Rich Friends (35 page)

The chandelier glowed on a not-quite-pretty woman with creases radiating from amber eyes. She appeared soft, reticent, compared to her shining child. But Alix is more fragile, Roger thought, far more. Beverly smiled at him. A remote, gentle smile that he sensed was not for him but for old times' sake, and he filed away the question: Was Alix's mother the only one capable of remembrance or was she the only one with something worth remembering?

While Roger talked, Dan had been drumming his knuckles.

“And so she's off with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There you are, Beverly. Cards on the table. Your play.”

Beverly said to Roger, “Alix has always done everything well. Easily. She's wonderful with people. Poised. Happy. That running to Hawaii and flying right back. I just don't understand.”

“She doesn't want you to understand, Mrs. Grossblatt.”

“I don't know her, not at all.”

Roger knew her. Someplace in this large, overdone house, she wept.

“There's a head?” he asked.

Dan jerked a thumb in the direction of the front powder room, and Roger, saying, “Excuse me,” went in the opposite way, toward the bedroom wing. Neither Dan nor Beverly noticed. They were staring at one another.

Roger was in a spacious hall with lighting bubbles inset in the ceiling. The doors were closed. The walls covered with paintings. Here, in the windowless heart of the house, were Beverly Schorer's mad rabbis. Hung in the Guggenheim. Strictly nonrepresentational daubs of black, streaky reds, touches of white rising upward. Roger glanced at a painting and was trapped. Humiliated by his outburst, worried because he didn't know any way to apologize to Alix, depressed by his actions, this painting dragged him a million miles farther down, into chaotic, agonizing questions about evil that he didn't have to ask. Hopefully, would never have to ask. Turning away, he concentrated on which door to try.

Dan's voice. “Well?”

“When she left for Hawaii, she was excited, happy. That is, she seemed happy. Dan, I can't remember her crying. Not since she was a baby. She never does.”

“Alix? No.”

“She's my daughter, and I don't understand her. Terrible, terrible. He understands her.”

“You mean you're going to encourage it?”

“He's different from Vliet. I don't know. He's less sure of himself, but more settled. Serious. And there's something very decent about him, sweet almost.”

“Sweet? Decent? Understanding? Oh balls! Don't be so fucking sentimental!” Pause. Calmer. “Listen to me, Buzz. So we've all had our reasons for spoiling her every step of the way. New cars. Any clothes she wants. Two-hour trips to Hawaii. One week in the mountains with one boyfriend, then it's off to Laguna with the other. Now she's decided to shack up with this Roger. Well, her father won't foot the bills for it, and for once, I'm with him!”

“That's holding money over her.”

“Like hell!”

“Yes.”

“So what if we are? If she's decided to be a fuck, let her go be a fuck on her own!”

Mad rabbis spun. Roger's fists clenched. He realized that Alix had pushed, especially with that last crack, and he shouldn't have slapped their sex life on the table with overdone beef, but to Roger the words (even though said in exasperation) were unforgivable. Roger was not quick to blame. Or to forgive. He never was able to forgive Dan for saying the words.

Beverly murmured.

“Buzz, it's not different now. She's a beautiful girl. Charming. Brilliant. She's got everything. We can't let her throw it away. For once we'll try to do what's right for her, not what eases the most guilts.”

Roger moved along the hall. A cutoff that way. He opened a door and was in a vast, gold bathroom. Another door. Blackness and the smell of the lotion she used on her hands. His pupils adjusted and he saw her on the bed. Closing the door, he inched through dark, pushing over something light, a wastebasket possibly. His leg touched the bed, and he dropped, kneeling, pressing his face to hers. Her cheek was hot and wet.

He said inside her ear, “Know how much I love you?”

“I resent how much I love you.” She exhaled through her nostrils, a snort he felt. “The Love Affair of the Week, and they're making it all dirty. Roger, what did your father tell you that jarred you like that?”

He couldn't tell her. He probably never could. A rejection on this level, he knew, could destroy Alix. “Hey,” he said, “I think your mother's about to foot your bills.”

“No!” she said, too loud, considering she had her cheek pressed to his. “Roger, I do not want her money. I do not want any of their money.”

“What's the other choice?”

“It's called work. I'll get a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Don't hassle me, please, not now. They will kill us. Or me, anyway. I'm sick of being a chattel. I have to do this on my own, otherwise it'll never be right.”

More or less what Dan had said.

She patted the mattress. “Join me.”

And Roger free-associated. “If I get on the bed and anyone opens the door, they'll assume I'm fucking you.”

She pulled away. “Oh, hasn't this been one great big joyous day! Before,
we
made love. Now,
you
fuck—”

“Rape. Oh Jesus, Alix, please listen, please, look.… Sweet, please?”

She cradled his head. “Don't, Roger.”

“Why not? You are.”

“It's just not Gentile,” she said, kissing the tears under his eyes. “I got all mixed up and I froze. Your Frankenstein's too good. I froze with you!” she said in horror.

“You were meant to … Alix, tell me how to … I'm sorry.…”

She knelt, facing him, her hands moving over his quaking shoulders. She could be tender, Alix, and this tenderness in a sharp, quipping girl would always take him by surprise. She whispered endearments, she held him, she comforted him.

After a few minutes he rubbed his face in her neck. “I better get home. Face Vliet.”

“That's the worst for you, isn't it?”

A rhetorical question. She reached out and a tall lamp went on. He blinked. Her eyes were wet, the lashes glued in points. He followed her to a corridor with louvered closets on one side and an elaborate washbowl on the other. He watched her splash water on her face, brush her teeth, her hair, finger white under her eyes, plum color the lids. In Laguna she hadn't used makeup. She licked a mascara brush. He defied anyone to guess she'd been weeping.

He looked at his reflection. He defied anyone to guess he hadn't. He threw water in his face, blotting with the same tiny blue towel she'd used.

The bubble lights shone down on them, a harsh, honest light, and Roger ran his palms down her sides, cheating a little with his thumbs at the roots of her breasts, cheating again at the rounded pelvic bones. She was right. They couldn't live another day like this. They couldn't risk it again. Alix wasn't a naive girl. She was fully aware that she was giving up inexhaustible clothes behind louvered doors, quilted upholstery, the open-end checking account, all items of considerable importance to her. She was committing a vast generosity.

“I always wanted to be a doctor,” he started.

“What else is new?”

“But there're other careers.”

“What? Who said anything about dropping medicine?”

“Me.”

“Then shut up.”

“I can't let you work.”

“Roger, you're very beautiful, but also you can be a stodgy crock, and right now you've got me all confused. So will you please shut up?”

Filled with love and guilty relief, he had his arm around her as they went back into the dining room. Dan stared over chocolate ice cream at them. Roger kissed Alix's forehead goodnight, a public act which shamed him because it seemed to him defiant. Vliet, he thought, Vliet could carry it off.

9

He parked Alix's Mustang across the street from his house. He was unable to communicate with his parents as if nothing had happened. He was equally unable to face Vliet. The living-room lights went out. Then others. Finally the one in his (and Vliet's) window. Roger waited forty minutes before he went in. He moved silently to the kitchen, finding a bottle of Smirnoff's—his mother's crutch—and in the den nursed it until either he fell asleep or passed out.

“Up,” Vliet was saying. “Up!”

Venetian blinds clattered. Sunlight blared.

“Off your ass,” Vliet said. “We've got a handball game.”

Roger cleared the back of his throat. Pain and the flavor of vomit reverberated along his sinus canals. Holding his forehead between his palms, he asked, “What's 'a time?”

“Almost seven.”

“Why're you up?”

“To get your shit together.” Vliet dug gloves and shoes from the closet. He saw the bottle. “You did a job?”

“Alix,” Roger said quickly, “she's coming to Baltimore.”

Vliet gave Roger a look that Roger couldn't fathom. “We better settle up before they're on us. Get off it.”

“I'm dead.”

“Nothing like handball to jolt the adrenaline.”

They drove through sleeping Sunday streets toward the pseudomosque that was the Glendale Athletic Club. As usual, Roger was at the wheel. Vliet lounged back (they were in Alix's Mustang), a peculiar expression of decision molding his face.

Vliet lacked his brother's mental force and physical stamina. God knows, he was no idealist. There aren't many Rogers around. But Vliet, from conception, had been tied to his lacks. He had adjusted magnificently. He let Roger propel them through infancy and into various schools, with sports in season. It was a terrific situation. Vliet saw himself as a member of the royal family, free to enjoy himself while an equerry (Roger) handled the grubby coins of decision. There's a fly in every ointment, though. And Vliet's bug was that the royalty role he envisioned was that of the champagne-head princeling who appears briefly but winningly in the second act of a campy Lehar operetta.

He shortchanged himself. He was very similar to the father of them all, the original Hendryk Van Vliet who had crossed the Isthmus with his spices, yeast powders, mercenary instincts, and ambitions. Vliet's easy blond looks hid these tougher traits from everyone, including himself. And here was a talen he had down pat. He could hide from himself.

One emotion he couldn't hide. He loved Alix. Of course—as he'd equivocated with himself these last six embittered days—he loved her for all the surface reasons. True, true. (But what did this have to do with anything? All Vliet's life, people had loved him for the wrong reasons.)

He could get his own way with anyone. This uncanny ability Vliet used as a social asset, along with his tennis game, sense of humor, and holding of the best grass. When the chips were down, though, he could put his skill to purpose. And today he needed to cut himself loose from Roger. He also needed
not
to cut himself loose from Roger. He wanted the twinship intact, and he wanted to be sprung. Vliet watched small, decently kept houses slip by. He would have to lie, show his superior cool, use a touch of malice—he'd been there before. And with Roger he had the advantage. He knew every button. Take your time, was his advice to himself. Don't rush it.

Accordingly, they played for fifteen minutes. Vliet, panting, served from between red lines. “Twelve-five,” he said. “There's no problem where she'll stay.”

Thwack
.

“Huhh?” Roger missing the easy lob, brushed sweat from his baffled eyes.

“Thirteen-five,” Vliet said. “I mean, you do plan this the healthy way? Share quarters?”

“There's a vacant single in the building.”

“Why not just change roommates? I'm not going back.”

Roger let the ball echo disconsolately against the back wall. “What?”

“I'm staying in Los Angeles.”

“You're—You mean, you're dropping out?”

“Christ, the man's a deductive genius.”

Roger turned to get the plum-size ball. All the years of spontaneous joys and perplexing rivalries, the shared Parker games and Tom Swifts and classes coming to an end as he'd feared. Sweat chilled him. It was a moment rather like death. He wondered if Vliet felt this terrible finality. I could ask, he thought. Shrugged. Vliet would come back with a quip, not the truth.

“Rogerboy, you cold-cocking the game because I'm up on you?”

Soon it was 21–7, Vliet. Game.

They collapsed, panting, knees up, bare wet shoulders resting against stucco. Vliet retied the red shoelaces that, he said, grabbed his opponents by the eyeballs.

Roger said, “You're quitting because of me and Alix.”

“Really. Why else?”

“Well, why?”

Bodies gleaming, white shorts gray where sweat had soaked, they examined one another through identical Prussian-blue eyes. Roger was inside Vliet. Therefore Vliet switched the subject.

“I've made up my mind. Hey, Roger. What rocks you most? I have a mind—”

“Vliet.”

“—or I made my mind up myself?”

Roger's hurt was too obvious.

“It can't come as news that you've made every life choice,” Vliet said.

“Me?”

“Christ, you want baseball, I head for the dugout, the year you decide it's basketball, we go to Johnny Wooden's Summer Camp. You opt for football, I suit up. You want Ha-a-ava-a-ard, I hit the books. You've always been into medicine, and there I am, looking at spit on a slide. Rogerboy, face it, we've lived in your straitjacket.” He tossed Roger the ball. “Now serve.”

Roger served. “Zero-zero,” he said.

Vliet's slighter, longer body bent into a return.
Thwack thwack thwack
. Vliet's red-laced shoes moved with Fred Astaire eloquence, but anyway, the volley ended with Roger's slamming his heavy muscles into a return to the right rear. Vliet couldn't get it.