The Gold Diggers by Paul Monette

Author:Paul Monette
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480473799
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

7

“But I like clutter,” Peter snapped into the phone. “Clutter is what I do. If you want a lot of empty spaces, honey, you want someone else.”

And he put the receiver back in the cradle neatly, not making a noise, as if he wasn’t going to be pushed into a temper. He turned to Rita, who looked up at last from her own worktable. She had just pulled the two oddest colors out of a photograph of a Pakistani rug they’d bought at an auction in La Jolla to put in a house on Mulholland Drive. A purple dark as eggplant and a green like celery. The rug was mostly rust and yellow. You couldn’t even see Rita’s two colors in the photograph, but Rita had been down on all fours on the rug itself, on the day of the sale, and she knew what knots of color made up the dark medallions in the pattern. Peter, who meant to go right on complaining about the heiress in Manhattan Beach he’d just hung up on, took a deep breath and said, “Holy shit,” by way of transition. But when he saw the two squares of fabric in her hand—chintz, for God’s sake, and purple and green—he flew to her side for a different tantrum.

“What the hell are you doing? Everything has to be beige in Teddy’s house, Rita. Colors make him depressed. His parents used to feed him crayons when he was naughty or something. Let me do it.”

“Do what, Peter?” she asked sweetly. Then she appealed to reason, her voice like Valium, but all the same she made it do a parody of Peter’s rattled state. “So Miss Bank Account thinks you’ve bought things too big for her little rancho, but is that a good excuse to butt in on my room for Teddy Dray?”

“But you’re not listening, Rita. He thinks brown is too much color.”

“I know. He’s putting all that behind him. We reached an understanding.”

No question about it, they’d had nothing but trouble in the three days Peter had been back. During all the time he was cooped up in his bedroom, Rita had made a daily report, and together they’d succeeded in putting the lion’s share of the current projects into suspended animation. Most of Peter’s clients were so cowed by his ruthless search for the truth in their living rooms and so well-trained for delays that they were half grateful to the snake for giving them a respite. Those others who could not live without Peter turned on Rita as if she were the snake. They professed to be lost in their own homes like a maze, reduced to tea and toast because they couldn’t get around alone. Somehow, though, they gathered the necessary strength to shriek at Rita daily over the phone, demanding things they wouldn’t have dreamed of bothering Peter with. And now that Peter was back, he had to have lunch three times a day, from twelve till nearly four, to accommodate the most well-heeled, whose houses were all they had.

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