Rich Friends

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  Dan turned away. He heard her footsteps leaving the room. He went into the windowless toilet. Throwing his tie over his shoulder so it wouldn’t get wet, he thrust his face under the high faucet, letting icy water strike him.

  He found her at the end of the hall, her forehead pressed on the window. A tarnished sun lay small in the overcast sky. Ten minutes he watched her, and she didn’t move, though she must have known he was there. He understood for the first time in all the years he’d known her, she didn’t want him near her, really didn’t want him.

  He said, “See you at dinner.”

  Still facing the window, she nodded.

  Around six, she phoned. Her mother, she said, had brought Alix, and the three of them were going to that new coffee shop around the corner.

  He went to evening services. He said the Shema, remaining on his feet as the Reader began. His father, Dan knew, would consider him worse than an apostate. He drove Saturdays. He slept with his wife at times of the month when he shouldn’t—twelve days after her period began, according to Moses, he was meant to stay clear of her. His kitchen wasn’t kosher. He hadn’t insisted her children get a Jewish education. With uneasy fear that he knew was superstition, he decided these sins would tilt any scale against him. Next to him an old man mumbled into his worn collar. The Reader intoned, “Blessed are You, O Lord, who heal the sick of Your people, Israel.”

  Pray, Dan told himself. Pray for Jamie.

  Jamie?

  Jamie he loved, the boy had the same gentleness as Beverly. In his heart, though, Dan knew he wouldn’t be praying for Jamie. Whatever his faults, Dan was not a man given to self-deception. He would be praying for his wife. He wanted his wife. Would she want him again? Invocations rose in the old-time synagogue. If anything worse comes up—and there’s plenty of possibilities—Dan answered himself, she won’t care to see me, even. Is there any way I can change this? Change her? Change me? A circle of questions clutched his throat. He undid the top button of his shirt, loosening his tie. “Blessed are You, O Lord, who hear prayer.”

  On Third they waited. Beverly huddled alone in one corner. She said hi and went back to staring at her broad gold wedding band. On the table lay a copy of the Examiner: VALLEY MAN CONFESSES TO STABBING. The others talked quietly. Dan couldn’t make sense of their individual voices. He could feel the mass hatred. He watched his wife twist her wedding band as if it hurt her. They’d been married ten months, and she was acting like the gold had been devalued and shrunk. A well-equipped hell of any denomination must have exactly such a waiting room. Maybe this was Gehenna. No! Gehenna was one sea of mud with icy rain slashing on shivering skeletons and over all the indescribable, unforgettable smell. Once you’d been in that place, how could you take this petty hell seriously? Oh Buzz, I can’t live with this guilt. I can’t live without you. Buzz, look at me.

  A little after eleven, Jamie died.

  3

  Cold hall. Masses of flowers blending into jungle odor. Young capless rabbi. Her parents and Philip having made all arrangements, a service as close to High Church as Judaism can come. The Lindes, Vilma Schorer, Philip, and her in the Family Room. Vilma Schorer, swathed in black voile, checking the house through silk curtains. SRO. (One hundred and thirty-seven of the names signed in the white-leather guest book were there because Jamie Schorer was Dan Grossblatt’s stepson, Dan drew people, whether they liked him or not, he drew people.) “Or even the silver cord be loosed or the golden bowl be broken.…” And the skull is like a bowl. Beverly, taking first her father’s dry handkerchief, then his wet one, finally burrowing her face in his shoulder.

  She left with her parents in the limousine. She had stayed in their house the three days since Jamie’s death. Since Dan had told her. Alix waited at the front door. Alix had wanted to go, but Mrs. Linde had pronounced a funeral too morbid for a young girl, and Beverly hadn’t been up to arguing.

  Beverly kissed Alix. Alix asked if she’d like a cup of coffee. Mrs. Linde said, “A lot of people will be dropping by. Willeen’s making coffee in the urn.” Beverly kissed her daughter again, saying she’d love some tea, and Mrs. Linde, firm if pale and red-eyed, said Beverly should rest while Alix made it.

  Beverly sat on her old bed, swinging up her legs. Don’t. Mrs. Linde’s commandment: Thou shalt not lie on the bedspread. She folded back Martha Washington candlewick. The blanket itched through her hose.

  “Mother,” Alix said, depositing a cup on the bedside table. “All those people coming. Think I better change?”

  Alix, in stretch jeans and lemon angora, the glowing quintessence of all-American girlhood. Beverly thought of Mrs. Linde’s strained face. “Maybe your blue jumper?”

  “It’s home.”

  “How about the pink you wore yesterday?”

  “It’s not dark or anything.”

  “It’s fine, just fine.” Beverly sat up. “Alix, are you all right?”

  Alix said yes.

  “About Jamie?” Beverly murmured.

  “I know what you meant.”

  Beverly looked into the luminous brown eyes and found the familiar barrier. Her daughter wanted reassurance about a pink sweater and skirt, nothing more. Yet Alix must be grieving. Alix had been very close to Jamie. In the teasing, disputatious, often cruel ways of an older sister, she had spent much time with him. They had shared secrets, trips to the beach, allowances, Helms’s jelly doughnuts, and Bobby Rydell records.

  Beverly said, “It’s impossible.… I keep expecting him to come in—don’t you?”

  “Mother, drink your tea.”

  “Can’t you talk to me about him, Alix?”

  “I put in a lot of milk. It’ll get cold.”

  No hostility lay behind the beautiful brown eyes, but no intimacy, either. The door shut.

  Beverly needed both shaking hands to hold her cup.

  “Mrs. Linde. I’ll be one minute.” Caroline. Outside the door.

  “She hasn’t slept since we lost Jamie.”

  Beverly loathed euphemisms for death. “I’m awake,” she called. “Caroline, come in.”

  Caroline sat on the organdy-ruffled stool. For a minute the two women regarded one another in the vanity mirror. After Beverly had dropped out of USC to marry Philip, they had seen one another infrequently, yet in the oval mirror, and in truth, their old friendship was reflected.

  Caroline took out a cigarette. “Mind?”

  Beverly shook her head.

  “For oral types like I, it replaces le mangez.” Caroline inhaled. “Gene and I sat with Dan.”

  Beverly said nothing.

  “He was crying. Luv, why is it so much worse when a man cries?”

  Beverly didn’t reply.

  “He isn’t here yet,” Caroline said.

  Beverly gazed at the vanity lamp, a shepherdess whose shepherd had been broken when Beverly was ten. Poor shepherdess, widowed lo these many years.

  “This is me. Caroline. Nothing if not subtle.”

  Beverly said, “I can’t face him right now.”

  “Because of that—that creepy weirdo?”

  Beverly sighed. “Caroline, I don’t understand why. I just can’t. Oh God, it’s such a mess.”

  Caroline tapped ash into an abalone shell. “Thinking time?” she asked.

  “I guess.”

  “How about Arrowhead?”

  “You mean that?” Beverly looked up. “I can use your parents’ cabin?”

  “We can. Package deal. Me or nothing.”

  “But—but how can you leave?”

  “Gene told me to ask you.” An honest lie. Gene certainly would have, if he hadn’t been forced to go directly from the funeral to a Van Vliet’s board meeting.

  “And Cricket?”

  “You’ll be doing Cricket the big favor. She’ll visit Em and be with her twin idols. Well, she favors Vliet, but then so do all us girls.” Caroline’s chuckle emerged through smoke. “One ground rule. You have to promise never, never to use any four-letter words. Especial
ly F-O-O-D.”

  “Caroline, thank you.”

  “What are friends for?” Caroline stubbed out her cigarette. “Tomorrow at ten.”

  Place is unimportant, Beverly discovered.

  A mountain resort is as bad as a city. Two days in the Wynans’ cabin blended with collateral darkness. The temperature was below freezing. Caroline lit fires and smoked. And talked constantly to drown the mausoleum silence.

  They had driven up in Beverly’s car. Beverly dropped Caroline off at Em’s. As they pulled up in front of the dinky, shuttered bungalow, Em was turning into the drive. Grocery bags were visible in back of her station wagon. Em came over. Beverly hadn’t seen her since the twins were born. Here was a different Em. Leaner, grooves in the small, carefully made-up face. Her upper arms, though thin, had a faint, dowdy sag.

  “There’s nothing I can say,” she said to Beverly.

  Beverly nodded in lieu of thank you.

  The man was a monster, said Em, elaborating on this theme. Then, thank God, Cricket ran out. Beverly hadn’t seen Caroline’s little girl in five years. Now Cricket’s limp was more of a skip. (She had been born with a defective ankle that had been corrected by a series of operations.) She was a few months younger than Jamie, she must be around ten and a half, but tiny, with dense yellow curls and an upper lip that protruded, giving her the tender, unformed look of a baby chick. She hugged her mother. She touched Beverly’s cheek lightly. “Mrs. Grossblatt,” she said. Her high, clear voice reminded Beverly of Mrs. Van Vliet, dead before this child was born.

  The two teenage boys at the front door seemed too large, too vital to have come from Em, or to be contained by the tract bungalow. Em, beaming, introduced her twins. Vliet, the fair, taller boy, extended his hand into the Buick with a charming, lopsided smile. The dark boy, more solid and strong-looking, had acne on his chin. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Grossblatt,” he said with difficult sympathy. This was Roger. Roger’s very intense. He’s got in mind to be a doctor, and he’ll be a good one, Caroline had said at some point of the Arrowhead torment.

  And the other boy, Vliet, the blond, reached for his aunt’s Mark Cross overnight case, saying, “Yes,” with another charming smile.

  Beverly turned from the twins. She mumbled something about being in a rush, and sped down a street of repetitive little houses, plans A, B, C, and D, escaping two tall boys, two beautiful adolescent boys, unloading a station wagon.

  She drove aimlessly. She found herself on Hollywood Boulevard, and without understanding why, bought a ticket at Grauman’s Chinese. Heavy, inert, unseeing, she sat through a Roman epic almost twice before it hit her. Alix! I must see Alix! She was filled with sudden morbid energy, running into the night, dodging tourists who squatted over famous hand-and footprints. Alix was with Philip, and Philip lived in an apartment facing the slip of his new forty-two-foot ketch. She drove faster than the legal limit to Marina del Rey.

  “Is Alix in bed?”

  “Sure,” Philip replied.

  “Awake?”

  “I doubt it, but—” He gestured politely at a door.

  Beverly opened it a slit. For a long time she stared at her sleeping child. Only child, she thought. The energy drained from her.

  “Can I fix you a drink?” Philip asked.

  She nodded.

  “Gimlet?”

  In the last two days she’d drunk too much and eaten not enough, she didn’t want anything, so why was she nodding?

  Philip handed her the stemmed glass. He said, “Are you ready for our talk?” After the funeral, when he’d come in his dark suit and dark glasses to the Lindes’ to pick up Alix, he’d said, We have things to settle, Beverly, but later.

  “Yes,” she said. Numb.

  “You understand what it’s about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s get down to details.”

  “Why details?”

  “I hate confusion.”

  She rubbed frost from her glass, aware of the thwarting distance she’d always felt with Philip, they never had seemed to touch, not even when he was heavy on her, their bodies locked in the moist marital embrace—sweat, semen, and her hungry kisses. Always he was rational and superior, she filled with confusion. And now was the most confusion. She yearned to hold Philip, to feel his once-familiar body in a kind of mourning ritual for their son.

  “… likes it here at the Marina,” Philip was saying. “Beverly, are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can be foggy. So for the record. Alix, is, going, to, live, with, me.”

  “No!”

  “You didn’t hear a word. I’m getting a three-bedroom. And Mother’s offered to move in with us.”

  “No! Never! I have custody.”

  “I’ll fight that.”

  “Please, Philip, please. She’s all I’ve got.”

  “Me, too. And I don’t have to explain why”—the pulse in his temple began to beat—“I can’t let my other child live in his house.”

  The room’s so neat, Beverly thought, battling a tremendous urge to slam down meticulously aligned Waterford glasses. The crystal, she knew, would be an extension of her nerve endings, echoing and crying in pain when they shattered.

  “It’s my home, too,” she said.

  “It won’t be Alix’s.”

  The faint sarcasm. Yet. The beating pulse. Oh, she needed to break those damn glasses.

  “If it were just her and me, alone?”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  The handsome, dark-haired head tilted questioningly. “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Yet.”

  “But you and her? Just you two?”

  “Someplace.”

  “I’d rather have her here with me,” he said, polite. After you, my dear Alphonse. “But alone with you is acceptable.”

  “Philip, he was the nicest little boy.”

  “We have this straight?”

  “Not in Dan’s house,” she said.

  “Good. That’s clear.”

  “Yes!” she shouted. “It’s clear! You need to punish us, Dan and me! But it’s too late for punishment. It’s too late for anything, anything.”

  The gimlet splattered and with shaking fingers she set it down. During their marriage they never had shouted. “Just Alix and me.” Her normal, gentle voice was conciliatory. “Us.”

  Philip’s face, still pale, relaxed. “He was such a nice little boy,” he said in an odd, rusty tone.

  “Phil, it’s so terribly empty.”

  “Empty, yes.”

  She lifted her hands toward him, the fingers separated, entreating. But Philip had a lack, a flaw, a hypodermic of ice embedded in him, and even if Beverly had not left him, he never could have brought himself to share his festering grief. Beverly’s face twisted with tears. He backed onto the vinyl-floored entry.

  “Goodnight,” he said, opening the door.

  She spent the night in an impersonal motel room. There was a scratch pad, and she covered sheet after sheet with convulsive pencil marks that resembled concentration-camp barbed wire. She did not sleep. At seven the next morning she was gone.

  Beverly Hills north of Sunset always is quiet: the early mornings are smothered. None of the men is in an income bracket that needs to leave early for work, the gardeners have not yet arrived with sleep-destroying power mowers, and children are not ready to be car-pooled. The slam of Beverly’s Buick door echoed. She let herself in, edging around terrazzo, imagining she could see speckles of red, knowing that Clara had scrubbed with the electric buffer. From the direction of the bedrooms came Dan’s voice. “Whozzit?”

  “Me.”

  The bedroom drapes were drawn. A small amount of light seeped around the top and bottom of heavy folds, but not enough to dim the flame in the tall memorial glass. A yartzeit. It occurred to Beverly that in her parents’ home and Philip’s, too, there had been no yartzeit. Ah well, she thought. A sheet had been hung, covering the horizontal mirro
r. The room was clotted with stale odors: candlewax, sleep, liquor, cigars. A bottle of Scotch stood next to the bed where Dan sprawled, his white shirt unbuttoned to show a delta of brown hair, staring up at her.

  “What brings you here?” he asked.

  “To explain.”

  “After six days?”

  Could it really be six days since Jamie had died? “Yes.”

  Dan didn’t move. “I’m not in the market for explanations,” he said. Liquor slurred his voice and a trace of New York clung to the words. Quartuh, Dan would say, not quarter.

  Outside, birds sang. She couldn’t tell what kind, but their liquid chirping wove a fabric. She sighed.

  “All right,” Dan said. “Where’ve you been?”

  “You know. Arrowhead.” She had phoned from her parents’ to tell him she was going with Caroline.

  “The whole time?”

  Beverly’s head throbbed dully, from lack of sleep, she guessed, and a surplus of tears.

  “I saw Philip,” she said. “Then I stopped at a motel in Santa Monica.”

  “A motel. That makes sense.”

  “Please don’t sound like that.”

  “How?”

  “Reasonable. Sarcastic. Polite.”

  He said in these tones, “Okay, what did you and that prize schmuck talk about?”

  “He doesn’t want Alix living here.” The words rushed out on an exhalation of fetid air.

  “So?”

  “I can’t let him take her.”

  “You mean he wants her to live with him?”

  “Just not here.”

  “You have custody.”

  “He’ll go to court.”

  “There’s lawyers.”

  “He’ll fight.”

  “He’ll never get her.”

  “He could.”

  “Like hell!”

  “He could,” she repeated.

  “Not unless you go along with him. You agree? She shouldn’t live in my house?”

  “How could I think that?”

  “Easy. You blame me.”

  “No!”

  “Balls. Of course you do. Listen, I sat in that waiting room the night the news broke. There was a crumb on your cheek, and you looked at me once. The way your parents always’ve looked at me. Like I’m to blame for whatever’s becocked in their world. Then you didn’t look at me again.”