Rich Friends

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  His words lingered, though, like a flu bug that Cricket couldn’t quite shake.

  Several nights later, she and her parents were eating dinner at the round kitchen table.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Cricket announced. “I’d like to take off, maybe up the coast. Do some serious work.”

  Caroline’s fork had halted and now was returning unoiled romaine to her salad plate.

  “The coast, luv, to take pictures?” Long pause. “Then you can stay with family?”

  “I guess,” Cricket agreed. “Yes.”

  Caroline’s relief surfaced in her fine laughter. “We’ve been wondering when you’d flee the coop, haven’t we, Genebo?”

  Gene’s thumbnail was pressed to his lip. Years ago he had broken himself of nail biting, yet at times of stress he couldn’t prevent the old reflex of lifting his hand. He looked with searching gravity across the table. Freckles and innocently raised upper lip. Sixteen? My God, he thought, she looks twelve. He could feel the souring of bland food—he’d been nursing an ulcer the two years he’d been president of Van Vliet’s.

  “All by yourself?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How far?”

  “Oh, like Northern California.”

  “She’ll be with family,” Caroline put in.

  “She’ll be driving alone.”

  “She drives alone now.”

  “In Los Angeles.”

  “You’re nitpicking. Gene, stop being so cautious!”

  Gene’s glance at his wife, in the nonverbal lingo of the long-married, said, “We’ll discuss this later.”

  He was cautious. For this reason he’d become head of the chain. When Richard Van Vliet decided to retire, he gathered the stockholders, Van Vliets all, to tell them he wanted to quit and their new man was Gene Matheny. “You can trust him,” Richard said, thus passing over the two obvious candidates, his own son and his dead brother’s son. “Gene’s got vision, but he’s not wild-eyed. He’s careful. You’ll see. He’ll double the value of our stock.” And in the two years Gene damn near had. Any man who pursues money, Gene knew, has to have a certain stupidity. And here he was, Eugene Matheny, a pursuant (prisoner?) of the buck. Therefore the stupidest of the stupid. What else could you call a man who wastes his life and ulcerated guts chasing what means so little to him?

  In bad moments Gene would wonder if Caroline’s jaunty hedonism were a substitute for the regard he’d lost in her shrewd blue eyes that long-ago winter noon when LeRoy Duquesne, PhD, had grounded his hopes. Gene’s creative energy had been diverted into merchandising groceries with excessive attention to each mill of profit. He had no respect for his work. Or himself. He was privately aware, as if of impotence, that the markets, which everyone assumed were his pride, were his shame. Yet he was not unhappy. He loved and was faithful to his wife. They had Cricket, the family. Besides, one has to have time to cultivate unhappiness. Gene worked a fourteen-hour day.

  He remained a liberal while officiating in the priesthood of capitalism—indeed, for this reason he clung the more devoutly to his early tenets. He believed the finest human is the one permitted to grow up without parental interference. Each child is a tabula rasa and must be permitted to scribble his own story. Cricket had been sent to progressive schools. Gene reached with alacrity for his checkbook whenever she verbalized one of her rare desires for more camera equipment. He never objected to the books she read, the photographs she took or bought. When she asked to see Hair for her birthday, Gene sat next to her, looking tolerantly through his glasses at frontal nudity and simulated sex groping. A decent, even straitlaced man in his own life, he refused to perpetrate evasions that might alter Cricket’s purity of vision. A child developing in its own bent, according to him, was the cardinal responsibility of parenthood. He finished dinner in silence.

  En famille they sat in front of the TV for “The Smothers Brothers.” After, Cricket gave a yawn and climbed the circular steps to her room.

  “The girls all travel now,” Caroline said.

  Gene put down the land prospectus he was studying.

  “She’s only sixteen,” he said.

  “They’re everywhere. Europe, Asia—”

  “Not at sixteen, alone.”

  “You know how sensible Cricket is.”

  “She’s a total innocent!”

  “Give me a good, honest innocent any day. They see far more clearly than us cynical astigmatics.” Caroline removed her reading glasses, making a nearsighted Mr. Magoo face, then chuckling.

  Gene smiled unwillingly. “Probably they do,” he admitted.

  “Then why don’t you trust her?”

  “I do trust her!”

  “She’s a careful driver.”

  “But—”

  “And we have family up and down every nook and cranny of California. Don’t you see, Genebo? Like this she can be away from us in a protected environment. Develop her own potential.”

  Gene knew his wife was pushing his weaknesses for all she was worth. He also knew that Caroline loved Cricket fiercely, the more so for the operations inflicted on their child’s infant body. For these reasons, love and pain, Caroline had vowed never to impose her admittedly bossy self on Cricket. She never would permit Cricket to be smothered under the canopy of protectiveness that is the bane of only children. “Every night she’ll be under a family roof. For heaven’s sake, Gene!”

  Gene picked up his prospectus. The cautious need more time.

  For six days Caroline busily convinced her husband that their daughter should be permitted “to express herself,” one of his cherished phrases.

  Finally, he capitulated. “She’s got to keep in touch every day,” was his condition.

  Cricket, unaware of the parental battle, readily promised to phone every evening, to write often, and never, never to give anyone a ride.

  In Santa Barbara she stayed with Donnie Van Vliet. She photographed San Francisco while luxuriating in the Nob Hill apartment of Fletcher Van Vliet, who ran the newly acquired Northern Warehouse. She crashed with Tana Matheny at Humboldt State.

  She started home.

  4

  REVELATION was painted in mysterious Islamic lettering above the restaurant’s brick patio.

  In Carmel, morning fog is routine, but now, at noon, it had burned away. Oak-shaded crowded tables. Not one vacancy. Waiters and waitresses bore salads and foamy juices, moving calmly to and fro. The bearded men wore white clothes and white headbands to keep back their long hair. The women, too, were in white. Not uniforms. An old Arrow with the collar lovingly embroidered, a pleated Mexican wedding shirt, a blonde girl floating in white muslin, another’s blouse patched with crocheted doilies. I must do that with Grandma Wynan’s, Cricket thought as she wove her way to a free table.

  Her waiter’s scraggly beard grew from a narrow face. About her age, she guessed. She mashed her banana into yogurt, eating slowly, luxuriating in white shapes moving in and out of sunlight. She was last at her waiter’s station, and he began, hesitantly, to talk.

  “I’m Cricket Matheny,” she said.

  “I’m Orion.”

  “That’s an unusual name.”

  He ducked his head in an embarrassment that reminded her of Tom Gustavsen.

  She soothed, “But then Cricket’s not exactly everyday.”

  “I used to be Lance Putnam. You know, Madison Avenue. Here, with the group, we pick a new name. I chose Orion.”

  Cricket already had guessed those who worked here were linked, possibly in religion. “Orion,” she said, trying it out. “Orion’s a constellation.”

  “Is it? I just, you know, liked the sound.”

  She touched her Nikon, snouted with a new 200-millimeter lens that was her parents’ going-away gift. “Okay to use this?”

  Orion frowned anxiously. “I better get Giles,” he said.

  Giles Cooke, thirty years older than the rest, also wore white. A heavyset man too short of leg for his massive shoulders, with a gray
ing beard spread across his powerful chest.

  “A lot of people want to take photographs,” he said in a purposefully calm bass. “I ask why.”

  “It’s so peaceful.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’d just like to try to get it on film.”

  “People think of us as freaks.”

  His voice was mild, yet she was intimidated—maybe because the mild voice issued from a graying beard.

  She flushed. “But you aren’t, you aren’t at all.”

  “In a way.”

  “No.”

  “You yourself said we’re different.”

  “I meant, the place is wonderful, so calm and full of peace.”

  Giles sat at the table. He had a scent to him, masculine, yet not tobacco or sweat. He picked up her camera, turning it in thick hands. He didn’t know cameras, he said, and this remark, she sensed, was to put her at ease, so she told him about her new lens. He asked about other lenses and exposures. She felt like a young child being manipulated by a clever teacher.

  “Do you sell your pictures?”

  “I never tried.”

  “Are you rich, then?”

  “Comfortable,” she said. “My parents are.”

  He returned her camera. “Go ahead.”

  The rest of the afternoon she squatted and perched behind her Nikon. Spraddle-legged, she stalked tame white pigeons. Sea fog rolled in, swallowing warmth and light.

  Orion asked, “Giles wants to know, will you spend the night at our place?”

  She hesitated. She was on parole, bound by her promise to stay only with family: the fact she loved her parents made the decision harder. She assessed the fogged patio. White clothes were disappearing into a tall old bus. Well? She’d have to stay in a motel. Wasn’t this preferable?

  “That’s really nice of him,” she said. “Thank you.”

  5

  The Chinese compound had been built during the twenties by an eccentric oil millionaire who chose to isolate himself five miles from Carmel Valley proper, his only access a twisting rut that turned to swamp with rain. A white elephant with cheap rent. During Cricket’s first visit, seven girls and five boys rattled around in the blue-tile-roofed villas enclosing the courtyard.

  The group had started with three members last August when Giles had opened REVELATION. Work and life were integrated as in a monastery. Giles was still formulating the order. Any rule he came up with was obeyed: the deliberate walk, the raw food, the nightly procession from the great hall—white clothes made it seem like a Chinese funeral. As each law was revealed unto Giles, he would set up a meeting to explain it.

  Cricket slept in a vast, furnitureless room with Magnificat (formerly Staci Grant of Orange County). At five came a bronze summons. The two girls rose from their mats, gasping as they washed in icy water, shivering across the dark courtyard to the great, beamed hall. Incense burned. On fleece rugs for a half hour they meditated. Giles then spoke of universal love and peace, his voice reverberating in his thick chest. Cricket had heard it all before, but never so compellingly. The men remained in the hall for Fellowship. Cricket went off with the women to prepare food. At eight the huge verdigris-encrusted bell sounded again. They breakfasted in the courtyard on wheat germ, almonds, raisins, dates, and unpasteurized milk. Nourishment, Orion whispered to her, that must last until six o’clock dinner. The secondhand yellow school bus jounced down the tortuous path. “When it rains, how do you get out?” Cricket asked. Orion replied, “Why would we need to? Outdoor restaurants, you know, don’t open in the rain.” From the Carmel Valley Road it was a fast half hour to REVELATION.

  The bus carried Giles away. He returned with crates of fresh curly greens, crates dripping red of berries, crates of apples, melons, celery. Giles’s blade flashed in lettuce and artichokes. Cricket noticed his heavy frame shudder as he re-locked knives in a cabinet above the cash register.

  “Why’s he locking them away?” she asked Orion.

  “He’s the only one allowed to use them.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re weapons.”

  “Vegetable knives?” she asked.

  “All knives’re, you know, weapons.”

  (The noon rush over, they sat on the patio wall—Cricket had just phoned Caroline to explain she was staying a day or two with new friends.)

  “Only if they’re used that way.”

  “They’re symbols,” Orion said.

  “Not if they’re cutting lettuce.” She had been profoundly disturbed by the way Giles’s thick shoulders quivered as if under the whip.

  “Every knife, Giles says, symbolizes every other knife. He wants us to kill the violence in ourselves.”

  “Kill violence,” she said. “That’s weird.”

  “He didn’t put it like that.…” Orion’s hesitancy apologized even for this mild dispute. “In each of us there’s this murder instinct. Wartime leaders only have to wave a flag and there most of us are with this kill kill kill reaction. We have to rid ourselves of every reminder, you know, of violence, before we can become immune. That’s our goal here. To become truly at peace.” He stopped. “Giles is right. He always is. That’s why we obey him.”

  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 kne
w 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.