Free The Gold Diggers by Paul Monette Page B

thoughts in order. There, like a widowed or banished lover who, without warning, still registers the most intimate expressions in his face, he seemed to be side by side exchanging knowing looks with Linda. Rita was a third party.
    â€œI’d love to talk about it,” she said, “except I have to take my bath.”
    â€œYes, you’d better go ahead,” Hey said, turning a placid smile in her direction. “They get out of here as soon as they’re ready. You know, you can’t waste a minute on Friday night. I’ll get your things out.”
    You can’t let that one go, she said to herself as she put the bathroom door ajar between them and hung the terry robe behind. She felt like such a coward sinking down into the bath. If she didn’t draw the line now, she supposed, she would find him one day making up at her vanity table and dressed to kill. But she hadn’t planned on being touched by Hey. She slopped the facecloth across her eyes as she lay back, because her throat had knotted and the tears were coming down. Unexpectedly, as if she were at a movie. She appreciated real commitment to such a degree that she’d gladly spend the better part of a year searching out a committed dry cleaner or drugstore. She could hold Hey back from laying out her party clothes on a Friday night, but at the risk of taking from him the chance to know a little further who he was. He might be crazy, she thought, but he had an idea inside him as pure as a fairy godmother.
    â€œLinda revealed herself in the cards,” Hey called out as he went about the room. For all Rita knew, it might have been a hand of poker. Softhearted though she was about the hands-across-the-sea between Linda and Hey, she took good care not to get involved in the method. She didn’t want so much as a word of spiritual advice. “She ran a traveling Bible school near Sutter’s Mill. Up in the mountains. It was during the Gold Rush, so Holy Brother and I think it must have been a cat-house, but we let Linda have it her way.” He paused, as if to hold two blouses out at arm’s length and pick a Friday color. “Which isn’t to say she wasn’t a lady,” he went on, almost to himself. “Her card is the queen of diamonds.”
    â€œHow does it feel?” Rita asked, not sure what she meant, but it had to do with being two people at the same time. She was floating after all, limp from the squall of tears and half-asleep. She knew from the sound of his voice that it must feel wonderful, so she gave him the cue to tell her so. Also, she guessed she’d be able to follow the story better if she encouraged him to talk girl-to-girl, so to speak, and underplayed the business of Linda’s telegrams from the beyond.
    â€œOh, you know,” Hey said through the door. “Men, men, men.”
    Rita blushed under the facecloth. She saw what a double outcast Hey had come to be. There wasn’t a woman she knew who wouldn’t have scored him for his dimwit, one-word, definition-of-a-woman feeling. But at the same time he wasn’t precisely gay. He didn’t say what he wanted. She bet he used the woman who lived like an echo in him to pretty up his longing for a man of his own. She suddenly knew he’d had no sex at all, none to speak of, anyway, none that kept on happening. He had the strained, slightly hysterical up-and-down in his voice that she associated with aging virgins. His gestures had lost their dancer’s logic. What, she wondered, had she expected? That he was as gay as Nick and Peter, probably. And that the Linda complication was another dimension still that connected him up all around. She’d wanted him exotic and wise like a hermaphrodite. A moment ago, when she was brimful of tears, she had turned him into a good-luck household god whose belly she could pat. Now he seemed instead just another out-of-touch and frazzled man cheated of love gratuitously. And she