Rich Friends (16 page)

“
Bullock's, Broadway, and Montgomery Ward already have signed leases. We have parking for 1,400 cars,” Grossblatt said
.

“
This self-contained environment will offer a unique experience to Southland shoppers. We have plans for a health spa and a sidewalk café, a Japanese garden with teahouse, as well as five other restaurants.
”

Completion is scheduled for January, 1964
.

This Sunday the phones in the new house never stopped ringing. Everyone, it seemed, had read the article and wished to offer congratulations and good wishes. Quite a few offered, “I've got some spare cash, Danny boy.”

7

The following Monday Jamie had a cold.

He stayed home. Happily. The move to Beverly Hills had caused Alix no pain. Jamie, though, lacked her social ease. He was New Kid in a different school system. Not that he was picked on. No. He was ignored. He walked invisible through locker-clanging corridors and noisy playgrounds. In gym, when teams were picked, he was overlooked. No teacher called on him, yet he feared the eventuality. What if his voice made no sound? He began to be obsessed with the idea that he didn't exist during school hours—but if he didn't, where was he?

Naturally he never told any of this to Beverly. Naturally, she understood.

He lounged in the sunny, overequipped kitchen, quartering oranges (good for a cold), reading the sports, scratching Boris's velvet ear, fixing tacos. His full, juicy sneezes gave him satisfaction. Around ten that morning he visited Beverly.

Her studio was reached by steps from the kitchen: the architect had incorporated in it all his splendors. Plastic bubble skylights, elaborate storage, a dais for her easel, a marble counter to set up still lifes. Currently on deck, one aphid-infested rose in an Adohr milk bottle. She frowned, using her brush to get to the heart of a rose. Jamie found pastels in one drawer, some rice paper in another. Boris began circling restlessly, giving small yips. Jamie let him out the back door. The beagle disappeared, Magellan in the many garbage-canned alleys of Beverly Hills.

Jamie returned, snuffling into his handkerchief.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

His mother looked away from the rose. They'd gone into the matter often. “Yes. Or Something. I'm not sure what, there's too many definitions. But how could a rose grow?”

“Nature?”

“That's just another definition. People worship nature.”

“I guess most people have Something.”

“Want to go to Sunday school with Michael and Vic?” (Each Sunday morning at eight thirty, Dan picked up his sons, driving them to temple.)

“That's not what I meant,” he said hastily. He was worried about what would happen when he turned thirteen. Dan was very big on him having a bar mitzvah. His own father was half-Jewish and answered in a funny, stiff voice if you even mentioned religion. After a minute Jamie said, “I wish I were a bird.”

Beverly wiped her brush. “Any particular sort?”

“No.”

“Why a bird?”

“I'd fly in the cool air just below the clouds and see everything.”

“I wonder what their eyes do see.”

“Everything,” he said. “Did you know the diving petrel can fly underwater?”

“Really?”

“I read,” he said. Picking a dark-green chalk, he knelt over rice paper.

After about fifteen minutes, he sat up, mopping his nose. “Doesn't it get boring?”

“Not for me.”

His eyes questioned her.

“I must have a high boredom threshold,” she said.

“You're good.”

She shook her head. “No. Maybe that's why I'm not bored. I'm trying to get decent.”

“People buy your stuff.”

“The pastels.”

“Sometimes the other,” he said.

They often talked like this, desultory remarks, maybe picked up later, maybe dropped. It was easy, nothing. But rare.

Jamie turned on his transistor. “Listen,” he said. “It's an oldie.”

A nasal voice inquired of a dead teenager, possibly in heaven, if the singer were still beloved.

“Like it?” Jamie asked.

“It's not Cole Porter.”

“Who?”

“Before your time.”

After a while, he wandered away.

After a longer while, someone rang the front doorbell.

Beverly didn't hear. She was deaf to everything. The rose was stubborn about yielding up its aphid-infected heart.

She unscrewed the canvas, turning it upside down to criticize color and balance. Rotating her shoulders, she squinted. The thalo violet patch in the lower right corner, she decided, should be knocked down. A faraway lawn mower roared. On the marble counter Jamie had left her a sandwich. She ate whole-wheat bread and canned salmon full of mayonnaise, running her tongue over her teeth. A fish taste lingered. I'll clean my brushes later, she thought, and went for milk. Piled on the big kitchen table were yesterday's real-estate sections, six of them, topped by Jamie's transistor grunting out music. A waste of batteries. The sixty-five cents for new ones came from the dollar allowance that Philip gave him each Sunday. With her thumb she twisted the serrated edge of the dial, cutting off a long-drawn-out “Ugggh.”

“Jamie,” she called.

“Jamie!” she tried again.

Taking the radio, she clattered across terrazzo. Her thongs on the hard surface sounded tropical and slatternly, making her think of magnificent golden trollops wearing only mules, then of the naked freedom of
Olympia
, then the free clarity of Winslow Homer's—

Her feet stopped moving.

Jamie's radio fell. Inside the leatherette case, plastic shattered.

She heard a loud gagging.

All warmth receded. She was ice. The dead dwarf suns of a frozen galaxy were warm compared to her. Ice petrified her blood. Each time she remembered this moment, she would experience this barren, awesome chill. Through the open front door coiled a strand of birdsong. Sunlight jounced from the mezuzah that Dan, two months ago, had nailed to the oversize doorjamb, pronouncing: “
Blessed art Thou … accept in mercy and favor the prayer of Thy children who gather to dedicate this dwelling and to offer their thanksgiving.…
”

Jamie lay, left side down, one skinny, pale leg twisted under him, a pastel smudge on his right hand. A streak of watery pink drained down his tallow white cheek, a meager trickle that somehow worried her more than the rich blood soaking his hair. Red streaks pointed across terrazzo. Flies buzzed.

Punishment, she thought.

Philip, what have I done?

In that same instant she was kneeling beside her son, pressing her fingers under his Black Watch robe. The heart was beating. It was beating.

“Jamie,” she said sharply, as if she were angry.

A fly landed on his head, and automatically she flicked. Never move an injured person. Her thoughts skittered frantically. Didn't they say never move an injured person? But didn't they say ambulances could take an hour? Who are they? Jamie's fingers were relaxed, as if he were asleep. Squatting, she picked him up, not noticing his weight, her only struggle with his limpness. His robe tie fell. He wore shorts. So thin. He. Kicking off her thongs so she wouldn't trip, she lugged him to her car, heaving him onto the front seat: his arms and legs sprawled, and she arranged them, sitting behind the wheel, propping his head against her thigh before she realized she didn't have her keys.

She ran inside, swerving around her thongs and the broken radio, slipping on red, balancing herself before she fell. Where was her purse? Where? When Jamie was two he'd fallen on a Venetian glass ashtray—Philip had held him while the doctor picked out slivered aquamarine with tweezers. Yanking open drawers. Shoving aside books at her bedside, books thumping onto deep white carpet. Where? Idiot! The duplicate is in the desk.

The accelerator resisted her bare sole.

She didn't pause at boulevard stops. An Edsel squealed to a halt, an old man shouted. The fingers of her left hand, some paint-smeared, some clean, gripped the steering wheel. Her right hand spread on Jamie's rib cage. My son, begotten on me by my enemy. The heart, the heart still beats. Her foot pressed to the floorboards. She was unaware of the red brake-warning light, she didn't smell burning rubber. At the Emergency entrance she lifted Jamie, then a man in a green tunic came swiftly at her, taking him, laying him on a gurney. The ice chill had shape now, but she couldn't define it. The stretcher tires made a
heinie minoosh, heinie minoosh
, the sound once heard in trains, and a nurse called, “I need information.”

Doors swung shut on the stretcher.

The nurse, separated by windowed counter, mouthed questions. She had a profile like a trout.

A young doctor, an intern or resident, stethoscope in his pocket, came in, leaning toward the nurse. His hair was thin and blond, and he frightened Beverly. After a minute she understood why. He reminded her of Lloyd Rawlings. She had treated Lloyd shabbily by not loving (and leveling with) him. She grew limp with irrational terror. She had been so very callous—would this in some manner harm Jamie? The doctor whispered, the nurse whispered, and Beverly, trying to eavesdrop, caught a word here and there … Surgery … Critical … Massive …

“Mrs. Grossblatt,” the nurse said loudly. “This is Dr. Erland.”

“Is Jamie conscious yet?” she asked.

Dr. Erland shifted in his rubber-soled white shoes. “The surgeon'll tell you. Louis Sherman.”

“Why didn't you say Sherman was here?” the nurse asked.

“Scrubbing. We're in luck.”

“Can I see him now, Jamie, before he goes into Surgery?”

“He's in now.” Dr. Erland pressed two professional fingers to her inner wrist, staring at his watch. “You'd better lie down.”

“I have to call my daughter!” How could I have forgotten Alix? She must be home by now. Alone, home, alone.

“What's your number?”

“Crestview six—No! I have to tell her.”

“All right, all right.” Despite the thinning hair, he looked young and embarrassed. “But you'll have to use the public phones. Regulations.”

“I didn't bring my wallet!”

“Calm down,” he said. “Doctor's orders.” And fishing under his white jacket, he came up with thirty cents.

She didn't know what she said to Alix.

Alix said to her, “Mother, cool it. I'm fine, fine. Listen, will you feel better if I'm at Melanie Cohn's? I was going to show her my new pink sweater, anyway. You look after Jamie. Mommy, he is all right, isn't he?”

Dan was out, Georgia told her, but she would do her bestest to locate him. Georgia emphasized by
est
s and
ly
s.

Dialing Philip, Beverly remembered when she'd last been in a hospital—September, she'd miscarried. Dan's son, in embryo. Dead. Now she was in a hospital with Philip's son. She began to shake. Philip's secretary put her right through.

“Where can I find Mrs. Dan Grossblatt?” The man in the rumpled gray suit stood at the desk.

“I'm Mrs. Grossblatt,” Beverly said. Plastic upholstery had stuck to her thighs, and as she rose, her flesh made a ripping sound.

The man introduced himself. Roehl of the Beverly Hills police. He questioned her. The wrinkles in his terra-cotta face might have been carved with a chisel. She answered him. A lot of times.

He was asking, “But you didn't hear the bell?”

“No.”

“The boy must have. He went to the front door.”

“Maybe to let in Boris—his dog.”

“You're sure you didn't hear anything?”

“It could've rung. I paint and sometimes I can get pretty involved.”

“Any idea how long he'd been there?”

“Flies were around.” She shivered.

Who, she kept wondering, had reported the accident? Her fingers clenched. She couldn't bring herself to ask. Roehl frightened her. Weren't police a symptom of mysterious perils, the violence beneath surface calm, like that strange pale blood seeping from Jamie's ear?

After the detective left, she again forced herself to the desk. “Have you heard about Jamie Schorer?” she asked the nurse.

“As soon as we get word, we pass it on.”

A breeze sucked through the stale hospital air. Glass doors to the parking lot swung shut. “Philip,” she called. Everyone in the long room turned.

Philip. White shirt, white teeth, and tan. Handsome under pitiless fluorescent lighting. One of those good-life sailing commercials.

He walked toward her easily, as if he wore his deck shoes, which he didn't.

“I got here as soon as I could.”

She looked up at her former husband, again experiencing that familiar feeling, close to hypocrisy, that she'd felt with him during their marriage. (After the divorce culpability had been added.) His dark eyes filmed over. For the first time she realized she was barefoot, in faded Bermudas, and her thigh was bloodstained.

“How's Jamie?”

“They're operating now,” she said.

Philip went to the trout-faced reception nurse. “Can you tell me James Schorer's condition?”

Eyes admiring. But the same canned message. “As soon as we get word, we pass it on.”

“I'd appreciate that,” Philip said with a hint of sarcasm. “Do you have a towel?”

The nurse held out a box of Kleenex. Philip wet several at the fountain, and Beverly scrubbed. Tissue wadded. Scraps clung to her thigh.

“There was so much blood. Oh Philip—”

He cut in hastily, “Where's Alix?”

“At a neighbor's.”

“Why not check that she's all right?”

Obedient, Beverly walked through crowded corridors to the phones. Inside a booth she realized she didn't know the name of Melanie Cohn's father, and besides she had no dime. The booth door muted clatter. And she heard her own voice. “Please, it's not fair to punish him for me.” She rested her head on the black box, mumbling, “
Shema Ysroel, Adonai elohenu, Adonai echod.
” (As much Hebrew as she'd learned as Mrs. Grossblatt.) “Please let him be all right, please, please, please.” If He hadn't helped those others, why should He help Jamie? “
Shema Ysroel
—”