Rich Friends (59 page)

“Good. However.” He raised his right hand. “I hereby vow never again to use my powers of persuasion on my cousin, Amelie Deane Matheny, also known as Cricket Matheny.” He gave his amused smile. The lines around his mouth were permanently etched. “Come on. Let's get back to the party.”

She had a look of despair. She took a deep breath as if she were diving into a tremendous wave and might never come out. She said, very clearly, four words.

“We had a baby,” she said.

A car backfired. Through an open window the sharp sound burst. Vliet, clutching his chest, gasped, “They got me.” He looked at her. “Come again?”

“We had a baby.”

“We who?”

“You and me.”

He dropped his cigarette, retrieving it, rubbing ash from polished parquet with his thumb. “No,” he denied.

“Yes.”

“Where's it at, then?”

“He.”

“Where?”

“Dead.” Her clear voice shook. “He's dead.”

“Listen, being shook makes for a certain lack of empathy. Cricket, I'm sorry.”

The splotches of color that had risen to her cheeks faded.

“Give me a minute, okay?” he said. And stared at the tip of his cigarette. The fall had doused it. At first her words refused to register. Dead. Who? Dead? A baby. A boy. They had made it once—no, two times—he out of pain, she out of love, and nothing new for either, so how could this be true? Empty soft drink crates were stacked along one wall. Reaching out, he dropped his dead cigarette in one. “How long did it—he—live?”

“About six hours.”

The unhappiness in her whisper cut through him.

“Not even the night,” she said, hunching over stacked cookies, a hand to her forehead.

Any other circumstance and he would have teased her, consoled her, cajoled her, touched her. In the living room they sang “Old MacDonald,” a ragged children's chorus drifting through closed doors.
With a blurb-blurb here, a blurb-blurb there
. Cricket took her hand from her eyes.

“Dr. Porter decided I was too young to stay on The Pill,” she said. “I hadn't had the coil put in.”

“What would you've done if he'd been okay?”

“I never really thought it through. I was all happy and excited. And you know me. I was worse then. No plans at all. Having him, that's as far as I thought.”

“Keep him, though?”

The soft upper lip curved in surprise.

“No, you wouldn't give any babies away, would you? How did you keep it quiet? And where was he born—That was when you were at REVELATION, right?”

“Yes,” she said.

Vliet's turn to close his eyes. He saw a bearded figure, bloodied sword in hand. Christ, he thought. “But this didn't come out with the rest of the garbage at the trial.”

“Only Orion and Genesis knew.”

“Orion dead, Genesis never speaking.” Vliet nodded.

“Genesis was different then. He helped me.”

“Other people there must've seen. Known.”

“The baby was seven months. I never got huge or anything. And Genesis asked me not to tell. He has this thing about collecting secrets. Orion guessed, but he was the only one. Vliet, I feel guilty, so guilty.”

“About what?”

“The baby.”

“Why?”

She stared at him, surprised. “He's dead.”

“But it's not your fault, Cricket.” He paused. “Why didn't you tell Caroline and Gene? They never would've thrown you out. They would've helped.”

“With a D&C,” she said.

After a moment he said, “I suppose so. Cricket, you should've let me in on it.”

“You would've helped the same?” She gazed questioningly at him. His eyebrows raised in helpless, hopeless affirmation. “Vliet, you just had finished telling me if I ever mentioned, well, the incident, you wouldn't be able to look at me. Ever again. And that was one thing I couldn't stand. Not seeing you. How could I tell you? There was everything to lose.”

She'd been barely sixteen. He took the top cookie from her stack, and centering it carefully on waxed table, inquired, “Why tell me now?”

Her small face was defeated. “I just split with David.” (A beefy, silent type, according to Caroline, and no loss at all.) “I keep going from one to the other. It's connected with you. When I see you, that finishes everything. With everyone.”

“So this,” he managed a painful smile, “is cold turkey?”

She didn't answer.

She was giving him a strange, impersonal look, as if she were about to photograph him.
With an oink-oink here
. She rose, walking around the table. The back of her long yellow skirt was rumpled.

“Cricket, hey, wait. Please.”

She didn't turn. The door clicked shut.

He sat in a cane-bottomed chair in the Sutherlands' pretty breakfast room, tapping a filter tip on the table. He didn't light it. He had crept into a neutral area of self-hypnosis where time means nothing and cold pads the interior-of the skull, protecting the mind. He didn't dare move. If he moved, there was no way of knowing which direction his brain would jump. A black cateress in uniform opened the door, clinking empties into segmented crates. She glanced curiously at him. He didn't move.

When, finally, he rejoined the living, the party was over. Mothers zipped children's jackets. People clustered in the hall, thanking the Sutherlands. Cold air streamed with each opening of the front door. Cricket was pulling on a brownish fur of possible rodent origin.

Cricket, a tiny girl who looked far younger than she was. A freckly girl with a bump-ended nose and yellow hair. In this house were several ladies, his own mother included, who must have looked somewhat similar at the same age. But this one had been involved in a brutal mass murder, had had an illegitimate baby for a day (fantastic telly title, he thought), and slept around. Once she had comforted him. His mother never would have considered sanctioning her body for such purpose. The family called her Cricket-the-hippie-one. Vliet thought of her as Cricket-my-little-cousin-who-loves-me. Now, for the first time, he was recognizing that she existed apart from him and his needs, in her own landscape of barren craters and dangerous, burned-out places. This separate identity made his throat ache with sadness. His fuzzy little mascot gone. Gone forever.

Caroline offered her perfumed cheek for a kiss, Gene gripped his hand. Cricket, lugging an incongruously businesslike camera bag, did not look at him as she slipped into the cold new year.

2

Two nights later, Friday at ten, Vliet stood at the Mathenys' front door. Gene squinted through the peep. “Oh, it's you.”

“I find myself in the neighborhood.”

“Where've you been the last two days?”

“I called in sick. Didn't the trucks roll?”

“You never miss. I was worried.”

“But I wasn't sick. Am I fired?”

Gene laughed. “It's cold, Vliet. Come on in.”

Yellow forms were spread on the den table. In this house, Vliet was surrogate son, not a guest. Gene went back to work. Caroline, snug in a crimson-velvet caftan, watched a black-and-white movie. “They don't make 'em like this anymore,” she said, smiling up. “Isn't Claudette the
most
?” She pronounced it French-style. Clowdette. “Get yourself something to eat, luv, or drink.”

“Cricket home?”

“In her room. Go cheer her. It must be breaking up with what's-his-name. But she's never been like this. A blue funk.”

He hauled himself, arm over arm, up the curving metal, pausing at the dark door. He listened to her even breathing. The room was unheated. Cold penetrated his Norwegian sweater. His pupils adjusted. She was stirring.

“Hi,” he said.

“Mmmm? Vliet?”

“Yes.”

She sat up. She wore a bathrobe. “Thank you,” she said.

“For being here?” he asked.

“I didn't think you would.”

“Not in character, is it?” he asked, sitting on the end of her single bed. “Got an ashtray?”

“Use that mug.”

It was on the floor, and he put it between his thighs, lighting a cigarette. “Why're you in bed?”

“I was up at five thirty.”

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a girl smaller than natural size,” he said. “Cricket, there's a lot I need to know.”

“About the baby?”

“My son.” He gave a curious, atonal laugh. “I've got a few things to tell you.”

She nodded.

“We're cousins,” he said. “But there's nothing wrong with the family.”

“I fell. It was raining. Orion wanted me to go to the hospital. With the rain we probably wouldn't've gotten there. Anyway, Genesis didn't believe in hospitals. Vliet, I knew he didn't.”

“You're not in the neighborhood of guilty, Cricket. It was a simple premature birth.”

“Whose fault was that?”

“Mine.” Vliet glanced around the dim room. Neat it wasn't. Cold it was. “Always sleep with the heat off?”

“In winter I wear my robe.”

“So I see. Cricket, know something? You're the only girl I ever talk to. More than opening my mouth, that is.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Why?”

“It sounds so lonely.”

“It is.” He set the mug ashtray back on the carpet. “I've been doing a lot of thinking these two days.”

“Daddy said you weren't at work. I figured, well, I figured.…”

“That I'd split?”

“Maybe.”

“What? And give up my red-hot career?”

“Where were you?”

“Going crazy,” he said. “Listen, that's what I wanta explain.”

Instead of explaining, however, he began to weep.

He leaned onto her bed, shaking and gasping. He wept the tears that hadn't come since Roger's private funeral. He wept for his twin, for poor, brave Alix, and for his unknown son. Rubbing his fists into his eye sockets, Vliet wept for Alix whom he loved and had been unable to help, he wept for an infant who had arrived on the scene too early. He wept for Cricket who was a sweet slob and lived in a room that smelled of photographic supplies. He wept for his parents who sublimated their miseries through him and therefore never could be let in on what a failure he was. He wept for his brother, his conscience, now rotting in a hardwood casket with bronze fittings.

He wept, in truth, as we all weep. He wept for himself. Until this hour it had seemed to Vliet that Genesis had him trapped forever in that hot June day with Handel blaring. Now, though, he accepted the unvarnished verity. It wasn't Genesis who had him trapped.

It was himself.

He wept because, at last, he had accepted his complicity. He had shoved Alix back in the cage. Given a chance, he would have done away with his only begotten son. There were times when he hated his brother, and always he'd envied him. He used people. He used Cricket and used her and used her.

Racked with guilt, Vliet wept into blankets. He could feel her crouching over him, her body warm and soft. He could hear her murmurings in his ear, not words, just comforting sounds.

I don't need to explain, he thought. She takes on faith. She accepts. I can't accept me, but she can.

She'll prevent me from being a hollow man, a straw man, a swindle, a mock turtle. With her I won't be a tin woodsman without heart or conscience, Vliet thought.

He let Cricket take over where Roger had left off.

3

When Vliet told Cricket the baby's death had nothing to do with their being cousins, he had been quoting Dr. Bjork, Roger's old mentor. Bjork should know. The man specialized in genetics, sickle cell and otherwise.

That New Year's night, after Vliet had left the Sutherlands', he had driven around the quiet western part of the city. The next two days and two nights, he had branched out, weaving and reweaving through Baldwin Hills, Thousand Oaks, Malibu, Fullerton (where Van Vliet's Distribution Center No. 3 was), North Hollywood, West Covina, Simi Valley. The megalop loop. He had put well over a thousand miles on the Mercedes. Unable to stay still long enough to eat a meal, he would pause at Van Vliet's—only Van Vliet's—tearing open Frito bags with his straight white teeth, munching as he drove one-handed. He had shaved with the Remington Electric that he kept in the glove compartment. He was always on the move. He couldn't stop. What amazed him was that Cricket's revelation had been the final straw. He would've figured the murder, the trial, Alix's trips to the country of the mad. But not this. Why this?

He'd had a son.

Thursday afternoon had found him parking on the hilly street between County General Hospital and the USC School of Medicine. Here, in a good-size office that smelled of new paint, sat that elderly genetics miracle man. Bjork. Vliet, pacing between white bookshelves and a window that overlooked a modern court, spewed out the bare story without embellishment or explanation. He spoke as plainly as he could. If he went into emotional responses, there was no knowing how he would react. Bjork's shining skull nodded from time to time. He requested a medical history of the family. Vliet gave him a reasonably complete one. Bjork said, “We don't know much about human genetics, you understand. But from what you've told me, I'd say you've got as good a background as is possible. In my opinion the child was premature, no more.” Wrinkled hands laced. “I can't tell you how saddened I was about your brother. A great loss. Such a fine young man.”

“Roger, yes,” Vliet said.

Darkness had fallen. Vliet had found his way around the huge, gaudily lit hospital complex, across a bridge, and onto the nearest freeway, the San Bernardino. He had been in Upland, in a self-service station (
Ladies, We Serve U
), when urgency had overtaken him. Cricket, he had thought, Cricket.

Cricket was inevitable.

Others, of course, do not always see the inevitable as inevitable. Vliet knew it. His gift was oiling difficulties. He set about doing so.