Free Belinda by Anne Rice Page A

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 SOIl. 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