Rich Friends (29 page)

“Ours wouldn't let us near the kitchen.”

“Let? Mother didn't notice. Artists get involved.”

“Understandable.”

“You get involved, too?”

“Very.” He buttered toast. “Her painting bothers you, doesn't it?”

“Let me think on that one,” Alix said. She finished her eggs.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“Well isn't this a fabulous morning,” he said, biting into his toast, watching her. Butter caught on his upper lip, and he sucked with the lower, watching her.

“I do have a mother-ambivalence thing. I don't mean to keep putting her down. She's very gentle and unique. Otherworldly, sort of. And a terrific artist. Most people think every good painter starves to death in a New York loft. It's difficult to realize a serious artist might live north of Sunset in Beverly Hills. She's going to have a one-woman show in The County. You can't buy that sort of thing. She was into mad rabbis before Francis Bacon and his mad popes, at least I'm pretty sure she was. When we get down I'll show you.”

“You're proud of her,” he said.

“Very. And her talent does bother me. Roger, want honey on that?”

He was starting the last piece. “Not unless—”

“I'm getting it for my tea.”

“There's a coincidence. I use it in mine.”

They looked at one another.

Touch me, she thought. And her hand inched toward his. Sunlight flickered on her buffed nails. She realized what she was doing. Quickly she rose, getting him a small jar labeled
ORGANIC CLOVER HONEY
, and nervous about sitting near him, went back to the drainboard for a slice of bread, carrying it and her tea mug to the porch. He followed, leaning in the door. She put crumbs on the rail. Wings flashed. Blue jays squawked. “That one's not getting any,” Roger said. The tension around his cheekbones had softened. His body was relaxed yet solid. She was conscious of her own body, her back muscles, the spring in her thighs as she bent to feed the neglected jay.

Around ten, Cricket, puffy-eyed and yawning, dragged upstairs.

Vliet got up just before noon. He was blowing his nose. “Terrific,” he said. “The common cold is with us.”

Vliet stayed indoors. Sniffling, coughing. Irritable. You'd never know this except for his cracks. They seemed funny, and were, but he would smile until you got the stinging point.

Mornings Vliet slept. The rest of the time he was dispatching his good nurse for soup or hot lemonade or vitamin C tablets. The weather turned overcast. Chill drafts swept through the old cabin.

Alix's time would have been less painful with the other two around.

But Cricket would zip into her enormous sweater and take off, sometimes with Nikon, sometimes without. (Alix would wonder what it was like to be Cricket, never worrying about making conversation, never conscious of hair or clothes.)

Roger spent hours smashing across empty gray water in some relative's Chris-Craft. The rest of the time he was downstairs in his room, alone with the fat medical books he'd brought along.

Breakfast, though, they shared. He would lean toward her, telling her about dissecting a tubercular brain, not gory but fascinating. Vliet never mentioned school. Roger was profoundly involved with every detail of life at Johns Hopkins—even the trivia, like blood counts and protein analyses. She felt the force of his enthusiasm. She listened without impetus to retort wittily.

On the third morning, she inquired what it meant, Wrecked Roger's Rags? The sweat shirt, he told her, had been presented by his high school teammates when he'd wrecked his ankle running a TD. “I heard it crack,” he said, and pulled up the right leg of his jeans, showing a scar that extended from hairless ankle to muscular, dark-haired calf.

“At the beach I wondered about that,” she said. “I didn't realize you were a jock. Did you win?”

“By the six points.” He grinned. “Otherwise you think they'd've bought me the sweat?”

“Roger.”

“What?”

“Christmas I missed you.”

That peculiarly wholehearted smile of his disappeared. “You melted the butter in the syrup,” he said.

“The pancakes don't get cold as fast.”

“Cold, they're doughy.”

“I needed to see you.”

“I wanted to see you, too,” he said quietly. “That's why I didn't come.”

“I wrote.”

“You did? I never got a letter.”

“There's the US mail for you,” she said. “I tore them up.”

“How many?”

“Five. No-no. Six.”

The wind had risen, howling through pine branches.

“I should've sent one of them,” she said.

He chewed.

“Shouldn't I?”

He poured more buttered syrup.

“I didn't quite get that answer,” she said.

“Did Vliet ever tell you about being a twin?”

She shook her head.

“Peculiar relationship,” he said. “Close, very. Not ESP or anything mystic. It comes from being side by side in your cribs, sharing a playpen, never being apart. Never being alone. You get to know your brother as yourself. There's always him. You don't have to round up a neighbor to play. You're independent, a unit. It cut pretty deep when he started with a gang. People always like him. I'm dull company. We are totally different, but that only makes it more convoluted. What I'm trying to say is, there are ties, ties. Understand?”

“You love him.”

“Yes. But it's deeper and less sticky than that. It's being the same person in two totally different brains and bodies.”

“Kind,” she said.

“What?”

“You're being kind. Letting me down easy.”

“You aren't the type to be let down by anyone.”

“That first year must be heavy on the psych!” she burst out. “How else could you understand me so well!”

“I only know girls like you have guys waiting from here to there.”

“And from there to here, too!”

“And one of them happens to be my brother, and like you say, I'm a serious guy, so I'd just as soon you didn't phony it up with unwritten letters.”

He might as well have slugged her in the chest. She had retyped each often, and the last had taken her three days to perfect. She felt so lost that she wanted to fold her arms on the battered kitchen table and cry. Big girls don't. Empty, phony girls can't. Alix picked up their dishes. At the sink her chest pains grew worse. I must get out, she thought. Cooped up in this miserable cabin I'm doing and saying all the wrong things. I have to move. A panic of necessity, this removing herself from the scene of the crime (rejection and/or making an ass of herself).

By the time she had washed the breakfast things, she was able to speak. “Roger, let me have the keys?”

He looked at her, startled.

“We need milk. Lemons. Stuff.”

“Let me drive you.”

She knew an apology when she heard one. Anyway, it was agree or cry. She got her cape.

The Volkswagen crunched over small twigs scurrying across the road. Alix's period was almost finished, but she felt very menstrual. She had read
Anna Karenina
again, and she remembered, more or less:
Like everyone else, in his past he'd done things that were wrong and that he should have on his conscience. Yet he suffered far less from these wrong acts than from insignificant humiliations
. Humiliations, she kept thinking. Every once in a while she would shiver. Damn him, she would think, damn all three of them.

In the market she chattered inconsequentially. She never let up. “This brand we use at home. Pure poison … Believe it or not, Mother's never made a pot of coffee in her life. Always instant. Roger, like Postum?… What? Never had it? What did your grandma give you when the adults had coffee?… Think chicken noodle'll cure Vliet's cold?… Smell that? Barbecued ribs. Shall I get some? Why not?… Hey, there're chocolate cookies. Mmmm, you've had a lot of chemistry. What is it, dicalcimate of glycerine?… Roger, be a doll, reach up and get those double-A eggs, the extra large. Three boxes.”

“We aren't staying that long.”

“Oh, look! Dried mushrooms. Now, they're good and serious in soup.”

His mouth taut, he shoved the basket.

The checker was a youngish woman wearing a heavy sweater pushed up to show thick red arms.

“Think spring'll ever come?” Alix asked with a dazzling smile.

The checker became Alix's friend. “Never,” she said. “That's a darling cape, hon. Get it around here?”

“No-no.”

“You can't never find anything that cute.” She pushed Northridge Whole Wheat bread along the stand, ringing her register. “You got a basketful.”

“Hungry mouths to feed.”

The checker said in a stage whisper, “I could tell right off you wasn't newlyweds.”

Alix laughed.

The checker rang the total, $23.49. Roger reached for his wallet, but Alix already had her B of A checkbook in hand. “Now, Roger,” she said dulcetly.

The woman held up Alix's check. “Alexandra Nancy Schorer. One-two-oh-seven Crescent. [She pronounced it Creskent.] Beverly Hills. Have a check-cashing card here?”

Alix shook her head.

“Let's have your driver's license, hon.” She jabbed a button, examining Alix's license again. “Not married,” she said.

“Not in the least,” Alix said.

The checker glanced at Roger. He turned a satisfying red.

As Roger and Alix emerged, a little girl, possibly she was eight, pedaled furiously around the parking lot on a small-wheel, high-handlebarred bicycle. Roger opened the back of the bus, Alix hefted a bag from the cart.

Tires squealed.

Thud
!

A narrow, wailing cry.

The little girl lay in an acute angle a yard from the overturned bike. The front wheel spun. A man was opening the door of a new green Pontiac. As Alix stared, blood began to spread on the child's pale-blue slacks.

“Oh Jesus!” Roger sprinted.

Alix, dropping the heavy brown paper bag in the cart, ran after him.

“I didn't see her. Them fucking low bikes! There oughta be a law. How can anyone see 'em?” As the driver spoke, his chin worked.

And all the time the child was emitting a thin, terrible wail.

Roger, flipping off his jacket, knelt over her. His shoulder and back muscles formed a curve, a cave, strong, secure, protective. “Listen, I'm going to try not to hurt you, but maybe I will.” He spoke quietly, his large hands gentle on the child. “I have to see the bleeding, okay?” Moving her hips as little as possible, he slid down slacks. Bright red blood spurted from a frail wishbone leg. Pressing the heel of his hand to the depression of inner thigh, he asked, “You a Brownie? Or a Bluebird?”

The child, now weeping in normal gulping sobs, shook her head. The orange earmuffs, twisted in lank hair, were matted with tears.

“I was a Scout. This is how they taught us to stop bleeding.” Roger glanced up at Alix, whispering swiftly, “They have diapers in there. Get some. Find out if they have an ambulance or what. A doctor.” And he bent over the child, reassuring.

Alix pushed through onlookers. How do they know, like buzzards, the minute there's an accident? she wondered while another part of her brain efficiently cataloged Roger's order: diapers, ambulance, doctor.

Returning, she found a bigger group and a highway patrolman talking into his pipping motorcycle radio.

“Fold me one,” Roger said. She folded. “Again,” he said. She did, handing it to him. The wound was no longer spurting, and he held the new diaper to it. The child's face was the blue-white of skim milk. “Get the spread,” he told Alix. She ran to the bus, returning to cover the child with old chenille. She heard comments.

“Shouldn't oughta allow them low bikes.”

“Hey, isn't that little Bobby Jean Damin?”

“Nobody else.”

“Oughtn't someone call the Damins?”

“Flip did.”

“Poor little Bobby Jean.”

They knew the child. Yet they held back. Roger was young, but Roger had the strength of confidence. They let him run the show. The highway patrolman strolled over to say help would be here directly. In less than five minutes an old-fashioned high ambulance squealed onto unpaved parking. A gray-haired man—Alix wasn't sure if he were an MD—knelt on the girl's other side.

“There was arterial bleeding,” Roger said. “But I think the knee's fractured, so I didn't raise the leg.”

“Good,” said the gray-haired man. “Bleeding's just about stopped. Good.” And he took over.

The ambulance swung out, raising dust, coated people drifted back to whence they'd come. Roger went to wash. Alix loaded groceries.

When they were back on the snaking road, she said, quietly, “You've learned a lot at Hopkins.”

“First-year med students don't get to lay on hands,” he said. “It's the truth what I told her—Bobby Jean. First aid, learned in Boy Scouts. Anybody could've done it.”

“But none of us did.”

He grinned. “We already decided you weren't a Boy Scout.”

Alix wanted to apologize for that bitchy, stupid scene in the market. A squirrel, tail raised in a question mark, ran across the road. Roger slowed. “I don't mean just physically,” she said. “You, well, you were reinforcing her.” It might not be an apology, but it was true.

When they stopped at the peaked garage, Roger glanced at her, sheepish. “What do you know?” he said.

“Nothing much, Doctor.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling at her. “Maybe doctor.”

3

April 25. April 25. April 25.

The date shattered her sleep. The date jumped in her mind. Today is April 25. Vliet snorted, rolling over, rubbing his stuffed nose in his pillow. Yesterday, making out the check, she had written April 24, 1968, and the writing had disturbed her, but she'd been too involved with her brilliant revenge to pursue the question. And the rest of the time, she'd thought about Roger, nothing else.