Free The Gold Diggers by Paul Monette Page A

wait a year and a half. Peter was always getting custom orders finally coming in when the clients were halfway through a divorce or, in one case, dead, leaving him with twenty-two rolls of wallpaper covered with bats and Japanese fans.
    Rita was in no mood. She’d drawn a hot bath, and she was doing a perfunctory bit of yoga while it cooled to a simmer. She twirled her neck in an arc and then got down naked on the white fur rug and did her best to be a cobra. As she rose to her feet, she felt a first glimmer of calm. Float, she told herself, feeling as if she’d come at last to a place where people took care of themselves the whole day long. She executed a slow tango across the room to the bathroom, a sweeping walk somewhere between Isadora Duncan and Groucho, when suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was Hey.
    â€œI’m doing a hand wash,” he said, somehow getting by her and into the room. “Do you have anything you want done?”
    â€œOh, Hey, I’m not that organized yet. Everything I own is dirty,” she said, pulling the seedy pink terry robe closer around her that she’d grabbed off the floor at the last minute. “I’ll just throw it all in the machine before the weekend’s over.”
    â€œI did some things already for you that I found in the closet,” he said, and she felt a small chill creep across the back of her neck. “I separated out the delicate things for later. I can do the green shawl if you want.”
    â€œPlease don’t bother, Hey. I’m used to getting things done on the run.”
    â€œIt isn’t good for the clothes,” he said, as if the clothes had some rights in the matter, too, whatever her penchant for barely making do. She knew he was offering her his services so he could fall in step with the rhythm of a woman, and she resisted them, but not because she was squeamish about his reasons. She supposed he was all charm and innocence when he gathered up her nightgowns and tights, and she wasn’t innocent herself about the other ways in which a man could go about it. Rather, she was afraid she would start to pose for him, to pay in kind for all his small attentions to her. He wants to be my lady-in-waiting, she thought. Yet she couldn’t help but envy his enthusiasm. He wanted so hard to hear the sea in the core of the shell that he brought it up out of the coursing of his own blood. The moves of a woman were a siren song to Hey; and Rita, just come from dancing in her room, was humming a few bars of it under her breath. No wonder people told her their life stories. She came across as if she’d lived them all herself. One on one, she flashed like a mirror.
    â€œYou know about Linda,” he said, when it seemed to her the pause had gone on too long, and she heard his voice drop to the level of confidences.
    â€œLinda who?” Was Linda the parrot’s name? She’d kept her distance from the perch in the kitchen garden because the bird looked bloodthirsty.
    â€œMy previous life,” he said, quite formal about it, and patient with others who weren’t so lucky.
    â€œOh. Well, I did hear something,” she said, and thought: Shut up now before you embarrass him. But she was too nervous to wait out the pauses while he picked his way over his English grammar. She tumbled on. “But you know who it is exactly, do you? I thought it was just a feeling. I mean, I didn’t know you’d got an actual person.”
    He looked off rapturously and sat down on the bed. “My spiritual adviser tracked her down,” he said. “It was a great breakthrough for him.”Then, while she inwardly sighed for the flattening bubbles in her bath, he got quite moody. He began to get very interested in the crease of his trousers; and Rita noticed that, as he pinched it between his fingers to sharpen it, he affected a dressy lady’s delicacy. He retreated into solitude as he sat and put his