Rich Friends (39 page)

“Since you got down from Arrowhead, you've been different. You're not you. You don't push this way.”

“Must be the family determination coming out.”

Gene didn't smile. Thumbnail pressed between bottom incisors, he examined her. “Whatever it is,” he said slowly, “we're here when you need us.”

“I feel terrible about Aunt Em.”

“She'll forgive you. In time, even me.”

“But not Alix.”

“No, not Alix.”

He kissed Cricket goodnight. After he had disappeared down the stairwell, she stood at the dark circle of windows.

An owl lived in the hillside sycamore.
Hoo hoo hoo
. When you win, you lessen the other person. She had shrunk her father. And somehow herself. And that was why she felt this crazy siphoning. Family determination?
Hoo hoo hoo
. Sighing, she got in bed.

“I never could do that again,” she whispered. “I can't fight.”

Her seventeenth birthday was July 10. She had slept with Vliet at the end of April. By her birthday she'd known for some time it was fight or run. So run it was. She thanked God the ice had been broken last year. (Cricket didn't have enough savvy to know she also should thank Him for making her a daughter of liberal, upper-middle-class Californians in the late sixties. She was not on drugs, she had graduated from high school, and therefore on the Mathenys' socioeconomic level was considered a job well done. Despite her parents' trepidations—and they had plenty—it was an article of their faith that from here on in—if they loved their child—it was hands off.)

Gene took in the Buick for a complete overhaul. Caroline, reeking with Interdit, hugged her small daughter good-bye, slipping her a fifty to augment the wad of traveler's checks. And Cricket was off, as Caroline put it, “to take pictures around Carmel, she'll stay with a group of friends.” This explanation was received with commiserating sympathy. Who in Caroline's and Gene's circle didn't have a child bent on some oddball way of life?

4

1. Love your Spiritual Father as you love life
.

2. Incline your heart to the teachings of your Spiritual Father and obey him in all matters.

3. Share all that you possess with the family of your Spiritual Father.

4. Cast off your old life and dwell in the current of the eternal now.

5. Harm not your body by food, drink, or knife.

6. Eat not the flesh of animal nor fowl nor fish.

7. The man and his woman are united: let nothing separate them.

8. Come together, O man and woman, only when forces of physical, mental, and emotional love are in perfect harmony.

9. Harm no person, including your own self, with knife, deed, or word.

10. Dwell in peace with those in the home of your Spiritual Father that your days may be happy and long
.

The commandments had been etched on a panel of the great hall. Below, a pottery vase half as tall as a man was filled with branches dangling reddish berries. A scorching afternoon at the end of July. Thick walls kept out the heat. Giles sat on the only chair, tugging his graying beard, while Cricket, on a tatami, explained her predicament. She called him Giles. “I'm not Giles now,” he interrupted. “Daughter, call me Genesis.” “Genesis,” she said, and her voice receded. The pungent odor of sugar bush drifted around them.

“Your folks,” he inquired, “do they know?”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“They'd get me an abortion.”

He leaned forward. The skin above his beard showed craters from long-ago acne.

“They love me,” she said. “They'd feel it was best. They'd insist. I can't fight them. I'm not good at fighting. They'd talk me into it, I know they would. That's why I came.”

“What'll you do with the child?”

“Keep it.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here.”

“And the father?” asked Giles—no, Genesis.

“He doesn't know, either.”

“He'd've insisted, too?”

She could visualize Vliet sidestepping fatherhood gracefully:
Cricket, keed, for Chrissake, this isn't downtown Dresden with the B-29s on the way. There's this very good man. Clean and safe
. And after that, he would not be able to force himself into a room with her.

“He don't care about you?”

“He's my cousin. It's impossible. He loves me, too, but I'm like a little sister. Not his type.” She nodded. “He'd insist.”

“Ever think how strange? The world out there loves with a knife.” Genesis spoke with the impersonal rancor he always used on life beyond this sanctuary. He paced, short, thick legs coming down heavy on old boards. His footsteps reverberated through Cricket's seated body. “In crises,” he said, “a person can't accept revelation.”

“But this is the only place I have!”

“We need to resolve all past conflict before we're free to become.”

“Then I can't stay?” Her question, high-pitched and anxious, traveled through shadows.

He came back to sit in his chair. “Not as one of us,” he said slowly. “But you can stay.”

“Thank you.” Her muscles were limp with reprieve. “Thank you. I'll pay.”

He glanced up at engraved wood.
Share all that you possess
.

She flushed. “I'll work.”

“Got your camera?”

She nodded.

“Customers at REVELATION sometimes ask about us. The way we live. There's quite a few who're curious, and never mind why. Others, though, are sincere. The words I come up with can be taken wrong. Sniggered at. But a photograph—people don't laugh at a photograph.”

How he hated to be laughed at! She said, “I'll get across the feel of REVELATION. I'll try, really try, Genesis.”

“After, you'll be one of us.”

“Thank you.”

“One thing, daughter.” He raised a thick, warning finger. “Don't mention the baby.”

This, also she remembered. He snipped secrets from people to wear like amulets against his leonine chest.

“There will be no way to hide it,” she said.

“When the time comes, I'll tell everyone.” The words were spoken as law. Fond and paternal, but law.

She dug from her purse the keys to the Buick, her traveler's checks, her wallet with the scented fifty-dollar bill, her Union Oil card. These she turned over to Genesis in accordance with commandment No. 3.

Genesis himself had burned the commandments into wood. As REVELATION had grown—and now there were thirty-one members, plus four girls including Cricket in a state of limbo—he had formulated an orthodoxy.

Like Jesuits, the group were obedient to a centralized authority. Genesis. For each minor decision he had a rule, for every act a regulation. They knew at five they would be washing with ice water, at eight they would eat their uncooked breakfast, they would bob a head to greet one another. Sundays, women sewed at the long table while men would take turns reading aloud from Hesse and Gibran. People instinctively yearn to be told what to do—if only to have something to rebel against. These offspring of America's upper-income bracket had found their old lives chaotic. They had been excused from working. College classes had been liberated of roll-taking, not obligatory. Each day had been a desert and no signpost to help them cross it. In REVELATION the Select (as members now were called) had crept into the immutable freedom where there's not a single decision to make.

Unaware of time as a little cat, Cricket drifted around tables and into the kitchen, getting the restaurant on film. One time she snapped Genesis with his knives. “Don't!” he barked. For once, his chesty gravel voice was out of control. As penitence, she took him with arms akimbo, eyes thoughtful under white headband, a very fine shot, and borrowing her car plus three dollars of her money, she drove to Monterey and had the picture blown to poster size. She presented it to Genesis. Delighted, he hammered the poster to a wall. That very day a customer requested a copy. Genesis had a dozen printed, selling them for five dollars each.

Carmel Valley turned from gray-green to rich, late-summer brown. Cricket's pregnancy never localized into a lump. Beneath the loose white clothes of REVELATION her body appeared to have spread into adolescent pudge, and she had no difficulty keeping her promise not to tell. She felt fine. Fine. Doctors were anathema here, but she remembered reading about calcium and so drank quarts of raw, unpasteurized milk. Her only craving, sunflower seeds. She cached them in her pockets, and her small white teeth were forever cracking papery shells. She bounced through the daily trip to Carmel until she had well over a hundred rolls, then she set up her developing equipment in the never-used butler's pantry of the Chinese compound.

To make a print, light must pass through the negative onto light-sensitive paper. Cricket experimented with a technique called dodging, covering a place to keep it lighter, thus darkening the background. She redid the poster chiaroscuro like a Rembrandt. Genesis, delighted, had these printed.

She wasn't in the restaurant that overcast Friday morning in early October. Neither was Genesis.

That was the morning the Select found
Murderer
! slashed in heavy black paint across Cricket's work. The patio buzzed like a disturbed apiary. Who had printed this slander? Who in this uptight resort, who in this unenlightened town? One by one, they were drawn to trace jagged lettering.
Murderer
! Just before the lunch trade arrived, Orion tore it down.

They drove home in blue-hazed twilight. Genesis sat in the great hall. Everyone halted on the veranda. At last, Orion, breathing in audible gasps, extended the ripped poster. Genesis stared. His bearded face turned terrible and still, as if he were viewing a Gorgon. They shrank back. His heavy footsteps echoed across tile paving. The door to his room slammed.

Nobody spoke. Finally, one of the women went to the kitchen house. The other women followed. After dinner both sexes gathered in a circle of lantern light talking about the guacamole pie they'd eaten for dinner, the morning fog, the ways to seat more customers. Anything except
Murderer
!

Cricket huddled alone on the dark steps of the hall. Orion, straining his eyes, went to her. He thought he loved her to desperation. That he didn't was a technicality. She was the first girl he'd ever felt relaxed with.

“Come be with us,” he said.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“Is it, you know?” he whispered tenderly. Orion alone had noticed she was pregnant. She had bound him to secrecy for Genesis' sake, amen.

“Uhh-uh. No.” Cricket put her lips to her bare upper arm, the way children extract comfort from their own flesh. “Orion, we don't know Genesis. Who he was or what he did.”

“What's the difference? He's shown us how to live.”

“But it's almost like he's making a movie. We're actors and he's directing us. We don't know the script, or if he's improvising, or what. Or even the kind of movie. I haven't told anyone about the baby, and without him to focus in, nobody's even guessed. Except you. People don't see unless he tells them to see. Don't do unless he tells them to do.” This remark, she realized, set her apart, so she added, “I write one letter a week. Call home once a week—and I miss them so much. But I do what he tells me. We all do. What if he told us to …” She couldn't finish, but the meaning was clear.
Murderer
!

“If that's how you feel, you better move right on out,” said Orion. The harsh, cold disciple. He left.

The others went to their rooms. She didn't budge.

Footsteps.

“Here,” Orion said, dropping a handful of sunflower seeds in her lap, forgiving her her trespasses.

She cracked one, her tongue seeking the tiny kernel.

He said, “Shouldn't you go to a doctor?”

“We here don't use doctors.”

“Now who's following?”

“I'm very healthy.” She was. Besides, she hated gyn visits. Dr. Porter had said maybe she was too young to stay on The Pill and that he would fit her with an IUD. Putting off her appointment had been Cricket's contribution to the population explosion.

“Women all the time go to obstetricians.” Orion's heresy went muted into darkness.

“Not in other countries.”

“Maybe you better tell your parents.” His implication: They'll get you to some kind of medical care.

She shifted her weight.

“Cricket?”

She said nothing.

“Eventually they'll have to know.”

She knew this. She just didn't think about it. Afterward her avoidance seemed inexplicable—but when had she worried about the future? At the time, she decided the boy sitting next to her was a real worry wart. He cared, though. “Orion,” she touched his bony wrist. “Everything's going to be great. You'll see.”

Genesis stayed in his room the next day.

And the next. They didn't dare knock on his chipped red-enamel door. Anxiety settled under Chinese roofbeams and in the salty air of the restaurant. The Select once again were open to the slings and arrows of choice. Arguments bubbled everywhere.

On the fourth morning, it was Magnificat's turn to sound the rising gong. Cricket woke to gray light. Magnificat slept with one hand under crinkly red hair. “Oh shit!” she said when Cricket nudged her. “I'll do it,” Cricket said, and Magnificat retorted, “But you aren't one of the Select—oh hell! Big deal who hits the damn thing.”

The deep note came then. It seemed to hang forever in the cold dawn.

Magnificat jumped from her tatami, performing the ritual she'd neglected the past two mornings. Long red hair flapping, she touched warped board with her palms. “I am of the earth,” she intoned, “I am of the earth.”

Genesis stood on the veranda. His robe was fresh, his beard and hair damp with combing. Everyone stopped at the foot of the steps, waiting for him to open the doors of meditation. When they were assembled, he moved his hands, a flat, benedictory gesture. “Today,” he said, “we aren't meditating. We won't open the restaurant. We won't eat. This day is for searching.”