Rich Friends (26 page)

“All right?”

“Dandy.”

“Sure?”

“Van Vliet, do me a favor. There's nothing to talk about, okay?”

“I admit it.” His easy tenor gone, he sounded as if his vocal apparatus were being worked by machine. “I'm not exactly proud of the way the deed was accomplished. Christ, the impartial might say it was shitty.”

“Come on, Vliet, the box was a joke.”

“Well, chick, you sure got the point.”

“Do we have here a double entendre?”

“Really,” he said. She could feel his muscles relax. He chuckled, and in his normal, casual way, inquired, “Want for me to tell you I love you?”

“If,” she made the obvious reply, “that's what you tell all the girls.”

He chuckled again and said no more.

A blessing. She was incapable of another word, another syllable. Vliet, lying on his back tapping ash out the window, began to hum “Let It Be,” a contented sound. But that puppy! Alix, also on her back, not touching Vliet, wished she could cuddle it. How heartless could owners be, ignoring that whimpering?

At intermission they left. After she had unlocked her door, he curved his hands around her shoulders and for a couple of seconds his chin rested on her hair. She voted it most personal contact of the evening.

Chapter Eight

1

Summer, for Cricket, came to an end on the overcast September afternoon when the twins flew to Baltimore. Alix already was gathering clothes for the thirty-mile trek to a dorm in Pomona.

At first Cricket drew into herself. She walked slowly, forgetting what she had in mind to do. She would find herself examining her (sometimes) dark-rimmed nails. Everything seemed shadowy. She missed Alix and Roger. She missed Vliet terribly. She would try to evoke the summer, but without the others, without their presence as testimony, the summer faded into an overexposed, out-of-focus, black-and-white print.

Cricket lived very much in the present.

She began to sleep late. After the years of getting up early for school, it was beautiful. She loved her room, the only upstairs in the Mathenys' sprawling Bel Air house. The previous owner, a film writer, needing a place to work, had built this aerie with its circular windows. Most mornings, smog veiled the city in the golden haze of a nineteenth-century sepia photograph: after a heavy wind or rain, though, the air glittered clean, and across twenty-six miles of Pacific, she could make out the purple shadow of Catalina. She would gaze out the window, dreamily tying the royal-blue kimono with gold-tongued dragons she'd found at Goodwill. Barefoot, she clambered down chill metal rungs which curled like a fire station's. She would get herself an orange. On the kitchen table, her father's breakfast dishes were hidden under the financial section.

The rest of the
Times
was on Caroline's bed. Caroline, propped by pillows, a mug of black coffee in hand, a full ashtray on the blanket cover, would be on the phone. She would excuse herself with, “My nestling's down. Call you later.” They would hug. “I saw Catalina.” “I know this sounds
in
credible, but we used to see it all the time in the olden days.” Cricket would peel her orange into a paper napkin and snuggle at the foot of the bed, letting tart segments dissolve in her mouth, feeling grown-up as she listened to Caroline describe a party, mimicking the other guests, sometimes unkindly, always wittily. “And what did you and Tom do?” Caroline would inquire, arch. Tom Gustavsen, pronounced Goose-ta-av-sen, a photography major at UCLA. Caroline knew exactly what her daughter did with Tom. Sometimes Em would phone, reading in her anxious voice a letter from one of the twins. Cricket would scrunch next to her mother, listening. If the mailman delivered them a letter from the boys, they would call Em.

Caroline would disappear into her vast, mirror-lined bathroom to ready herself for shopping at Magnin's or Saks. She had her salesladies, whom she gave Christmas presents in exchange for being first to see “what just came in.” Generally she shopped with friends. Never once did she try to influence Cricket to join them. Caroline considered it her God-given challenge not to impose her dedication to the body (as a pleasure object) on her child. Actually, if she had, it would have been more of a challenge. Cricket, in her small innocence, was incorruptible.

After Caroline left, Cricket would return to the writer's hideaway. His wet bar had been converted to a darkroom. A couple of afternoons a week, she and Tom would take off on a photographic safari.

To Cricket those hazy fall evenings had the most glamour. She and Tom would visit his friends in their messy apartments around the UCLA campus. I'm old enough to know people with their own places, she would think, awed.

That was the fall she had turned sixteen.

2

Cricket stood on wet pavement at the top of the drive. It was Christmas vacation. Vliet and Roger had been due in last night. Their custom was to drop over the next day.

Rain had stopped a few minutes earlier, and now the sun was out. The silver birch next to the garage was a luminous miracle: opals gleamed at the end of each brown catkin, moonstones caught at each secret bud. The lovely tree gave Cricket a queer ache, as if a bubble were swelling inside her chest.

She was photographing the birch when Vliet arrived. Leaving her Nikon on wet paving, she ran to him. He lifted her, hugging, then set her down. He measured off with a graceful, waist-high wave of hand.

“How come you never grow?” he asked.

With anyone else she would have blushed. Four-feet-ten seemed less than nothing.

“How come you never shrink?” she asked.

He put her down, measuring her head this time. “Short-stuff,” he said.

“Where's Roger?”

“Baltimoh.”

“But why?”

“The last minute, and he decided his medical career would be forever screwed if he didn't hit the books.”

For a moment the fresh afternoon dimmed. She missed Roger. But for Cricket it was Vliet's blond hair, Vliet's smile that shone. Since before memory she'd felt this way about him, showing her love so openly that the family, Vliet included, discounted it, like a comfortable chair that one sits in every day and therefore doesn't actually see.

“Where's Aunt Caroline?”

“Christmas shopping and shopping-shopping.”

“The great consumer,” he said. “Christ, I missed you, Bubble Mouse.” He concocted nicknames for her. Cricket was his invention. She'd been christened Amelie Deane, after her great-grandmother.
But she looks like a little Cricket
, Vliet had persisted.

Inside, she poured him milk, scrambling up on the lower shelf to reach for Assorted Tea Biscuits. Vliet leaned back until the front legs of his captain's chair were raised. He took a crinkly paper of cookies.

“How's Johns Hopkins?” she asked.

“Grinding.”

She wrinkled her nose.

“Really, there's your only description. Meat. Just meat is all. Roger and I share a stiff with two other guys.” He leaned toward her. “Eau de cadaver.”

She sniffed. “More like aftershave. Nice. Is Roger really behind?”

“You kidding? You know him. He's gotta be ready to hang up the old shingle. Cricket, he's one damn boil coming to a head. Only for your innocent ears, this, but if the bastard isn't totally horny, I—well, take my word. He is. He's between. Why doesn't he get on to the next dog?” (Roger gravitated to mortal girls with heavy glasses or heavy legs.)

“Ever ask?”

“Ever try for a broken jaw? This is your total uptight situation.”

She nibbled a cookie.

“Being a twin,” Vliet said, “is only slightly less fun than using a kidney machine. And I'm stuck with him. Not that we're together that much, he being so straight and virtuous and hardworking and honest and sincere.”

“You make it sound bad.”

“Having him three thousand miles away is bad. Ever had that dream, the one where you're at a party and you look down and realize you've forgotten something? Like, say, your pants?”

“Or your conscience?”

“Really.” He grinned, drinking milk. “That's some shirt.”

She glanced down. She was wearing a navy-and-yellow-stripe T-shirt with
CUB SCOUTS
written cursively along the yellow. “Got it at a swap meet. Only fifty cents.”

“I'd've sold you mine for a quarter.” Circling the sleeve, his fingers drummed lightly on bare skin below. “Sexy you, you sex me up, sexy you,” he crooned like an old-time singer.

He meant, of course, the opposite. Still, she wanted to hold his hand to her, and with this, her happiness shattered. It took her a moment to understand why. Vliet did sex her up. For the first time, her love for him was tinged with carnality. The plain freckled face was suffused with color. After the fall, she thought, the loss of innocence this fall, it's because of Tom. In Tom's place, making love had come about naturally. One minute they had been looking at a proof sheet and the next they were entwined on his Navajo rug. Warm, pleasurable, exciting. Cricket, able to give herself to the moment, was a true sensualist. Yet she did not invest what Tom and she did on coarse, handwoven wool with romance, which, possibly, was why when a couple of weeks ago they had decided to be friends, just friends, they could be. Now she picked Tom up in her car—Caroline's old Buick—to go take pictures, kissing his prickly cheek when she dropped him off.

Vliet took away his hand. He lit a cigarette.

“Where's Alix?” she asked.

“Sweating out an exam. I rise at the crack of dawn, drive through the flood. Buy the woman lunch. Right away she drags herself off to hit the books. Want some?”

Cricket sipped from his milk glass. She didn't envy Alix. But how could she not? Under the new circumstances, how not? She was unable to rouse up any emotion toward Alix beyond despairing affection laced with pity. Cricket always had sensed that Alix's perfection was, like the gift of a wicked fairy godmother, a curse. Alix didn't believe in her own beauty, but it turned others envious, catty, awed, surly—obstacles Alix must surmount without realizing why.

Vliet asked, “And what've you been doing?”

Cricket shrugged. Her doings she considered like her body. Too small-scale to be of interest.

“Really. You must've done something.”

“Oh, enjoy myself.”

“That activity is no good for growing children.” He leaned back, smiling at her, his feet doing a tap dance under the table. “Have to get you earning your bread by the sweat of your brow like the rest of us slobs.”

3

“I'm stuck for a drive to LAX,” Vliet was saying through the phone.

The holidays over, Aunt Em must have a “cold,” Cricket decided. She said, “Pick you up.”

On the way to the airport a funny thing happened.

Vliet started on there's-this-holier-than-everybody-stage-that-certain-adolescents-get-into-causing-them-to-think-they-don't-need-to-do-one-damn-thing-beyond-contemplate-their-navel-fluff.

Stretching his long legs on the Buick's worn carpet, he finished, “Admit it. To you college is the living pits, and a horde of professors are waiting, for Chrissakes, to corrupt Cricket Matheny from her pure state of intellectual ignorance.”

“You sound like you've been brushing up on your Salinger.”

“But with a grain of truth?”

“A lot of people aren't going now.”

“Don't give me it's a sign of the times, Cricket. It won't wash. Not when I know your IQ's one sixty. Or was the number sixty-one?”

“My parents aren't hassling me.”

“Uncle Gene and Aunt Caroline have the old laissez-faire attitude. Do not interfere with nature's major minor miracle.”

Cricket's small hands tightened on the wheel. Her parents liked her fine the way she was, she knew this, but hearing Vliet say it caused a fuzzy pain on her skin, as if she'd been dumped into scalding water.

“What's wrong with just living?” she asked.

“Listen to what you're saying, willya? No goals, no aims. You're totally, goddamn absolutely satisfied with the
status quo.
”

Of course she wasn't. She knew she was small, plain. Yet at the same time she inherited Caroline's assuredness. She drove the great arcing span to the Ventura Freeway and lifted her chin.

“Nobody chops you, do they, Cricket?” he said, laughing. “That Lady Vere de Vere in microfilm, it gets me, Cricket, it really does.”

She guided the Buick into the flow of traffic. “You think I should go?” she asked. She loved him. His good opinion meant everything to her. “Do you?”

“Just get off that cute little ass is all.”

“Like?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“I've been working.”

“Do it seriously, then.”

She looked bewildered.

“Put yourself on the line,” he said. “Do it right, finish it, to quote Ma. Don't cop out.” He rolled down the window and threw out his cigarette. He never finished them. “Maybe you shouldn't go to college. You're too damn unpolluted. Listen, why not head someplace and do the click-click?”

“What's wrong with here?”

“Don't you have any ambition?”

“No,” she admitted sadly. “None.”

At the airport Cricket watched from the vast window as his plane bumped onto the runway. Her thoughts kept zigging back and forth. Was Vliet right? Had she copped out? Not just on the college question, but all the way down the line? Well? She looked at her jeans—she had found them at the Salvation Army in Pasadena, and the knees were faded a lovely white. A lot of Brace Ridge girls had gone to thrift shops and swap meets. Still … Was her refusal to visit Saks, Magnin's, and Judy's a means of escaping comparison with the beautiful Alixes? As if there could be comparison!

She had picked photography. Photography is a field where there is virtually no chance of making it. If, for example, she were a teacher, she would be called upon to show how well she taught. But as a photographer she never would have to face up to her own ability, or lack thereof.