Rich Friends (28 page)

Here was REVELATION's first commandment.

Thou shalt obey Giles. They had ended up here because they were lost in the way only bourgeois youth can be lost. They weren't hungry or anything, but something sure was missing. Giles gave them faith, belief, a religion. They were celibate. If, later, they chose to marry, they would come together for the flesh's true purpose only: to create new life. They eschewed knives and leather. They were vegetarian—animals, too, are God's creatures, and anyway, meat-eating destroys spirituality. The work was divided into men's tasks and women's tasks, as the Bible saith.

There are a lot of communes. Cricket, though, never had lived in one. She was entranced. Each morning she rolled up her straw mat, eager even at this unearthly hour to unravel mysteries. She learned that Magnificat, née Staci Grant, willowy, dimpled, and redheaded, had had three (illegal) abortions before she was eighteen, and that Disciple had turned heroin addict in Vietnam. That Orion's life as Lance Putnam had been divided one month at a time between his mother's large home near the Huntington Museum and his alcoholic father's apartment in San Marino.

She ate organic meals, she wore her white Levi's with her Mexican shirt, sat in meditation. Yet even when her ankle ached, she found herself moving faster than the others. She talked in clearer tones. Once, during meditation, she got this crazy urge to shake herself like a wet pup and run noisy, yipping circles around the silent figures.

She would feel Giles watching her. When their eyes met, he would smile. She couldn't award him
loco parentis
as the others had—Caroline and Gene were her anchor people. Yet for Cricket, Giles's gray beard, his powerful build, his age transformed him into a patriarch.

One evening he sat next to her on the bus home.

“I don't see the fancy camera,” he said. “You have all the pictures you want?”

She had only that first afternoon's negatives. “I hope so,” she said.

“Go ahead whenever you want to.”

“I, uhh, feel like I'm, uhh, prying.”

“Then you've caught onto our way?”

“You live in peace.”

“And how do we manage it?”

“Everybody shares. You help each other. Synergistic.”

“Amazing, isn't it, how much easier life is when you aren't fighting up the ladder?”

They swayed, jolting. The bus had turned off the road. They moved into purple, folded hills. A pair of quail, crests bobbing, walked unfrightened.

After a silence, Giles said, “You belong here.”

Cricket had to battle an impulse to answer,
Right, yes, I do belong
. She did not feel this way. Her response came from his depth of voice, his tone of command.

She wondered, as she had before, about Giles Cooke.

Nobody knew his past. Giles believed that former lives have no utility. He had absolved each of them of any past sin, laying on the light penitence of never revealing certain details: these secrets Giles kept hidden in his head like the sacred reliquaries buried under cathedral floors. The past is dead, Giles ordained. We live in the Eternal Now. A philosophy that Cricket, God knows, understood. But Brace Ridge had taught her to question, and sitting next to Giles, conscious of his bulk, his odors, his grizzled beard, she asked herself wasn't Giles the sum of a mysterious former life?

“You belong,” he repeated. And said no more.

6

“You have a good soul,” Orion said.

“Yeah. Sure,” Cricket replied.

They were exploring the hills around the Chinese compound.

“It's true. My head's together enough now to catch the vibrations.”

“You people here are good.”

“We have to work at it. You're there already.”

A peculiar conversation to be having with a shy boy whose rough hand she held as they climbed, especially since it had to be seen in the light of the fact that during the four days she'd known him, Orion reminded her more and more of Tom Gustavsen. Vliet, she thought suddenly, and stumbled. Earth got in the sandal of her bad foot. She wiggled her leg to get it out. Orion steadied her.

“Don't leave,” he said.

“Did Giles say anything?”

“I want you to stay.” Orion's narrow face was tense. “Yes, he did. We all want you.”

“Because of my soul?”

“Don't laugh.”

“Orion, I'm not putting you down.”

“Just stick here awhile. You don't have to, you know, make any real decision. Not yet.”

Vliet had said she never committed herself. Well, here was her big chance. It was funny and she would have laughed except it would have hurt Orion. Wasn't this place, these people, the last commitment that Vliet had intended? She let go of Orion's hand.

When they reached the crest they were both panting. Orion pushed up his white band, mopping sweat from his forehead. The sky was a soft blue, a patch of early spring lupine echoed this blue, and far below, from blue-tile roofs, a flight of birds scattered. From here they were tiny dots.

“It's so beautiful,” she said.

“Stay.”

The following afternoon she left.

She had been with REVELATION five days, and her decision to go had nothing to do with Giles or Orion. In late morning she called Caroline from a phone booth in Carmel. The sun burned through glass, very hot, but they were a long time.

“Nothing else is new,” Caroline said. “Oh yes. The twinnies'll be home.”

“Soon?”

“Next week, Em said. They have time off for Easter. God, I
hope
Roger comes this time. Poor Em, she lives for those two beautiful lunks.” Pause. “Why don't you be home?”

“I will,” said Cricket. “'Course I will.”

Chapter Nine

1

They entered the cloud bank, and pine trees came out of the gloom, materializing for one ghostly second before disappearing. Roger flicked on the dims, stopping at the Arrowhead turnoff so they could pile on more clothes. Vliet, a worn, red-plaid shirt, the heavy lumberjack kind, Roger shrugging into a leather jacket with sheepskin bleeding through at one arm, and Cricket—already bundled in three mismatched sweaters—pulling up the zip of an Indian cardigan which hung almost to her knees. Alix thanked God she'd bought her Austrian loden cape—it was old.

As she looped buttons through thick green wool, she said, “Mother was up here right after—” Abruptly she stopped. She still could not say Jamie's name to anyone except (infrequently) her parents. The violence of her grief repelled her. She kept it to herself, decent, lonely, and raw as a bleeding ulcer.

“After what?” Roger spoke for the first time, almost.

Alix shook her head. Something about Jamie was nagging at her, but she was busy erasing her remark with, “Oh, after God and before The Bomb. She used to come up with Caroline.”

“Then you have preknowledge of the place?” Vliet asked. “Like memory in a cut cutworm?”

“I pray for it.” Alix clasped her knit gloves together.

“Yeah,” Roger said.

“I do. The three of you, blood relatives, and me the original outsider.”

“Ever try saying something you mean?” Roger asked.

“Hey, it's freezing,” Cricket cried, hauling her small self back in the bus.

At the cabin Roger busied himself with a chemical toilet, Vliet did things with gas and water pipes, and Cricket was meant to put away groceries, but she was a dawdler. It was Alix who efficiently stocked shelves. Her breath formed clouds. She thought of the ice mansion where Zhivago had written his poems to Lara.

She had noted a stack of logs by the front door. She set rough pine over kindling, struggling to rip a carton with cold-reddened hands, feeding the scraps. She knelt, blowing and coughing. Finally some bark caught.

“What do you know,” Roger said, pausing to unwrap a Hershey. He added the paper to her small flame. “Fire.”

“Three summers at Trinity, you have to learn something.”

“I never figured you for a Boy Scout.”

She sat back on her boot heels, visualizing the little box house. Trinity was an expensive camp.

“I would've learned from Girls Scouts had I been a member,” she said. Then, without meaning to, added, “Roger, don't push on me. Please?”

“I'm a superior pain in the ass when I try for humor.”

“On the way up, was that meant to be funny?”

He looked uneasily down at her. “No, not then,” he admitted. “I'm sorry.” He held out chocolate. A peace offering.

She broke off two squares, putting one in her mouth. He grinned. “Hey, that cape, I like it,” he said. And went for more wood. She let the chocolate melt in her mouth, watching him. He doesn't move gracefully, like Vliet, she thought, he moves better, with a kind of comfortable strength.

They gathered in front of the fire to eat hamburgers. After, Roger tilted his head back, drinking Coors from the can. Vliet rolled Zig Zags, passing joints, and Cricket dozed. Alix, keeper of the flame, fire tonged a log, shifting it. She was riveted to a single fact. Soon, soon, she and Vliet would go downstairs to the bedrooms, she and Vliet together, with Roger watching. Ridiculous, she kept telling herself. Roger knows I'm sleeping with Vliet. Intellectual information, though, is abstract. Having Roger watch them go to a bedroom is concrete, embarrassing, and for Alix something far worse than embarrassing. Dishonorable. A log fell, giving up sparks.

Vliet, yawning, said, “C'mon, Alix. Dance.” Pulling her up, he began to sing “When the Saints Go Marchin' in,” dancing her to the shadowy kitchen corner, dancing her to the windows, putting his arm over her shoulders. Side by side, their hips sashaying in perfect time to his beat,
I want to be in their number
, bumpsy, bumpsy, they danced to the dark stairwell. It was so easy. She should've remembered nothing public was embarrassing with Vliet.

The uncarpeted little room was refrigerated. Alix's nipples puckered into her breasts, and to hide the sad display, she turned her back, hastily dropping on her flannel nightgown. The sheets were clammy cold. Vliet, in old gray sweats, hugged her.

“I just got my period,” she apologized.

“There's timing,” he said. She held her breath in the icy dark, hoping he would keep his arms around her at least until she was warm. “Well,” he said, turning onto his back, “other stuff.”

She thoroughly disliked other stuff, and the disliking made her feel yet more inadequate. Saying nothing, shivering, freezing, miserable, she moved over him and put on a heavy act.

2

Light came around skimpy curtains. She glanced at her small Bulova. Ten past seven. Vliet breathed lightly. Blond stubble showed. His long face was relaxed and his quizzical expression gone. Sleep is more personal than sex, she decided, looking away. She stretched her arms overhead and arched her back. The morning chill was different. Alive. Happy.

She buttoned her robe, pulling on gray wool socks that, like her cape, had come from
Ach Du Lieber
Vienna, and were too heavy for normal Southern California purposes. She tiptoed out. Upstairs she opened the porch door, gulping mountain-scented ice. Morning sun was brilliant, outlining with black the trees that dropped down to the lake. A small bird swooped directly at her, veering at the last moment. She laughed aloud. Salutation to the dawn, she shought, and waved her arms up and down, dancing sideways along the narrow porch. Fast-moving socks make sweet sluffing sounds.

She heard another noise. Halted.

Roger's hands were touching the top of the door. His sweat shirt, stretched like this, exposed a strip of muscular, hairy stomach. Across the faded navy was yellow-stitched
WRECKED ROGER
'
S RAGS
. He was smiling. “Good morning,” he said.

“Not just good. Fantastic,” she replied, too happy to be defensive about her dance.

He breathed big under Wrecked Roger's Rags. “Isn't it?”

“Want some coffee?”

“Tea,” he countered.

“Me, too. I hate coffee.” She lit the high-legged stove with a match. “Anything else?”

“I'm going to scramble eggs. Want some?”

“No-no. I'll wait for Vliet.”

Roger was opening cabinets. Finding a heavy china bowl, he asked, “Don't you eat breakfast?”

“My favorite meal.”

“Unless it's forced on him, Vliet never gets up before lunch.”

“I never in my life slept past eight thirty.”

“Me, either,” Roger replied. He cracked an egg, southpaw. Shell fragments oozed into the bowl.

“Here,” Alix said.

“Eggs are my specialty.” He cracked another. More shell.

“The hands of a surgeon, not a chef.”

Laughing, he surrendered the bowl. She spooned shell from albumen, cracking four more eggs, sprinkling pepper, pouring salt from her palm, measuring in two spoons of icy water, holding the bowl against her robe. Rich melting-butter smells. Bacon crisping in heavy spider. Turn whole-grain bread in old-fashioned toaster.

“A major coup,” he said. “Everything hot at once.”

They smiled at one another.

She looked away first. For months now, Alix had admitted to herself how she felt about Roger. When he hadn't come home Christmas, her total misery (undisplayed, naturally) had proved to her what until then she had managed to submerge. She loved him. She loved him, and love terrified her.

She formed a large smile. “My Beverly Hills exterior hides a Dickensian past. Age ten I was apprenticed as a domestic. Cook, clean, scrub, iron, I learned the household arts the hard—”

“Look, you were the one who wanted me to quit, remember?” The blue eyes were bewildered. “Jesus, for a few minutes can't you drop the dialogue?”

“Does everything have to be stony-bottom serious with you?”

“When you're funny, I know how to laugh.”

She looked down at her eggs. “I did do stuff when I was a kid,” she said quietly. “Mother kept at her painting. Anyway, she's not neat. And here's a terrible confession. I am. So we—” She caught herself in time. Jamie. No trespassing. “I used to dust between Willeen's Mondays, vacuum, iron. Cook dinner sometimes.”