing illegal in that, is

there? It was thick, yes, but it gave under my touch as if it were full of

air.

She actually had dimples. Two little dimples. "That's very sweet of you, Mr.

Walker."

"Pleasure, Belinda."

"I heard them saying you'd be coming over here. I hope you don't mind..."

"Not at all, sweetheart. Want to go to the party?"

Had I said that?

Jody shot me an incredulous glance. She was holding the elevator door. "Sure,

Mr. Walker. If you really want me to-" Her eyes were dark blue, that was the

thing. They'd never look anything but blue. She glided past me into the glass

car. Small bones, very straight posture.

"Of course, I do," I said. The doors swished shut. "It's a press party, lots

of people will be there."

Very official, you see, I am not a child molester, and no one is going to

grab your beautiful hair in two handfuls. Streaks of yellow in it. It could

have been naturally that light. Then you wouldn't call it platinum. "I

thought you were all tuckered out," said Jody.

The elevator shot up soundlessly past the roof of the old building, and the

city spread out around us all the way to the bay, frightening in its clarity.

Union Square got smaller and smaller.

Belinda was looking up at me, and when I looked down, she smiled again and

the dimples came back just for a second.

She held the book close to her side with her left hand. And with her right

she fished another little cigarette out of her blouse pocket. Gauloises.

Crumpled blue pack there.

I reached for my lighter.

"No, watch this," she said, letting the cigarette hang on her lip. Out of the

pocket with the same hand she pulled a matchbook.

I knew this trick. But I didn't believe she was going to do it. With the one

hand she opened the book, freed a match, bent it back, closed the book, and

struck the match with her thumb. "See?" she said as she touched the flame to

the cigarette. "I just learned that."

I started laughing. Jody was staring at her, vaguely astonished. I just

couldn't stop laughing.

"Yes, that's very good," I said. "You did it perfectly."

"Are you old enough to smoke?" Jody asked. "I don't think she's old enough to

smoke."

"Give her a break," I said. "We're going to a party."

Belinda was still looking up at me and she dissolved into giggles without

making a sound. I stroked her hair again, touched the barrette that held it

in back. Big silver barrette. She had enough hair for at least two people. I

wanted to touch her cheek, touch the dimples.

She looked down, cigarette dangling from the lip again, reached into her

pouch and pulled out a big pair of sunglasses.

"I don't think she's old enough to smoke," said Jody again. "Besides, she

shouldn't smoke in the elevator."

"There's nobody but us in this elevator."

Belinda had the glasses on when the door opened.

"You're safe now," I said. "They'll never recognize you."

She gave me a little startled glance. Her mouth and cheeks looked even more

adorable under the big square rims. Skin so brand-new. I couldn't stand it.

"You can't be too careful," she said with a little smile.

Butter, that's what the voice was, warm butter, which I happen to like better

actually than caramel.

The suite was jammed and full of smoke. I could hear Alex Clementine's deep

movie-star voice rolling over the seamless chatter. Passed cookbook queen

Ursula Hall utterly mobbed. I took Belinda's arm and forced my way through to

the bar, acknowledging a few hellos here and there. I asked for a Scotch and

water, and she whispered that she wanted the same thing. I decided to chance

it.

Her cheeks looked so full and soft, I wanted to kiss them, kiss her candy

mouth.

Get her off in a corner, I thought, and keep her talking as you memorize

every detail of her so you can paint her later. Tell her that's what you're

doing, she will understand. There is absolutely nothing lecherous about just

wanting to paint her.

The fact was I could see her in the pages of a book already, and her name was

making strings of words in my head, something to do with an old poem by Ogden

Nash: "Belinda lived in a little white house..."

Flash of her thin gold bracelet as she pushed at the glasses. The lenses were

pink, and pale enough for me to see her eyes. Faint white fleece on her arm,

barely visible. She was looking around as if she didn't like it here, and she

was starting to get the inevitable glances. How could people not look at her?

She bowed her head as if she was really uncomfortable. For the first time I

noticed she had breasts under the white blouse, rather large ones. The collar

gaped a little and the tan went all the way down-Breasts on a baby like this,

imagine.

I took the two drinks. Best to move out of sight of the bartender before I

gave it to her. I wished now I'd ordered gin. No way did this look like a

soft drink.

Somebody touching my shoulder. Andy Fisher, columnist from the Oakland

Tribune, old friend. I was trying hard not to spill the two drinks.

"Just want to know one thing, one thing," he said. He gave Belinda the eye,

lost a beat. "Do you even like children?"

"Very funny, Andy." Belinda was headed away. I followed her.

"No, seriously, Jeremy, you've never told me that, do you actually like kids,

that's what I want to know-"

"Ask Jody, Andy. Jody knows everything."

I caught a sudden glimpse of Alex's profile through the crowd.

"On the twelfth floor of this very hotel," Alex was saying, "and she was a

real darling little girl, her name was Virginia Rappe, and, of course,

Arbuckle was famous for these drunken-" Where the hell was Belinda?

Alex turned, caught my eye, waved. I gave him a little salute. But I'd lost

Belinda.

"Mr. Walker!"

There she was. She was whispering to me from the entrance to a little

hallway. She seemed to be hiding in there. But somebody had my sleeve again,

a Hollywood columnist I rather loathed.

"What about the picture deal, Jeremy? This going to happen with Disney?"

"Seems like it, Barb," I said. "Ask Jody. She knows. Probably not Disney

though, probably Rainbow Productions."

"Saw that sweet little suck-up piece they did on you in the Bay Bulletin this

morning."

"I didn't."

Belinda turned her back to me, moved on, head down.

"Well, I heard the movie deal was dead in the water. They think you're too

difficult, trying to teach their artists how to draw."

"Wrong, Barb." Fuck you, Barb. "Besides, I don't give a damn what they do

with it."

"The conscientious artist."

"Of course, I am. The books are forever. They can have the movies."

"For the right price, I hear."

"And why not, I'd like to know. But why do you waste your time with this,

Barb? You can write your usual lies without hearing the truth from me first,

can't you?"

"Jeremy, I think you're a little too drunk to be at a publicity party."

"Not drunk at all, that's the problem." Just turn your back and she'll

disappear.

Belinda reached out, tugged on my arm. Thank you, darling. We moved down the

little hallway. There were two bathrooms there side by side, and the bedroom

with its own bath, which I could see through the open doorway. She was

looking at the bedroom. Then she looked up, her eyes dark and deceptively

grown-up behind the pink lenses. Could have been a woman then. Except that

the pink glasses went with the candy-pink mouth.

"Listen, I want you to believe what I'm going to say," I said. "I want you to

understand that I am perfectly sincere."

"About what?" Dimples. Her voice made me want to kiss her throat. "I want to

paint your picture," I said. "Just really paint your picture. I'd like you to

come to my house. Nothing more to it than that, honestly, I swear to you.

Lots of times I use models, all on the up and up. I call reputable agencies.

I'd like to paint you-"

"Why shouldn't I believe that?" she asked, almost laughing. I thought she

would start giggling again, the way she had in the elevator. "I know all

about you, Mr. Walker. I've read your books all my life."

She went into the open bedroom, short pleated skirt swinging tightly with her

hips, showing the naked thigh right above her knees.

I slipped in after her, backing away from her a little, just watching her.

Her hair was very long down her back.

The noise dropped off somewhat, and the air was cooler here. A wall of

mirrors made it seem impossibly enormous. She turned to me.

"May I have my Scotch now?" she asked.

"Sure you can."

She took a deep swallow and looked around again. Then she took off the

glasses and shoved them in her open bag and looked at me again. Her eyes

seemed to be swimming with light that came from the low lamps and the

reflections of the lamps in the mirrors.

The room seemed overdone to me, padded and draped, as it was, and stretching

on through the glass into infinity. Not a sharp edge anywhere. The light was

almost caressing. The hotel bed, covered in gold satin, resembled a great

altar. The sheets would be smooth and cool.

I scarcely noticed that she had put down her bag and put out the cigarette.

She took another swallow of the Scotch without even a wince. And she wasn't

faking it. Remarkable poise actually. I don't even think she knew I was

studying her.

And a sad realization drifted through my head, something to do with how young

she was, how good she looked in any light, how light didn't make the

slightest difference with her. And how old I was, and how all young people,

even plain young people, had begun to look beautiful to me.

I didn't know whether this was a gift or a curse. It just made me sad. I

didn't want to think about it. And I didn't want to stay in here with her. It

was too much.

"Will you come to the house then?" I asked.

She didn't answer.

She went to the door and closed it and turned the latch, and the noise of the

party simply evaporated. She stood against the door and took another swallow

of the drink. No smiles, no giggles. Just that adorable poochy little mouth

and the woman eyes above it and her breasts pushing against the cotton

blouse.

I felt my heart shut down rather abruptly. Then a painful warmth in my face,

and a change of gears from man to animal. I wondered if she had the slightest

idea what that shift was like, if any young girl could be expected to. I

thought of Arbuckle again. What had he done? Grabbed the doomed starlet

Virginia Rappe and shredded her clothes-something like that. Shredded his

career in something less than fifteen minutes probably-

Her face was so earnest, yet so innocent. Wetness on her lips from the

Scotch.

I said,

"Don't do this, honey."

"Don't you want to?" she asked.

My God. I had thought she'd pretend not to understand me.

"This just isn't very smart," I said.

"Why isn't it?" she asked. Nothing flippant, artificial.

I knew absolutely and positively I wasn't going to lay a hand on her.

Cigarette or no cigarette, Scotch or no Scotch, she was no street kid. The

doomed don't look like this, no, never. And I had only helped myself to those

sad lost little girls just a few times in my life, just a few times, when

desire and opportunity collided with more heat than I'd expected. The shame

never went away. The shame of this would be unbearable.

"Come on, honey, open the door," I said.

She didn't do anything. I couldn't imagine what was going through her mind.

Mine was sort of letting me down. I was looking at her breasts again, at her

socks so tight on her legs. I wanted to peel them off. Strip them off, I

think the word is, actually. Forget about Fatty Arbuckle. This isn't murder,

it's just sex. And she's what, sixteen? No, just another part of the criminal

code, that's all.

She put her drink down on the table. And she came towards me slowly. She

lifted her arms and put them around my neck, and the soft babycheek was

against my face, her breasts against my chest, her candy mouth opening.

"Oh, Goldilocks," I said.

"Belinda," she whispered.

"Hmmmmm... Belinda." I kissed her. I lifted her pleated skirt and slid my

hands up her thighs and they were as soft as her face. Her bottom was so

tight and smooth under her cotton panties.

"Come on," she said in my ear. "Don't you want to do it before they come and

ruin everything?"

"Honey-"

"I like you so much."

I woke up when I heard the door click shut. The digital clock on the bedside

table told me I'd slept for maybe half an hour. She was gone.

I found my wallet lying neatly on top of my pants, and all my money was still

in the silver money clip in the front pants pocket.

Either she hadn't found it or she had not been trying to rob me in the first

place. I didn't think too much about it. I was too busy getting dressed,

combing my hair, straightening up the bed and getting out into the party to

find her. I was also pretty busy feeling guilty. Of course, she wasn't there.

I was halfway down to the first floor when I realized this was futile. She

had too big a head start. Yet I searched the entire maze of dim carpeted

hallways, went in and out of the swanky dress shops, the restaurants.

I checked with the doorman out front. Had he seen her, gotten her a cab?

She was just gone again. And I was standing there in the late afternoon

thinking, well, I'd done it with her and she was probably sixteen and

somebody's daughter. No consolation that it had been simply terrific.

The dinner was particularly awful. And no amount of Pinot Chardonnay could

make it any better. Strictly big bucks, contracts, agents, TV and movie talk.

And Alex Clementine had not been there to lend any charm to it. They were

holding him back for his own dinner later on this week.

When the subject of the new book came up, I heard myself say: "Look, it was

what my audience wanted." And after that I shut up.

A serious writer, artist, whatever the hell I was, has to be smart enough not

to say things like that. And the funny thing was the remark surprised me.

Maybe I had begun to believe my own hype, or begun to believe that my hype

was hype. In any case, by the time the dinner was over, I felt rotten.

I was thinking of her. How tender and fragile she had seemed, and yet so sure

of herself. It was not new to her, making love, no matter how new she was.

And yet she'd been so delicate, so purely romantic in the way that she'd

kissed, touched, let me touch her.

No hint of guilt or old-fashioned shame or the defiance they can produce. No,

none of that.

I was going mad over it. I couldn't figure it out.

Too fast it had all been. And then the short sleep afterwards with my arm

around her. I had never figured on her slipping away. I hated myself and I

was angry with her.

Some rich kid she was, probably, skipping school; and now safe in her mansion

in Pacific Heights telling some other brat on the phone about what she'd

done. No, that didn't fit. She was too sweet for all that.

I picked up a pack of Gauloises before I left downtown. Very strong, no

filter, too short. just the kind of thing a kid would think was romantic. In

my Beat Generation days we had smoked Camels. So with her it was Gauloises.

I smoked the Gauloises in the cab on the way home, my eyes searching every

downtown block for her.

It was still hot after dark, truly unusual for San Francisco. But the big

high-ceiling rooms of my old Victorian house were cool as always.

I made some coffee and sat for a while, smoking another one of those

miserable cigarettes, and I just looked around me at the shadowy living room,

thinking about her.

Toys everywhere. Dust and disarray of an antique shop on the worn oriental

carpets. I was rather sick of it. Had the urge to sweep it all into the

street, just clean the place to the bare walls. But I knew I'd regret it.

It had taken me twenty-five years to collect these things, and I did love

them. They were props in those early days. When I did Bettina's World, I

bought the first of the antique dolls, and the first old standard-gauge

railroad train, and the big fancy Victorian doll house because these were

Bettina's things, and I needed to have them before me when I painted the

pictures.

I'd photograph them in black and white from every angle, in every

combination. Then take the photographs up to my studio and work in oil on

canvas from the flat patterns that had been created in these photographs.

But I began to like the toys for their own sake. When I found a rare French

doll, a porcelain beauty with almond eyes and withered lace clothes, I built

the book Angelica's Dreams around her. And as the years passed, it continued

to work that way, toys generating books, and books swallowing toys, and so

on.

The big old carousel horse, fixed on its brass pole between ceiling and

floor, had generated The Celestial Carnival. The mechanical clown, the old

leather rocking horse with the glass eyes-these had sparked the series called

Charlotte in the Attic. Charlotte at the Seaside had followed, and I'd bought

the rusted bucket and pail for that, and the antique wagon. Then a string of

books called Charlotte in a Glass Darkly had involved almost everything I

owned, recycled in new color and juxtaposition.

Charlotte was my biggest success to date, with her own Saturday morning

cartoon show. And the toys were always accurately rendered in the background.

My grandfather clock was in the background, too, as it was in all the books,

along with the antique furniture scattered through this house. I lived inside

my pictures. Always had, I suppose, even before I ever painted any.

There were plastic replicas of Charlotte here too in the dust somewhere,

drugstore dolls that sold briskly along with packages of tacky little period

clothes. But this stiff little creation couldn't compare with the nineteenth

century beauties piled in the wicker baby carriage or lining the top of the

square grand in the dining room.

I didn't like to look in on the Saturday morning show. The animation was

excellent, the detailing rich-my agents had seen to all that-but I didn't

like the voices.

Nobody on that show had a voice like Belinda, a low buttery voice that made

its own soothing music. And it was sad. Charlotte ought to have a good voice,

because Charlotte was the one who had really made me famous with just a

little help from Bettina and Angelica and all my other girls.

Many another children's book artist had redone fairy tales as I had done with

Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin. Many another had created lavish

illustrations, suspenseful stories, amusing adventures. But my singular gift

was for inventing young heroines and shaping every illustrated page around

their personalities and emotions.

In the early days my publishers had urged me to put little boys in the books,

to broaden the audience, as they said, but I had never yielded to that

temptation. When I was with could give it the full passion. I kept critics

who now and then ridiculed my girls, I knew where I was, and I the focus

tight. And to hell with the me for it.

When Charlotte stepped into the picture, things began to happen that

surprised me completely. Charlotte actually grew older in the books. She went

from a tender waif of seven years old to adolescence. That never happened

with the others. My best work was Charlotte, even though she too finally

stopped at age thirteen or so about the time I signed that television

contract.

I could never paint her after she went on the air, no matter how great the

demand for books with her. She was gone. She was plastic now. And Angelica

might go that way too if this animated movie deal went through. I might never

finish the Angelica book I had started a couple of weeks ago.

Tonight I did not care much about it. Bettina, Angelica-I was tired of them.

I was tired of it all, and this booksellers convention was only making me

face it. The exhaustion went way back. Looking for Bettina, what did that

mean? I couldn't find her myself anymore?

I smoked another one of the Gauloises. I relaxed all over.

The party, the dinner, the noise and bustle were losing their hold at last.

And the dingy stillness of the room was comforting, as it was meant to be. I

let my eyes drift over the faded wallpaper, the dusty crystal baubles of the

chandelier, the fragments of light caught in the darkened mirrors.

No, nor ready to throw it all in the street. Not this lifetime anyway. Need

it after hotels and bookstores and reporters-

I pictured Belinda on the carousel horse, or sitting cross-legged beside the

oval of the toy train track, her hand on the old rusted locomotive. I

pictured her slumped on the sofa amid all the dolls. Damn, why did I let her

get away like that?

In my head I took her clothes off again. Saw the lattice of marks on her

tanned calves left by the ribbed socks. She had shivered with pleasure when I

ran my nails lightly over those marks, grabbed the soft mid part of each

naked foot. The light hadn't mattered to her. I was the one who had turned it

off when I started unbuttoning my shirt. The hell with it!

You'll be lucky you don't end up in jail someday for this kind of thing, and

you're mad at her for skipping out on you. And with the street brats you kid

yourself that it's OK because afterwards you give them so much money. "Here,

use this for a bus ticket home. Here, this will even make plane fare." What

do they buy with it, pot cocaine, booze? It's their problem, isn't it?

Look, you got away with it again, that's all.

The grandfather clock chimed ten. The painted plates along the dining room

mantel gave a faint musical rattle. Time to try to paint her.

I poured another cup of coffee and went upstairs to the attic studio.

Wonderful the familiar smells, the linseed oil, the paints, the turpentine.

The smells that meant home, safe in the studio.

Before I turned on the lights, I sipped the coffee and looked out the big

uncovered windows in all four directions. No fog tonight, though there would

be tomorrow. It had to follow the heat. I'd wake up cold in the back bedroom.

But for now, the city was shining with an eerie, spectacular visibility. It

was no mere map of lights. There was a muted color to the thick rectangular

towers of downtown, to the peaked-roof Queen Anne houses spilling down the

Noe Street hill into the Castro. The canvases stacked all about seemed faded,

shabby.

I changed that by turning on the lights. And I rolled up my sleeves and I put

a small canvas on the easel and started sketching her.

I don't often sketch. When I do, it means I don't know where I'm going. And I

don't do it with a pencil. I do it with a fine brush and just a little oil

paint squeezed out on the plate, usually raw umber or burnt sienna. Sometimes

I do it when I'm tired and don't really want to get going. Sometimes I do it

when I'm afraid.

This was an example of the latter. I couldn't remember the details of her.

I just couldn't see the features of her rice. I could not get the "there

there" that had made me do it with her. It wasn't just her availability. I am

not that morally rotten, that stupid, no, not that contemptible. I mean
I'm a grown man, I could have fought my way out of there. Cotton panties,

lipstick, and sugar. Hmm.

No good. I had the pyramid of hair all right, thick soft nest of hair. I had

the clothes of course. But not Belinda.

I decided to go back to the big canvas I was doing for my next book a jungle

garden in which Angelica roamed searching for a lost cat. Back to the fat

glossy green leaves, the bulging branches of the oaks, the moss hanging in

streaks to the high grass through which the cat came to reveal its hateful

grin-beware Angelica-like Blake's tyger.

It all looked like clichés to me, my clichés. To fill in the background, the

ominous sky, the overhanging trees-it was like setting myself on high-speed

automatic pilot.

When the doorbell rang around midnight, I almost didn't answer. After all, it

could have been any one of half a dozen drunken friends, and more than likely

a failed artist who wanted to borrow fifty dollars. I wished now I had just

left fifty dollars in the mailbox. He would have found it. He was used to

finding it.

The bell rang again, but not hard and long, the way he always did it. So it

could be Sheila, my next door neighbor come to tell me her gay roommate was

having a fight with his lover and they needed me to come over at once.

"For what?" I would say. But I'd wind up going if I answered. Or, worse yet,

having them in. Getting drunk, listening to them argue. Then Sheila and I

would wind up in bed together out of habit, loneliness, compulsion. No, not

this time, not after Belinda, out of the question, don't answer.

Third ring, just as short and polite. Why wasn't Sheila cupping her hands

around her mouth and screaming my name by now so that I could hear it all the

way up here?

Then it occurred to me: Belinda, she'd gotten my address from my wallet.

That's why it had been lying on top of my pants. I ran down the steps, both

flights, and opened the front door, and she was just walking away, that same

leather pouch hanging from her shoulder.

She had her hair up and her eyes were rimmed in kohl and her lips darkly red.

If it hadn't been for the mail pouch bag, I wouldn't have immediately known

her.

She looked even younger somehow-it was her long neck and her babycheeks. She

looked so vulnerable.

"It's me, Belinda," she said. "Remember?"

I fixed some canned soup for her and put a steak in the broiler. She was in a

mess she said, somebody broke the padlock on the door of her room. She was

afraid to sleep there tonight. It was scary somebody busting into her room,

and it wasn't the first time it had happened. They'd taken her radio, which

was the only damn thing worth taking. They almost stole her videotapes.

She ate the bread and butter with the soup as if she was starving. But she

never stopped smoking or drinking the Scotch I'd poured for her. This time it

was black cigarettes with gold bands on them. Sobranie Black Russians. And

she was looking around all the time. She had loved the toys. Only hunger had

got her to the kitchen.

"So where is this padlocked room?" I asked.

"In the Haight," she said. "You know, it's a big old flat, a place that could

look like this if somebody wanted to save it. But it's just a place where

kids rent rooms. Full of roaches. There's no hot water. I have the worst room

because I came in last. We share the bath and the kitchen, but you'd have to

be crazy to cook in there. I can get another padlock tomorrow."

"Why are you in a place like that?" I asked. "Where are your parents?" Under

the light I could see the pink streaks in her hair. Her nails were done

black. Black! And all that since this afternoon. One costume follows another.

"It's a hell of a lot cleaner than one of those skid row hotels," she said.

She laid her spoon down properly, didn't drink the dregs in the bowl. The

nails were long enough to look deadly. "I just need to stay here tonight.

There's a hardware store up on Castro, where I can get the padlock."

"It's dangerous living in a place like that."

"You're telling me? I put the bars up on the window myself."

"You could get raped."

"Don't say it!" Visible shudder. Then her hand up demanding silence.

Was it panic behind the paint? Cloud of smoke from the cigarette. "Well, why

the hell-"

"Look, don't lose any sleep over this, OK? I want to crash here for one

night."

That clipped quality was almost gone. Pure California voice. She could have

been from anywhere. But it still sounded like butter. "There's got to be

someplace better than that."

"It's cheap. And it's my problem. Right?"

"Is it?"

She broke off another piece of French bread. The makeup job wasn't bad at

all, just outrageous. And the soft black gabardine dress was vintage thrift

shop. Either that or she got it from her grandmother. It fit snugly over her

breasts and under her arms. A few sequins fallen off the tight neck band.

"Where are your parents?" I asked again. I turned the steak over.

She chewed the bread, swallowed it and her face set in a rather stern

expression as she looked at me. The heavy mascara made her look even sterner.

"I'll go if you don't want me here," she said. "I'll understand perfectly."

"I do want you here," I said, "but I just want to know-"

"Then don't ask me about my parents." I didn't respond.

"I'll leave if you mention that again." Very gentle. Very polite. "It's the

easiest way you could get rid of me. No hard feelings. I will just go."

I took the steak out of the broiler and put it on the plate. I turned off the

broiler.

"Are you going to mention it again?" she asked.

"No." I set the plate down for her with a knife and fork. "Want a glass of

milk?"

She said no. Scotch was good enough, especially good Scotch. Unless of course

I had bourbon.

"I have bourbon," I said in a small voice. This was criminal. I got down the

bourbon and fixed her a weak drink. "That's enough water," she said.

In between rapid bites of the steak she was looking around the kitchen at the

sketches I'd tacked up, the few dusty old dolls that had found their way to a

shelf here. One early painting hung above the cabinets. It wasn't so good,

but it was of the house where I grew up in New Orleans-my mother's house. She

studied that. She looked at the old black wrought iron stove, the black-and-

white tile.

"You have a dream house here, don't you?" she said. "And this is real good

bourbon, too."

"You can sleep in a four-poster bed if you like. It has a canopy. It's very

old. I brought it out here from New Orleans. I painted it in my Night Before

Christmas."

She seemed immediately delighted.

"It's where you sleep?"

"No. I sleep in the back room with the door open to the deck. I like the

night air. I use a pallet on the floor."

"I'll sleep where you want me to sleep," she said. She was eating incredibly

fast. I leaned against the sink and watched her.

Her ankles were crossed and the straps of the little shoes looked very pretty

going over her insteps. The napkin was a perfect white square on her lap. But

her neck was the exquisite part. That and the gentle slope of her shoulders

under the black gabardine.

She probably thought she looked grown-up. But what the nail polish and the

paint and cocktail clothes did, really, was turn her into kiddie porn.

I was thinking it over.

Seeing her got up like this, gulping bourbon and puffing that cigarette, was

like watching little child star Tatum O'Neal smoke cigarettes in the movie

Paper Moon. Children didn't have to be naked to look sexual. You could

carnalize them by simply turning them out like adults, having them do adult

things.

The problem with this theory was, she had looked just as sexy when I first

saw her in the Catholic school uniform.

"Why don't you sleep with me in the four-poster?" she asked. Same simple and

earnest voice she had used in the hotel suite.

I didn't say anything. I reached into the refrigerator and took out a beer

and opened it. I took a long drink. There goes painting anymore tonight, I

thought, rather stupidly since I knew I wasn't going to paint. But I could

still photograph her.

"How have you managed to stay alive this long?" I asked. "Do you only pick up

famous writers?"

She studied me for a long moment. She blotted her lips very fastidiously with

the napkin. She made a little cast-off gesture with her right hand, ripple of

slender fingers. "Don't worry about it."

"Somebody ought to worry about it," I said.

I sat down opposite her. She was almost finished with the steak. The paint on

her eyes made it very dramatic when she looked down, then up. Head like a

tulip.

"I have pretty good judgment," she said, carefully trimming the fat from the

meat. "I have to. I mean I'm on the street, room or no room. I'm ... you

know... drifting."

"Doesn't sound like you like it."

"I don't," she said. Uneasy. "It's limbo. It's nothing-" She stopped. "It's a

big waste of everything, drifting like this."

"So how do you actually make it? Where does the rent come from ?"

She didn't answer. She laid her fork and knife carefully across the empty

plate and lighted another cigarette. She didn't do the matchbook trick. She

used a small gold lighter. She sat back with one arm across her chest, the

other raised, curved hand holding the cigarette between two fingers. Little

lady with pink streaked hair, blood red mouth. But her face was absolutely

opaque.

"If you need money, you can have it," I said. "You could have asked me this

afternoon. I would have given it to you."

"And you think I live dangerously'." she said.

"Remember what I said about photographing you," I said. I took one of the

cigarettes out of her pack. I used her lighter. "Strictly proper stuff. I'm

not talking about nude shots. I'm talking about modeling for my books. I can

pay you for that-"

She didn't answer. The stillness of her face was a little unnerving.

"I photograph little girls all the time that way for my work. They're always

paid. They come from reputable agencies. I take pictures of them in old-

fashioned clothes. And I work with these photographs when I make my paintings

upstairs. A lot of artists work this way now. It doesn't exactly fit the

romantic idea of the artist painting from scratch but the fact is artists

have always-"

"I know all that," she said softly. "I've lived around artists all my life.

Well, sort of artists. And, of course, you can photograph me and you can pay

me what you pay the models. But that's not what I want from you."

"What do you want?"

"You. To make love to you, of course." I looked at her for a long moment.

"Somebody's going to hurt you," I said.

"Not you," she said. "You're just what I always thought you'd be. Only you're

better. You're actually crazier."

"I'm the dullest guy in the world," I said. "All I do is paint and write and

collect junk."

She smiled, a very long smile this time. Bordering on an ironic laugh.

"All those pictures," she said, "of all those little girls wandering through

dark mansions and overgrown gardens, all those secret doors-"

"You've been reading the critics. They love to go to town on a hairy-chested

man who does books full of little girls."

"Do they talk about that, too? How sinister it all is, how erotic-"

"It's not erotic."

"Yes, it is," she said. "You know it is. When I was little, it used to put me

in a spell to read your books. I felt like I was leaving the world."

"Good. What's erotic about that?"

"It's got to be erotic. Sometimes I didn't even want to start, you know-

didn't want to slip into Charlotte's house. It would give me these funny

feelings just looking at Charlotte creeping up the stairs in that nightgown

with the candle in her hand."

"It's not erotic."

"Then what's the threat? What's behind all the doors? Why are the girls

always looking out of the corner of their eyes?"

"I'm not the one chasing them," I said. "I don't want to lift their long

dresses."

"You don't?" she asked. "How come?"

"I hate this," I said gently. "I work six months on a book. I live in it,

dream in it. I don't question it. I spend twelve hours a day going over and

over the canvases. Then somebody wants to explain it all in five hundred

words or five minutes." I reached out and took her hand. "I avoid this kind

of discussion with people I don't know. People I do know never do it to me."

"I wish you'd fall in love with me," she said.

"Why?"

"Because you're really someone worth falling in love with. And if we were in

love, I wouldn't be drifting. I wouldn't be nobody. At least not while I was

with you." Pause.

"Where do you come from?" I asked.

No answer.

"I keep trying to place your voice."

"You'll never do it."

"One moment it's just California. Then something else creeps in-a trace of an

accent."

"You'll never guess it."

She withdrew her hand.

"You want me to sleep in the four-poster with you?" I asked.

"Yes." She nodded.

"Then do something for me."

"What?"

"Wash off all this glamour," I said. "And put on Charlotte's nightgown."

"Charlotte's nightgown? You have that here?"

I nodded. "Several upstairs. White flannel. One of them is bound to fit you."

She laughed softly, delightedly. But there was more to it than delight. I was

silent. I wasn't admitting anything.

"Of course," she said finally. "I'd love to wear Charlotte's nightgown." So

gracious. Flash of black fingernails as gracefully she ground out the

cigarette.

No wonder she had thought that the matchbook trick was such a comedy. She was

old, polished and suave, and even a little angry. Then she was young and

tender. She was shifting back and forth before my very eyes.

And it was very disturbing to me. I wondered: Which did she want to be?

"You're beautiful," I said.

"You think so?" she asked. "You wouldn't prefer a darker, more mysterious

older woman?"

I smiled. "Been married to two of them. It was interesting. But you're

something else."

"In other words, you want me to know it's not always little girls."

"Yes, I want you to know that. I want to remind myself too. But I can't

figure you out. You've got to give me a clue on where you came from. A clue

on the voice."

"I grew up everywhere and nowhere. Madrid, LA, Paris, London, Dallas, Rome,

you name it. That's why you'll never pin down the voice."

"Sounds marvelous," I said.

"You think so?" Little twist to her smile. "Someday I'll have to tell you the

whole ugly story. And you think Bettina has it bad in that old house."

"Why not start telling me now?"

" 'Cause it won't make a pretty picture book," she said. She was getting

uneasy. She blotted her lips again carefully and put the napkin back in her

lap. She drank the last of the bourbon. This girl definitely knew how to put

it down.

Ears with the tiniest lobes. Pierced lobes, but no earrings. just the hurtful

little mark. And the skin very tight around her eyes so that there was only a

tiny seam running around the lashes. This is the kind of tightness you see in

the face of very little children. It usually goes away in the teenage years

as the face becomes more modeled. The eyebrows were soft, unshaped, just

brushed lightly with gray to darken them. In spite of the paint, her face

still looked virginal, the way only a blond face can. And the nose was most

decidedly upturned. She would most certainly hate it when she really grew up.

But I would love it forever, and the poochy, delicious, puckered little mouth

with it. I wanted to touch the loose hair that made fine question-mark curls

near her ears.

"Where are your parents? You do have them, don't you?"

She looked startled. She didn't answer; then her face went blank. And it

seemed she swallowed. She looked stunned actually, as if I'd slapped her.

And when her eyes began to water, I was stunned. I felt this stab inside as I

watched her.

"Thank you for everything," she said. She was gathering up her bag. "You've

been very nice." She laid the napkin down beside the plate, and she stood up

and went out into the hallway.

"Belinda, wait," I said. I caught up with her at the front door.

"I have to go, Mr. Walker," she said. She had her hand on the knob. About to

burst into tears.

"Come on, honey," I said. I took her by the shoulders. No matter what else I

felt, what else I wanted, it was unthinkable that she walk out the door at

this hour, alone. That simply wasn't going to happen.

"Then don't mention all that again," she said, her voice thickening. "I mean

it. Kick me our if you want, and I'll go downtown and drop a hundred bucks

for a room or something. I've got money. I never said I didn't. But don't

mention parents and all that again to me."

"All right," I said. "All right. Belinda has no parents. Nobody's looking for

Belinda." I clasped her neck gently in both hands, tilted her face up. She

was almost crying.

But she let me kiss her, and she was pure warmth and melting sweetness again.

The same yielding and the same heat. "Christ, have mercy." I whispered.

"Where's the nightgown?" she asked.

In the morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, I knew she was gone.

The phone was ringing, and I managed to mumble something into it as I saw the

nightgown, hanging neatly on the hook on the closet door.

It was Jody, telling that they wanted me on a talk show in Los Angeles.

It was national coverage. They'd put me up at the Beverly Hills of course. "I

don't have to, do I?"

"Of course not, Jeremy, but look, they want you everywhere. The sales reps

say they want you for signings in Chicago and Boston. Why don't you think it

over, call me back?"

"Not now, Jody. All wrong for me."

"Limos and suites all the way, Jeremy. First-class air."

"I know, Jody. I know. I want to cooperate, but it's just not the time, Jody

-"

Even the collar of the nightgown had been buttoned. Perfume. Clinging to it

was one golden hair.

Downstairs I found the ashtray and the dishes washed, everything stacked on

the drainboard. Very neat.

And she had found the article on me in the Bay Bulletin, and that was spread

out on the kitchen table, with me smiling in the big photograph they'd taken

on the public library steps.

WITH FIFTEENTH BOOK WALKER CONTINUES TO WEAVE MAGIC SPELL

Forty-four, six-foot-one blond-haired Jeremy Walker is a gentle giant among

his small fans crowded into the Children's Reading Room of the San Francisco

main library, a gray-eyed teddy bear of a man to the eager little girls who

besiege him with questions as to his favorite color, favorite food, or

favorite movie. The personification of wholesomeness, he has never given

these young readers anything but old-fashioned and traditional images, just

as if the garish world of "Battlestar Galactica" and "Dungeons and Dragons"

did not exist-

How she must have laughed at that. I threw it in the trash.

There was nothing else of her left in the house. No note, no scribbled

address or phone number. I checked and double-checked.

But what about the rolls of black and white pictures we'd taken, still in the

camera? Old-fashioned and traditional images. I made a phone call to break a

dinner date for that night, and went to work in the basement darkroom right

away.

I had good prints by the afternoon. And I put the best of them along the

walls of the attic and hung my favorites from the wire in front of my easel.

They were a satisfying, tantalizing lot.

But she had been right when she had said she was not one of my little girls.

She wasn't. Her face did not have the unstamped coin look of my models. Yet

her features were so conventionally cure, so babyish.

Like a ghost she looked, actually. Positively eerie. I mean, she suggested

somebody who was apart from things around her, somebody who had seen things

and done things that others didn't know about.

Precocity, yes, surely that was there, and maybe even a little cynicism. I

saw that in the pictures, though I had nor seen it when I was taking them.

She'd showered before she put on the nightgown. Her hair had been loose and

full of wispy little tendrils, and in the photographs these caught the light.

And she had played the light rather naturally. In fact, she had been

extraordinarily relaxed before the lens; she would sink almost into a trance

as I photographed her, responding just a little now and then as if she were

actually feeling my eyes on her, feeling the click when I took the shot.

There was something seductively exhibitionistic about her. And she knew

things about how she photographed. Once in a while she'd made some little

remark about an angle, about the light. But this was pretty unobtrusive. She

had let me do what I wanted to do. And I had never quite had a subject like

her. No stiffness, no posing; almost a deep and automatic surrender to the

situation. It was distinctly wonderful and odd.

The best picture was one of her sitting sidesaddle on the carousel horse in

the living room, her naked ankles crossed beneath the hem of her gown. Key

light from above. Then there was a very good shot of her on the four-poster

bed with her feet drawn up under her, her knees to the side. These I enlarged

and printed right up to poster size.

Another excellent picture was of her on the living room floor kneeling beside

the old doll house, her face beside the turrets and the chimneys and the

lace-curtained windows, and all around her a scatter of other toys.

[bad scan] to bed before we started. I wanted to make love to her right there

on the living room carpet, but I didn't want to frighten her, and maybe it

wouldn't have if I'd suggested it. But it was frightening me.

The shots of her on the stairway with the candle were supposed to be pure

Charlotte. I had gone up ahead of her, shooting as she came towards me.

Minimal light. Here she really did look like a child, like a child I had

painted a hundred times, except for something in the eyes, something... We

almost didn't make it to the bed.

But then taking her in the four-poster was too good to miss. She'd been more

relaxed, less anxious to please and more ready to be pleased than at the

hotel, which was perfect. The first time I don't think she had enjoyed it

really; this time I knew that she had. And it had been a big thing to me that

she enjoy it. I had wanted to make her come, and she had, certainly, unless

she was world-class at faking it. We'd done it twice actually. And the second

time was better for her, though it really left me knocked out and just

wanting to sleep after that, the night over too soon.

Sleeping next to her, though, feeling her naked in that usually empty bed,

the big cold bed full of faint memories of New Orleans childhood-ah, that was

too good.

Her face was smooth in most of these pictures. No smile, but she looked soft,

receptive, open.

And when I had them up on the wall, I really began to know the anatomy-the

wide cheekbones, the slightly square jaw, and the childlike tightness of the

skin around the eyes. I couldn't see the freckles in these photographs, but I

knew they were there.

Not a woman's face. Yet I had kissed her breasts, her nipples, her scant

smoky pubic hair, felt her bottom in my open hand. Hmmmm. Pure woman.

I thought of a joke I'd heard a few years ago in Hollywood. I'd gone down

there to close a deal for a television remake of one of my mother's novels-my

mother had died years ago-and I was having a celebratory lunch with my West

Coast agent, Clair Clarke, at the new and very fashionable Ma Maison.

The whole town was talking then about Polish film director Roman Polanski,

who'd just been arrested for allegedly carrying on with a teenage girl.

"Well, you've heard the joke, haven't you?" my agent said. "She might have

been thirteen, but she had the body of a six-year-old?" I had died laughing.

With Belinda it was the face that was six years old.

I wanted to start painting immediately from these-a whole series was coming

into my head-but I was too worried about her.

I knew she'd be back, of course she would, she had to come back here. But

what was happening to her now? I don't think a parent could have been more

worried about her than I was, even if that parent had known about me.

Late Saturday afternoon I couldn't stand it any longer. I went down to the

Haight to look for her.

The heat wave had not let up, the fog had not rolled in, and I had the top

down on my old MG-TD as I crawled through the streets from Divisadero to the

park and back again, scanning the shoppers and the drifters, the street

vendors and the strollers who made up the crowds.

People say the Haight is coming back, that the new boutiques and restaurants

are resurrecting the neighborhood that became a slum after the great hippie

invasion of the late sixties-that a new era has begun. I cannot see it. Some

of the finest Victorians are in this part of town, true, and when they are

restored, they are magnificent, and, yes, trendy clothing stores and toy

shops and bookstores are bringing the money in.

But there are still bars across the front windows. The drugged out, the

insane, still stand on the corners spouting obscenities. You see the hungry

and the dangerous hovering in doorways, sprawled on front steps. The walls

are scarred with insipid graffiti. And the young people who drift into the

cafes and ice cream parlors are often soiled, disheveled, dressed in thrift

shop rags. These places themselves have a desolate look. Tables are greasy.

There is no heat. You see the evidence of pain and neglect still everywhere

you turn.

The place is interesting, I give it that. But no amount of vitality makes it

hospitable. But then it never was.

Back in the days when I had my first painting studio in the Haight, before

the flower children flocked there, it was a hard, cold part of town. The

merchants didn't make conversation. You didn't get to know the people

downstairs. The bars were tough. It was a neighborhood of people who rented

from out-of-town landlords.

The downtown Castro District, where I eventually settled, was an entirely

different place. The Castro has always had the feeling of a small town, the

same families owning their homes for as long as a century. And the influx of

gay men and women in recent years has only created another community within

the community. There is a mellowness in the Castro, a sense of people looking

out for one another. And of course there is the warmth, the sun.

The day-to-day San Francisco fog often dies at the top of Twin Peaks just

above the Castro. You can drive out of the chill of other neighborhoods and

find yourself home under a blue sky.

But it's hard to say what the Haight might become. Writers, artists, students

still seek it out for the low rents, the poetry readings, the thrift shops,

and the bookstores. It does have a lot of bookstores. And to prowl there on

Saturday afternoons can be fun.

If you're not looking for a runaway teenage girl. Then it becomes the

proverbial jungle. Every bum is a potential rapist or pimp.

I didn't find her. I parked the car, ate dinner at one of the miserable

little cafes-cold food, indifferent service, a girl with sores on her face

talking to herself in a corner-and I walked around. I couldn't bring myself

to show the pictures to the kids I saw, ask if they'd seen her. I didn't feel

I had the right to do that.

When I got home, I found that painting her was the best thing I could do to

get my mind off her. I went up to the attic, looked over the photographs, and

set to work on a full-scale painting immediately. Belinda on the Carousel

Horse.

Unlike many artists, I don't grind my own pigments. I buy the best that is

commercially available, and I use my paints right out of the tube, since

there is usually more than enough oil in them already. I use a little

turpentine to dilute, when I need it, but not very much. I like the stuff

thick. I like the whole work to be dense and wet, yet moving only when I move

it.

As for the canvases, I work almost exclusively in large size with only a few

small ones for taking to the park or the yard. And I have them stretched and

primed for me. There is always a good supply on hand because I often work on

more than one project.

So setting to work on a full-scale painting meant squeezing out a full

palette of earth colors-yellow ochre, burnt sienna, raw umber, Indian and

Venetian red-and reaching for any one of a hundred prepared brushes. I might

sketch a little first, but probably not. I'd go in alla prima, painting

everything all at once, creating within hours a fully covered surface.

Representing something exactly as it looks-that is automatic with me.

Perspective, balance, the illusion of three-dimensional space, all that I

learned before I knew what to do with it. I was able to draw what I saw when

I was eight years old. By sixteen I could do a good oil portrait of a friend

in an afternoon, or in one night cover a big four-by-six foot canvas with

realistically rendered horses, cowboys, farm land.

And speed has always been crucial. I mean, I work best when I work fast, on

every conceivable level. If I stop to think about how I am rendering a

trolley car crowded with people as it rattles downhill under windblown trees,

I might get blocked, lose my nerve so to speak. So I plunge. I execute. In an

hour and a half, voila, the trolley car.

And then if I don't like it, I throw it out. But time equals output with me.

And one of the surest signs that I am doing something bad, that I am on the

wrong track creatively, is that something takes too long to finish.

An art teacher I once had-a failed painter himself who worshiped the severe

abstract canvases of Mondrian and Hans Hofmann-told me I ought to break my

right hand. Or start painting with my left exclusively.

I didn't listen to him. As far as I'm concerned, that was like telling a

young singer who has perfect pitch that he has to learn to sing off key to

get some soul into his voice. He doesn't.

Like any representational artist, I believe in the eloquence of the

accurately rendered image. I believe in that fundamental competence. The

wisdom and magic of a work come through a thousand unarticulated choices

regarding composition, lighting, color. Accuracy won't keep life out. To

think so is stupid. And in my case weirdness is inevitable.

Despite my craft, no one has ever called me dull or static. On the contrary,

I've been labeled grotesque, baroque, romantic, surreal, excessive, inflated,

overblown, insane, and, of course, though I didn't want to admit it to

Belinda, many people have called me sinister and erotic. But never static.

Never overskilled.

All right. I took the plunge. I went at her full sweep with her dense golden

hair and her white nightgown and her gorgeous little feet beneath the hem of

the gown and the great layers of umber gloom closing in around her, and it

was really working and the horse was splendid as always, and her little

hand...

Something completely unexpected happened.

I wanted to paint her naked.

I thought about it for a little while. I mean, what was this with her sitting

there on this glorified toy in this white flannel nightgown? What the hell

was she doing there? She's not Charlotte. It was an OK painting so far. In

fact, it was better than OK, but it was also all wrong. A detour.

I took it off the easel. No. Not her.

And then, without thinking much about it, I turned to the wall the canvases

of Angelica for the new book. I laughed when I caught myself doing it. "Don't

look, Angelica," I said. "In fact, why the hell don't you pack up and get

out, dear? Go to Rainbow Productions in Hollywood."

I looked around.

No need to turn around the other canvases. These were the grotesque ones, the

ones the reporters often asked about but which no one ever saw in any book or

any gallery.

They had nothing to do with my published work or images. Yet I'd done them

for years-pictures of my old house in New Orleans and the Garden District

around it, mansions rotting, forlorn beings in rooms of peeling wallpaper and

broken plaster, landscapes prowled by giant rats and roaches. They all

produced in me a kind of giddiness. I mean, I rather enjoyed it when friends

came in here and gasped. Childish.

Of course, the lushness of New Orleans is in everything I do. The wrought

iron fences are always there, the flowers in threatening profusion, the

violet skies of New Orleans seen through webs of leafy limbs.

But in these secret pictures the gardens are true jungles, and the rats and

insects are gigantic. They peer through windows. They hover over vine-covered

chimneys. They roam the narrow tunnel-like streets beneath the oaks.

These pictures are damp and dark, and the red used in them is always blood

red. A stain almost. The secret trick of them is never to use pure black in

them because they are already so black.

I paint these pictures when I am in certain moods, and it feels like driving

my car at a hundred miles an hour to paint them. My usual breakneck speed is

doubled.

My friends tease me a lot about them.

"Jeremy's gone home to paint rats."

"Jeremy's new book is going to be Angelica's Rats."

"No, no, no, it's going to be Bettina's Rats."

"Saturday Morning Rat."

My West Coast agent, Clair Clarke, came up into the studio once, saw the

rats, and said, "My God! I don't think we'll sell the movie rights to that,

do you?" and went downstairs immediately.

Rhinegold, my dealer, had looked them all over one afternoon and said that he

wanted at least five for immediate exhibit. He wanted three for New York and

two for Berlin. He'd been excited. But he didn't argue when I said no.

"I don't think they mean enough," I said.

There was a long silence and then he nodded.

"When you make them start meaning enough, you call me."

They have never started meaning enough. They have remained fragments, which I

paint with a vengeful hilarity. Yet I have always known that these pictures

have a disconcerting beauty. Yet the lack of meaning in them feels immoral.

Rather horribly immoral.

Whatever the limitations of my books, they have meaning and are moral. They

have a complete theme.

So much for the roach and rat paintings.

I didn't bother to turn them around when I started painting Belinda naked on

the carousel horse. But that wasn't because I thought painting her naked was

immoral, either.

No, I had no such idea of that. I could still smell her sweet feminine smell

on my fingertips. She was all things naked and good and sweet to me in this

moment. She was not immoral and this was not immoral. Far from it.

And it had nothing to do with those rat and roach paintings. But something

was happening, something confusing, something dangerous, dangerous to

Angelica somehow.

I stopped, thought about it for a moment. The craziest feeling had come over

me, and, boy, how I liked it. How I liked feeling this, this sense of danger.

If I thought about it long enough-but no matter. Don't analyze.

For now, I wanted to capture a highly specific characteristic of Belinda-the

ease with which she'd gone to bed with me, the frankness with which she had

enjoyed it. That was the point of the nudity. And it gave her power, that

frankness and ease.

But she mustn't worry, ever, about these pictures because nobody would see

any of this. I'd be sure to tell her that. What a laugh to think of what it

would do to my career if someone did see this, oh, too funny that, but no, it

would never happen.

I got her face effortlessly again from the photographic map of lines and

proportion. And I was working double fast, as I always did when I did the

dark pictures. Everything felt wonderful. I was piling on the paints, creamy

and thick and gleaming, and the likeness of her was glaring there, and my

brush was racing over the details, all that craft rising up without the

slightest conscious hindrance.

Her body of course could only be true to my memory of it, breasts a little

large for her small frame, nipples small, light pink, scant pubic hair, truly

the color of smoke, no more than a discreet little triangle. There were bound

to be inaccuracies. But the face was the crux; the face held the character.

The slope of her naked shoulders, the high curve of her calves, all that I

re-envisioned, thinking about how it had felt to touch it. And kiss it.

It was working out all right.

Around twelve o'clock I had a near-complete giant canvas of her and the

horse, and I was so elated that I couldn't paint for very long without

stopping, just to drink coffee, light a cigarette, walk around. I filled in

the last details at about two o'clock. The horse was as good as she was now.

I'd got his carved mane, the flared nostrils, the bridle with the paste

jewels and the gold paint peeling from it.

The thing was done, absolutely done. And it was as photographically real as

anything I'd ever painted-her sitting there in a dim bronze Rembrandt light,

hallucinatively vital, yet subtly stylized through the even attention to

every detail.

I wouldn't have changed it then if she had come in and posed naked for me. It

was all right. It was Belinda-the little girl who'd made love to me twice,

apparently because she wanted to-just sitting there naked, staring at me, and

asking what?

"Why do you feel so guilty for touching me?"

Because I am using you, my dear. Because an artist uses everything.

When I got back from my drive through the Haight the next afternoon, there

was a note from her in the mailbox. "Came, went-Belinda."

For the first time in my entire life I almost drove my fist through the wall.

Immediately I put the keys to the house in an envelope, marked her name on it

and put it in the box. She couldn't miss it. Somebody else might find it, of

course, and loot the house. I didn't give a damn. There was a deadbolt on the

attic studio, where all the paintings were, and another on the darkroom

downstairs. As for the rest of it, dolls and all, they could have it.

When she hadn't come by or called by nine o'clock, I started working again.

This time she was kneeling naked beside the dollhouse. I'd work on her for a

while, then on the dollhouse. It took a lot of time, as it always did, to

reproduce the shingled mansard roof, the gingerbread windows, lace curtains.

But it was as important as she was. And then everything around her had to be

done, until the entire background was there with the dusty toys, the edge of

the velvet couch, the flowered wallpaper.

By the time the morning light came through the windows it was finished. I

scratched the date into the wet oil paint with my palette knife, whispered,

"Belinda," and fell asleep right there on the cot under the burning morning

sun, too tired to do anything but cover my head with a pillow.
[4]

The last important party of the booksellers convention was scheduled that

evening at a picturesque old mountainside hotel in Sausalito. It was the

official sit-down dinner for Alex Clementine to launch the autobiography he'd

proudly written-on his own without a ghost-and I simply had to be there.

Alex was my oldest friend. He'd starred in the most successful films ever

made from my mother's historical novels, Evelyn and Crimson Mardi Gras. We'd

shared a great deal, both good and bad, over the years. And most recently I'd

connected him with both my literary agent and my publisher for his new book.

Weeks ago I'd offered to pick him up downtown at the Stanford Court Hotel and

drive him across the bay to the Sausalito party.

Fortunately the warm clear weather held out, the New Yorkers were positively

moaning over the dazzling view of San Francisco across the water, and Alex,

white-haired, sun-bronzed, and impeccably dressed, overwhelmed us with

California Gothic tales of murder, suicide, transvestism, and madness in

Tinseltown.

Of course, he'd seen Ramon Novarro only two days before he was murdered by

gay hustlers, talked to Marilyn Monroe only hours before her suicide, run

into Sal Mineo the night before he was murdered, been seduced by an anonymous

beauty onboard Errol Flynn's yacht, been in the lobby of the London

Dorchester when they'd wheeled out Liz Taylor on the way to the hospital with

her near-fatal pneumonia, and "had almost gone" to a party at the house of

Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, on the very night the Charles Manson gang

broke into it and massacred all the occupants.

But we forgave him all that for the countless authentic little tales he told

about the people he really had known. His career had spanned forty years,

that was a fact, from his first starring role opposite Barbara Stanwyck to a

regular part on the new nighttime soap "Champagne Flight" opposite the

indomitable erotic film star Bonnie.

"Champagne Flight" was the season's camp trash hit. And everybody wanted to

hear about Bonnie.

In the sixties she'd been the Texan who conquered Paris, the big beautiful

dark-haired Dallas girl who became queen of the French New Wave along with

Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda. Seberg was dead. Fonda had long ago come home.

But Bonnie had remained in Europe, in seclusion a la Brigitte Bardot, after

years of making bad Spanish and Italian films never released in this country.

It had been the hard-core pornographic flicks-Deep Throat, Behind the Green

Door, The Devil and Miss Jones-that had killed the stylish, often profound

erotic films that Bonnie had made in the sixties, driving her and Bardot and

others like them from the American market.

Everybody at the table admitted to remembering those old pictures, loving

them.

Bonnie, the brunette Marilyn Monroe, peering out from behind big horn-rimmed

glasses as she talked existentialism and angst in her soft American-accented

French to the cold, callous European lovers who destroyed her. Monica Vitti

was never more lost, Liv Ullmann never more sad, Anita Ekberg never more

voluptuous.

We compared notes on the rat-hole art theaters where we'd seen the flicks,

the cafés in which we'd talked about them after. Bonnie, Bardot, Deneuve-they

had had intellectual approval. When they stripped for the cameras, it had

been courageous and wholesome. Was there anyone comparable to them now?

Somebody still had the Playboy in which Bonnie first appeared wearing only

her horn-rimmed glasses. Somebody else said Playboy was reprinting the

pictures. Everybody remembered her famous ad for Midnight Mink with the coat

open all the way down the front.

And every single one of us admitted, to our shame, having tuned in the

stylish but wretched "Champagne Flight" at least once just to get a look at

Bonnie. Bonnie at forty was still first-rate Bonnie.

And though her few Hollywood films had been disasters, she was now in the

pages of People magazine and the National Enquirer along with Joan Collins of

"Dynasty" and "Dallas" star Larry Hagman. Paperback biographies of her were

in every drugstore. Bonnie dolls were on sale in the madcap gift shops. The

show was in the top ten. They were bringing back her old films.

Soulful Bonnie; Texas Bonnie.

Well, Alex had had his arms around her only last Monday afternoon; she was a

"darlin' girl," yes, she did need the horn-rimmed glasses, couldn't see two

feet in front of her; yes, she did read all the time, but not Sartre or

Kierkegaard or Simone de Beauvoir "and all that old foolishness." It was

mysteries. She was addicted to mysteries. And no, she didn't drink anymore,

they had her off the booze. And she wasn't on drugs either. Who said such a

thing?

And would we please stop knocking "Champagne Flight"? It was the best break

Alex had had in years, he didn't mind telling us. They'd used him in seven

episodes and promised him a couple more. His career had never had such a shot

of adrenaline.

The nighttime soaps were bringing back all the worthwhile talent-John

Forsythe, Jane Wyman, Mel Ferrer, Luna Turner. Where the hell was our taste?

OK, OK. But we wanted real dish on Bonnie. What about the shooting last fall

when she mistook her new husband, "Champagne Flight" producer Marty Moreschi,

for a prowler and pumped five bullets into him in their Beverly Hills

bedroom? Even I had paid attention to that story in the news. Now, come on,

Alex, there's something there, there has to be.

Alex shook his head. Bonnie was blind as a bat, that he could swear to. She

and Marty were lovebirds on the set of "Champagne Flight." And that Marty,

well, he was director, producer, writer of "Champagne Flight."

Everybody loved him. That's all Alex could tell us. The company line, we

grumbled.

No, Alex protested. Besides, the best dish on Bonnie was old dish, the story

of how she'd picked a father for her kid while she was still big bucks in the

international cinema. Hadn't we heard that one?

Soon as Bonnie decided to have a baby, she'd gone shopping for a perfect male

specimen. And the handsomest man she'd ever seen was the blond blue-eyed

hairdresser George Gallagher, better known as G.G., six foot four and

"breathtaking down to the last detail of his anatomy." (Lots of nods from

those who'd seen G.G.'s shampoo commercials. And the New Yorkers knew him.

You had to book him three months in advance.) Only trouble was, he was gay,

absolutely thoroughly and incurably gay, this guy, and had never been to bed

with a female in his life. In fact, his most reliable pattern for sexual

release, "if you'll pardon my language," was manipulating himself as he knelt

worshipfully at the feet of a leather-clad boot-wearing black stud.

Bonnie moved him into her suite in the Paris Ritz, plied him with vintage

wines and gourmet foods, had her limo take him to and from work on the

Champs-Elysses, and commiserated with him round the clock about his sexual

problems, all to no avail, apparently, until she accidentally stumbled on the

key.

The key was dirty talk. Real good and steady dirty talk. Talk dirty to G.G.

and he didn't care who you were, he could do it! And whispering in his ear

the whole time about handcuffs and leather boots and black whips and black

members, Bonnie got him into her bed and "doing it" all night, and then she

kept him "doing it" all over Spain while she made her last big hit, Death in

the Sun. He did her hair too, by the way, and her makeup and her clothes. And

she talked dirty to him. And they slept in her dressing room together. But

when she was sure the baby "had took." she slapped a plane ticket back to

Paris in his hand with a kiss good-bye and thank you. Nine months later he

got a postcard from Dallas, Texas, and a photocopy of the birth certificate

with his name on it as the natural father. The baby was gorgeous.

"And what does this kid look like now?"

Don't ask!

But seriously she was a little doll, that baby, just precious. Alex had seen

her in Cannes at the film festival last year during the very lunch on the

terrace of the Carlton where Marty Moreschi, on the prowl for "Champagne

Flight" had "rediscovered" the woman who soon became his wife, the one and

only Bonnie.

And as for G.G., it turned out he loved being a father to the little

dollbaby, he'd chased Bonnie and the kid all over Europe just for five

minutes here and there with his little girl to give her a teddy bear and take

a couple of pix for the wall of his salon, until finally Bonnie got fed up

with it and had her lawyers drive G.G. right out of Europe so that he ended

up with his fancy salon in New York. Tell us another one, Alex.

But as the evening wore on, as the stories got racier and funnier and Alex

got drunker, an interesting truth emerged: not a single juicy anecdote had

been included in Alex's autobiography. Nothing scandalous about Bonnie or

about anybody. Alex couldn't hurt his friends like that.

We were hearing a best-seller nobody would ever read. No wonder Jody, my

beloved publicist, and Diana, Alex's editor, were sitting there over their

untouched drinks looking positively catatonic.

"You mean none of this is in the book!" I whispered to Jody. "Not a single

word of it."

"Well, what is?" I asked. "Don't ask!"

I soaked up over three cups of coffee, then went to the phone booth and rang

my house hoping Belinda had found the keys and let herself in or that she'd

called and left a message on the answering machine.

No score on either account. Just a call from my ex-wife Celia in New York

saying in sixty seconds or less that she needed to borrow five hundred

dollars at once.

Finally I started the drive back with Alex, and we were arguing almost at

once over the wind in the open car about why he hadn't put the little true

stories in his autobiography.

"But what about the juicy ones that wouldn't hurt anybody?" I kept insisting.

"Forget Bonnie and George Hairdresser What's-his-name, you know all kinds of

things-"

"Too risky," he said, shaking his head. "Besides, people don't want the

truth, you know they don't."

"Alex, you're behind the times," I said. "People are as hooked on the truth

these days as they used to be on lies in the fifties. And you can't kill a

career anymore-anybody's career-with a little scandal."

"The hell you can't," he said. "They may put up with some of the dirt they

didn't want yesterday. But it's got to be the right dirt in the right

measure. It's just a new set of illusions, Jeremy."

"I don't believe that, Alex. I think that's not just cynical, it's a bad

observation. I tell you, things are different now. The sixties and seventies

changed everybody, even people in small towns who never heard of the sexual

revolution. The ideas of those times raised the level of popular art."

"What the hell are you talking about, Walker? Have you watched any TV lately?

'Champagne Flight,' you can take it from me is garbage. It's the step-kid of

the fifties 'Peyton Place.' Only the hairstyles have been changed."

I smiled. Only an hour ago he'd been defending it.

"OK, maybe so," I said. "But any TV show today can handle incest,

prostitution-taboo subjects they wouldn't even touch twenty years ago. People

aren't scared to death of sex these days. They know that lots of the big

stars are gay."

"Yeah, and they forgave Rock Hudson for it because he died of cancer, same

way they forgave Marilyn Monroe for being a sex queen because she went into

the big sleep. Sex, yes, as long as death and suffering comes with it, gives

them the moral overtone they've still got to have. Take a look at the

docudramas and the cop shows. I tell you, it's sex and death, just like it

always was."

"Alex, they know the stars drink. They know they have kids like Bonnie did

out of wedlock. It's a long way from the years when they drove Ingrid Bergman

out of town for having a baby by an Italian director she wasn't married to."

"No. Maybe for a little while it was really open, when the flower children

were big, but now the wheel's turning again, if it ever turned at all. Yeah,

we've got a gay guy on 'Champagne Flight' because 'Dynasty' did it first, but

guess who plays him, a straight actor, and it's all minor stuff and you can

smell the Lysol they sanitized it with a mile off. Just the right dirt in the

right measure, I'm telling you. You've got to be as careful with the

proportions as you were in the past."

"No, you could have packed your book with the truth and they'd still love you

and everybody you wrote about. Besides, it's your life, Alex, it's what

you've seen, it's you going on record."

"No, it's not, Jeremy," he said. "It's another part, called movie-star

writer."

"That's too cold, Alex."

"No. It's a fact. And I gave them what they wanted, as I always have. Read

it. It's a damn good performance."

"Bull shit," I said. I was getting angry. We had glided off the bridge and

down the freeway past the ghostly Palace of Fine Arts and into town, and I

didn't have to shout so loud now. "And even if you're right, the stories you

know are good. They're good entertainment, Alex. The truth is always strong.

The best art is always based on the truth. It has to be."

"Look, Jeremy, you make these kid's books. They're sweet, they're wholesome,

they're beautiful-"

"You're making me sick. But those books happen to be exactly what I want to

do, Alex. They are the truth for me. Sometimes I wish they weren't. It's not

like there's something else better that I'm hiding or passing up."

"Isn't there? Jeremy, I've known you for years. You could paint anything you

want, but what do you do? Little girls in haunted houses. The fact is you do

them because they sell-"

"That's not true, Clementine, and you know it."

"You do them because you've got an audience and you want them to love you.

Don't talk to me about truth, Jeremy. Truth's got nothing to do with it."

"Not so. I'm telling you that people love us more for the truth," I said,

really working up a head of steam. "That's my whole point. The stars dish the

dirt about their love affairs in books now, and the public devours it because

it's authentic."

"No, son, no," he said. "They dish the dirt about certain affairs, and you

know what I'm talking about."

Dead silence for a moment. Then he laughed again, his hand lightly squeezing

my shoulder. I knew we should lighten up. "Come on, Walker-"

But I couldn't let it go. It tormented me too much, him blazing away at

dinner with all those stories and none of them in the book. And me, what the

hell, had I said to that reporter two nights ago at the promotion dinner?

That I wrote Looking for Bettina because the audience wanted it? Did I mean

that? That little slip was bound to come back to haunt me, and maybe I

deserved it, too.

There was some real important issue here, something that was damned near

critical to my life. But I was maybe a little too drunk and a little too

tired to really grasp it.

"I don't know what's wrong with me tonight. I don't know," I said. "But I

tell you, if you'd put everything you knew in that book, they'd have loved it

more, they'd have made a movie out of it."

"They'll make a movie out of it the way it is, Jer," he said with the loudest

laugh yet. "We've got two firm offers."

"OK, OK," I said. "Money, the bottom line, all that crap. Don't I know it!

I'm going to paint some pictures of money!"

"And you'll sell your little Angelica What's-her-name to the movies, too,

won't you? But listen, son, they're calling you a genius for this Looking for

Bettina book. Saw a window of it downtown. Downtown. Not in some kiddie

bookstore. Genius, Jeremy. Got to admit it. Saw it in Time."

"Fuck it. Something's wrong, Alex. It's wrong with me and that's why I'm

fighting with you. It's really wrong."

"Ah, come on, Jeremy, you and me, we're both fine," he drawled. "We've always

been fine. You've got it made with those kids, and if and when you write your

life, you'll lie for them and you know it."

"It's not my fault my books are wholesome and sweet. It's the card I drew,

for Chrissakes. You don't pick your obsessions when you're an artist, damn

it!"

"OK, OK, OK!" he said. "But wait a minute, smarty pants. Let me give you a

damn good example of why I can't tell the true stories. You want me to tell

everybody that when your mother was dying, it was you who wrote her last two

novels for her?"

I didn't answer. I felt as if he had hit me in the head.

We had stopped at the light at Van Ness and California and the empty

intersection was absolutely quiet. I knew I was glowering at the street in

front of me, positively glowering, but I could not look at him.

"You didn't know I knew that story, did you?" he asked. "That you actually

wrote every word of Saint Charles Avenue and Crimson Mardi Gras?"

I shoved the car into first and made an illegal left turn onto California.

Alex was probably my closest friend in the world, and no, I had not known

that he shared that old secret.

"Did the publishers tell you all that?" I asked. They had been my mother's

publishers too-twenty-five years ago. But all those editors were now gone.

"I've never heard you talk about that," Alex went on, ignoring my question.

"Not ever. But you wrote both those last two books 'cause she was too sick

and in too much pain to do it. And the critics said they were her best works.

And you've never told anyone."

"They were her outlines, her characters," I said.

"Like hell," he said.

"I read her the chapters every day. She supervised everything."

"Oh yeah, sure, and she was worried about leaving you all those medical

bills."

"It took her mind off the pain," I said. "It was what she wanted."

"Did you want it? To write two books under her name?"

"You're making a big issue of something that really doesn't matter now, Alex.

She's been dead for twenty-five years. And besides, I loved her. I did it for

her."

"And those books are still in every library in this country," he said. "And

Crimson Mardi Gras plays on late-night television somewhere out there

probably once each week."

"Oh, come on, Alex. What's that got to do with-"

"No, it's right to the point, Jeremy, and you know it. You'll never tell for

her sake. That biography of her-what was it?-I read that thing years ago, and

not a word in there about it."

"Popular junk."

"Sure. And I'll tell you the real tragedy in it, Jeremy. It's about the best

story that anybody ever tells about your mother. It may be the only story

about her entire life worth telling."

"Well, that's my point now, isn't it?" I said. I turned and glared at him.

"That's what I'm trying to say, Alex. The truth is where it's at, goddamn

it!"

"You're a scream, you know it? Watch the road."

"Yeah, but that's my goddamn point," I said again. I yelled it: "The truth's

commercial."

We were pulling into the driveway of the Stanford Court and I was relieved

that this was almost over. I felt scared and depressed. I wanted to be home

now. Or go looking for Belinda. Or get dangerously drunk with Alex in the

bar.

I stopped the car. Alex just sat there. Then he pushed in the dash lighter

and took out a cigarette.

"I love you, you know," he said.

"The hell. Besides, who cares about that story? Tell it."

But I felt a little stab inside when I said that. Mother's secret. Mother's

goddamned secret.

"Those kids keep you young, innocent."

"Oh, what crap," I said. I laughed, but it was awful. I thought of Belinda,

of reaching under Charlotte's nightgown and feeling this hot, succulent

little thigh that was Belinda's. Picture of Belinda naked. Was that the

truth? Was that commercial? I felt like a fool. I felt exhausted.

Go home, wait for her to call or come, then take her clothes off. Lay her

down on the crumpled flannel nightgown in the four-poster bed and pull of her

tight pan ties and push into her gently, gently... like a brand-new little

glove-

"It was your mother, you know, who told me about your writing the books,"

Alex said, his voice rising easily to its dinnertime volume. Lights, action,

camera. I could feel him relaxing in the seat. "And she never told me I had

to keep it secret either."

"She knew a gentleman when she saw one," I said under my breath as I looked

at him.

He smiled as he let out the smoke. He looked immensely attractive even now in

his late sixties. His white hair was still full, sculpted in a flawless Cary

Grant style. And he carried what little extra weight he'd gained over the

years with authority, as if other people were just a little too light.

Perfect teeth, perfect tan.

"It was right after the premiere of Crimson Mardi Gras," he said, eyes

narrowing, his hand on my shoulder. "You remember we had wanted to fly her

out to California and she couldn't come, it was impossible the way she was

then, but you came, and then later I flew down to New Orleans to call on

her."

"Never forget."

"Jeremy, you don't know how Gothic it all was, that trip south."

"You have my sympathy."

"My car pulls up to this gigantic old rose-colored house on Saint Charles

Avenue with all the dark olive green shutters bolted, and the picket fence

just holding back the oleanders so they don't fall right down on the front

pavements. It took two of us just to push in that front gate."

"No place like home," I said.

"And then I enter this dark cold hallway with the grim bronze pirate's head

on the yule post, and a big shadowy oil painting of what was it, Robert E.

Lee-?"

"Lafayette," I said.

"-Those ceilings must have been fifteen feet high, Jeremy, and those old

cypress floorboards, enormous. I went up and up that Scarlet O'Hara

staircase. The old gas light fixtures were still in the walls!"

"They didn't work."

"-And just a tiny little chandelier dangling in the upstairs corridor-"

"It was murder changing the light bulbs."

"-And there she was, the Cynthia Walker, in that cavern of a front bedroom.

That wallpaper, Jeremy, that old gold-leaf wallpaper! A set designer would

have given anything to get his hands on that old paper. Yet even so, it was

like being in a tree house when you stood there and looked through the open

slats of all those blinds. Nothing but the oak branches and the green leaves.

If you peeped out the front, you could barely see the traffic moving down

there, just little specks of color and that old wooden streetcar rocking

past. It gave off a roar, like the sound in a sea shell."

"Write another book, Alex, a ghost story."

"And there she was in her big old-fashioned bed with the oxygen tanks beside

it, the oxygen tanks right in the middle of all this gold wallpaper and

mahogany furniture. Big highboy-wasn't it?-with the curly Queen Anne legs,

and one of those old French armoires with the mirrored doors ?"

"Full of moth balls."

"You can't imagine how it looked to me, that room. And the book jackets and

photographs and the mementos everywhere, and those tinkling wind chimes,

those dreary brass wind chimes-"

"They were glass, actually-"

"-And this tiny little woman, this mite of a woman, sitting up against all

these embroidered pillows."

"Silk."

"Yeah, silk. And she was wearing a lavender silk negligee, Jeremy, beautiful

thing, and cameos. She had cameos on her neck and on her fingers, and on her

bracelets. I never forgot those cameos. Said they came from Italy."

"Naples."

"And a wig, a gray wig-I thought she had a lot of class to have a wig like

that made, natural gray and with a long braid of hair, nothing modern or

false for her. And she was so gaunt, I mean, there was nothing left of her."

"Eighty pounds."

"Yet she was so lively, Jeremy, so sharp, and you know she was still pretty!"

"Yes, still pretty."

"She had me sit down and drink a glass of champagne with her. She had the

silver ice bucket right there. And she told me how on Mardi Gras days the

king of the Rex parade would stop at every house along Saint Charles Avenue

in which a former king lived, and the former king would climb up a ladder to

the new king's throne on the float, and they would drink a glass of champagne

together while the entire parade waited."

"Yeah, they did that."

"Well, she said that it was like having the king of the Rex parade come to

drink champagne with her to have me come to New Orleans to see her. And, of

course, I told her what a great writer she was, and what a privilege it had

been to play Christopher Prescott in Crimson Mardi Gras and how well the

premiere had gone and all. She laughed and she said right out that you'd

written every word of it. She didn't even know who Christopher Prescott was!

Oh, how she laughed. She said she hoped he was a gentleman, this Christopher

Prescott, and that he drank champagne with the king of Rex during the Crimson

Mardi Gras. She said you'd done the last two books under her name and you'd

be doing others, lots of others. Cynthia Walker was alive and well in your

hands. Cynthia Walker would never die. She was even leaving you her name in

her will. You'd be doing Cynthia Walker books forever, saying you'd found the

manuscripts in her files and her bank vaults, after her death."

"Well, I didn't do them," I said.

He sighed and crushed out the cigarette. Blessed silence. No sound but the

roar of the Saint Charles car in my ears. Two thousand miles away, but I

could hear it. Smell of that room.

"I got the call in New York when she died," he said. "That must have been-

what?-two months later? We toasted her that night at the Stork Club. Real

genuine article she was."

"Undoubtedly. Now get out of my car, you drunken bum," I said. "And next time

you write a book, put the story in it."

"I'd like to see you do that," he said.

I thought for a moment.

"And what if I did?" I asked. "Somebody would come along and make a TV movie

of just that story. And sales of all her books would go up-"

"But yoga wouldn't tell it."

"-And so would the sales of my books, and all because people got a little

truth. Truth makes art and people know it. Now go on in, you bum, some of us

have to work for a living."

He looked at me for a long moment, gave me one of his easy, wide screen

smiles. So well kept he looked as if somebody had gone over him with a

magnifying glass to remove every blemish, every line, every unwanted hair.

I wondered if he was thinking about the other part of the story, if he even

remembered it.

On his way out of the house that afternoon, he'd come by my back porch

painting room, and I had invited him in, and he had shut the door and

casually slipped the bolt. When he sat down on the cot, he gestured for me to

sit beside him. We had made 1ovc-I guess you could call it that, he had

called it that for fifteen minutes, more or less, before the big limousine

had taken him away.

He had been the leading man then in all his glory, graceful of build with

curly jet black hair. I remember he had on a white linen suit with a pink

carnation in the buttonhole and a white raincoat over his shoulders which

faintly suggested the capes he always wore in his costume roles on the

screen. Effortlessly charming. That part had not changed at all.

"You stay with me when you come out west," he'd said. He'd written his

private number inside a matchbook for me.

I had called that number three months later when I decided to leave the

house.

And there had been the brief affair, a week at most in his splendid, clean

Beverly Hills house before he'd said: "You don't have to do this for me, kid.

I like you just fine the way you are." I hadn't believed it at first, but he

had meant it.

Sex he could get anywhere, and he didn't care if it was the cute little

Japanese gardener or the new waiter at Chasen's. What he really wanted around

the house was a nice-looking straight kid who could fit in like a [bad scan].

When his wife, Faye, had come home from Europe, I'd understood it a little

better, staying on with them for weeks after, loving both of them, and pretty

much having the time of my life.

Parties, movies, late-night cam playing, drinking, talking, afternoon walks,

shopping trips, we did all those things easily and comfortably, and the sex

was utterly forgotten as if I'd imagined the whole thing. I didn't leave till

I had finished a portrait of Faye, which hangs over the living room fireplace

down there to this day.

She had been one of those pretty comic starlets that nobody remembers now,

her career and her life were swallowed by Alex, but no matter how many "sons"

or lovers he had had over the years, she was his one and only true leading

lady. He'd gone through absolute hell after her death.

I'd never been to bed with a man after that, though now and then I'd felt a

powerful temptation to do it, at least when I was very young. And though many

of Alex's "sons" had outgrown his interest, we had become enduring friends.

We'd shared some pretty dramatic moments since those times and would probably

share others as the years passed.

"Don't worry, kid," he said now. "I'll never tell that New Orleans tale or

any other. The truth is just not my business. It never was."

"Yeah, well," I said bitterly, "maybe you've got a point."

He laughed a little uneasily. "You're cranky tonight. You're crazy. Why don't

you get out of the fog for a while, come down south with me?"

"Not right now," I said.

"Go home and paint little girls then."

"You got it."

I smoked one of those horrible little Gauloises because they were all I had

left, and I drove down Nob Hill and out to the Haight to look for Belinda.

But I couldn't shake Alex's story. He was right about me not being able to

tell that old tale. Neither of my former wives had ever heard it. Nor had my

closest friends. And I would have hated Alex had he put it in his book. I

wondered what he would think if he knew I'd never set foot in Mother's house

since the day I'd left on the plane for California. It was still exactly as

he had just described it, as far as I knew.

For a few years I'd rented out the lower floor for wedding receptions and

other gatherings through a local agency. You could do that with a Saint

Charles Avenue mansion. But when they'd insisted on redecorating, I'd

stopped.

The place was kept alive now by an old Irish housekeeper, Miss Annie, whom I

knew only by voice on the phone. It wasn't in the guide books anymore, and

the tour buses no longer stopped in front. But now and then, I was told, some

elderly lady would ring the doorbell asking to see where Cynthia Walker had

written her books. Miss Annie always let them in.

Finally these dark recollections started to lift as I cruised through the

late-night Haight. But other thoughts, just as dark, began to intrude.

Why the hell had I left Alex and Faye so soon to go to San Francisco? Over

and over they had asked me to settle down south near them.

But I had to be independent, to grow up, of course. I'd been terrified of the

love I felt for Faye and Alex, of the sheer comfort I knew in their home. And

how had I become independent? By painting little girls in drafty moldering

San Francisco Victorians that reminded me of Mother's old New Orleans house?

It was right here in the Haight, in a Victorian on Clayton Street, that my

mother's, editor, trying in vain to persuade me to write more Cynthia Walker,

had discovered my paintings and signed me up for my first children's book.

The portrait of Faye I'd left on Alex's wall was the last picture of a grown

woman that I'd ever done.

Forget it. Drive it all out of mind as you've always been able to do. And

think on the exhilaration you feel when you paint Belinda. Just that.

Belinda.

I cruised down Haight slowly from Masonic to Stanyon looking for her on both

sides of the street, sometimes blocking the little stream of traffic till

someone honked at me.

The neighborhood tonight seemed uncommonly forlorn and claustrophobic.

Streets too narrow, houses with their round bay windows shabby and faded.

Garbage in the gutters. No romance. Only the barefoot, the lost, the crazy.

I made my way back to Masonic again. And then back down to Stanyon and along

the park, studying every passing female figure.

I was cold sober now. I must have made the circuit six times before an

absolute fright of a kid dashed right up to me at the stoplight on Masonic

and leaned into the car to kiss me.

"Belinda!"

There she was under a mess of paint.

"What are you doing down here?" she asked. Blood red lips, black rings around

her eyes, gold mascara. Her hair was a shower of magenta-gelled spikes.

Perfectly horrible. I loved it.

"Looking for you," I said. "Get in the car."

I watched her run around the front. Horrid leopard skin coat, rhinestone

heels. Only the purse was familiar. I could have passed her a thousand times

like that and never seen her.

She slipped into the leather seat beside me and flung her arms around my neck

again. I shifted gears, but I couldn't really see anything. "This car's the

greatest," she said. "Bet it's as old as you are."

"Not quite," I mumbled.

It was a 1954 MG-TD, the old roadster with the spare on the trunk, a

collector's item like the damned toys, and I did get a kick out of her liking

it.

In fact, I couldn't believe I had her again.

I turned sharply onto Masonic and headed up the hill towards Seventeenth.

"So where are we going?" she asked. "Your place?"

The perfume must have been Tabu, Ambush, something like that. Real grownup

scent. Like the big rhinestone earrings and the beaded black dress. But she

was working hard on a wad of gum that smelled deliciously like Doublemint.

"Yeah, my place," I said. "I have to show you some pictures I did. Why don't

we swing by your room and get your stuff so you can stay for a while? That

is, if you don't get mad about the pictures."

"Bad news back there," she said. She popped her gum suddenly, then two more

times. (I winced.) "The guy and his lady in the back room are having a fight.

Somebody's liable to call the cops if they don't stop it. Let's just wing it,

OK? I've got my toothbrush. I was by your place a couple of hours ago, you

know. Five dollars cab fare. Did you get the note I left you?"

"No. When are you going to give me an address and phone number?"

"Never," she said. "But I'm here now, aren't I?" She popped her gum again

three times in succession. "I just learned how to do that. I still can't blow

a bubble."

"It's charming," I said. "Who did you learn it from, a car hop? No, don't

tell me, the same person who taught you the matchbook trick."

She laughed in the sweetest way. Then she kissed me on the cheek, then on the

mouth. In fact, she had me in a clinch, all prickly and soft at the same time

with the spikes of hair and the juicy little mouth and her eyelashes like

wire and her cheeks like peaches.

"Stop," I said. "We're going to go off the road." We were headed down the

Seventeenth Street hill towards Market, and my house about a block past it.

"And besides, you just may get mad when you see the pictures I painted of

you."