Rich Friends (25 page)

“It's easier for girls now,” Beverly said.

Funny, Alix thought, I was thinking the opposite.

“You won't make the mistakes we did.”

“Father?” Alix stared in the mirror. Her jaw was set. She did look hard. Maybe she and her mother weren't close, maybe that's not in the cards for mothers and daughters, but more important, between them stood the matter of Alix's having a father only a few hours on Sunday. She would fix blueberry pancakes at his place, and they would sail his new Kettenberg. Alix never invited a friend, not even when her father suggested it. Other people would cut into her time with him.

“I didn't mean—”

“Not trying out Father before, was that your big mistake?” Alix asked, surprised how close to tears she was, surprised, too, at her own cruelty.

Beverly sank into blue flowers like (Alix thought) a bewildered doe shot out of season. Alix's animosity always reached this end: her sprayed buckshot drawing Beverly's blood and causing Alix separate but equal pain.

Their pain might balance. But never their guilt.

Beverly's fine features contorted as she sat back in the cushion. I'm a painter, she thought. This parenthetical summing up of identity shivered through her like a freezing wind. In it lay the years and hours since she had found her son lying on terrazzo. The guilts.

Jamie, in all his sweetness, lay under a flat marble plaque. Philip never had remarried—why? Alix. Had she, Beverly, somehow touched Alix into Midas's daughter, the golden girl? Sam wasn't really her baby, but his father's. And Dan? They still shared the mundane things, the rumpled king-size bed (pleasurably), the same toothbrush (four in the holder, but they invariably used the same one), a checkbook, he dealt with her dealers, she went on his rare Business Evenings. But. Dan loved her. And to her, Dan was merely her friend. No more. It's true at times he could get rough, very, but under the circumstances who could blame him? Not Beverly. Her
modus vivendi
(painter) made her guilty as hell.

Most of us hide our guilts in a private safety vault. Beverly hung hers on walls. Her agony burned on unstretched canvas and she rose from the ashes, a phoenix reborn to suffer again. As she gazed up at Alix, pain twisted Beverly, yet in her secret heart she knew she would relive this suffering at her easel and (possibly) manage an oil that some fruitcake would buy for his collection. Perhaps it was this that exasperated Beverly most. What sin, this recycling of life's misery into art! A phoenix, after all, isn't human. And Beverly, of course, considered herself a unique monster.

Alix took an audible breath.

“With everyone else I can say the right thing. Saying the right things is a game. You don't understand, do you, Mother? Well, I just can't play with you. I can't. And I can't be open with you, not anymore. I want to, but I can't.” Her lovely face seemed fuller, childish, pleading.

She reached. For a moment mother's and daughter's long, slender hands clasped.

“Alix, let me help?”

Alix moved away. “With my sex life?”

“It's always been important to me,” Beverly murmured.

“That,” Alix said, cold again, “everybody knows. Oh God. Don't you see we can't talk? Okay. Fine. Good. Make me an appointment with a reputable OB.” She grabbed her purse, and hair still wet, ran from the house.

She drove with no destination in mind, and it was without thought that she turned west on Sunset, curving past UCLA, hanging a right on Maggiore Lane, passing the house where once she'd lived. She curved up the hill by older places snuggled into their big trees, coming on the new houses. The sites had been leveled ten years earlier, but she still thought of the overbuilt, starkly modern extrusions as the new houses. Maggiore Lane ended. A thick metal rope stopped her car:
FIRE ROAD
/
SEPULVEDA WEST
/
NO TREPASSING
. She parked. Ducking under the rope, she walked along the unpaved ledge cut in the hill. The canyon was filled with late-afternoon shadows: three gulls flew up, their wings turning silver as they touched sunlight. Alix left the fire road, using both hands to scramble up a shale cliff. Pebbles clattered in a small avalanche behind her. She reached a flattened hilltop, maybe a hundred square yards of arid adobe with a few sparse brown weeds managing to grow in the cracks. She held a hand on her pounding heart. Below lay the city, the ocean, and a distant blue-whale hump that was Palos Verdes.

This was the secret place. Hers and Jamie's.

Never had they questioned who had carved off the hilltop, or why. It was theirs, a private domain above the world. The law of the land was secrecy. “If you bring anyone here, your nose will fall off,” Alix had vowed with preadolescent Freudian symbolism. The rule was far rougher on her than him. Social Alix. She'd never been here, though, with anyone other than Jamie. She'd never been here without him.

Pushing her sunglasses firmly up on her hair (almost dry now), she forced herself to seek out the old house. There it was, in the curve of the road. Peaked ell roof, three brick chimneys sheltered by oaks. She thought:

This is the land of lost content

I see it shining plain

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again
.

She tilted back her head. At a point above her eyes a sheer film of atmosphere raced together as if a seamstress were gathering blue sky with her needle. What I told Mother was true. I wasn't a nice little girl. I was a nice little bitch. (It never entered Alix's head that most children aren't nice, merely that she'd been a bitch.) Yet when we lived there, the four of us, I was a person. Whole. Complete.

She looked down at the shake roof, then closed her eyes, thinking,
And cannot come again
, without the nostalgia of the Housman verse, but with anger that hurt her gut. Mother and Dan, she thought bitterly. Oh, wasn't this immature, blaming them? Was it their fault she'd grown into an unhappy ice creature, terrified to get close to anyone for fear she might melt? (Yes, yes!) How much passion and courage she lacked.

Her mother's offer had shoved her into panic. Alix was sophisticated enough to know she was what previous generations had admired. Chaste. But now everyone wore sex-tinted glasses. Movies, books, songs, jokes delegated the non-lascivious to the back streets of womankind. You were meant to be propelled by unhaltable passion. Come to think of it, had anyone described the female end of this unhaltable passion? And what did it have to do with the action on a chenille spread in the twins' battered VW? How dare she question the sex urge, the basis of family life, motherhood, and all advertising? She was un-American. Vliet (and her previous boyfriends) were more than generous to her, an unfallen woman.

She stared down at the shake roof. The house represented a time with Jamie alive, and Jamie alive meant the world whole. Alix whole. She was crying. She cried until her legs itched. Red ants were attacking her. Goddamn ants. Wiping her eyes, she started down. As she passed her old house, she did not look at it.

She began to have a recurring nightmare. She was trying to cross Wilshire at Santa Monica Boulevard, but her legs refused to carry her across the wide stretch. A large truck was bearing down on her. Obvious.

She still could not give in.

8

August 30 was hot, and in the late afternoon, sprinklers had been turned on. At a little after eight, cooling Beverly Hills air smelled of damp grass.

Vliet, opening the bus door for Alix, said, “Got you something.”

“Any reason, like?”

“We've known one another two months.”

“Today?”

“Possibly. Or possibly not.”

The gift was wrapped in maroon velvet flocking and tied with pink satin ribbon on which was printed:
ALIX ALIX ALIX ALIX ALIX ALIX
. Under the bow three red roses fanned in fullblown grace. Vliet didn't start the engine. He watched her. She hefted the box. About the size of a book. But too light. Vliet never had given her anything, and this was dangerously sentimental.

Touching his hand, she said, “Vliet, thank you.” Her voice caught.

“Before you choke up, Alix, why not see what it is?”

“I enjoy anticipation.”

“Really.”

“There's this place on Sunset that does—”

“Did this. Except the roses. They're swiped from Ma. Her last is all.”

Alix touched a petal. Taking care to do no damage, she removed each flower, placing it on the dash, bloom toward her. On the last she pricked her finger and paused, sucking the drop of blood. She untied loop-edge ribbon—
ALIX ALIX ALIX
—rolling it around outspread fingers.

“I'm queer for unwrapping presents,” she said.

“Never would've guessed.”

“In some ways, it's the best part.”

“That, Alix, is where we differ.”

She smiled, thanking him again, and with a thumbnail unScotch-taped, trying not to pull any velvet finish. She folded wrapping into a neat square. The box was plain white cardboard. With both hands she lifted the lid. Shredded tissue.

“What is it?”

“Find out, why don't you?”

Her fingers explored.

Feeling, feeling.

Her fingers contacting only more white shreds. She removed clumps, pulling them apart, keeping the mess on the lid. When she had removed every scrap of tissue, she repacked the box, replacing the lid. Her fingers were steady. Amazing.

“Well, what do you know?” she said. Her voice kept normal, and this, too, amazed her.

“Nothing,” he answered.

“Just what I need.”

“But, Alix, with a fantastic wrap job.”

She nodded.

“It's our little joke.”

“Oh, that I got,” said Alix, leaning over to touch his cheek with her mouth. “Hit the road, Van Vliet. We don't want to miss Coming Attractions.”

He turned off the inside light, shifting gears. She held the box on her lap. Time. She needed time. Not to examine the depth of her pain—Allah willing, she need never do that—but time to suture the arteries. She was hemorrhaging. It's our little joke, Vliet had said. Me. I'm our joke. A good wrap job and some shreddy paper to poke in. Hahahahahaha. But if that's all I am, why do I hurt so much? Well, he gave me roses. (But what are three swiped roses to a bleeding eighteen-year-old girl who is more ripped up than most and hiding it better?) Suddenly she thought of Roger. He chopped at her, she understood this, out of his own psychological scar tissue. Vliet never had tried to hurt her before. That's what made this calculated. Vliet moves rook to Q4. Check Alix.

They waited in the line of cars at the Olympic Drive-in with its pair of weirdly proportioned surfers painted on the back-of-the-screen entry. An usher flashlighted them to a place.

“Drumstick?” Vliet asked. “Good 'n Plenties? Popcorn?”

“Please.”

“Which?”

“Whichever.”

He held onto the open door, peering at her.

“Git,” she said.

She watched him go, seeing him above the cars. Alix, you're feeling sorry for yourself. Am I? Definitely. And in a big way. And self-pity is a way of making up for affection that others don't give. Always it comes back to that ancient loss of love. She closed her fist. The lights were fading, and people were hurrying away from refreshment stands.

“Hey,” Vliet said. “You crushed one.”

“Shame on me.”

He'd gotten two popcorns. She didn't eat hers. She never could remember what the film was, a genuine case of blocking. After a few minutes he took the full cylinder from her hand, kissing her, a hard, buttery kiss. Openmouthed, she kissed him back and went from there without anger, hurt, rebellion, self-pity. She felt nothing. If emotions entered the bus, she would throw a fit of drive-in movie hysterics. They squirmed over the back of the seat. He pulled curtains. She was conscious of smells. Dust and Coppertone ingrained in the spread. Rancid butter. Shell Regular. Her Miss Dior cologne. His aftershave. The soap and seawater smells of his chest. Crushed roses. Cleopatra, it is said, used rose petals to close her womb: Alix's was guarded with Mother-bought Ovulen.

In cars around, people either watched or didn't watch the screen. And Alix, shivering, held her breath. “It's all right, all right,” Vliet said. Flickery Technicolor shadows moving on her, she gripped his shoulders. “Alix,” he whispered. It hurt less than the raw nerves compressed by her too-tight rib cage. He whispered words in her ear, possibly instructions that she didn't get—didn't want to get—and she worried someone would pass and see through the windshield. Would anyone notice a slightly rocking VW? At the end, it did hurt. So what? Alix wasn't around to notice anything.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Huhh?”

“Half the time I had it figured you were, but the other I assumed you were holding out.”

“And so it goes.”

“Next time'll be better.”

“There's the one advantage of a virgin. She knoweth not.”

Oh God, she found herself praying, please don't let me talk cutesy. German steel cut into her hip. Please, God, help me.

Even without Alix's fear of hormonal deficiencies, she knew from her many friends that nobody should expect the Story of O her first time out, certainly never in a Volkswagen bus at the Olympic Drive-in. And after the empty box incident! Yet for some archaic reason, doubtless brought on by too much fiction, she had hoped she would feel closer to Vliet. She now realized how greatly she'd hoped for affection. Warmth. Instead, she had shivered miles beneath him. Then made cracks. Well, no doubt about it, she thought, Vliet Reed has proved his axiom. Fancy wrap + shredded paper = Alexandra Nancy Schorer. In the next car a very young puppy cried, a spasmodic whimpering. The puppy had been whimpering for a long time.

Vliet kissed her lightly, her hair got between their lips, and he, pushing it away, kissed her again, then shifted his weight. She straightened her clothes.