When they reached the crest they were both panting. Orion pushed up his white band, mopping sweat from his forehead. The sky was a soft blue, a patch of early spring lupine echoed this blue, and far below, from blue-tile roofs, a flight of birds scattered. From here they were tiny dots.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said.
“Stay.”
The following afternoon she left.
She had been with REVELATION five days, and her decision to go had nothing to do with Giles or Orion. In late morning she called Caroline from a phone booth in Carmel. The sun burned through glass, very hot, but they were a long time.
“Nothing else is new,” Caroline said. “Oh yes. The twinnies’ll be home.”
“Soon?”
“Next week, Em said. They have time off for Easter. God, I hope Roger comes this time. Poor Em, she lives for those two beautiful lunks.” Pause. “Why don’t you be home?”
“I will,” said Cricket. “’Course I will.”
Chapter Nine
1
They entered the cloud bank, and pine trees came out of the gloom, materializing for one ghostly second before disappearing. Roger flicked on the dims, stopping at the Arrowhead turnoff so they could pile on more clothes. Vliet, a worn, red-plaid shirt, the heavy lumberjack kind, Roger shrugging into a leather jacket with sheepskin bleeding through at one arm, and Cricket—already bundled in three mismatched sweaters—pulling up the zip of an Indian cardigan which hung almost to her knees. Alix thanked God she’d bought her Austrian loden cape—it was old.
As she looped buttons through thick green wool, she said, “Mother was up here right after—” Abruptly she stopped. She still could not say Jamie’s name to anyone except (infrequently) her parents. The violence of her grief repelled her. She kept it to herself, decent, lonely, and raw as a bleeding ulcer.
“After what?” Roger spoke for the first time, almost.
Alix shook her head. Something about Jamie was nagging at her, but she was busy erasing her remark with, “Oh, after God and before The Bomb. She used to come up with Caroline.”
“Then you have preknowledge of the place?” Vliet asked. “Like memory in a cut cutworm?”
“I pray for it.” Alix clasped her knit gloves together.
“Yeah,” Roger said.
“I do. The three of you, blood relatives, and me the original outsider.”
“Ever try saying something you mean?” Roger asked.
“Hey, it’s freezing,” Cricket cried, hauling her small self back in the bus.
At the cabin Roger busied himself with a chemical toilet, Vliet did things with gas and water pipes, and Cricket was meant to put away groceries, but she was a dawdler. It was Alix who efficiently stocked shelves. Her breath formed clouds. She thought of the ice mansion where Zhivago had written his poems to Lara.
She had noted a stack of logs by the front door. She set rough pine over kindling, struggling to rip a carton with cold-reddened hands, feeding the scraps. She knelt, blowing and coughing. Finally some bark caught.
“What do you know,” Roger said, pausing to unwrap a Hershey. He added the paper to her small flame. “Fire.”
“Three summers at Trinity, you have to learn something.”
“I never figured you for a Boy Scout.”
She sat back on her boot heels, visualizing the little box house. Trinity was an expensive camp.
“I would’ve learned from Girls Scouts had I been a member,” she said. Then, without meaning to, added, “Roger, don’t push on me. Please?”
“I’m a superior pain in the ass when I try for humor.”
“On the way up, was that meant to be funny?”
He looked uneasily down at her. “No, not then,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.” He held out chocolate. A peace offering.
She broke off two squares, putting one in her mouth. He grinned. “Hey, that cape, I like it,” he said. And went for more wood. She let the chocolate melt in her mouth, watching him. He doesn’t move gracefully, like Vliet, she thought, he moves better, with a kind of comfortable strength.
They gathered in front of the fire to eat hamburgers. After, Roger tilted his head back, drinking Coors from the can. Vliet rolled Zig Zags, passing joints, and Cricket dozed. Alix, keeper of the flame, fire tonged a log, shifting it. She was riveted to a single fact. Soon, soon, she and Vliet would go downstairs to the bedrooms, she and Vliet together, with Roger watching. Ridiculous, she kept telling herself. Roger knows I’m sleeping with Vliet. Intellectual information, though, is abstract. Having Roger watch them go to a bedroom is concrete, embarrassing, and for Alix something far worse than embarrassing. Dishonorable. A log fell, giving up sparks.
Vliet, yawning, said, “C’mon, Alix. Dance.” Pulling her up, he began to sing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ in,” dancing her to the shadowy kitchen corner, dancing her to the windows, putting his arm over her shoulders. Side by side, their hips sashaying in perfect time to his beat, I want to be in their number, bumpsy, bumpsy, they danced to the dark stairwell. It was so easy. She should’ve remembered nothing public was embarrassing with Vliet.
The uncarpeted little room was refrigerated. Alix’s nipples puckered into her breasts, and to hide the sad display, she turned her back, hastily dropping on her flannel nightgown. The sheets were clammy cold. Vliet, in old gray sweats, hugged her.
“I just got my period,” she apologized.
“There’s timing,” he said. She held her breath in the icy dark, hoping he would keep his arms around her at least until she was warm. “Well,” he said, turning onto his back, “other stuff.”
She thoroughly disliked other stuff, and the disliking made her feel yet more inadequate. Saying nothing, shivering, freezing, miserable, she moved over him and put on a heavy act.
2
Light came around skimpy curtains. She glanced at her small Bulova. Ten past seven. Vliet breathed lightly. Blond stubble showed. His long face was relaxed and his quizzical expression gone. Sleep is more personal than sex, she decided, looking away. She stretched her arms overhead and arched her back. The morning chill was different. Alive. Happy.
She buttoned her robe, pulling on gray wool socks that, like her cape, had come from Ach Du Lieber Vienna, and were too heavy for normal Southern California purposes. She tiptoed out. Upstairs she opened the porch door, gulping mountain-scented ice. Morning sun was brilliant, outlining with black the trees that dropped down to the lake. A small bird swooped directly at her, veering at the last moment. She laughed aloud. Salutation to the dawn, she shought, and waved her arms up and down, dancing sideways along the narrow porch. Fast-moving socks make sweet sluffing sounds.
She heard another noise. Halted.
Roger’s hands were touching the top of the door. His sweat shirt, stretched like this, exposed a strip of muscular, hairy stomach. Across the faded navy was yellow-stitched WRECKED ROGER’S RAGS. He was smiling. “Good morning,” he said.
“Not just good. Fantastic,” she replied, too happy to be defensive about her dance.
He breathed big under Wrecked Roger’s Rags. “Isn’t it?”
“Want some coffee?”
“Tea,” he countered.
“Me, too. I hate coffee.” She lit the high-legged stove with a match. “Anything else?”
“I’m going to scramble eggs. Want some?”
“No-no. I’ll wait for Vliet.”
Roger was opening cabinets. Finding a heavy china bowl, he asked, “Don’t you eat breakfast?”
“My favorite meal.”
“Unless it’s forced on him, Vliet never gets up before lunch.”
“I never in my life slept past eight thirty.”
“Me, either,” Roger replied. He cracked an egg, southpaw. Shell fragments oozed into the bowl.
“Here,” Alix said.
“Eggs are my specialty.” He cracked another. More shell.
“The hands of a surgeon, not a chef.”
Laughing, he surrendered the
bowl. She spooned shell from albumen, cracking four more eggs, sprinkling pepper, pouring salt from her palm, measuring in two spoons of icy water, holding the bowl against her robe. Rich melting-butter smells. Bacon crisping in heavy spider. Turn whole-grain bread in old-fashioned toaster.
“A major coup,” he said. “Everything hot at once.”
They smiled at one another.
She looked away first. For months now, Alix had admitted to herself how she felt about Roger. When he hadn’t come home Christmas, her total misery (undisplayed, naturally) had proved to her what until then she had managed to submerge. She loved him. She loved him, and love terrified her.
She formed a large smile. “My Beverly Hills exterior hides a Dickensian past. Age ten I was apprenticed as a domestic. Cook, clean, scrub, iron, I learned the household arts the hard—”
“Look, you were the one who wanted me to quit, remember?” The blue eyes were bewildered. “Jesus, for a few minutes can’t you drop the dialogue?”
“Does everything have to be stony-bottom serious with you?”
“When you’re funny, I know how to laugh.”
She looked down at her eggs. “I did do stuff when I was a kid,” she said quietly. “Mother kept at her painting. Anyway, she’s not neat. And here’s a terrible confession. I am. So we—” She caught herself in time. Jamie. No trespassing. “I used to dust between Willeen’s Mondays, vacuum, iron. Cook dinner sometimes.”
“Ours wouldn’t let us near the kitchen.”
“Let? Mother didn’t notice. Artists get involved.”
“Understandable.”
“You get involved, too?”
“Very.” He buttered toast. “Her painting bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“Let me think on that one,” Alix said. She finished her eggs.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Well isn’t this a fabulous morning,” he said, biting into his toast, watching her. Butter caught on his upper lip, and he sucked with the lower, watching her.
“I do have a mother-ambivalence thing. I don’t mean to keep putting her down. She’s very gentle and unique. Otherworldly, sort of. And a terrific artist. Most people think every good painter starves to death in a New York loft. It’s difficult to realize a serious artist might live north of Sunset in Beverly Hills. She’s going to have a one-woman show in The County. You can’t buy that sort of thing. She was into mad rabbis before Francis Bacon and his mad popes, at least I’m pretty sure she was. When we get down I’ll show you.”
“You’re proud of her,” he said.
“Very. And her talent does bother me. Roger, want honey on that?”
He was starting the last piece. “Not unless—”
“I’m getting it for my tea.”
“There’s a coincidence. I use it in mine.”
They looked at one another.
Touch me, she thought. And her hand inched toward his. Sunlight flickered on her buffed nails. She realized what she was doing. Quickly she rose, getting him a small jar labeled ORGANIC CLOVER HONEY, and nervous about sitting near him, went back to the drainboard for a slice of bread, carrying it and her tea mug to the porch. He followed, leaning in the door. She put crumbs on the rail. Wings flashed. Blue jays squawked. “That one’s not getting any,” Roger said. The tension around his cheekbones had softened. His body was relaxed yet solid. She was conscious of her own body, her back muscles, the spring in her thighs as she bent to feed the neglected jay.
Around ten, Cricket, puffy-eyed and yawning, dragged upstairs.
Vliet got up just before noon. He was blowing his nose. “Terrific,” he said. “The common cold is with us.”
Vliet stayed indoors. Sniffling, coughing. Irritable. You’d never know this except for his cracks. They seemed funny, and were, but he would smile until you got the stinging point.
Mornings Vliet slept. The rest of the time he was dispatching his good nurse for soup or hot lemonade or vitamin C tablets. The weather turned overcast. Chill drafts swept through the old cabin.
Alix’s time would have been less painful with the other two around.
But Cricket would zip into her enormous sweater and take off, sometimes with Nikon, sometimes without. (Alix would wonder what it was like to be Cricket, never worrying about making conversation, never conscious of hair or clothes.)
Roger spent hours smashing across empty gray water in some relative’s Chris-Craft. The rest of the time he was downstairs in his room, alone with the fat medical books he’d brought along.
Breakfast, though, they shared. He would lean toward her, telling her about dissecting a tubercular brain, not gory but fascinating. Vliet never mentioned school. Roger was profoundly involved with every detail of life at Johns Hopkins—even the trivia, like blood counts and protein analyses. She felt the force of his enthusiasm. She listened without impetus to retort wittily.
On the third morning, she inquired what it meant, Wrecked Roger’s Rags? The sweat shirt, he told her, had been presented by his high school teammates when he’d wrecked his ankle running a TD. “I heard it crack,” he said, and pulled up the right leg of his jeans, showing a scar that extended from hairless ankle to muscular, dark-haired calf.
“At the beach I wondered about that,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were a jock. Did you win?”
“By the six points.” He grinned. “Otherwise you think they’d’ve bought me the sweat?”
“Roger.”
“What?”
“Christmas I missed you.”
That peculiarly wholehearted smile of his disappeared. “You melted the butter in the syrup,” he said.
“The pancakes don’t get cold as fast.”
“Cold, they’re doughy.”
“I needed to see you.”
“I wanted to see you, too,” he said quietly. “That’s why I didn’t come.”
“I wrote.”
“You did? I never got a letter.”
“There’s the US mail for you,” she said. “I tore them up.”
“How many?”
“Five. No-no. Six.”
The wind had risen, howling through pine branches.
“I should’ve sent one of them,” she said.
He chewed.
“Shouldn’t I?”
He poured more buttered syrup.
“I didn’t quite get that answer,” she said.
“Did Vliet ever tell you about being a twin?”
She shook her head.
“Peculiar relationship,” he said. “Close, very. Not ESP or anything mystic. It comes from being side by side in your cribs, sharing a playpen, never being apart. Never being alone. You get to know your brother as yourself. There’s always him. You don’t have to round up a neighbor to play. You’re independent, a unit. It cut pretty deep when he started with a gang. People always like him. I’m dull company. We are totally different, but that only makes it more convoluted. What I’m trying to say is, there are ties, ties. Understand?”
“You love him.”
“Yes. But it’s deeper and less sticky than that. It’s being the same person in two totally different brains and bodies.”
“Kind,” she said.
“What?”
“You’re being kind. Letting me down easy.”
“You aren’t the type to be let down by anyone.”
“That first year must be heavy on the psych!” she burst out. “How else could you understand me so well!”
“I only know girls like you have guys waiting from here to there.”
“And from there to here, too!”
“And one of them happens to be my brother, and like you say, I’m a serious guy, so I’d just as soon you didn’t phony it up with unwritten letters.”
He might as well have slugged her in the chest. She had retyped each often, and the last had taken her three days to perfect. She felt so lost that she wanted to fold her arms on the battered kitchen table and cry. Big girls don’t
. Empty, phony girls can’t. Alix picked up their dishes. At the sink her chest pains grew worse. I must get out, she thought. Cooped up in this miserable cabin I’m doing and saying all the wrong things. I have to move. A panic of necessity, this removing herself from the scene of the crime (rejection and/or making an ass of herself).
By the time she had washed the breakfast things, she was able to speak. “Roger, let me have the keys?”
He looked at her, startled.
“We need milk. Lemons. Stuff.”
“Let me drive you.”
She knew an apology when she heard one. Anyway, it was agree or cry. She got her cape.
The Volkswagen crunched over small twigs scurrying across the road. Alix’s period was almost finished, but she felt very menstrual. She had read Anna Karenina again, and she remembered, more or less: Like everyone else, in his past he’d done things that were wrong and that he should have on his conscience. Yet he suffered far less from these wrong acts than from insignificant humiliations. Humiliations, she kept thinking. Every once in a while she would shiver. Damn him, she would think, damn all three of them.
In the market she chattered inconsequentially. She never let up. “This brand we use at home. Pure poison … Believe it or not, Mother’s never made a pot of coffee in her life. Always instant. Roger, like Postum?… What? Never had it? What did your grandma give you when the adults had coffee?… Think chicken noodle’ll cure Vliet’s cold?… Smell that? Barbecued ribs. Shall I get some? Why not?… Hey, there’re chocolate cookies. Mmmm, you’ve had a lot of chemistry. What is it, dicalcimate of glycerine?… Roger, be a doll, reach up and get those double-A eggs, the extra large. Three boxes.”
“We aren’t staying that long.”
“Oh, look! Dried mushrooms. Now, they’re good and serious in soup.”
His mouth taut, he shoved the basket.
The checker was a youngish woman wearing a heavy sweater pushed up to show thick red arms.
“Think spring’ll ever come?” Alix asked with a dazzling smile.
The checker became Alix’s friend. “Never,” she said. “That’s a darling cape, hon. Get it around here?”
Rich Friends Page 22
