She shifted so her spine rested on rock, and went back to Vliet. Saturday lunch, club sandwiches, and he asked if I had boys after me in San Francisco. “Nothing serious,” I said, smelling the bacon in his sandwich. “I didn’t figure you were serious, Cricket. Still, a little puppy love is important in growing up.” And I smiled because he was smiling, and he fingered mayonnaise from the corner of my mouth.
Cricket leaned forward to massage her ankle. She noticed a brown pelican one-legged on driftwood. She took off her lens cap. The shot would be too red. Late-afternoon sun photographs too red. But that big beak! Just look at that wondrous beak! Heavy wings rustled. Cricket trotted after the pelican. Blonde curls standing up in the wind, Cricket forgot all past griefs and raced to capture a bird from an endangered species on Kodacolor X.
6
After Roger and Alix had dropped Cricket off at the beach, they went directly back to the cottage and now were on the patio chaise, Alix curled facing Roger, she reading Swann’s Way, he on his back with one finger twined in her hair, his free hand holding the New England Journal of Medicine. Next door, Janis Joplin wailed: I keep pushin’ so hard, an’ babe, I keep tryin’/To make it right to another lonely day. Roger set the magazine on his stomach to negotiate one-handed page turning.
He chanced to look up.
Genesis was leaning on the gate, thick arms akimbo on sequoia planks, watching them. Roger jerked to sitting position. And understood the taboo that ancient kings had put on gazing at the royal person: he felt part of himself, part of Alix, had been stolen. Besides: “How’d you know where to find us?”
“Won’t you come in, Genesis?” Alix said far more smoothly.
Roger, standing, repeated the invitation, adding, “Sir,” rather sullenly. A mechanism to hide his sense of underhandedness. “Orion’s in Peninsula Community Hospital.”
I keep pushin’ so hard. sang Janis. Kozmic Blues.
Roger turned on the yellow patio light. “The growth has to be removed tomorrow morning,” he said.
Genesis said nothing.
“He’ll stay a couple of days. Go see him. He’s terrified about your reactions.”
The gate creaked. Genesis had moved his arms. “So you did take him.”
“I met him there.”
“But you arranged it?”
“Yes.”
“When I had him cured.”
“The biopsy showed it malignant. They’re going to have to cut some ear cartilage to get it all. The prognosis is good, though.”
“What gave you the right?”
“Me? It was the matter of his need.”
“Christ on His cross,” Genesis said, “is the man who has belief stolen from him.”
Roger’s heart was pounding. Logical and rational, he never was quite able to believe that others didn’t share these qualities in some degree. He never could conceive that a blind spot was truly blind or that mental quirks and aberrations were real. On his psychiatry rotation he’d been positive that the other students drew on vast knowledge while he, hopelessly ignorant, was reduced to talking common sense to his patients: he’d given himself up as a psychotherapeutic disaster area and was speechless when Dr. Haries, handing him a Styrofoam of coffee, had inquired if he’d considered making this his specialty. Some shrink he’d be! Separated by a gate from a psychotic, he nursed on angry suspicion that the man was putting him on.
“That nodule,” he said with forced patience, “took months to grow to that size. It ulcerated and bled and you used ointment. It scabbed, but it would have scabbed anyway. Scabbing’s not cure. Eventually it would’ve bled again, scabbed again. Grown. Spread. Destroyed him.”
“You’ve destroyed him.”
“Sir, at Peninsula Community Hospital they’ll explain better than I can.”
And Alix put in, “We’ll drive you. We’ve got some paperbacks for him.”
Genesis’ mouth moved in his thick beard. He said, “The boy can’t be one of us.”
“What?” Roger’s head jerked.
“He’s mutilated.”
“After surgery, later, they’ll do a little plastic work. It won’t show much.”
“They already cut him, didn’t they?”
“A biopsy.”
“So you’ve already taken him from us.”
“You mean you’re punishing him because he’s getting treatment for cancer?”
“I’m not the one to punish.”
Roger’s fists clenched. “What do you call it? Reward?”
“Go ahead. Laugh.”
“I’m not.”
“You people laugh at everything that doesn’t fit your ways. Well, let me tell you, there’s a better way than you ever dreamed.”
“None of this has anything to do with basal cell carcinoma.”
“Our Rule is a cathedral. You can’t take away one of the foundation blocks. The building will topple. We obey every part.”
“If you’d ever seen anyone die of cancer, you wouldn’t.”
“I’ve seen men die.” Genesis squinted one-eyed at Roger as if he were a crack marksman (Giles Cooke had been) sighting along his M-I rifle. “Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord.”
The quiet words seemed to hang in the pale dusk. Genesis didn’t say good-bye.
His footsteps rang, and the darkness swallowed a middle-aged man, the type sometimes seen in California, loose shirt, beard invariably whiter than long hair. Time keeps movin’ on. Alix pressed back a cuticle. Roger picked up his journal. Moths thumped on the yellow lightbulb. I keep movin’ on, but I never found out why.
“Brrr,” Alix said finally.
“Cold?”
“Him.”
“He’s an infuriating bastard.”
“He’s more than that.” She hunched her shoulders to prove a shiver.
In the kitchen she took off her ring, washed her hands, and bent in front of the refrigerator searching for hamburger. Roger kept the door open, taking out a bunch of celery.
“Look,” he said, rinsing two stalks, “if he weren’t basically all right, Cricket never would’ve lived here.”
“I guess,” she said, pouring Lawry’s Seasoned Salt on ground meat.
He put one of the celeries in her mouth. She bit. Chewed.
“Roger, I keep thinking of the man who killed Jamie. Peculiar, isn’t it, how the mind works? Me, I relate every nut in the world to him.”
Chapter Twelve
1
On Roger’s graduation day, Alix slid into their mailbox a card: Roger S. Reed, MD. Roger, holding the small key at the double row of boxes, flushing with triumph, touched the letters.
“Engraved,” he said.
“Nothing but the best, Doctor.”
She’d had the card made for this one occasion. Before seven the following morning they were out of Baltimore. He had been accepted as an intern at Stanford Medical Center. “California,” he said. “Home.”
Across a continent of tender early summer they drove, the rear window of her four-year-old Mustang obscured with her clothes, the floor jammed with his Bausch & Lomb binocular microscope, books, journals, the trunk gorged. They had figured on taking it easy, but as they left the city limits, there was Roger’s foot gunning down. They traveled 66 remembering their years in Baltimore, bursting into spontaneous laughter at phrases humorous to them alone, they tuned in local radio stations. “Oh, remember that one?” Alix would cry. Roger would describe incidents that proved he should go into internal medicine, thus becoming a specialized GP in a rural area. They would eat soggy A&W hamburgers in shimmering heat, drink shuddery-cold 7Ups at Texaco stations. They marveled how endless was the Midwest, they dived into motel swimming pools, stretching on unfamiliar mattresses to make love with bodies that smelled of chlorine. Home. They were going home.
In Phoenix they stayed at a rundown court, walking to a café they’d spotted a few blocks back. A moonless night, the stars were huge.
“Look,” she pointed up. “There’s the Big Dip
per.”
“And the Little Dipper.”
“Which?”
He held her finger toward the sky. “There. See? Those three stars make a handle.”
“So they do.”
They passed a boarded-up garage: in the shadows a cat darted, eyes glinting as if battery-operated.
“How’s the country with you?” he asked.
“Or a poverty pocket.”
“Country’s better for kids.”
“How many are you counting on?”
“Lots.”
“Ever hear of Zero Population Growth?”
“I’m old-fashioned. We’ve got good genes. I plan to teach you the constellations and keep you pregnant.”
“About those night calls?”
“I’m healthy.”
“Very.”
“Say two boys and two girls?”
“What if it’s four boys?”
“We keep trying.”
She didn’t really believe in the babies. It was as if Roger were telling her the story of some girl on one of those distant pinpoints of light. She was cool from a recent shower and numb in the flesh from twelve hours of driving. She was very happy. How simple it sounds, she thought, as he held open the screen door for her. How easy.
2
The house on Kings Road in West Hollywood was like an ancient, extremely ugly woman. When others in her generation have died, she no longer is considered in terms of looks. She is a relic of the past, unique and irreplaceable. Therefore precious. The house, old only in Los Angeles terms, was built just before the twenties in a style that the architect probably had called Gothic—else how could he have justified the ells, useless gables, the tower, the narrow, stained-glass windows that caught sun and kept out light? This anachronism was centered on two large lots. It was protected by dagger-topped iron rails and hidden by a bushline of lemon trees. Later, it would be called a handsome old estate, a former gathering spot for Los Angeles society, a secluded mansion.
Secluded it was.
The neighboring houses had been leveled. On either side, foundations were being dug for hundred-unit apartment buildings. Soon, soon, salvager and wrecking crew would fall on the old place. Its owner, Mrs. Dormin Van Vliet, great-great-aunt to Cricket Matheny and the Reed twins, was dead.
“I don’t see why they want to come here,” Orion said. “Your aunt and uncle live in Glendale. Alix’s parents must be, you know, someplace around.”
“Beverly Hills.”
“Well?”
“It has to do with the family situation.” Cricket hooked her knees over the back of the sofa. A warm evening, she wore cutoffs. The horsehair upholstery felt like a brush on her bare legs. “I’m neutral territory—Alix wrote that.”
It was almost eleven and they were in the little downstairs library.
Three months earlier, Cricket had called Sidney Sutherland—he was probating the will of his late mother-in-law—to inquire about the place, which enchanted her. Could she stay? Cousin Sidney had replied, “Until the estate’s settled—that is, if it’s okay with Caroline and Gene.” Of course it was.
Orion had been here since last Friday.
He had traveled to Los Angeles in one of REVELATION’s secondhand school buses. Genesis, Magnificat, and their entourage of Select males were at Magnificat’s sister’s home in Hollywood. Orion had called Cricket: “Okay if I crash with you?” In the ensuing time he had explained, more or less, how things were with him. Bad. (Although this he never verbalized.) His face appearing thinner, he had told her that after he’d left the hospital he’d not been allowed in the Chinese compound or to work in the restaurant. He had rented a room in Carmel, working at Taco Bell. “I can’t be one of the Select, but Father Genesis, he’s been very good, he lets me hang around.”
Orion sat on the Bokhara, clumsily sewing a button on a white shirt. Though no longer bound by the Rule, he followed it, wearing only white and never trimming his hair or beard.
“Where’ll they sleep?” he asked.
“Aunt Raphaela’s room.”
“Creepy.”
“Why?”
“You said she died in there.”
“You don’t want them, do you?”
He pulled. Thread snapped. He licked the end, concentrating on passing it through the eye of his needle. “Roger interfered,” he mumbled.
“Helped.”
“Wrecked me.”
“Paid most of the bills.”
“He did?”
“It’s lucky he saw you when he did.”
“Lucky?” Orion stared at her with outraged eyes, as if she’d congratulated him on being the sole survivor of hydrogen holocaust. Then he went back to threading his needle.
“Look, I understand,” Cricket said, touching his arm. “It’s hard for you to be with him.”
“Impossible.”
“Then move in with the Tadovitches. They won’t mind.” The Tadovitches, a Czech couple who had worked for old Mrs. Van Vliet, had remained on in their garage apartment as caretakers. The garage was a replica of stables, and like real stables, had been placed as far as possible from the house, way in back of the property. “You won’t be around him.”
Orion bent over his sewing.
And Cricket understood. A choice. He wants me to choose. Him or them. By now she was used to this male egotism: former boyfriends—not that Orion fell into this precise category—asking favors they never would have considered asking but for warm, moist sharings. She stood.
“I’m going in the kitchen. Want something?”
He shook his head.
“Milk? Or the bananas are just right.”
“Thanks, I’m not hungry.”
She padded barefoot, circling the loose board, opening one of the golden-oak doors of the built-in refrigerator, shaking Altadena certified raw milk, tilting back her head to drink.
She took the plastic bottle with her.
“Cricket,” he said slowly, “come back to REVELATION.”
“It’s bad for me there. Like you seeing Roger.”
“You’re different. You’re a serene kind of person. You’ll get over it.”
She took another gulp, holding creamy milk in her mouth.
“It’s not like you’re doing anything,” he said. “You dropped out of school.”
She hadn’t dropped out. She had oozed out. Most semesters she’d ended up with maybe five units. Five hours a week. Last semester she had stared at registration forms. How dumb, she had thought. And torn papers into her basket. She’d driven back to Los Angeles, asking Sidney Sutherland for housing. She had a trust fund, not inherited like the boys’ but set up by Gene with no strings. It paid her $1,800 a year. Without rent, she managed fine.
“Is it so great for you?” he asked. “Are you so happy?”
“Pretty much.” Except, of course, when she thought of her guilt. For it was a great guilt. And at this moment very much with her.
She bent to a cabinet below empty bookshelves, retrieving a blue nylon sleeping bag. She yawned elaborately. “Mind?”
He retreated as if she’d shouted. The commandment of celibacy ruled him yet.
She unrolled the bag on the horsehair sofa. She thought. She zipped herself into the bag. She thought some more. A family of raccoons lived under the avocado tree and one of them rustled by. Cricket, thinking, unzipped the bag, pulled on a chenille robe, felt her way upstairs. Darkness never frightened her. (Orion, on the other hand, flicked on the Tiffany wall brackets wherever he went.)
“That you, Cricket?” Orion’s voice came anxious from the room that had belonged to Dormin Van Vliet, a tiny man with hairy nostrils and a pacemaker in his heart who had departed this life from St. Vincent’s and therefore, according to Orion, could have left no haunting ghost.
“You really want me back, don’t you?” she said.
He switched on the light. “Father Genesis would be pleased,” he said.
“There’re things you never can repay. Gen
esis took me in, he helped me have the baby, he’s always been good to me. But that doesn’t stop me from seeing stuff.”
“What?”
“He’s gotten bitter.”
“He has cause.”
“And look at the way he cut you out.”
“I disobeyed the Rule.”
Cricket ran a finger along the rosewood dado. Examining accumulated dust on her fingertip, she asked, “If I go back, will he let you in again?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But you think so?”
Orion’s scraggly beard worked. “He wants us all to live the Rule.”
The Rule. Goosebumps formed under Cricket’s swap-meet robe. Yesterday Genesis had come over. He had sat on the low wall of the terrace with Magnificat at his feet, leaning her red hair on his knees. The other Select, cross-legged on flagstone, had gazed devoutly up. Genesis had spoken of civilization doomed: Those who have accepted REVELATION shall survive, he had rumbled. According to Genesis, humanity was divided in two parts—the hundred or so who belonged to REVELATION and the billions of doomed. He had crossed his bricklayer arms, prophesying the end. Roger and Vliet, both, had called Genesis a nut. He probably was. (But doesn’t a prophet have to hand over his sanity as collateral until the world is proved round, man related to the ape?) Genesis had said, Who do you think will survive? The killers of animals, the men who knife other men? The workers in gun factories? The Nixons and Congress? The fornicators, adulterers, sodomites? Surely before God builds His new world, these, too, must pass. Under a balding forehead that had sojourned in prisons, the eyes had glowed. It was the eyes that got Cricket. Eyes searching, peering, probing, gazing into the sun. Peyote, Cricket had wondered, does it affect the eyes?
“He’s hooked on this doom thing, Orion.”
“If Ralph Nader says the human race has had it, people believe him.”
“I don’t.”
“You should,” Orion said.
The next morning he told her he was taking off.
Rich Friends Page 35
