Rich Friends (27 page)

She loved Vliet. Yet she wasn't jealous of his parade of Miss Americas, not even Alix. Come on, try a little, she ordered herself. But all she could summon was a kind of dull envy for Alix's competitiveness.

Furthermore, Cricket seemed to be the only sixteen-year-old girl in the state of California who loved her parents, admired them. Worse, was comfortable living with them.

She stepped back and saw herself, one of the crowd reflected in plate glass. A midget, nonproductive, a floater, unwilling to enter the ambition game that is humanity's delight and torture. A parasite living on happiness that came to her free as Hawaiian breadfruit. Cricket might be young, but instinctively she understood certain truths. She knew that whatever benefits she would gain from putting herself on Vliet's line, happiness was not one of them.

His words lingered, though, like a flu bug that Cricket couldn't quite shake.

Several nights later, she and her parents were eating dinner at the round kitchen table.

“I've been thinking,” Cricket announced. “I'd like to take off, maybe up the coast. Do some serious work.”

Caroline's fork had halted and now was returning unoiled romaine to her salad plate.

“The coast, luv, to take pictures?” Long pause. “Then you can stay with family?”

“I guess,” Cricket agreed. “Yes.”

Caroline's relief surfaced in her fine laughter. “We've been
won
dering when you'd flee the coop, haven't we, Genebo?”

Gene's thumbnail was pressed to his lip. Years ago he had broken himself of nail biting, yet at times of stress he couldn't prevent the old reflex of lifting his hand. He looked with searching gravity across the table. Freckles and innocently raised upper lip. Sixteen? My God, he thought, she looks twelve. He could feel the souring of bland food—he'd been nursing an ulcer the two years he'd been president of Van Vliet's.

“All by yourself?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How far?”

“Oh, like Northern California.”

“She'll be with family,” Caroline put in.

“She'll be driving alone.”

“She drives alone now.”

“In Los Angeles.”

“You're nitpicking. Gene, stop being so
cau
tious!”

Gene's glance at his wife, in the nonverbal lingo of the long-married, said, “We'll discuss this later.”

He
was
cautious. For this reason he'd become head of the chain. When Richard Van Vliet decided to retire, he gathered the stockholders, Van Vliets all, to tell them he wanted to quit and their new man was Gene Matheny. “You can trust him,” Richard said, thus passing over the two obvious candidates, his own son and his dead brother's son. “Gene's got vision, but he's not wild-eyed. He's careful. You'll see. He'll double the value of our stock.” And in the two years Gene damn near had. Any man who pursues money, Gene knew, has to have a certain stupidity. And here he was, Eugene Matheny, a pursuant (prisoner?) of the buck. Therefore the stupidest of the stupid. What else could you call a man who wastes his life and ulcerated guts chasing what means so little to him?

In bad moments Gene would wonder if Caroline's jaunty hedonism were a substitute for the regard he'd lost in her shrewd blue eyes that long-ago winter noon when LeRoy Duquesne, PhD, had grounded his hopes. Gene's creative energy had been diverted into merchandising groceries with excessive attention to each mill of profit. He had no respect for his work. Or himself. He was privately aware, as if of impotence, that the markets, which everyone assumed were his pride, were his shame. Yet he was not unhappy. He loved and was faithful to his wife. They had Cricket, the family. Besides, one has to have time to cultivate unhappiness. Gene worked a fourteen-hour day.

He remained a liberal while officiating in the priesthood of capitalism—indeed, for this reason he clung the more devoutly to his early tenets. He believed the finest human is the one permitted to grow up without parental interference. Each child is a
tabula rasa
and must be permitted to scribble his own story. Cricket had been sent to progressive schools. Gene reached with alacrity for his checkbook whenever she verbalized one of her rare desires for more camera equipment. He never objected to the books she read, the photographs she took or bought. When she asked to see
Hair
for her birthday, Gene sat next to her, looking tolerantly through his glasses at frontal nudity and simulated sex groping. A decent, even straitlaced man in his own life, he refused to perpetrate evasions that might alter Cricket's purity of vision. A child developing in its own bent, according to him, was the cardinal responsibility of parenthood. He finished dinner in silence.

En famille
they sat in front of the TV for “The Smothers Brothers.” After, Cricket gave a yawn and climbed the circular steps to her room.

“The girls all travel now,” Caroline said.

Gene put down the land prospectus he was studying.

“She's only sixteen,” he said.

“They're everywhere. Europe, Asia—”

“Not at sixteen, alone.”

“You know how sensible Cricket is.”

“She's a total innocent!”

“Give me a good, honest innocent any day. They see far more clearly than us cynical astigmatics.” Caroline removed her reading glasses, making a nearsighted Mr. Magoo face, then chuckling.

Gene smiled unwillingly. “Probably they do,” he admitted.

“Then why don't you trust her?”

“I do trust her!”

“She's a careful driver.”

“But—”

“And we have family up and down every nook and cranny of California. Don't you
see
, Genebo? Like this she can be away from us in a protected environment. Develop her own potential.”

Gene knew his wife was pushing his weaknesses for all she was worth. He also knew that Caroline loved Cricket fiercely, the more so for the operations inflicted on their child's infant body. For these reasons, love and pain, Caroline had vowed never to impose her admittedly bossy self on Cricket. She never would permit Cricket to be smothered under the canopy of protectiveness that is the bane of only children. “Every night she'll be under a family roof. For heaven's sake, Gene!”

Gene picked up his prospectus. The cautious need more time.

For six days Caroline busily convinced her husband that their daughter should be permitted “to express herself,” one of his cherished phrases.

Finally, he capitulated. “She's got to keep in touch every day,” was his condition.

Cricket, unaware of the parental battle, readily promised to phone every evening, to write often, and never, never to give anyone a ride.

In Santa Barbara she stayed with Donnie Van Vliet. She photographed San Francisco while luxuriating in the Nob Hill apartment of Fletcher Van Vliet, who ran the newly acquired Northern Warehouse. She crashed with Tana Matheny at Humboldt State.

She started home.

4

REVELATION
was painted in mysterious Islamic lettering above the restaurant's brick patio.

In Carmel, morning fog is routine, but now, at noon, it had burned away. Oak-shaded crowded tables. Not one vacancy. Waiters and waitresses bore salads and foamy juices, moving calmly to and fro. The bearded men wore white clothes and white headbands to keep back their long hair. The women, too, were in white. Not uniforms. An old Arrow with the collar lovingly embroidered, a pleated Mexican wedding shirt, a blonde girl floating in white muslin, another's blouse patched with crocheted doilies. I must do that with Grandma Wynan's, Cricket thought as she wove her way to a free table.

Her waiter's scraggly beard grew from a narrow face. About her age, she guessed. She mashed her banana into yogurt, eating slowly, luxuriating in white shapes moving in and out of sunlight. She was last at her waiter's station, and he began, hesitantly, to talk.

“I'm Cricket Matheny,” she said.

“I'm Orion.”

“That's an unusual name.”

He ducked his head in an embarrassment that reminded her of Tom Gustavsen.

She soothed, “But then Cricket's not exactly everyday.”

“I used to be Lance Putnam. You know, Madison Avenue. Here, with the group, we pick a new name. I chose Orion.”

Cricket already had guessed those who worked here were linked, possibly in religion. “Orion,” she said, trying it out. “Orion's a constellation.”

“Is it? I just, you know, liked the sound.”

She touched her Nikon, snouted with a new 200-millimeter lens that was her parents' going-away gift. “Okay to use this?”

Orion frowned anxiously. “I better get Giles,” he said.

Giles Cooke, thirty years older than the rest, also wore white. A heavyset man too short of leg for his massive shoulders, with a graying beard spread across his powerful chest.

“A lot of people want to take photographs,” he said in a purposefully calm bass. “I ask why.”

“It's so peaceful.”

“Is that all?”

“I'd just like to try to get it on film.”

“People think of us as freaks.”

His voice was mild, yet she was intimidated—maybe because the mild voice issued from a graying beard.

She flushed. “But you aren't, you aren't at all.”

“In a way.”

“No.”

“You yourself said we're different.”

“I meant, the place is wonderful, so calm and full of peace.”

Giles sat at the table. He had a scent to him, masculine, yet not tobacco or sweat. He picked up her camera, turning it in thick hands. He didn't know cameras, he said, and this remark, she sensed, was to put her at ease, so she told him about her new lens. He asked about other lenses and exposures. She felt like a young child being manipulated by a clever teacher.

“Do you sell your pictures?”

“I never tried.”

“Are you rich, then?”

“Comfortable,” she said. “My parents are.”

He returned her camera. “Go ahead.”

The rest of the afternoon she squatted and perched behind her Nikon. Spraddle-legged, she stalked tame white pigeons. Sea fog rolled in, swallowing warmth and light.

Orion asked, “Giles wants to know, will you spend the night at our place?”

She hesitated. She was on parole, bound by her promise to stay only with family: the fact she loved her parents made the decision harder. She assessed the fogged patio. White clothes were disappearing into a tall old bus. Well? She'd have to stay in a motel. Wasn't this preferable?

“That's really nice of him,” she said. “Thank you.”

5

The Chinese compound had been built during the twenties by an eccentric oil millionaire who chose to isolate himself five miles from Carmel Valley proper, his only access a twisting rut that turned to swamp with rain. A white elephant with cheap rent. During Cricket's first visit, seven girls and five boys rattled around in the blue-tile-roofed villas enclosing the courtyard.

The group had started with three members last August when Giles had opened REVELATION. Work and life were integrated as in a monastery. Giles was still formulating the order. Any rule he came up with was obeyed: the deliberate walk, the raw food, the nightly procession from the great hall—white clothes made it seem like a Chinese funeral. As each law was revealed unto Giles, he would set up a meeting to explain it.

Cricket slept in a vast, furnitureless room with Magnificat (formerly Staci Grant of Orange County). At five came a bronze summons. The two girls rose from their mats, gasping as they washed in icy water, shivering across the dark courtyard to the great, beamed hall. Incense burned. On fleece rugs for a half hour they meditated. Giles then spoke of universal love and peace, his voice reverberating in his thick chest. Cricket had heard it all before, but never so compellingly. The men remained in the hall for Fellowship. Cricket went off with the women to prepare food. At eight the huge verdigris-encrusted bell sounded again. They breakfasted in the courtyard on wheat germ, almonds, raisins, dates, and unpasteurized milk. Nourishment, Orion whispered to her, that must last until six o'clock dinner. The secondhand yellow school bus jounced down the tortuous path. “When it rains, how do you get out?” Cricket asked. Orion replied, “Why would we need to? Outdoor restaurants, you know, don't open in the rain.” From the Carmel Valley Road it was a fast half hour to REVELATION.

The bus carried Giles away. He returned with crates of fresh curly greens, crates dripping red of berries, crates of apples, melons, celery. Giles's blade flashed in lettuce and artichokes. Cricket noticed his heavy frame shudder as he re-locked knives in a cabinet above the cash register.

“Why's he locking them away?” she asked Orion.

“He's the only one allowed to use them.”

“Why?”

“They're weapons.”

“Vegetable knives?” she asked.

“All knives're, you know, weapons.”

(The noon rush over, they sat on the patio wall—Cricket had just phoned Caroline to explain she was staying a day or two with new friends.)

“Only if they're used that way.”

“They're symbols,” Orion said.

“Not if they're cutting lettuce.” She had been profoundly disturbed by the way Giles's thick shoulders quivered as if under the whip.

“Every knife, Giles says, symbolizes every other knife. He wants us to kill the violence in ourselves.”

“Kill violence,” she said. “That's weird.”

“He didn't put it like that.…” Orion's hesitancy apologized even for this mild dispute. “In each of us there's this murder instinct. Wartime leaders only have to wave a flag and there most of us are with this kill kill kill reaction. We have to rid ourselves of every reminder, you know, of violence, before we can become immune. That's our goal here. To become truly at peace.” He stopped. “Giles is right. He always is. That's why we obey him.”