“Hey Vliet!”
Roger’s pass was purposefully high, and Vliet had to jump for the striped beach ball. He held it with both hands, running in and out of low-tide wavelets, his long legs pumping high, his hips swiveling in almost girlish grace as if he were running a broken field. Roger, using his high school linebacker form, closed in. Vliet swerved. The ball dropped. Roger recovered. He punted far into the Pacific. The twins raced into the sea, spuming saltwater, pivoting around bathers, simultaneously diving under a small, breaking wave. Vliet reached the ball first, pushing it out. Out again. They swam after a bobbing orange-and-yellow circle, Vliet’s long arms and legs moving easily, Roger—a strong swimmer—plowing doggedly. They gasped, heaved, blew saltwater. Vliet had slowed. Roger, seeing this, churned into a sprint. They were far from shore. Vliet trod water while Roger retrieved the ball, holding it up, Atlas triumphant. Both boys laughed. And with an identical jerk of neck muscles, threw wet hair, brown and blond, out of identical blue eyes. They turned on their backs to float in gently bucking water. Neither had spoken. Since babyhood it had been like this: spontaneously they would break into wild action that was half play and half rivalry.
Roger paddled with his hands, the sun a golden blaze behind his closed eyelids. He had a broad, probing mind. For a few minutes he and his brother had merged. He was pondering if this symbiosis dated back to that other sea, tideless and amniotic, or from some warm primate blood tie ancient beyond man. Roger’s human contacts were few and very deep. This one was a miracle. Don’t let me always need to win, he thought.
The loss of an inflated beach ball meant nothing to Vliet. SOP. Roger dominated in school, athletics, purpose, areas that to Vliet were of no importance. He, Vliet, wanted the real goods, money, a Porsche with a tape deck, records, the best girls, popularity, and to attain these he would inflict kindness or cruelty with equal indifference. He had many friends. He had no idea how closely he was tied to his twin.
Still, without speaking, the boys turned toward the beach, swimming the butterfly, paired dolphins curving in and out of glittering blue water.
Alix woke. Roger was lying on his stomach two feet from her.
She wanted him to talk to her. She would ask him to. It was that easy. Instinctive moments when the thought is the act are rare in most people. Even more so in Alix. Her life was complicated and full of striving, yet sometimes, without understanding why, she could reach out with no self-consciousness.
“Roger,” she whispered.
His eyes opened. “What’s up?” He spoke as softly.
“Talk to me?”
“What about?”
“Just talk.”
“Give me more of an opening.”
“The grant,” she said.
“It wouldn’t interest you.”
“I’m asking,” she said, “as a friend.”
He stared at her, then rolled so he was facing her. Sand clung to his chest and he rubbed at it. “Not a grant. A job,” he said. “Bjork got it for me. At County General. He’s doing research there.”
“What kind?”
“Sickle cell. I got to be an orderly with his patients. I prefer working with patients.”
“Why?”
He thought a moment. “When people are sick I feel helpless, impotent. Doing something, whatever it is, to make them better helps me. Nothing noble. Anyway, I met Bjork through this boy—”
“The gardener’s boy?”
“Uh-huh. Not our gardener, we don’t have one. But he came along in the truck, around the neighborhood, a nice little kid about eight. Johnny. He was small for his age and he got a lot of infections. He often had these crises—”
“Crises?”
“Bad pain. In his abdomen. The gardener told me he was just a weak child, and they didn’t bother with doctors anymore. I sort of guessed what it was.” Roger swallowed as if he had a sore throat. “Last summer I took him over to County General. That’s when I met Bjork.”
“What, exactly, does it mean, sickle cell?”
“Well, normal blood cells are bioconcave. Disk-shape. People with sickle cell don’t get enough oxygen, so the cells are misshapen.”
“Into a sickle?”
“That’s right.”
“Why the pains in his stomach?”
“Ordinarily a blood cell lives about a hundred and twenty days, a sickled one about sixty. The spleen has to enlarge to absorb all the damaged cells.”
“Can they cure it?”
“Alleviate only. Jesus, do you realize how few doctors can diagnose it, even?”
Her voice below the mumbling sea, she said, “You did.”
He looked embarrassed, pleased.
“When did you decide?” she asked. “I mean, that you wanted medicine?”
Roger turned on his back, hands under his neck. Alix was tremendously conscious of dark, thick axial hair. “So long ago it’s hard to remember. Maybe it had something to do with Dad’s being a pharmacist. I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to be a doctor.”
“Are you so sure about everything?”
“Jesus, no!”
“But you are about this?”
“This, yes.”
(Later it occurred to Alix that neither of them had mentioned that other embryo physician, Vliet.)
“What’re you going to do?” Roger asked.
Try to stay afloat, she thought, shrugging.
“You have a major?”
“I’ll find one,” she said. And work my butt off, she thought. “Roger, it goes without saying, careers turn me off. As the daughter of that famous Beverly Hills housewife.”
“Your mother?” Roger asked, bewildered. “Mrs. Grossblatt?”
“She’s known as Beverly Schorer in the art world.”
“She paints?”
“Part-time. Never more than twenty hours a day. She’s in the best collections and museums throughout Europe and the US, as her brochure tells us. Including the Guggenheim.” Envy mingled with pride. Ugly, Alix decided. And boastful. “Roger, face it, you’re the fortunate exception with this cosmic goal thing. I’m the rule.”
Bare, heavy legs walked between them, scattering sand. Vliet, who had been sleeping on Alix’s other side, woke up.
7
A knock at her door. “Alix?” Beverly said.
Alix shoved Arrowsmith under the chaise pillow and began combing her hair, which she’d just shampooed. “Come in,” she said.
Beverly, Alix noted, had on her large-eyed expression. Her cheeks were flushed. Shutting the door, she walked slowly to the armchair and sat twisting her plain gold ring. “I wish I knew how to put this.”
Put what? Faster than a speeding bullet, Alix knew what.
“The Pill?” she asked, smiling too widely.
Beverly’s flush deepened. “I thought.…”
Alix went to her mirror. Drops of water scattered as she passed her comb through wet hair.
“Would you like …? Alix, I can’t say this properly.”
“Try. Be mod. With it.”
“Please don’t make it so difficult.”
“Mother, I’m willing to lay odds there’s no easy way. So why not come right out? Do I need the egg killer?”
“You sound, well, so hard.”
“It’s an awkward scene.”
“You were such a nice little girl.”
“I wasn’t.” In Alix’s head a crazed animal ran circles. Circles never end. Why was she so terrified? Everyone, even her mother, expected her to be screwing herself dizzy. But she was afraid. Wasn’t that just like her? Well, living on a flat surface makes one afraid of any shadow.
“It’s easier for girls now,” Beverly said.
Funny, Alix thought, I was thinking the opposite.
“You won’t make the mistakes we did.”
“Father?” Alix stared in the mirror. Her jaw was set. She did look hard. Maybe she and her mother weren’t close, maybe that’s not in the cards for mothers and daughters, but more impor
tant, between them stood the matter of Alix’s having a father only a few hours on Sunday. She would fix blueberry pancakes at his place, and they would sail his new Kettenberg. Alix never invited a friend, not even when her father suggested it. Other people would cut into her time with him.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Not trying out Father before, was that your big mistake?” Alix asked, surprised how close to tears she was, surprised, too, at her own cruelty.
Beverly sank into blue flowers like (Alix thought) a bewildered doe shot out of season. Alix’s animosity always reached this end: her sprayed buckshot drawing Beverly’s blood and causing Alix separate but equal pain.
Their pain might balance. But never their guilt.
Beverly’s fine features contorted as she sat back in the cushion. I’m a painter, she thought. This parenthetical summing up of identity shivered through her like a freezing wind. In it lay the years and hours since she had found her son lying on terrazzo. The guilts.
Jamie, in all his sweetness, lay under a flat marble plaque. Philip never had remarried—why? Alix. Had she, Beverly, somehow touched Alix into Midas’s daughter, the golden girl? Sam wasn’t really her baby, but his father’s. And Dan? They still shared the mundane things, the rumpled king-size bed (pleasurably), the same toothbrush (four in the holder, but they invariably used the same one), a checkbook, he dealt with her dealers, she went on his rare Business Evenings. But. Dan loved her. And to her, Dan was merely her friend. No more. It’s true at times he could get rough, very, but under the circumstances who could blame him? Not Beverly. Her modus vivendi (painter) made her guilty as hell.
Most of us hide our guilts in a private safety vault. Beverly hung hers on walls. Her agony burned on unstretched canvas and she rose from the ashes, a phoenix reborn to suffer again. As she gazed up at Alix, pain twisted Beverly, yet in her secret heart she knew she would relive this suffering at her easel and (possibly) manage an oil that some fruitcake would buy for his collection. Perhaps it was this that exasperated Beverly most. What sin, this recycling of life’s misery into art! A phoenix, after all, isn’t human. And Beverly, of course, considered herself a unique monster.
Alix took an audible breath.
“With everyone else I can say the right thing. Saying the right things is a game. You don’t understand, do you, Mother? Well, I just can’t play with you. I can’t. And I can’t be open with you, not anymore. I want to, but I can’t.” Her lovely face seemed fuller, childish, pleading.
She reached. For a moment mother’s and daughter’s long, slender hands clasped.
“Alix, let me help?”
Alix moved away. “With my sex life?”
“It’s always been important to me,” Beverly murmured.
“That,” Alix said, cold again, “everybody knows. Oh God. Don’t you see we can’t talk? Okay. Fine. Good. Make me an appointment with a reputable OB.” She grabbed her purse, and hair still wet, ran from the house.
She drove with no destination in mind, and it was without thought that she turned west on Sunset, curving past UCLA, hanging a right on Maggiore Lane, passing the house where once she’d lived. She curved up the hill by older places snuggled into their big trees, coming on the new houses. The sites had been leveled ten years earlier, but she still thought of the overbuilt, starkly modern extrusions as the new houses. Maggiore Lane ended. A thick metal rope stopped her car: FIRE ROAD/SEPULVEDA WEST/NO TREPASSING. She parked. Ducking under the rope, she walked along the unpaved ledge cut in the hill. The canyon was filled with late-afternoon shadows: three gulls flew up, their wings turning silver as they touched sunlight. Alix left the fire road, using both hands to scramble up a shale cliff. Pebbles clattered in a small avalanche behind her. She reached a flattened hilltop, maybe a hundred square yards of arid adobe with a few sparse brown weeds managing to grow in the cracks. She held a hand on her pounding heart. Below lay the city, the ocean, and a distant blue-whale hump that was Palos Verdes.
This was the secret place. Hers and Jamie’s.
Never had they questioned who had carved off the hilltop, or why. It was theirs, a private domain above the world. The law of the land was secrecy. “If you bring anyone here, your nose will fall off,” Alix had vowed with preadolescent Freudian symbolism. The rule was far rougher on her than him. Social Alix. She’d never been here, though, with anyone other than Jamie. She’d never been here without him.
Pushing her sunglasses firmly up on her hair (almost dry now), she forced herself to seek out the old house. There it was, in the curve of the road. Peaked ell roof, three brick chimneys sheltered by oaks. She thought:
This is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
She tilted back her head. At a point above her eyes a sheer film of atmosphere raced together as if a seamstress were gathering blue sky with her needle. What I told Mother was true. I wasn’t a nice little girl. I was a nice little bitch. (It never entered Alix’s head that most children aren’t nice, merely that she’d been a bitch.) Yet when we lived there, the four of us, I was a person. Whole. Complete.
She looked down at the shake roof, then closed her eyes, thinking, And cannot come again, without the nostalgia of the Housman verse, but with anger that hurt her gut. Mother and Dan, she thought bitterly. Oh, wasn’t this immature, blaming them? Was it their fault she’d grown into an unhappy ice creature, terrified to get close to anyone for fear she might melt? (Yes, yes!) How much passion and courage she lacked.
Her mother’s offer had shoved her into panic. Alix was sophisticated enough to know she was what previous generations had admired. Chaste. But now everyone wore sex-tinted glasses. Movies, books, songs, jokes delegated the non-lascivious to the back streets of womankind. You were meant to be propelled by unhaltable passion. Come to think of it, had anyone described the female end of this unhaltable passion? And what did it have to do with the action on a chenille spread in the twins’ battered VW? How dare she question the sex urge, the basis of family life, motherhood, and all advertising? She was un-American. Vliet (and her previous boyfriends) were more than generous to her, an unfallen woman.
She stared down at the shake roof. The house represented a time with Jamie alive, and Jamie alive meant the world whole. Alix whole. She was crying. She cried until her legs itched. Red ants were attacking her. Goddamn ants. Wiping her eyes, she started down. As she passed her old house, she did not look at it.
She began to have a recurring nightmare. She was trying to cross Wilshire at Santa Monica Boulevard, but her legs refused to carry her across the wide stretch. A large truck was bearing down on her. Obvious.
She still could not give in.
8
August 30 was hot, and in the late afternoon, sprinklers had been turned on. At a little after eight, cooling Beverly Hills air smelled of damp grass.
Vliet, opening the bus door for Alix, said, “Got you something.”
“Any reason, like?”
“We’ve known one another two months.”
“Today?”
“Possibly. Or possibly not.”
The gift was wrapped in maroon velvet flocking and tied with pink satin ribbon on which was printed: ALIX ALIX ALIX ALIX ALIX ALIX. Under the bow three red roses fanned in fullblown grace. Vliet didn’t start the engine. He watched her. She hefted the box. About the size of a book. But too light. Vliet never had given her anything, and this was dangerously sentimental.
Touching his hand, she said, “Vliet, thank you.” Her voice caught.
“Before you choke up, Alix, why not see what it is?”
“I enjoy anticipation.”
“Really.”
“There’s this place on Sunset that does—”
“Did this. Except the roses. They’re swiped from Ma. Her last is all.”
Alix touched a petal. Taking care to do no damage, she removed each flower, placing it on the dash, blo
om toward her. On the last she pricked her finger and paused, sucking the drop of blood. She untied loop-edge ribbon—ALIX ALIX ALIX—rolling it around outspread fingers.
“I’m queer for unwrapping presents,” she said.
“Never would’ve guessed.”
“In some ways, it’s the best part.”
“That, Alix, is where we differ.”
She smiled, thanking him again, and with a thumbnail unScotch-taped, trying not to pull any velvet finish. She folded wrapping into a neat square. The box was plain white cardboard. With both hands she lifted the lid. Shredded tissue.
“What is it?”
“Find out, why don’t you?”
Her fingers explored.
Feeling, feeling.
Her fingers contacting only more white shreds. She removed clumps, pulling them apart, keeping the mess on the lid. When she had removed every scrap of tissue, she repacked the box, replacing the lid. Her fingers were steady. Amazing.
“Well, what do you know?” she said. Her voice kept normal, and this, too, amazed her.
“Nothing,” he answered.
“Just what I need.”
“But, Alix, with a fantastic wrap job.”
She nodded.
“It’s our little joke.”
“Oh, that I got,” said Alix, leaning over to touch his cheek with her mouth. “Hit the road, Van Vliet. We don’t want to miss Coming Attractions.”
He turned off the inside light, shifting gears. She held the box on her lap. Time. She needed time. Not to examine the depth of her pain—Allah willing, she need never do that—but time to suture the arteries. She was hemorrhaging. It’s our little joke, Vliet had said. Me. I’m our joke. A good wrap job and some shreddy paper to poke in. Hahahahahaha. But if that’s all I am, why do I hurt so much? Well, he gave me roses. (But what are three swiped roses to a bleeding eighteen-year-old girl who is more ripped up than most and hiding it better?) Suddenly she thought of Roger. He chopped at her, she understood this, out of his own psychological scar tissue. Vliet never had tried to hurt her before. That’s what made this calculated. Vliet moves rook to Q4. Check Alix.
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