Putting on Rubber Soul, his latest Beatles album, he stood in front of her snapping his fingers, moving his shoulders and narrow hips, an invitation to the dance. Laughing, she rose to her feet. Kicking off her heels, facing Alexander, who was already six inches the taller, she gave herself up to the violent beat, throwing out her arms, bouncing her head.
“Hey, Mom, you’re pretty fabulous,” he said.
“I used to be considered a good dancer,” she said, pushing back a strand of her hair.
“Used? You’re no antique. Nobody would guess you were my mother.”
“Flattery, flattery.”
“I mean it. You don’t look old at all.”
Delighted, she teased, “Maybe you need glasses like Gid.”
“Hey, listen! Why don’t we give it a go? Next Saturday Varger’s having a party. You could come with me.”
“That’d put a damper on the evening. I can remember how welcome parents are.”
“I meant as my date.” His face was taut with eagerness.
“Come on, Alexander,” she said, smiling.
“If you left off the makeup and wore an Indian top or a really neat T-shirt, I say you could pass as my date. Ten dollars, Mom, is it a bet?”
“You’d lose two weeks’ allowance,” she said.
“I’m serious.”
“Do you want to give your father another heart attack?”
“Dad’s in bed by nine thirty.”
“That’s enough, Alexander,” she said with no-nonsense, maternal flatness.
* * *
But when she met Imogene for lunch Thursday, she couldn’t resist boasting about Alexander’s bet. “Isn’t it idiotic? Imagine me as a teeny-bopper!”
Imogene’s bony face tilted appraisingly. “Never fourteen, darling, but then again that gorgeous hunk of yours is advanced. Maybe he goes out with seventeen-year-olds. Without the makeup, hair flapping, yes . . . . Not in daylight, of course, but at night maybe. A definite maybe.” She raised her hand for their waiter and began gathering her gold cigarette case, her glasses, into her Hermes shoulder bag.
“We haven’t had our coffee—where are you rushing?”
“Don’t you see? This is but exactly the boost you need. Since Gideon’s heart attack, you’ve been a hermit. It was just too much, the sickroom, never going out, that dreary work.”
“Imogene, you’re mad.”
“Trust me. Last week Melissa”—one of Imogene’s numerous ex-stepchildren—“took me to the most dee-vine thrift shop in the Tenderloin.”
37
Crystal’s anticipatory pipe dreams about the lark she would share with Alexander bade her adieu as she entered the brown stucco in St. Francis Woods. The Vargers being on a trip to Japan, the kids had the house to themselves.
The less than two decades since Crystal, an English schoolgirl, had burst on the American youth scene could just have easily been a million years, or so it seemed to her. Had these been black Oakland adolescents or hippies from the Haight, she would have been primed for drugs, casual sexual alliances, foul language. But this was Alexander’s crowd, private school students, offspring of San Francisco’s best people.
They congregated around the crackling eucalyptus fire in the basement playroom, ten of them, male and female alike wearing tight, faded Levi’s and a rainbow variety of tops, entertaining themselves by watching their host, Avery Varger, a skinny spider of a boy, studiously roll marijuana in zigzag papers, then handing around the tokes from one to the next, closing their eyes to inhale deeply and appreciatively.
“My mom’s such a fucking hypocrite,” said a little girl with bare, dirty feet. “She’s been dried out a hundred times and all she does is rave on and on about the evils of grass. As far as she’s concerned the first goddamn puff sets you on the yellow brick road to being a dope fiend, sticking yourself with needles.”
A boy nodded his overlong bush of brown hair in agreement. “I mean, they don’t know the first fucking thing about grass, that it’s organic and won’t hurt you. No, they munch that chemical Miltown shit and guzzle their vodka and fuck their minds and livers, and then dump on us if they discover we’re holding.”
Crystal could not for the life of her comprehend what pleasure these juveniles derived from nursing on their saliva-slimed marijuana. At first she simply passed on the loathsome thing, but Alexander turned on her. “What’s wrong, Cryssie? You chicken?”
His voice shook. A plea? It occurred to her that she was jeopardizing his social life by not entering wholeheartedly into the masquerade.
Resolutely stimulating pleasure, she took her turns. But no matter how deeply she dragged or how long she submerged the heavy smoke in her lungs, she felt no effect. Thank God for that. From earliest childhood the mere thought of losing control had filled her with uneasy dread—and that night in San Rafael with Curt Ivory had been an object lesson.
Somebody had put on a record, a grating blast she recognized from Alexander’s collection. The redheaded girl with the face of a ten-year-old was skinning off her tie-dye T-shirt to display breasts larger than Crystal’s own—although not as shapely. The girl raised her arms, revealing tufts of auburn axial hair as she gyrated her torso to the violent beat, her bulbous nipples rolling like a madman’s eyes.
Crystal huddled back in the ancient, dusty-smelling couch. Until now the sexual banter for all its obscenity had a certain innocence—she could remember playing the fraudulent game of sophistication with her dates. But this dance was a defiantly lascivious invitation. The record ended, another began, and the half-naked little slut plopped herself down on the other side of Alexander. Crystal went clammy with horror, envisioning her Alexander coiled in sex with the creature, her Alexander afflicted with VD, about which she knew nothing but imagined as running sores à la the finale of the filmed version of The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
“Man, this is the best fucking grass,” said the boobed wonder. “It from Acapulco, Alexander?”
“Turkey,” Alexander retorted tersely.
“Wow, Turkish!” said mine host, the firelight red on his steel braces. “Mellow, Talbott, mellow. Agree, Cryssie?”
Crystal agreed. The one rosy spot about the evening was that she, costumed in her thrift shop finery, hair hanging straight and nearly veiling her face, was accepted as Alexander Talbott’s date, Cryssie Saunderson.
The joints seemed to be making the rounds more rapidly.
A huge platter of sandwiches appeared and she devoured four halves before realizing that she detested packaged bologna, and anyway it was loaded with calories.
Varger was pressing his moist, steel-backed lips to hers. She pushed at his scrawny chest with both hands, however, his bologna and smoke tasting tongue continued to foray. She raised her hand in what she intended as a quasi-humorous rebuffing slap. It rang loudly. The others chortled.
“Bitch,” Varger snarled. “You’re stoned out of your fucking gourd.”
“Cut it out, Varger,” Alexander said easily. “Let he who’s not stoned among us cast the first stone.”
Varger shifted to the seminude slut, and Crystal shrank back into the shadows. Vagrant chips of conversation came at her, but her attention was fixed on the orange and yellow flames which rose, writhing like the naked bodies of the damned in an endless sexual torment.
Then Alexander was pulling her to her feet. “Twenty to twelve, Cryssie. Time for the car to pick us up.”
“Them and their fucking curfew,” she said as an exit line.
The three stories of the Vargers’ house descended down the precipitous slope of St. Francis Woods, and this basement room opened onto the back garden. The cold air felt sharp and clean and she reached out her arms to embrace the tulle mist that hid the tops of the pines, tilting her head to catch the faraway, sweetly mournful song of a foghorn.
“This way,” Alexander said, leading her along the pine-needle-covered path, his grip firm, his hand considerably larger than her own. “Well?” he said. “Wasn’t I
right? Nobody guessed, did they?”
“Alexander . . . . That crowd—I didn’t like that crowd.”
“Face it, being that up front with you proves they accepted you. Mom, you owe me ten.”
“Oh, that stupid bet!” she cried. Halting, she fumbled with the clasp of Aunt Matilda’s old needlepoint bag, but it got away from her and the contents—mirror, handkerchief, change purse—spilled across exposed bones. Or was it the roots of a tall ponderosa?
As Alexander bent to retrieve her possessions, he said quietly, “It’s Curt Ivory, isn’t it?”
Certain she’d heard him wrong, she clutched at the empty purse.
He rose to his feet, and she saw nothing but his intent topaz eyes, lion’s eyes. “Curt Ivory,” he said. “He’s my father, isn’t he?”
That August night, cold but foggy like this night, came to her drenched with detail: she could once again feel the wet grass against her naked buttocks, the constricting steel of the Merry Widow, the pounding, furious burden of her sister’s husband. She could not properly recall the involuntary, mind-obliterating spasms that were surely hatred—or were they the only orgasm of her life?—but knew she’d experienced them.
“So I’m right,” he said softly. Taking the purse from her limp hand, he stuffed in the trivia. “See the steps? Careful, they’re sort of uneven.”
The shadow of a big Lincoln rose ahead of them. Imogene and her latest, Max, were waiting as promised.
Alexander opened the back door. “The ten bucks is mine!” he announced with adolescent glee. “I mean, two guys hit me for old Cryssie here’s phone number and Varger tried to make out. There was one bad moment when my date slugged him, I mean I was shaking she’d announce herself, but she got with it again.”
* * *
Crystal awoke with a pounding heart and an inflexible premonition of doom. She moved her head cautiously on the mound of tiny pillows: sharp daggers stabbed above her temples. The events and thoughts of the previous evening were blurred together in a monstrous splotch, and she had trouble differentiating between reality and what had transpired within her imagination.
Had Alexander said, Curt Ivory, he’s my father, isn’t he? or were the words as insubstantial as the naked copulating figure she’d glimpsed in the fire?
Anina bore in her breakfast tray. Crystal waved the maid away, mumbling about the flu to excuse herself from eating and from church.
A few minutes later another tap sounded. “Mom, it’s me,” Alexander called, opening the door.
With his long bright hair flopping over his forehead, white shirt and the pants of his dark suit, he was Christopher Robin grown into naive adolescence.
“Anina tells me you have the bug,” he said, closing the door. Approaching the bed, he asked softly, “It’s nothing to do with last night, is it?”
“No, I must’ve been coming down with it.”
“That’s a relief. No offense, Mom, I didn’t mean I want you ill. But that grass Varger got ahold of was Turkish. Top grade. Strong. One thing, you can always count on Varger for good grass.”
She held two fingers to her ghastly headache. Hadn’t she heard Varger say Alexander had procured the dope? Alexander’s innocently anxious gaze remained on her. No, her drug-distorted mind must have juxtaposed the remarks.
“I never would’ve made you go through with it last night if I’d known you were sick.”
“I wasn’t, not then.”
His head tilted and he looked yet younger. “You’re sure?”
“It was fun, Alexander, the most fun I’ve had in years. I wish they wouldn’t smoke marijuana, or use that kind of language—”
“So what else is new?” he interjected, grinning.
“—but they were very nice, your friends.” And as she looked up at her son’s beautiful, conspiratorial young face, it did seem to Crystal that the evening had not been a debacle but a bewitched return to the happy harbor of youth.
“Wouldn’t it blow their minds if they knew?”
38
Crystal shivered.
Beyond the rain-slashed, breakfast room bay window, deer were taking advantage of the rotten weather to browse on the deserted, sodden golf course, while on the far side of the fairway she could see choppy gray waves breaking and spuming. The barren island rock appeared deserted until a huge bull seal rose up to slither into the morose Pacific.
“I’m sorry about this rain, Daddy,” she said. “The worst part is they say it’ll keep up through tomorrow.”
“Crystal, you grew up an English girl.” Langley gave his rueful, charming chuckle. “Have you forgotten our happy breed doesn’t melt?”
“Don’t let Mom kid you, Grandpa,” Gid said. “She ordered the storm to make you feel at home.”
They were at the Carmel place for Easter. In honor of the first morning of Langley’s visit, Crystal had made an appearance at breakfast. Gideon’s place at the head of the maple table was already vacant, its tureen of oatmeal empty, an inch of thin, bluish milk remaining in the cut-glass pitcher—no more tasty over-easy eggs, thick pink rashers of Canadian bacon and hash browns for Gideon Talbott. He couldn’t be convinced, however, to alter his practice of working regardless of holidays, and was already immured with Mitchell in the upstairs study.
“Looks like we’re stuck inside,” Alexander said. “Grandpa, I challenge you to another round of Scrabble.”
“Excellent idea.” Langley raised his Bloody Mary. “As soon as I finish breakfast.”
Before Langley’s arrival yesterday afternoon at the small Monterey airport, he had passed two tactfully unmentioned weeks in the Ivorys’ Los Angeles house with “my three ladies,” as he called Honora, Joscelyn and his baby granddaughter. Curt had been in Singapore, then Washington, D.C. Malcolm was still in Lalarhein.
Gid drained his milk. “This time count me in.”
“Good, why not?” Alexander said. “We need a calming influence, don’t we, Grandpa? Last night some of those words got pretty imperspicuous, and caliginous, too.”
“Hey, what?” Gid said.
“Those’re synonyms for esoteric,” Alexander retorted.
Gid didn’t join the Scrabble game. While Crystal made her calls—she was inviting wives of junketing Congressmen to a bridge luncheon the following day—she heard him clicking balls around the Brunswick pool table. When she finished on the telephone the rain was pelting more fiercely. Reflecting how dear it was of Alexander to entertain his grandfather, she peeked into the den.
“The Rain Fairburn Show” blasted away on the Magnavox while Alexander and Langley leaned across the game table, conversing intently. Seeing her, they stopped talking.
“Don’t mind me,” Crystal said, turning the set down. “Go on with your game.”
“Can’t you see my wounds?” asked Langley a shade too heartily. “Trounced by this mere youth. The honor of British publishing destroyed with a kuvasz.”
“Kuvasz?” she asked.
“A Hungarian hunting dog,” Alexander explained.
“That vocabulary.” Crystal smiled indulgently before asking, “What were the pair of you talking about just now? You looked like you were planning World War Three.”
“A matter considerably more significant,” Alexander said, glancing across the Scrabble board at his grandfather. “We thought after lunch we’d brave the storm and go into Carmel for a movie.”
“That sounds perfect,” Crystal said. “I’ve nothing on.”
“Grandpa wants Dr. Zhivago, Mom. You’ve seen it.”
“So have you.”
“It happens I have this big thing for Julie Christie.”
“I know when I’m not wanted,” she said, a smile covering her sliver of hurt at Alexander’s transparent rejection.
* * *
The storm lasted that day and the next, when she lunched with the Congressional wives. Thursday, however, the sun was out, drawing ripples of steam from the drying shake rooftops. The ice plant that covered the darkly wet dun
es shimmered with wetness; the Pacific was vibrant blues and the fairways a gaudy emerald.
Alexander challenged Gideon to a round of golf.
Alexander had won three gold-plated cups in state teenage tournaments; Gideon swung his clubs with graceless, chopping vigor and seldom broke a hundred. Both played for money—and blood.
When Gideon came in at two, he lay down on his bed, his cheeks an unhealthy purple.
“Didn’t you take a cart?” Crystal asked.
“After that storm? You know it’ll be at least three days before they allow carts on the course.”
“In that case, dear, nine holes is enough.”
“I need to brush up on my game, play more, not less. That Alexander’s good.”
“How much did he win?”
“Seven dollars and thirty-five cents.” Gideon scratched his fleshy ear. “Crystal, on the fifth hole his drive landed in the rough, and I’m positive he kicked his ball for a better lie.”
Crystal laughed. “You’re a bad loser, Gideon.”
“Well, if anyone has to beat me, I’m glad it’s one of my boys. Gid ought to take it up.”
“As far as I can see, Alexander’s enough for you.”
“Gid wouldn’t cheat.”
“Stop being idiotic!” she shrilled. Drawing a breath, she said, “Alexander’s like you. Competitive.”
Later she said to Alexander, “Your father’s not well. On the course, go a little easier.”
Alexander assumed that unnervingly sullen adolescent expression. “How?”
“Maybe miss a putt now and then.”
“Why don’t you play with him, then? He can beat you.”
* * *
Friday the temperature rose to the mid-seventies, and the sky was the clear Saxon blue of Crystal’s eyes. Humming, she trotted down the stairs. Gid was watching a pre-season baseball game.
“TV on a day like this?”
“I’m waiting for Grandpa, Mom. We’re driving into Carmel.”
“With Alexander?”
“Nope. He and Dad had a nine o’clock tee-off time.”
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