Free Belinda by Anne Rice Page B

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 inc.
    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