Rich Friends (48 page)

They were at the vegetable gondolas. Vliet cupped a bright cos lettuce in one hand as if hefting a bowling ball. “Consider,” he said. “This was in the fields yesterday. If it were ours it wouldn't be at the warehouse dock yet. Tomorrow it would be reloaded and—maybe—maybe trucked to the market. The lettuce in a Van Vliet's is four days old at the youngest.”

“Is it that I'm not Elsie Episcopalian?”

“I got you the first time,” he said. He dropped a cellophaned English cuke in the basket. “You're here to shop, girl.”

She picked up a pomegranate. “Or I'm living with him?”

Vliet bagged something round and purple, a red cabbage maybe, or an eggplant.

“What?” she asked.

“Alix, are you buying that or fondling it to death?”

She dropped the pomegranate in their basket. “I'd like to know. We're going there this afternoon.”

“White of him to drop by.”

“We,” Alix said.

“I think, Alix, you'd better reconsider.”

“It's already settled. We're getting married this week.”

He jerked as if he'd woken with a painful charley horse, though why her announcement should affect him this way, he didn't know. Christ, no surprise here. She was smiling as if she expected him to say something. So he said, “Congratulations.”

“Thursday. Vliet, you have to be down here.”

“Are they invited, too, my parents?”

“Why do you think I've been giving this questionnaire? Of course they are.”

“If I were you, then, I wouldn't play it so up front. Let Roger visit alone. At best they think of you as a working girl, an independent contractor. Let Roger go alone. They care for him, they care a lot.”

He hadn't meant to be cruel. He disliked cruelty—unless it got you someplace. She had provoked him into it. But she continued smiling as if he'd said something not exactly funny but wry.

“He wants me along.”

“Roger the bulldogger,” he said. “Well, be braced for the worst.”

“I am.”

“Good,” he said.

At Sav-on they stopped for RB's Wella Balsam. The lot was full. “I'll run in,” Alix said. She fled the little car. She was thinking of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, atomic warfare, pestilence—where were those apocalyptic horsemen who showed the world in its proper perspective?

7

The front door was open.

Choral music flooded from the house, assaulting the open car. Hallelujah. Hallelujah! HAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLL-LLEYYYYYYYYYYLLLLLLLUUUUUUUYAAAAAAAA, the Vienna Academy Chorus filling the smogless California day. Buster yipped violently, a small tympany counterpoint to the amplified voices. HALLELUJAH.

“Funny,” Alix said. “Roger wouldn't have that on.”

“No,” Vliet agreed. “RB either. And Christ, listen to that volume.”

Handel, lucid, airy, rejoicing, transparent, with woodwinds, oboes, bassoons, harpsichords. Loud. Loud.
For the Lord God
, repeated the sopranos.
For the Lord God
. Handel had written for more powerful castrati voices, but these recorded twentieth-century women sang their staccato blocks of triumph, the music soaring into an ear-shattering universe.

Cricket stared at the open door. Her face had gone ashen. Lord God, Prince of Peace, let it not be, she thought. Don't let it be. She couldn't force herself to think what it was that she prayed God not to have happened. A chill rested on her skin, it was as if the temperature had plunged to zero. She was sharing the bucket seat with Alix. Leaning across the perfumed girl, Cricket jerked at the door handle, swinging over crisp yellow piqué, bumping long legs, spilling bagged groceries. Then she was skimming over brown lawn, music battering her, HALLELUJAH, her big toe cracking against a sprinkler head. She almost fell, but regained her balance. As she climbed front steps, one two three four, her toe began to bleed.

At the door she stopped.

Inexplicable forces had propelled her from the car. She had been unable to slow her momentum. Now she stopped. She could go no farther. Knees flexed slightly as if she were readying herself for a parachute jump, she peered into the dim hall that was the interior of the tower. The amplified oratorio might have been a river in full flood, raging toward the sea, battering, pouring, hammering, sweeping, destroying everything in its path. Terrible, mindless voices. Overwhelming. Warning. Voices stopping her. Vliet was brushing by, and Alix. She saw them stop at the living room. Alix, suddenly white, held onto the carved entry. Vliet tensed, his mouth opening.

Over the music, she could hear Alix's shrill “ROGER!” Saw a lift of yellow skirt, long slender legs fleeing to the end of the hall, door flinging open.

Vliet sprinted toward the butler's pantry.

Cricket waited, not knowing which would scream first, knowing only that one would scream. The music, a cruel tidal wave, poised in balance, waiting to drown her.

“Roger, ROGER!” Vliet's peculiar, hoarse cry skimmed above choruses like a bird over that tormented river.

Cricket's soft upper lip for once was pulled down over her teeth. The muscles under her eyes quivered. She stood some time before she could force herself through sound into the Gothic house that had been built by her great-great uncle. She did not glance into the living room, she went stiff-legged to the library, raising the needle, taking the record from the spindle. She bent ringed plastic until it snapped. The raw edge bit into her chest.

She moved to the hall, reaching for the phone.

8

Alix was poised on the terrace, scanning the overgrown garden, one hand shielding her eyes, when she heard the hoarse cry, “Roger, ROGER!” She wheeled, racing to the door at the far right. Hinges had been pulled, and she struggled before the spring gave.

Full midday sunlight came through rusty screens, glinting on broken pieces of a green tumbler. The day's heat filled the room with a gluey warmth. Cabinet doors had been flung open, and across three of them was rusty printing. The doors were old-fashioned oak. One would have to look carefully to make out capital-lettered words.

Alix did not look, carefully or otherwise.

In the arch between service porch and large, airy kitchen the stepladder-stool had been kicked over. She swerved around it. The heavy black frying pan was upside down on linoleum, and the pottery bowl she'd used for mixing pancakes was on its side on the stove. Batter had dried on the porcelainized top, dribbling down the oven door. These pale stains were a relief.

They relieved the various reds. Blood.

The sunlit kitchen was drenched with blood. Blood pooled on linoleum and on the hardwood floor of the butler's pantry, it had been tracked to make paths from various doors, yet—strangely—only one shoe print, near the sink, was clear. Blood formed a long curl, a brown question mark pointing to the service porch. One of the dirty breakfast plates had been impressed with a maroon handprint—it resembled the hand medallions that kindergarteners make from clay as Christmas gifts for parents. A dishcloth had been used to wipe blood, then been crumpled on the table. Everywhere crimson, rust, maroon, dark plum, every shade of red. The warmth made the smell overpowering. Ripe. Salty. You could taste that red smell.

The two bodies were sprawled like life-size rag dolls sewn from red cloth.

RB, naked, thin arms flung up over her head, lay on her back. Wounds cut a spaced line down her torso. Her shift, borrowed last night from Alix, white eyelet now splattered with red, hung from the cooler knob.

Roger's T-shirt and shorts were soaked red. Cuts marked his arms. His clenched fists were drawn up as if he still battled his attackers.

Naturally, none of this was real. When Alix read, she willingly suspended belief. Now her belief took off for points unknown. She had seen Orion neatly dead in the living room, and she had not believed in that. So how could she believe in this? Roger couldn't be on worn linoleum. There was no way he could be lying here, a Raggedy Andy dipped in Rit, not when he was due to report to Stanford Medical Center next Saturday, not when this morning he'd played tennis and eaten from-scratch pancakes doused in Log Cabin, pouring more syrup on the bottom one.
Have to do something about that sweet tooth
, he'd said. She'd left him a little more than an hour, so how could she believe? Her breath made an angry, denying bubble. She dropped to her knees, crouching over him. She did not know she was repeating his name. His chest is warm, she thought. He's warm, yes. Warm equals living. He is warm, therefore he is.

Vliet was already hunched on the other side of the body, grasping his twin's wrist. His first two fingers moved frantically. He lifted the arm, holding it against his chest, and his fingers continued their worrying. After a minute he set the wrist down, carefully. It was if the arm had been severed from the body and he wanted to get it positioned right. His brother's blood made a maroon pattern. Vliet's shirt's an abstract, Alix thought. Mother should get a load of it. Here we have the latest Beverly Schorer masterpiece awaiting frantic bidding. Vliet tried for pulses at the groin, at the neck. He looked up.

“Nothing,” he whispered.

“There must be!”

“No.”

“Otherwise he'd be cold,” she insisted.

“Not yet.”

“We've got to get him to a hospital!”

“No point, Alix.”

“Now!” she ordered. Their heads were very close. She could see tiny bubbles of sweat on Vliet's forehead. Red wires crisscrossed in his eyeballs.

Vliet bent his ear to Roger's chest, then he raised his head and said, “No,” again. With his second and fourth finger he closed Prussian-blue eyes. That's what they do in movies, Alix thought, he's seen too fucking much celluloid to behave rationally.

“Hurry!” she snapped. “They need to do stuff right away!”

“His vital signs—”

“You with your two-thirds of a year of Hopkins! They inject right into the heart, don't you know that!” She jumped to her feet. “I'll get the fire department.”

“Approximately six quarts,” he said.

“What?”

“That's how much there is in the average adult male, Alix. Blood.”

And it was then that her consciousness admitted the blood. That is to say, her mind darted with thoughts of blood. Amazing. So much from two people. And in the living room, Orion's blood. A sea of blood. The red sea. Each blood cell has a spiral that codes every secret of the entire body. Blood ties, blood kin, blood enemies. Blooded is what happens in English novels when a hunter kills his first fox. Each month flows blood from every woman born. A crime may be committed in hot blood or in cold blood. Roger stopped that little girl's blood in Arrowhead, what was that child's name? He knelt over her and pressed his hand like so. (Alix pressed her hand on the largest wound. The flesh was limp and sticky.) In olden times doctors were called leeches because they bled their patients. Leech Roger Reed, MD, has type B. Six type B quarts is all the average adult male has.

Howsabout your average preadolescent male?

(She and Melanie Cohn walked home from Hawthorne School, gradually dropping off the others of their crowd at various large houses that got larger as they walked north. They talked about Richard Chamberlain and how sexy he was, and Melanie, who was in love, really in love with JoJo Buberman, wondered if JoJo didn't look just a teensy like Richard Chamberlain, and Alix agreed. Visions of JoJo with his own TV series danced in the cool Beverly Hills air. It was slightly uphill all the way, but they chattered and the long blocks went quickly. On Melanie's floor they devoured scoops of fudge ripple and Cheezits, listening to Melanie's new single.
I wanna hold your hand
. “My little brother's sick,” Alix said finally. “I better get home.”

When she walked onto the patio, she saw the front door was ajar. Strange. Boris rushed out, whining circles around her. “Wassamatta, boy? Wassamatta?” Boris yipped and slunk into the yard. Then she noticed her mother's car was gone. She was in the enclosed patio, a funny halfway point, not inside, not really outside. A nervous breeze rustled through bare new landscaping, touching the recently transplanted olive tree, shaking the birds of paradise. They look like orange vultures, Alix thought, shivering, clutching her books closer. She edged slowly around the pools. About five feet from the open door, she called, “Mother! Jamie!” No answer. But Mother's always here when we get home. Besides, Jamie's got a killer cold. Everybody's left me, Alix thought suddenly, not just Daddy, everybody. She wanted to race back to Melanie's house, noisy and alive with three bickering younger sisters and a huge, comfortable black maid. But Alix, new in school, had set up a reputation for being hip, and how would hipness jibe with this baby fear of an empty house? They've left, I'm alone forever and ever, Alix thought. She called again, “Mother!” Flies rose, circling the open door. Alix got a sick feeling: something awful had happened and it was her fault and she deserved to take the blame and deserved to be left alone forever. She took three tiny steps. Now she could see her mother's ratty thongs, and next to them, Jamie's transistor. Broken. He never took care of his junk. Alix did. Compulsively. The flies had settled on some funny brown marks on the terrazzo. Alix was inventing reasons to take her back to Melanie's when the phone rang, a thin sound of life from the dead heart of the house. Alix raced inside.)

Huge, lazy houseflies buzzed. It took Alix a heartbeat to realize the music had stopped. When? Awhile ago. Vliet was sitting back on his heels much as a Zen monk would. He did not hold his hands to his contorted face. He wept openly.

A strange, cold fury toward Vliet burst in Alix's stomach. He ought to be functioning. Roger would be, she thought, Roger would know what to do, Roger never sits on his Adidas weeping. Vliet's always been shallow. Weak. He rose, walking unsteadily toward the ugly half-bath off the service porch.