Rich Friends (32 page)

First, she never again would let her instinct rule her. Others could, but she couldn't afford it. She would keep her distance and be all likable things to all people. Second. She would work on her appearance. She would get an eyebrow arch at Aida Grey. She would inquire among her friends which hairdresser was currently giving the best cut. She would try Right Bank for new pants. She would start an early tan—without sun, silver foil would do the trick. Third. She would call her friends alphabetically through her red phone book. Maybe have a barbecue next Saturday night. Yes, there's a practical idea. Everybody was home for the break. Suddenly she could see herself moving around the crowded patio, a simpy Catherine Deneuve smirk glued across her face. Oh God, God! That's not what I want. Well, I can't have what I want, and anyway, it terrifies me, loooo-oooove. The external being my destiny, let me win the Miss Superficial of Beverly Hills contest.

To the right of the freeway, like a vast-winged old eagle, perched County General. Roger glanced toward the hospital. Tired, he drove with his broad shoulders hunched. He can't wait to get away, Alix decided.

“Turn on the Glendale,” she said. “I'll drop you off.”

“What?”

“A medical library shouldn't have to hitch,” she said with her copious smile.

“Alix?” said Sharon Stein through the telephone. Sharon was an old Beverly High buddy. “You free this aft?”

Alix sat up. Her stomach muscles hurt. Fifteen minutes earlier she had run into the house, heaving in her toilet long after clear acid had stopped, falling across her bed, weeping. “Sure,” she wiped her eyes. “What's doin'?”

“Ronni Bolt”—another Beverly High chum—“is in Oahu. Her parents have this condoo. My mom was driving me to the airport, but she's got the bug.”

“How long're you going?”

“Eight days. Ever been?”

“Never.”

“There's deprivation for you. It's the grooviest. Hey, I just got this fantastic—”

“—idea.”

“Ronni's been dying to see you. She's for always saying we should get together. Think, Alix. Three foxy ladies on Oahu.”

“What time's the plane?”

The secretary put her right through.

“I thought you were in Arrowhead,” Philip said.

“It was fun. Father, remember the trip to Europe you gave me for graduation?”

“The one you never took?”

“That's the one. Is it the same fare to Hawaii?”

“Much less.”

“Ronni Bolt's parents have a condominium, and Sharon Stein's going.”

“This summer?”

“No-no. This day.”

Philip laughed.

“Father?”

“If it's what you want,” he said. Alix had known he would say that. “Do you have enough in your account?”

“Six hundred?”

“That should be plenty. But if you need more, call me collect. Alix, buy traveler's checks.”

“This'll make two Sundays in a row. Father, I miss you.” Alix should have known better, but she waited for Philip to reply he'd missed her terribly. (Her mother, too, had waited for this handsome, cold—and decent—man to utter words he was incapable of.)

“I have an appointment,” he said. “Alix, hon, enjoy yourself.”

“Daddy—”

But the phone had clicked.

Sharon's pretty, empty eyes glowed as she described her previous trips to Hawaii. Alix nodded, bemused. With a wonderful sense of unreality she was speeding at seven hundred miles an hour. She was a small appliance disconnecting herself. Far below, a ship lay like a pin in the endless blue curve.

“Alix,” Sharon was repeating, “what's wrong?”

“Wrong?”

Sharon's forehead went through a repertory of questioning wrinkles. “You haven't said one thing.”

“Oh, you mean wrong,” Alix said. “Sharon, ever let a guy in on the fact you're sort of hung up on him?” She spoke wryly, with a trace of self-derision. This wasn't soul baring, but a fine joke on herself.

“I don't believe it! I—do—not! Alix most beautiful, Alix most cool, Alix most popular.” Alix had been voted these by their graduating class. “Alix in love? Impossible!”

“Possible.”

“My God—at this late age, it can be fatal.”

Alix shivered.

Sharon had had her moment of vindictiveness. She put her hand on Alix's. “Hey, you're ice,” she said, her plump little body twisting in the awkward half stoop that plane design requires, turning off the air nozzle, pulling down a blanket. “Here.”

Alix clasped her freezing hands under acrylic. “Have you?” she asked. “Told any guy that? First?”

“Everybody has,” Sharon replied. “Who?”

“Nobody you know. I've been dating his brother.”

“Oh that one. The Safeway twins.”

“Van Vliet's,” Alix said. “He's a really beautiful person. Very idealistic and strong. He's at Hopkins, too. Sharon, he saved this little girl's life. He's very stable.”

“But he hasn't said he's hung up on you?”

“You've hit the teensy problem. He isn't,” Alix said. “Now what?”

“Oh, keep coming at him. Make excuses to phone him, see him. Be subtle, but keep pushing, know what I mean? The important thing is to keep his attention.”

“Does it work?”

“Either it does or it doesn't.”

“But it's the only way?”

“You'd know it is,” Sharon said, “if you were human like the rest of us.”

At Hawaii International, Ronni, a pert redhead, greeted Alix with hugs and kisses and cries of delight. Alix responded in kind. Ronni had a couple of men in tow, the short one, deeply tanned, Alix didn't quite catch his name, took her mother's blue overnight case, and Alix must have made the right responses at the right times, because he was laughing. They walked miles through the terminal, at one point mingling with a planeful of Japanese tourists. They crowded around the baggage slide.

“Alix,” said Sharon, sweet, dumb Sharon, “Alix, let's go to the john.”

Alix realized she was crying.

“Got change?” she asked, wiping her eyes.

“For the john?”

“For the phone.”

Sharon, Ronni Bolt, and the two men donated silver.

Alix direct-dialed the Reeds' number. On the first ring Roger answered.

“Where are you?” His voice was subdued and not by distance.

“Hawaii.”

“So your mother said.”

“There's a flight back in two hours. Pan Am Eight Thirty. It lands at seven fifteen
A
.
M
.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Roger?”

“Yes.”

“You sound strange.”

“I'm not exactly alone.”

“My car's at the airport, but Roger, will you meet me?”

“What? I can't hear you. We've got a rotten connection.”

“It's because I'm crying.”

“Don't do that.”

“I said, will you meet me? Please? Roger, this is pushy and not very subtle. But I love you.”

“I feel the same.”

“You do?”

“Isn't it obvious?”

“No-no. I'm very insecure.”

“I am, too,” he said, his voice lapsing into its normal huskiness. “Tell you about it at seven thirty.”

6

Laguna is forty miles south of Los Angeles, and the Nautical Motel is a mile and a half south of Laguna. The original ship-fronted building, circa 1938, is level with Pacific Coast Highway. The white cabins, which ramble down a cliff planted with pink Martha Washington geraniums, become newer and more expensive as they approach the beach. On every door hangs a life preserver with a red-painted name. Roger and Alix picked the First Mate's Bunk, it was on the street, cheap, and had a kitchen area: Alix wanted to fix their meals—“Play house,” she said. As far as her family knew, she was in Ronni Bolt's Hawaiian condominium. Roger had told his parents he was visiting a friend for the six days until he must fly back to Baltimore. Neither considered telling the truth. Couples their age lived together, God knows. But Roger and Alix were middle-of-the-roaders—imprinted by previous bourgeois generations, they were what their elders referred to as good kids. Their evasions were not hypocrisy but form to assuage parental mores.

They awoke at the same time, on their backs, naked, her left calf under his right, his arm across her stomach.

“Alix?”

“Mmmm?”

“You awake?”

“No-no.” She was stroking his shoulders. “You've got a bump.”

He felt. “Yes,” he said. He traced her collarbones. “You're totally different.”

“From what? A zit?”

“You look tall and sort of … sort of.…”

“Horsy,” she supplied.

“Awe-inspiring. But you feel small. Soft. Like a little kid.”

“Ahh, flat-chested?”

“Let me—No, sweet, not at all.”

“Now you'd have a terrific bod if you could clear up that postadolescent acne.”

“My diagnosis is too many Hersheys,” he said. “What do you weigh?”

“One sixteen.”

“Five-seven?” he asked.

“Eight and a half. Why? Is this a complete physical?”

“I'm trying to understand you.”

“Maybe it's best if you don't,” she sighed.

“Hey, don't shut me out.”

At the same moment they rolled toward one another.

“I never realized you'd be so fragile. Breakable.” He finger-walked her spine, cupping her shoulders. “Sweet, you did break there, sort of, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“The second time,” he said. “Not the first.”

She tugged his moustache.

“Right?” he asked.

“It's embarrassing.”

“I'm the one with anxieties.”

“It never happened before.”

“That you didn't?”

“You do have anxieties,” she said. “The other way round.”

“Seriously?” he asked.

“I have this major problem.”

“You don't.”

“I can cross it off my list?”

“Yes.”

“Roger.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I like the sound of it. Roger. Roger.”

“When your mother told me you'd gone to Hawaii, I wanted to cry.”

“Did you?”

“Some.”

Her lips touched his eyelids in turn. “I'd never've guessed on the phone. You were very suave.”

“One thing you never can accuse me of.”

They chuckled into the darkness.

“Where'd you get the money?” he asked.

She rubbed her cheek in his neck.

“I want to know everything about you,” he said.

“My father. It's a graduation gift.” Moving her palms down his sides, she whispered, “Was I okay?”

“A postmortem?”

“You know, on a scale of one to ten?”

“You're really asking, aren't you?”

“But you don't have to answer,” she said.

“At the end I was sort of out of my head. I never imagined it could be like this.”

She whispered, “Me, either.”

“But being with you, holding you now, is as important.”

They listened to the sea, small waves sucking at a foggy night, and after a while he held her hand to his chest. “If I had one moment,” he said, “one out of my whole life, this would be it.”

They walked downhill to Laguna. She needed groceries. Ralphs' was closer, but she insisted on Van Vliet's. A tremendous number of men (and quite a few women) turned to look at her. But how could drivers in a resort town gauge Alix from the rear? Roger, lagging back in the spirit of research, decided it was her walk. Long-legged, free and easy. Catching up with her, he dropped an arm around her shoulders, saying, “You're a Maserati.”

“What?”

“The guys all look at you.”

“That, let me explain, is a sport. It is called girl-watching. Every girl is watched by every male under ninety and over nine.”

“We don't spot the Chevies,” Roger laughed.

Before, she had turned him heavy. Now, she made him light. He had brought his
Bloom and Fawcett
to bone up on histology. For the first time in his life he was unmotivated and the book stayed shut.

They would walk hours on the empty, iodine-odored beach, talking. Pleasure rippled through him each time he uncovered a similarity. Oddly, there were quite a few. They both strove after perfection and grades, they delighted in physical action, enjoying sports as fierce competitors. They used Pepsodent and favored the sourest green pippins. They were intelligent, full of vitality, and both had suffered childhood allergies. When Alix told of her asthma, they were sitting on the sand in front of the Laguna Hotel, but he held his ear to her breasts to find out if she still had rales. Jealous of and guilty toward Vliet, he avoided mentioning his brother. When he told her about his old girls—there were three—she fired questions, afterward demolishing each of them with the facts. He protested that they were nice girls. She threw a rock at him, the rock was gray and had holes from a species of boring seaworm. He ducked. “Jesus, Alix! That could've been a concussion.” “What's the matter? Haven't you learned how to treat one?” He saved the stone in his pocket. Thursday it rained, and after lunch they went back to bed. He could hold off no longer. Through taut lips he asked if his brother were the first. “The only,” she sighed. Rain anointed the roof. He put his arms and legs around her.

“Want to talk about it?” he asked.

“No-no,” she said.

And with uncharacteristic hesitancy, began to. As an adolescent, kissing didn't repel her, she said, it scared her to death. How come she never got those hot little urges to move on to phase two, three, and etcetera? After, uhh, well after, she had been really terrified. She had fantasized a hush-hush trip to learn intercourse in the clinical St. Louis clinic of Masters and Johnson. She had to fake it.