Rich Friends

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  Finally, around six, she closed the front door on Caroline and Gene and the Reeds. She headed again for the reproduction sideboard which today served as a bar. She was dizzy, nauseated, and had to make an effort to appear (almost) sober.

  “Quit while you’re on your feet,” Dan said in her ear.

  “It’s a party.”

  “You’re ready to keel over.”

  “Why’d you have to talk about that to Gene?” she asked. Never before had she used this low, furious tone. Never. A stranger was talking. In vino veritas. That stranger is me.

  “The Anti-Defamation League?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was interested.” Bellicose. “And why the hell shouldn’t I talk about it?”

  “And did you have to make that scene with Sheridan? About nothing?” This definitely is not me.

  She started to move away. Dan grabbed her arm, examining her. The Christmas tree a blinking rainbow pyramid, “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” a smell of pine, a fall of laughter, and the two of them facing one another.

  The muscles around Dan’s eyes contorted. “So that’s what’s with you,” he said.

  Beverly twisted from his grasp.

  A drink later, she heard Mr. Harley’s polite voice being marched over by Dan, something about the British having no right to be in Palestine, something about a White Paper being reneged on. From time to time she caught Dan examining her with an expression she was far too drunk to interpret. He left as the disembodied tones of Lionel Barrymore started to creak out the story of Scrooge.

  5

  It rained January 5, on the night before Dan was to leave.

  He was staying at the Biltmore, and he and Beverly ate in the Grill. Over his porterhouse he told of his day in various shoe stores. She looked into his face. She knew misery when she saw it, but he continued talking in a pleasant tone. He was standing. He must’ve signed the check. A convention of California Men’s Clothiers, yellow identification cards on their lapels, crowded the vast lobby. Dan stopped at a gilt easel with a true-color photograph of Tanya Someone, appearing nightly. He said, “We’ll go hear her.”

  “No.”

  “It’s wet out,” Dan said. “She’s convenient.”

  “No,” Beverly repeated.

  “Where do you want, then?”

  “Your room.”

  A threesome of Men’s Clothiers eyed Beverly up, down, up again.

  “To talk. I won’t rape you. Dan, please?”

  The men were listening. Dan shrugged, heading for the broad steps that led to the elevator hall. Neither of them spoke on their way to his room. Lighting a cigar, he lounged on the bed made up as a couch. Its perpendicular mate was turned down. She sat on the chair. Gusts of water slashed at windows.

  “Lucky it wasn’t like this New Year’s,” he said. And conversed about the Rose Bowl. He’d been close on those thirty points, Illinois having skunked UCLA 45–14. She twisted her purse strap.

  I must start, she thought, I must.

  She was in this impersonal room to put an end to cocooned silences, to conversations breaking midsentence, to ambiguity about future letters. It was dead for him, she assumed, but she wanted it interred as it had lived. With honesty. She wanted to know cause of death. Even if the results of the autopsy killed her. She almost laughed. Wasn’t she taking herself a mite seriously? If God didn’t believe in her, how could she take herself so seriously?

  Dan gestured at the windows. “This keeps up, they’ll close the airport.”

  “Dan.” Her heart was pounding furiously. “Listen, I’m very smart. It’s obvious we’re through, and it happened when I got drunk at the Open House. The thing is, I’m not sure why.” She swallowed painfully. “I mean, what happened?”

  He was standing. “That Tanya, can she be all bad if she’s booked here?”

  “You’ll be gone tomorrow. Dan, you’re the only person I ever could talk to. Please?”

  He sat again, tapping a cigar ash. “All right. Where shall we begin? Your parents?”

  “It’s us I need to understand.”

  “For openers, then. Don’t you think your mother talked a lot about age?”

  “No. I guess. Maybe.” Yes. Of course. And hadn’t Beverly eaten every meal to conversations about the quiet, unostentatious virtues?

  “Dirty old man!” he snorted. “A first for me.”

  “Parents always think their children are children.”

  “On the button, in your case.” He spoke loudly. She jumped, and felt better. Being argumentative was more natural to Dan than the past few days’ careful politeness. “And about this Lloyd Rawlings?”

  She flushed. “They couldn’t use their Civic Light Opera tickets. They gave them to Lloyd, a Christmas present.”

  “And you don’t call that running interference? Listen, there’s one thing you ought to know. Your parents don’t give one damn what’s right for you. They worry about their friends. And put that word, ‘friends,’ in quotes.”

  “We’re here to talk about us, not them.”

  “I embarrass them. I admit I’m Jewish.”

  “A lot of people there were. The Crowns, the Garets—”

  Dan interrupted, “It’s a new one on me.” Bewilderment creased his forehead. “Jewish parents who’d rather have their daughter take on a poor goy than—”

  “They think we’re more alike.…” Her voice trailed away. “Besides, Lloyd’s not poor. He’s bourgeois.” She didn’t much care for that bourgeois. Pretentious. “Middle class. Like us. Middle middle. You try to fit in with everyone else, like it’s a Saturday Evening Post world. Besides, money’s not all that important to them.”

  “Mazeltov!” he exploded. “And you don’t know what you’re talking about. Christmas trees, carols, the whole schmear, that’s fitting in? There’s nothing about their own God or their own past they want, so they horn in on someone else’s.”

  He’s right, she thought, then her blood raced, and glands, loyal-to-her-parents glands that she hadn’t realized existed in her, secreted hot acid in her arteries. She was on her feet, sorority white-cotton gloves, purse dropping unnoticed to beige carpet.

  “Just because they aren’t fanatics—”

  “They’re the worst kind!”

  “They respect all sorts of people.”

  “Respect, hell! They want to be them. They’ll do anything, including wipe themselves out, to avoid being what they are. In Germany they supported Hitler. They gave him money. At the beginning they gave him money. They hated themselves that much!”

  Cheekbones raised, Dan’s face distorted as if he’d run the mile. Dan, looking into his not-so-private hell, a nightmare world that shrank Beverly’s problems to nothing.

  “They’re not like that,” she said quietly. “You don’t understand them.”

  “The hell I don’t!”

  Her filial anger returned for a weak second round. “Just one afternoon couldn’t you have behaved decently?”

  “Decently? What’s that mean?” Dan was talking in a deep, ferocious rumble, as if his voice came from a place beyond his control or volition. “Okay, okay, you’re hot to have it out. I’d never seen this side of you, that’s all, and—”

  “Dan—”

  “—and it hit me you despise being Jewish enough to kill everything else you are.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “And you were wishing you could kill me off, too.”

  She bowed her head.

  “Weren’t you?”

  She bent for her purse and gloves.

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  And at the admission, with no warning, tears came. She turned, resting her head on the chair back. Her crying made no sound. Rain alone was audible. Beverly was not a girl who could excuse herself. She couldn’t simply think, It didn’t work out between us, that’s all. There was no way she could convince herself that her parents were at fault. She thought herself the worst
monster. She tried to stop her tears by thinking of the rain, it had rained so much of the time they’d been together. And eventually the crying stopped.

  Dan gave her a minute or two’s grace. “Beverly? Look at me.”

  God, no. She must be a holy wreck. She couldn’t know it, but grief pared her features to delicate bones: beautiful amber eyes dominated the face. Grief, that was Beverly’s color.

  “Buzz?”

  This time she looked.

  He grimaced unhappily, stubbing out his cigar. “Buy you a drink,” he said, crossing the room. He pulled her to her feet.

  “Who else do you know who can have silent hysterics?”

  “Look, I … Buzz.”

  The kiss started out light, but turned all tongues and teeth and a struggle to get every part of their bodies closer. He was tugging at her side zipper. She took over. No words. Unlaced shoes, hosiery like brown snakes on a white garter belt, shorts, slip, lace bra, panties, socks, everything falling to the carpet, and in the middle, Beverly and Dan. His hands moved up and down her hips. He led her to the turned-down bed.

  Urgency left them. It was as if hotel sheets were hot water, they moved so languorously. He traced the almost invisible scar under her lower lip and she kissed his finger. He slid a hand between them, circling her navel. Waiting. And she almost stopped breathing. Waiting. Now she blessed the rain, it was a noisy curtain shutting them off from time and the world. She never had any physical shame with Dan, and she guided his hand down, reaching for him, her hand curving around the pulsing hardness, the smooth skin like a glove, veins in back, rubbery ridge. She had avoided looking at it and was glad they were under covers so she couldn’t see it. Why? She didn’t know why. She loved every part of him, the hair in his armpits, which wasn’t beige like the rest of his body hair but a sort of reddish-brown, the flat mole the color of a cough drop on his left shoulder, she loved the smell of him, cigar, underarm sweat, and all, she loved the way his body stuck lightly to her body, his moist, warm breath penetrating her ear, his heart beating against her squashed breasts. She loved him more than she ever had.

  “Buzz,” he said against her hair, “it’s me, not you.”

  “No.”

  “I just couldn’t take it. You’re the gentlest girl, someplace off by yourself, so gentle. Don’t let them ruin everything for you.”

  She put both arms around him, feeling the crisp hairs on incurve of spine. He moved onto her. His shoulders and chest were strange like this, naked. He smiled dreamily down.

  “S’a nice room,” she murmured.

  “Shouldn’t it be, at these prices?”

  “In a good hotel,” she whispered.

  “So they tell me.”

  “No fleas biting.”

  “Not one.”

  “You’re not Mr. Smith.”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m not Mrs. Smith.”

  “You aren’t registered, even.”

  They whispered inanities, touching one another’s lips, their breath conveying the depth of their feeling, pain and regret and flowing need. Far away a siren howled, then there was just the rain, softer now.

  “Any other girl,” he said, “would be trying to patch things up. Thank you, Buzz.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “You, too.”

  “Do people always?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I want,” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “You do?”

  “More than anything in my life.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. I have to get a—” All at once he forced himself off her, saying, “Oh God. Am I really this big a bastard?”

  “Please?” She shifted in the bed. “Dan, can I, this?”

  “Yes, ahh, like that. Buzz …”

  And so, a victim to Dan’s loyalty to the ancient code, you don’t lay a Jewish virgin unless you intend marriage, Beverly was a virgin, semidemihemiquaver, but a virgin nonetheless when she married Philip Schorer.

  Chapter Three

  1

  It didn’t rain again until a Tuesday late in February.

  Em, aware of the patter on roof shingles, snuggled deeper into her blankets. Her small bedside Sentinal was tuned to KFI, an organ rose majestically and her thin little face grew eager: “Stella Dallas” was one of her favorites. Her anticipation shamed her. Still, what else could she do? After Christmas she’d gotten so huge she could barely totter around the apartment. Dr. Porter had ordered her to bed.

  The first six months of her pregnancy, Em had felt contemptible, like a child who’s done something nasty in her pants: to justify the fast-growing evidence of her misdeed, she had prepared feverishly for her new role, devouring books by Spock, Gesell and Ilg, any expert in the field of child development. Now, though, her body unequivocally invaded and alien, she had sunk into mindless acceptance.

  “Ahh, Stella, how can I tell you.”

  Em retrieved lipstick and brush from her drawer, carefully painting her dry mouth. She wore a pink bedjacket crocheted by her mother, and her limp blonde hair was neatly curled at the ends. Here, at least, she hadn’t let herself go. Later she would turn on the oven. In it was a lamb stew that Caroline had dropped off on her way to class—every day either she or Mrs. Wynan would pop in with a casserole so at least Em rested easy knowing Sheridan always ate a hot dinner.

  Em’s head tilted. The staircase was shuddering under a man’s shoes. Sheridan had a heavy step. But it was way too early for him. A key scraped in the front door.

  “Sheridan?” Em called, hastily turning the black knob. Stella faded midsigh. “Sheridan?”

  He came into the pocket-size bedroom.

  “You’re soaked through,” she said.

  “Rain’ll do that.”

  “You’re so early.”

  His lips grew taut. She had learned to dread this angry white at the corners of his mouth. But why should he be angry? All she’d done was mention his being home.

  He stripped off his loafers, dark with rain, and his sopping argyles, knitted from dangling spindles by Mrs. Wynan. At last Em ventured, “It’s Tuesday. You have a lab until five.”

  “School’s out.”

  “Because of the rain?”

  “You take every word literally.”

  Pushing up in bed, wincing, she peered through her glasses at him. “Sh-Sheridan, I don’t understand.”

  “I had an appointment with Mr. Cambro at twelve, so I came right on home.” Sheridan used their wedding-present Ford to deliver emergency night prescriptions for Mr. Cambro.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Tom Marshall’s quitting. We were talking about me taking Tom’s job.”

  “But Tom works full-time.”

  “A six-day week,” Sheridan agreed.

  “You can’t handle that, not with your schedule.”

  “You might as well know the worst.” With a sardonic grin, he deposited water-heavy socks in the clothes hamper. “I’ve dropped out.”

  “You what?”

  “Cashed in my chips.”

  “But we never even discussed it!”

  “Why should we? My mind’s made up.”

  His full meaning sank in. “You won’t have a degree,” Em cried. “You won’t be a pharmacist. Ohhh, Sheridan.”

  “It’s no three-alarm fire,” he snapped, heading for the kitchen, returning with a slice of Weber’s white smeared with Skippy.

  “Fall, I’ll get another teaching position,” she said. At notification of her pregnancy, the Los Angeles Unified School District, naturally, had canceled her contract.

  “Cambro’s starting me Monday.”

  “I’ll send for the papers.”

  “Don’t you listen?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It’s settled, so lay off will you, Em?”

  She wouldn’t. Couldn’t. “I’ll apply now.”

  “And what’ll you do with the twins? Drown
’em?”

  “Dr. Porter could make out only one heartbeat.”

  “He’s looked at your belly, though.”

  Through Max Factor pancake, patches of red appeared. She pulled blankets higher, over that horrendous mound with the navel popping like a cherry atop a sundae.

  Sheridan had been pacing barefoot. He stopped, wagging bread over her. “Listen, Em, I know it gripes you, and I understand it. You want the big future. But you picked the wrong guy. I’m too old for this homework crap. I’m not about to brown-nose some 4F prof into an A.”

  “But you’ll have wasted two and a half years, and—”

  “And I’ve got me a wife and kids to support. I need money. Cambro’s giving me one fifty-five to start. Don’t look like that, Em. Your hubby’ll be out there prescribing St. Joseph’s and Midol with the best of ’em.” His cheerful words didn’t track with his expression.

  Poor Sheridan, Em thought with a quick rush of sympathy. My poor sweetie. She wanted to cuddle his face against her swollen breasts. She wanted to express her very real sympathy and her equally genuine gratitude for his never once having thrown the pregnancy up to her. But watching his strong teeth clamp on white bread and peanut butter, she found herself wondering, Is he taking the course of least resistance?

  The question hurt, turned her traitor, yet doubts already were planted within Em. Sheridan, she knew, tested 130, Binet, yet at finals, lower IQs walked off with the grades. For the longest time she had assumed Sheridan’s tight, ridiculing smile turned professors against him. Then she’d realized he did as poorly on anonymously corrected blue books. The past month, in her serious, methodical way, Em had worked out the reason for this low performance level. Sheridan was afraid. His classes filled him with dread, not knowledge. She had taken so long reaching this conclusion because Sheridan was no physical coward—in the bottom drawer of their chest he had stored medals dangling from faded ribbons, medals he’d earned across the Pacific. Em, always endeavoring to see both sides, concluded her husband had reason to fear education. She’d never met his parents—they hadn’t been able to afford the trip from Wichita for the wedding. From Sheridan’s remarks, however, she knew they were poor, mean-poor, obsequious to, yet belittling of those above them. His three older brothers, returning from active duty, had gone back to their assembly jobs at Kelvinator. Sheridan alone had taken up the gauntlet of the GI Bill. And at USC, a private school where well-off students accepted college as their due. Last semester Sheridan had gone down two grade points (all those chem labs!), which meant this semester he had to earn better than Cs.