Cricket reached for the light.
“No need,” he said.
Darkness suited Cricket. She never had been self-conscious, but now she kept thinking she was a slob-pathetic type. Too short. Plain. She yanked sweaters over her head, skinning off jeans. She heard a button fall, rolling on boards. She paid no attention.
He held back clammy sheets to receive her.
She traced the skin of his shoulder, he brushed away her. fingers. She kissed his chin, he jerked his head. He moved onto her. Surprised, she struggled. But he had her pinned down, his body paying no attention to hers. I’m being used, she thought, exactly as he’d said. Fury burst through Cricket, a sexual outrage that she’d never experienced. Don’t, her brain shouted, and she almost yelled it aloud. DON’T! With Tom, always it had been mutual. Tom Goose-ta-av-sen. And I didn’t love Tom. She found herself moving, but Vliet was a runner, sprinting alone, uncaring. She could smell his sharp, mustardy sweat, the soured wine.
Vliet was experiencing a frantic brutality alien to him. Alix’s rejection, Roger’s defection were a gangrenous wound. The body under his was merely a vessel into which festering pus could explode.
Maybe ninety seconds and he was rolling off her, getting out of bed. The other mattress creaked. Neither had spoken. Neither spoke now. She curled on her side, making herself smaller.
A groan awakened her.
“Vliet,” she said into the dark.
Muttering.
“Wake up!” she said.
A low, wordless cry.
She padded across frozen night, crowding next to him. He was shuddering. Cold sweat covered his naked skin. By osmosis, his night terror reached her.
“Huhh?” he mumbled.
She moved her hand gently down the damp trough of his spine. “Shh.”
“Cricket?”
“Me, yes.”
He sniffed violently. “I was killing Roger.”
“A nightmare.”
“Then he was murdering me with his fists. He can, Cricket, he can.” Vliet’s thumb rubbed her cheek. “Hey little cos. You rescued me in the nick of time.”
He reached under the bed, finding a pack of Chesterfields that he must’ve stashed beforehand. He took a long time lighting up. In the yellow flicker the line cut by his crooked smile was deep. He looked drawn, ill. He looked as if he were getting over far worse than a cold. Shaking out the match, he inhaled deeply. “C’mere,” he said.
She moved over, aware of biceps, muscles hard below her neck, aware of contiguous bodies. She had forgotten the misery of impersonal sex. She watched the glow of his cigarette, thinking of the bonds of warmth, familial affection, shared memory that joined them. And separated them. She understood the sense of vocation that leads a woman to a convent. The religious feel they are joined to, yet divided from, God. They consider their lives a bridge to gap the distance to Him. Cricket, the drifter, knew she had similar purpose. She would live only for Vliet. Even to her the idea was ludicrous. Puppy love, crushes, adolescent yearnings are very funny. (Yet who laughs when a young postulant in white cuts off her hair and takes her vow?) Vliet stubbed out his cigarette, turning on the pillow, nuzzling her cheek. “It’s one of our small-size Van Vliets,” he said.
“I am?”
“Really.” He touched her breasts in turn. “Full and nice here.”
Dazed with pleasure, she whispered, “You’re beautiful.”
He kissed her lightly. “We shouldn’t let it get personal, we shouldn’t. Cricket, Cricket, it is you?”
“Me.”
His fingers traced down her back. “Remember? I picked cactus from this.”
She began to tremble.
“You were one,” he said.
“Three.”
“Two.”
“Three,” she whispered.
“Three, then,” he said, kissing her, the kiss turning inside out, and they started to make love, side by side, easily, gently, her hands floating on him, and he rambling about the cactus, yes, here the cactus. Caroline had driven Cricket and the twins for a day at Uncle Hend and Aunt Bette’s ranch near Palm Springs, and Cricket, wobbly from one of the operations, had fallen, spiking herself on a cholla cactus, and Vliet was the only one she’d let use the tweezers to remove painful spikes. I love you, she thought over and over, maybe she said it, she kissed sharp collarbones and lightly fleshed chest, their breathing the only sound, their sweat-glazed bodies protected by their mutual grandmother’s quilt stitchery, and they were moving luxuriously as if they had had a lifetime’s carnal pleasure of one another, and when it finally came, that mingling of flesh, fluid, nerve ends, and self, it was through her muscles. There was odd tenderness in such culmination. Vliet never before had been able to permit it, it was too unguarded, but this was Cricket merging around him, Cricket held no danger, no shadows, he trusted little Cricket, ahhh … trusted.… Their breathing quieted slowly. Through frost-edged windows shone huge mountain stars, a glittering that had traveled atomless eternity to reach a tall, elegantly handsome man with a nose like a Viking ship, who held a tiny, freckled girl with the same nose and blonde golliwog hair.
“You’re a small snail,” he said.
“I love you.”
“You said a few hundred times.” He kissed her.
“It’s no crush. I love you.”
“I encourage you.” He strummed on her shoulder. “Cricket, recognize?”
“No.”
“Should.”
“What is it?”
“For you I chust composed. I vill call it der Moonlight Sonata.”
“You mean everything to me,” she said, rubbing her nose in his neck.
“There’s one thing.”
“What?”
“Not to give you a swollen head, but that was topnotch stuff. And now it’s very cozy. Really. I could stay in bed with you forever.” He curled, yawning, around her. “You’re my small snail.” Another yawn. “Small snail.”
2
Cricket transferred food into cardboard cartons. There were soups and chili, packages of cookies and crackers, an unopened two-pound jar of unprocessed honey, cellophane-packed dried mushrooms, eggs. Most of the purchases made by Alix four days earlier.
Vliet slept downstairs. Cricket moved slowly, the soft upper lip a dreamy curve. She set a bottle of White House dressing on Hostess Twinkies, crushing them. She wasn’t caught up by anything that Vliet had said (I could stay in bed with you forever) or by the way he’d acted (tender, gentle, and yes, loving). She had promised last night wouldn’t exist. And if she couldn’t exactly keep this promise, well, she could come pretty close. For Cricket, as for small children, once a yearned-after activity is in the past, it takes on a mythic quality. For her, last night already had transcended what is real.
Vliet, shaved and immaculate, came upstairs, giving her his standard smile. Except Vliet, a night person, wasn’t good for smiles until his second cup of coffee.
“’Morning,” he said, smiling into her eyes. “Packed?”
“Finishing up.”
“We’re set, then.”
“There’s the beds. I’ll do them while you get the toilet.”
“First my coffee.” He moved to the stove. His lopsided smile definitely was lasting too long. A white-toothed reminder: your promise.
She hurried downstairs.
She folded Alix’s stuff into Alix’s case. Except for a faint perfume, the clothes were as they had emerged from the tissue of an I. Magnin box, where, according to labels, most of them had been bought. She stripped beds. She ended up in her room.
“Ready?”
She jumped. Vliet lounged at the door, smiling at her. She let the quilt (they had shared it) slip, then hastily refolded it.
“Practically,” she said.
“No rush.” He lit a cigarette, letting it dangle. “Hey, little cos, you’ve got milk on your upper lip.”
Reddening, she licked a finger to her mouth.
“Just for the record, say
something.”
“I don’t know what.”
He gave her a long look and walked to the bed nearest the window, sitting, extending his legs. Sunlight polished hand-sewn boots.
She said, “If you mean—That didn’t change anything for me, last night.”
“How could it, Cricket?” He smiled. “Nothing happened, last night.”
She shoved more dirty linen in the pillowcase. She was confused, hurt. Obediently she had sponged away his moist, affectionate coupling as she would jam from a blouse, and if a faint mark, no longer quite real to her, stained her memory, well, she wouldn’t wear that side. She didn’t understand what it was that he wanted from her.
“Must you,” she asked, and her voice trembled, “keep grinning like that?”
“Get off that damn high horse! What’re you trying to hold me to?”
Camera slung around her neck, duffel over her shoulder, afghan under her elbow, Cricket headed for the door.
“I didn’t mean.…” Vliet’s voice came apart. “I’m sorry. Really. Listen, you’re a good, generous, smart little nipper.” Dragging on his cigarette, he discovered it had gone out. He dropped the butt in his palm. “But you’re ten—”
“Sixteen.”
“—and for the sake of argument, let’s say I hadn’t slept in my own bed.”
She turned away.
“I might have said things, done things, I couldn’t mean. No way I could mean them. You’re too young. You’re my cousin. You’re not—you’re not my type.” His voice had that odd, toneless quality. Despair, she thought. “Tell me, how do you figure I’d feel every time I see you?”
“Vliet,” she said, “today’s today.”
“For you. Not me. If I’d behaved in a way that led you on …” He paused, relighting the cigarette. “I’d feel lousy. And people cannot face those they feel lousy toward. I wouldn’t be able to come into the same room with you. Understand? We couldn’t be in the same room.”
She leaned against the battered highboy.
“You mean too goddamn much,” he said.
She avoided looking at him head-on. What was it he wanted? Cricket had the tendency of openly generous people to imagine the motives of others were cleverer, more cerebral than her own. She never could realize that in general the elaborate circumlocutions they used were to justify their own triviality. She stood silent, weighted down by the heavy duffel.
“Cricket,” he muttered, “it’s gotta be the same, you and me.”
“But it is.”
“I am so screwed. Lost. I couldn’t take it if things changed with us. Can’t you see that?”
And finally she did see. Vliet wanted her to behave as he had. A bit much. He wanted her to let him know she was playing his game. At first she had ignored last night, so how could he assume she was ignoring it?
“Know what?” She forced cheer into her voice.
“What?”
“That’s what,” she said, brightly nodding at the lumpy pillowcase.
And he, rewarding her with his fine, uneven grin, swung the makeshift laundry bag over his shoulder. “Off, off and away.” Relief sang in his voice.
She followed him upstairs. Her shoulders were hunched, her face drawn. She looked like a shy child who has been coerced by grown-ups into performing at one of their parties.
3
A low-pressure area had formed over the Pacific. The next day, around eleven, rain started. As Cricket came out of her bathroom, she heard Vliet’s voice. He must’ve been telling Caroline a joke because as Cricket circled down her stairs, Caroline’s golden laughter rang.
“Cricket,” Vliet said. “Let’s drive.”
Caroline’s laughter ceased. “It’s pouring cats and dogs. She has wet hair, and you, luv, have a cold.”
“The VW’s well caulked.” Bending, he kissed his aunt’s pink cheek. “Mmm. Only nymphomaniacs should use that perfume.”
Silent, Vliet drove to Topanga Canyon, snaking between mountains dead with tumbled igneous rocks. At the summit, he pulled over. Leaving his door open, he whirled gracefully around the bus. When he got back in, rain had darkened his hair, his Irish sweater smelled woolly.
“Why the skipping?” she asked.
“Don’t be dense, Cricket.” He palmed water from his cheeks. “That was a rite of thanksgiving.”
“For what?”
“For the first time in twenty-four hours I’ve been free from speeches about hauling ass back to Hopkins. Ma and Dad never stop. And the minute I set foot in your place, Aunt Caroline’s on me. She’s what gets me down.”
“It doesn’t sound like her, even.”
“Ma must have her brainwashed.”
“They were on the phone hours this morning.”
“Before Uncle Gene left?”
“Daddy?”
“Eugene Matheny, president of all the Dutchmen.”
“Funny. I never think of him like that.”
“Don’t give me your mental lapses, Cricket. Was he around?”
“Part of the time.”
“Well, that ties it. And I was going to talk jobs.” Vliet stared at rain-bleak mountains. “Cricket, when we discussed my future, we overlooked the obvious. Groceries. The markets’ve always smelled good to me.”
Vliet did question her father about business, often, but Cricket never had been positive whether the interest was genuine or Vliet was simply being simpático.
“Well, so much for lost causes.”
“He’d side with Mother, yes.”
“Think the condition could change?”
“Maybe,” she said with great uncertainty.
“Any ideas how to get it to?”
She shook her head.
“I’d be in your debt.”
“Daddy would never go against her and Aunt Em.”
Vliet dropped by the next afternoon when he knew Caroline would be out shopping. For an hour he was a stand-up tragedian. Cricket listened to his acid one-liners about his parents, his biting monologue on Alix and Roger. She offered milk and sympathy.
In the kitchen, he asked, “Did I mention Executive Employment Placing?”
“No. Were you there?”
He downed his milk. “This morning.”
“Any luck?”
“When I told ’em I wouldn’t do heavy lifting, they were stumped. They are going to have a genuine problem with me.”
“You’re a Harvard graduate.”
“Sure, and with a name like mine, I should have it made. But …”
The next afternoon was a repeat, with more emphasis on the day’s fruitless visit to Executive Employment Placing.
If you are being worked, there inevitably must come the moment when you realize it. At this point, one is meant to experience hurt, then anger. And refuse to let it continue. In truth, if you look up to the worker, when the fact hits you, you are flattered. Who, me? I can help you? This flattery gives a tremendous high, like winning at craps: you can’t lose. Every throw will come up seven or eleven. You tackle forces normally you wouldn’t dare. After, you’ll remember and be a little proud, or ashamed, or unbelieving, but at the moment, you wade in, saying and doing things that you’d never say or do for yourself.
God knows, Cricket wasn’t a fighter. She let events shape themselves. Certainly she never had fought Gene, and she never even suspected that Caroline sometimes did it for her. She loved her father for his slow way of talking, for the few loyal remaining strands brushed across his scalp, for being decent, for being her father. She never could understand his involvement with the heavy black ledgers and stacks of paper that he strewed across the den table every night.
As soon as she grasped the situation, though, Cricket—for her knight of the currently doleful countenance—entered battle with her father.
She opened fire at bedtime, when Caroline was in the bathroom washing her face, a two-minute soap massage followed by thirty counted splashes followed by a lengthy slathering of four different antiwrinkle emo
llients.
“Vliet’s not going to be a doctor,” Cricket said.
“That’s all I hear.” Gene, in faded flannel pajamas, was winding his watch.
“He never wanted to, Daddy.”
“Nobody gets that far without an affinity.”
“Roger’s got the affinity.”
Gene admired Roger’s drive, honesty, strength of character, but always he’d been caught by Vliet’s humor, his quirk of smile. It was Vliet who made him laugh. Gene was ashamed of loving the less worthy boy. He set his watch on the mantelpiece. “Vliet’s grades are fine. There’s no reason for him to drop out.”
“Roger and Alix.”
“Oh?”
“They’re going together now,” Cricket said. “Didn’t Mother tell you? It’s what decided him.”
“He should come up with something more profound.”
Cricket gazed at him.
“All right,” Gene sighed. “A girl’s as good as a loyalty oath. But Vliet’s had a hundred girls, all beautiful. He’ll recover.”
“He hates Johns Hopkins.”
“That, surprising as it may seem, isn’t crucial. A lot of men hate their schooling.” Gene opened a door to what once had been the adjoining bedroom. Caroline recently had converted it into a vast closet lined with shelves for purses, sweaters, shoes: there were racks of varying heights for blouses, dresses, long gowns. I work all day, Gene thought wryly, for unequal distribution of women’s clothes. He wasn’t blaming Caroline, but himself. This, this was how he had chosen to spend his only life. He shut the door.
“Know what I wanted to be?” he asked.
“A professor.”
“A writer, too,” he corrected.
“You worked on the UCLA paper.”
“Not a journalist. A real writer. Novels. I started with some short stories. I never had the nerve to send them out.”
“Daddy, that’s sad.”
“I’m not telling you this for sympathy.” Gene paused. “The family tell me I’m a success. What do you think?”
“Yes. No. I never wanted to do anything, not really. I don’t know.”
“Well, I’m not. Success would’ve been those books with my name on the jacket. And you know why I failed?”
“The Oath. You wouldn’t sign it. You lost your job.”
Rich Friends Page 29
