Rich Friends

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  RB sat naked on the edge of the carved rosewood bed that had belonged to Dormin Van Vliet. She was brushing her lank brown hair. Pausing, she held up a strand for examination.

  “They’re splitting,” she said.

  “Who’s splitting?” Vliet called from the adjacent bathroom where he was using his Remington Electric.

  “My ends,” she said.

  Noisy shaver to his cheek, Vliet looked through the open door at her. Unwrapped, the body proved disappointing. The knobs of her spine were purplish. The body, to be frank, was breastless, pale and scrawny. The cinematographer on One Step, Two Step had genius, her ex-husband had genius, and possibly in a role RB projected genius. As it was, here sat a flat-chested ectomorph chick with split ends.

  “I shouldn’t’ve stayed,” RB said. “I’ve got this publicity deal at one.”

  “No sweat. We’ll be there.”

  “Two’s fine.” She yawned. “Sunday, who’s up before two? But, Vliet, these ends.”

  Orion said, “Okay to use the phone?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s not a toll or anything.”

  She heard him dial, she heard him say, “Let me talk to Father Genesis. It’s Orion.… Father Genesis … Yes, it’s for the good.… I understand.… The only way …” And so on. Sunlight cut through dusty leaded windows that soon would be broken by a wrecker’s crew.

  He returned. “Thank you,” he said. For some reason his gratitude sounded like an apology.

  “Welcome,” she said. “Orion, have some breakfast.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure,” he said, squatting. He put both hands to her cheeks and gently, very gently, kissed her. His beard was soft, his lips cold. This the first and last time Orion—Lance Putnam—would kiss her. She heard footsteps coming down the hall. She felt Orion’s breathing, and she thought of Genesis on that terrace, his mouth a purplish wound gaping amid gray hairs as he spoke of destruction. Orion pulled away.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “It’s something I wanted to do, always.”

  “Why didn’t you, then?”

  “It’s against the Rule.”

  “And now?”

  “Now everything’s going to be right,” Orion said.

  Vliet buttoned the fresh blue shirt he’d had in his flight bag. RB continued brushing lank hair.

  “That Orion’s one creep,” she said.

  “You should see the rest of them.”

  “There can’t be more.”

  “Hundreds. All purer than St. Augustine,” Vliet said.

  “He’s a creep.”

  “So you said, RB.”

  “I know your cousin sometimes limps, but.…”

  “Even a basket case can pick and choose?” Vliet asked pleasantly.

  RB shrugged, unmalicious, uncaring. She held out a clump of hair so she could see it. “Shit. All these ends. I’ve got to condition.”

  “Why?”

  “Splits make me nervous,” she said. “Are you getting me conditioner or aren’t you?”

  “I wasn’t quit sure that’s what you were after.”

  She yawned.

  “What’s your pleasure?” he asked.

  “Wella Balsam.”

  “Maybe Alix has some.”

  He knocked on the back-bedroom door and Alix answered. Sashing a long yellow skirt, she regretted she used whole milk on her hair.

  “She wants a name brand, and I have to get the damn stuff. Tag along?”

  Any excuse to put it off, Alix thought. “We do need dinner,” she said.

  They went downstairs to the sunny, weed-filled garden.

  “I’m going to pick up some groceries,” she said to Roger.

  He held a finger to his place in the heavy book. “I want to go over this again, anyway,” he said, rubbing a tiny emerald insect from his shoulder. “When you get back I’ll be ready.”

  She gave him a too-brilliant smile and forgot to kiss him good-bye. Vliet opened the screen door for her.

  “And now?” they heard Cricket say.

  “Now everything’s going to be right,” Orion said.

  Vliet pointed at his cousin. “We’re off to Chalet Gourmet,” he said.

  “Join us?” Alix said.

  “No, thanks,” Cricket replied.

  “Yes,” Orion said.

  “Why?” Cricket.

  “Why not?” Vliet said.

  “Cricket,” Alix said, “let’s barbecue tonight.”

  “Would a Van Vliet’s please you?” Vliet asked. “No way as elegant, but you do have stock in the company.”

  “Go.” Orion pulled her to her feet.

  “But—”

  “I’ll scramble myself some eggs.”

  “Alix made pancake batter, and I could—”

  His face convulsed and he turned to the empty, baronial fireplace. “Please go!”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  But there was Vliet grinning down on her. “We need someone to push the basket,” he said.

  Cricket picked up her sandals.

  They went out to Vliet’s car, an Austin-Healy, getting in gingerly because the leather was hot. Sunday. Kings Road was free of its weekday racket of hammers, saws, cement mixers. Vliet steered his new car around hillocks of sand fronting a huge construction in the raw lumber stage: SINGLES/NOW LEASING FROM $185/SAUNA/STEAMROOM/THREE RECREATION ROOMS/NIGHT TENNIS. “Not to mention night screwing,” Vliet said, turning onto Santa Monica Boulevard.

  Cricket was bent, buckling her sandal, otherwise she would have seen it. The old school bus swerving onto Kings Road.

  6

  Vliet pulled into a Jack-in-the-Box. “I need my coffee. Ladies?”

  “Milk,” Cricket said.

  “A root beer for me,” Alix said.

  He parked in the shade of the building and they leaned against the car. Cricket swirled her straw in the milk carton. Vliet and Alix bantered. Every word she said was filler to distract her from this afternoon’s torture sequence—the meeting with Roger’s parents.

  In Chalet Gourmet Cricket watched lobsters lumber over one another. Trout flashed in a nearby tank.

  Vliet waited with Alix at the meat counter. Frilled lamb chops, opaline-white veal scallops, impressive pork, ruby roasts set like great jewels on a velvet bed of parsley. A high-class operation for a high-class trade, Vliet thought. He pushed his playboy image, the image of a guy to whom things came easily. This covered the sweat. But. When Cricket or anyone called him shrewd, Vliet felt as if he were passing. He was unaware that from those he called the Dutchmen he’d inherited a knack of blue eye for seeing each turn of profit.

  The huge porterhouses he’d selected were being wrapped. “And we worry,” he said, “about getting the optimum cuts per carcass.”

  “But now Seattle will have large steaks?”

  “More cleverly wrapped is all. But I do covet the luxury end.”

  “I could acquire a taste for it, too,” Alix said.

  “Alix, you always had a taste for it—thanks.” The butcher was handing over a heavy white package.

  “My Beverly Hills background?” she said. “Is that what gets your parents?”

  Vliet pushed the basket over carpeting. He had dated Miss September, he had dated a novelist who promoted her bestseller by being more pneumatic than Miss September, he had dated three models, one of them nymphomaniacally inclined, he had dated a stunning philosophy doctoral candidate who popped Ritalin, he had dated RB Henderson—this had got him in Joyce Haber’s column. These women roused in him the same emotions as fine tailoring. They looked great on his arm. Nothing they said or did could pierce his cool. Alix was by that barrier. And the last thing he cared to do was get into a discussion, however oblique, about her relationship with his brother.

  They were at the vegetable gondolas. Vliet cupped a bright cos lettuce in one hand
as if hefting a bowling ball. “Consider,” he said. “This was in the fields yesterday. If it were ours it wouldn’t be at the warehouse dock yet. Tomorrow it would be reloaded and—maybe—maybe trucked to the market. The lettuce in a Van Vliet’s is four days old at the youngest.”

  “Is it that I’m not Elsie Episcopalian?”

  “I got you the first time,” he said. He dropped a cellophaned English cuke in the basket. “You’re here to shop, girl.”

  She picked up a pomegranate. “Or I’m living with him?”

  Vliet bagged something round and purple, a red cabbage maybe, or an eggplant.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Alix, are you buying that or fondling it to death?”

  She dropped the pomegranate in their basket. “I’d like to know. We’re going there this afternoon.”

  “White of him to drop by.”

  “We,” Alix said.

  “I think, Alix, you’d better reconsider.”

  “It’s already settled. We’re getting married this week.”

  He jerked as if he’d woken with a painful charley horse, though why her announcement should affect him this way, he didn’t know. Christ, no surprise here. She was smiling as if she expected him to say something. So he said, “Congratulations.”

  “Thursday. Vliet, you have to be down here.”

  “Are they invited, too, my parents?”

  “Why do you think I’ve been giving this questionnaire? Of course they are.”

  “If I were you, then, I wouldn’t play it so up front. Let Roger visit alone. At best they think of you as a working girl, an independent contractor. Let Roger go alone. They care for him, they care a lot.”

  He hadn’t meant to be cruel. He disliked cruelty—unless it got you someplace. She had provoked him into it. But she continued smiling as if he’d said something not exactly funny but wry.

  “He wants me along.”

  “Roger the bulldogger,” he said. “Well, be braced for the worst.”

  “I am.”

  “Good,” he said.

  At Sav-on they stopped for RB’s Wella Balsam. The lot was full. “I’ll run in,” Alix said. She fled the little car. She was thinking of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, atomic warfare, pestilence—where were those apocalyptic horsemen who showed the world in its proper perspective?

  7

  The front door was open.

  Choral music flooded from the house, assaulting the open car. Hallelujah. Hallelujah! HAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLL-LLEYYYYYYYYYYLLLLLLLUUUUUUUYAAAAAAAA, the Vienna Academy Chorus filling the smogless California day. Buster yipped violently, a small tympany counterpoint to the amplified voices. HALLELUJAH.

  “Funny,” Alix said. “Roger wouldn’t have that on.”

  “No,” Vliet agreed. “RB either. And Christ, listen to that volume.”

  Handel, lucid, airy, rejoicing, transparent, with woodwinds, oboes, bassoons, harpsichords. Loud. Loud. For the Lord God, repeated the sopranos. For the Lord God. Handel had written for more powerful castrati voices, but these recorded twentieth-century women sang their staccato blocks of triumph, the music soaring into an ear-shattering universe.

  Cricket stared at the open door. Her face had gone ashen. Lord God, Prince of Peace, let it not be, she thought. Don’t let it be. She couldn’t force herself to think what it was that she prayed God not to have happened. A chill rested on her skin, it was as if the temperature had plunged to zero. She was sharing the bucket seat with Alix. Leaning across the perfumed girl, Cricket jerked at the door handle, swinging over crisp yellow piqué, bumping long legs, spilling bagged groceries. Then she was skimming over brown lawn, music battering her, HALLELUJAH, her big toe cracking against a sprinkler head. She almost fell, but regained her balance. As she climbed front steps, one two three four, her toe began to bleed.

  At the door she stopped.

  Inexplicable forces had propelled her from the car. She had been unable to slow her momentum. Now she stopped. She could go no farther. Knees flexed slightly as if she were readying herself for a parachute jump, she peered into the dim hall that was the interior of the tower. The amplified oratorio might have been a river in full flood, raging toward the sea, battering, pouring, hammering, sweeping, destroying everything in its path. Terrible, mindless voices. Overwhelming. Warning. Voices stopping her. Vliet was brushing by, and Alix. She saw them stop at the living room. Alix, suddenly white, held onto the carved entry. Vliet tensed, his mouth opening.

  Over the music, she could hear Alix’s shrill “ROGER!” Saw a lift of yellow skirt, long slender legs fleeing to the end of the hall, door flinging open.

  Vliet sprinted toward the butler’s pantry.

  Cricket waited, not knowing which would scream first, knowing only that one would scream. The music, a cruel tidal wave, poised in balance, waiting to drown her.

  “Roger, ROGER!” Vliet’s peculiar, hoarse cry skimmed above choruses like a bird over that tormented river.

  Cricket’s soft upper lip for once was pulled down over her teeth. The muscles under her eyes quivered. She stood some time before she could force herself through sound into the Gothic house that had been built by her great-great uncle. She did not glance into the living room, she went stiff-legged to the library, raising the needle, taking the record from the spindle. She bent ringed plastic until it snapped. The raw edge bit into her chest.

  She moved to the hall, reaching for the phone.

  8

  Alix was poised on the terrace, scanning the overgrown garden, one hand shielding her eyes, when she heard the hoarse cry, “Roger, ROGER!” She wheeled, racing to the door at the far right. Hinges had been pulled, and she struggled before the spring gave.

  Full midday sunlight came through rusty screens, glinting on broken pieces of a green tumbler. The day’s heat filled the room with a gluey warmth. Cabinet doors had been flung open, and across three of them was rusty printing. The doors were old-fashioned oak. One would have to look carefully to make out capital-lettered words.

  Alix did not look, carefully or otherwise.

  In the arch between service porch and large, airy kitchen the stepladder-stool had been kicked over. She swerved around it. The heavy black frying pan was upside down on linoleum, and the pottery bowl she’d used for mixing pancakes was on its side on the stove. Batter had dried on the porcelainized top, dribbling down the oven door. These pale stains were a relief.

  They relieved the various reds. Blood.

  The sunlit kitchen was drenched with blood. Blood pooled on linoleum and on the hardwood floor of the butler’s pantry, it had been tracked to make paths from various doors, yet—strangely—only one shoe print, near the sink, was clear. Blood formed a long curl, a brown question mark pointing to the service porch. One of the dirty breakfast plates had been impressed with a maroon handprint—it resembled the hand medallions that kindergarteners make from clay as Christmas gifts for parents. A dishcloth had been used to wipe blood, then been crumpled on the table. Everywhere crimson, rust, maroon, dark plum, every shade of red. The warmth made the smell overpowering. Ripe. Salty. You could taste that red smell.

  The two bodies were sprawled like life-size rag dolls sewn from red cloth.

  RB, naked, thin arms flung up over her head, lay on her back. Wounds cut a spaced line down her torso. Her shift, borrowed last night from Alix, white eyelet now splattered with red, hung from the cooler knob.

  Roger’s T-shirt and shorts were soaked red. Cuts marked his arms. His clenched fists were drawn up as if he still battled his attackers.

  Naturally, none of this was real. When Alix read, she willingly suspended belief. Now her belief took off for points unknown. She had seen Orion neatly dead in the living room, and she had not believed in that. So how could she believe in this? Roger couldn’t be on worn linoleum. There was no way he could be lying here, a Raggedy Andy dipped in Rit, not when he was due to report to Stanford Medical Center next Saturday, not when this morning he’d played tennis and eaten from
-scratch pancakes doused in Log Cabin, pouring more syrup on the bottom one. Have to do something about that sweet tooth, he’d said. She’d left him a little more than an hour, so how could she believe? Her breath made an angry, denying bubble. She dropped to her knees, crouching over him. She did not know she was repeating his name. His chest is warm, she thought. He’s warm, yes. Warm equals living. He is warm, therefore he is.

  Vliet was already hunched on the other side of the body, grasping his twin’s wrist. His first two fingers moved frantically. He lifted the arm, holding it against his chest, and his fingers continued their worrying. After a minute he set the wrist down, carefully. It was if the arm had been severed from the body and he wanted to get it positioned right. His brother’s blood made a maroon pattern. Vliet’s shirt’s an abstract, Alix thought. Mother should get a load of it. Here we have the latest Beverly Schorer masterpiece awaiting frantic bidding. Vliet tried for pulses at the groin, at the neck. He looked up.

  “Nothing,” he whispered.

  “There must be!”

  “No.”

  “Otherwise he’d be cold,” she insisted.

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ve got to get him to a hospital!”

  “No point, Alix.”

  “Now!” she ordered. Their heads were very close. She could see tiny bubbles of sweat on Vliet’s forehead. Red wires crisscrossed in his eyeballs.

  Vliet bent his ear to Roger’s chest, then he raised his head and said, “No,” again. With his second and fourth finger he closed Prussian-blue eyes. That’s what they do in movies, Alix thought, he’s seen too fucking much celluloid to behave rationally.

  “Hurry!” she snapped. “They need to do stuff right away!”

  “His vital signs—”

  “You with your two-thirds of a year of Hopkins! They inject right into the heart, don’t you know that!” She jumped to her feet. “I’ll get the fire department.”

  “Approximately six quarts,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That’s how much there is in the average adult male, Alix. Blood.”

  And it was then that her consciousness admitted the blood. That is to say, her mind darted with thoughts of blood. Amazing. So much from two people. And in the living room, Orion’s blood. A sea of blood. The red sea. Each blood cell has a spiral that codes every secret of the entire body. Blood ties, blood kin, blood enemies. Blooded is what happens in English novels when a hunter kills his first fox. Each month flows blood from every woman born. A crime may be committed in hot blood or in cold blood. Roger stopped that little girl’s blood in Arrowhead, what was that child’s name? He knelt over her and pressed his hand like so. (Alix pressed her hand on the largest wound. The flesh was limp and sticky.) In olden times doctors were called leeches because they bled their patients. Leech Roger Reed, MD, has type B. Six type B quarts is all the average adult male has.