Rich Friends (33 page)

“With you I never fake it—I can't. It's always nice, very nice, but …” A long silence before she whispered, “Darling,” in a voice so inaudible that even though they were wrapped around one another he had to strain to hear, “it doesn't always work, only sometimes.”

Here was a truth very few women would dare confess. And Roger appreciated—overwhelmingly—that Alix trusted him enough to tell him what he already knew. When it worked, this delicate, squirming passion of girl with her high coital cries shook his entire being. He held her, just held her, until the rain stopped, several hours.

She was protective of her mother, her father, her brothers—alive and dead—even Dan, and when he mentioned this loyalty, she jammed him with hip, brittle Beverly Hills chatter. Her own goodness humiliated her.

Roger felt as if he existed in a rising point of discovery, and while he ached to learn more, he didn't want the point to move in time. He hated her small gold watch, which was their only clock. How can a man with a scientific background hate time?

7

Friday, their last full day, was cold, with a sharp north wind. After breakfast they walked along the beach to a huge outcropping of rocks. The tidepools. Heads close, they knelt to examine tiny sea creatures in the impermanent pools.

Roger said, “I'm transferring to USC.”

Surprised, she blinked. “Oh?” she said. “Well, there's a goof. For the MCAT you only scored above the ninety-five percentile in all four categories. How do you expect to hack it in one of our really phenomenal West Coast medical schools?”

“Alix, I know it's not as good as Hopkins,” he said. “But I've been thinking a lot. About us.”

“Me, too,” she said. “And I bet there's even an undergraduate school in Baltimore.”

A gust of wind snapped her hair onto both their faces.

“In Baltimore,” Roger said, “there's Vliet.”

“Vliet. Let's see. Isn't he the one you didn't go to Harvard Med School because of? And you could've gotten in with only three years of premed?” Tenderly she held his face between hands that were orange and purple with cold. “I already messed it up between you. I want to make it right.”

“How'll your coming to Baltimore do that?”

“Here, you'll be separated.”

“Someday the umbilicuses have to be unwound.”

“I don't want to be the responsible party.”

“Alix,” he said, looking at her, putting his hand in icy water. He let the fleshed petals of a sea anemone close around his finger.

“As symbolism goes,” she asked, “isn't that a mite heavy?”

“I'm the one who brought up the subject,” he said. His tone, perversely, was filled with gloom.

She gave him a sharp look. “Oh, the prognosis isn't all that rough.” Her tone, too light. “We'll both make a satisfactory recovery.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Take a peek outside Hopkins. Real life can turn you cynical.”

Her voice remained light. From the set of her mouth, though, he knew she was thinking of her parents' divorce, of her mother's separation from Dan. Love is a highly perishable commodity, she was thinking.

“I'm nothing,” he said, “if not steadfast.”

“Steadfast. Let's see. That means six months.”

“You really can be a bitch.”

“We who play it cool, we are the survivors.” She gave him that dazzling smile.

Roger pushed himself up. On cautious feet they clambered over barnacled rocks. More than barnacles lacerated Roger. She had every right to be bitchy, he decided. He should be insisting he come out here, not let her move to Baltimore. Yet his dilemma involved not only the quality of medical education but also his brother, so he said nothing. When they came to the edge of rocks, he jumped six feet into sand that stung his ankles. He reached a hand to her. Ignoring his help, she landed easily.

“When,” he asked, “are you going to tell your parents?”

“About the transfer? Tomorrow. I have to move fast to get enrolled someplace this semester.”

“You'll get reactions.”

“Roger, face it.” Alix used that infuriating tone of banter. “So long as the sex is decently under the blankets, nobody'll say a word.”

Tell her you'll come back here where it'll be even more decently hidden. “Your father—” he started earnestly.

“He pays. He'll tell himself he's putting in for a better school. And Mother—well, she gave me The Pill.”

“When?”

“Last summer. To save me from making the same mistake she did. To let me make my own mistakes.”

Roger somberly considered her use of the plural before he asked, “Dan?”

“Screw Dan.”

It never occurred to Roger that any problem might come from his parents: he was a male, and even as far as his mother was concerned, sex was permissible to males. Who she thought they were meant to have it with, Roger never had ascertained.

“And nobody's going to say anything that we're—what's their expression? Shacking up?”

“Dummy. We're playing it their way. Separate addresses, the same bed.”

“For as long as a week or two,” he said with a painful degree of cruelty.

“Oh, give it a semester,” she said. Suddenly she laughed. “Shacking up! There's a terrific description. I mean, a lean-to and lots of grunting. No wonder you don't sound all that eager.” And she punched his arm. Hard.

He feinted, as if to hit back, she dodged, hitting again, he feinted again, and she started to run. He put his arm around her, forcing her into a hard trot. He could hear her jagged breathing at his side, but he didn't slacken his pace. Climbing steps, they counted in unison, gasping out fifty-three. They fell, panting and sweaty, across the unmade double bed. Their minds exhilarated and clear from running, they began to make love, violently at first, becoming more and more tender.

“Always been such a stud, Roger?”

“There's a loaded question.”

“Know something? You don't believe it when people are rotten.”

“What's that got to do with being a—”

“You don't believe I could use you and dispose of the wrapper.”

“Could you?”

“Will you listen to the point I'm making? You get all mean and bewildered when people aren't as decent as you are.”

“Alix—”

“That's me. And I was there, remember, in Arrowhead. I saw you with Bobby Jean. You cared, Roger, cared. And don't tell me you helped the gardener's boy because he was black and currently relevant. Another case of caring. You waited for Vliet. I never met anyone else who puts himself out for decency and caring.”

Embarrassed, delighted, and guilty because he was so much less than she thought, he said, “Sweet, I'm hardly Jesus Christ.”

“For that you'd have to be Jewish.”

He laughed.

“I did get nasty back there,” she said. “You were making noises like you didn't want me. Why am I so damn vulnerable with you? It scares me. I mean, do I jump from the Beverly Wilshire roof on the day you don't want me?”

“I'll love you until I die,” he said.

It wasn't the remark a young man of absolute integrity makes. Roger hadn't intended it. He had meant to say
I love you
, which he could with honesty.
I love you
is present tense.
I'll love you until I die
is something else again. A promise, an obligation. Roger had dedicated himself to the admittedly archaic concept of behaving at all times with honor. The only thing that stopped him from being a prig about it, as Alix had pointed out, was his sullen bewilderment when he (or others) didn't live up to his principles. He never made a commitment he couldn't keep, even on a social level. A large seabird bumped into the window. They looked up. Alix saw Roger's expression.

“I painted you into that,” she said. “Roger, tomorrow I have to explain about the transfer to Father. Come with me?”

He kissed her shoulder. “Won't that be obvious?”

“I have this thing for both of you. I'd like my Oedipuses to meet.”

“To show which you're sleeping with?”

“For a Phi Bete, Roger, you really aren't very brilliant. Can't you understand? This has nothing to do with sleeping. I am changing schools. A little fast, maybe, but a simple transfer. This semester I enter fabulous Baltimore College—wherever it is—and in the fall, Hopkins.”

“Both in Baltimore,” Roger said. “Where I am.”

“A connection Father won't let himself make.” (Alix underestimated Philip here.)

“I guess they'll all know,” Roger said. “Once you're there, it can't be a secret.” A secret, anyway, that Roger was ambivalent about: it was his basic honesty versus his desire to protect Alix from criticism. He felt even more unworthy that she was making the transfer.

“Stop brooding,” she said. “In fond parental eyes it'll be another Andy Hardy boy-girl thing, not the CBS Love Affair of the Week.”

He gave her a long, tender kiss.

“Father has to know first. For gross reasons,” she said. “He pays the tuition.”

8

Philip lived in a new two-story apartment in a new part of the marina. They arrived the following morning around eleven.

“You're home early,” Philip said to Alix.

“A couple of days,” Alix replied.

“Weren't you enjoying Hawaii, hon?”

“It was fabulous. Thank you, Father.”

“Why didn't you ring? I'd've picked you up.”

“My car was at the airport. Roger hitched out to meet me.”

Philip glanced over her shoulder. “So you're the twin,” he said.

“No-no. Roger's
the
twin.”

They shook hands. Roger noted that Alix's father was tall, an inch or so taller than he, around six-three, and since it was Saturday, wore informal white ducks and a boat-neck striped shirt, a cinematic man smiling at him with gleaming teeth.

“Come on in, Roger,” he said.

Philip appeared to sense he should let Hawaii go, and in the living room (a two-story window overlooking a fortune in masts) he began a conversation about UCLA basketball and Lew Alcindor, a topic that was easy enough, yet Roger kept shifting in his chair. He tried leaning back. The seat felt uncomfortably short. He dreaded hearing Alix lie about the transfer, he ached to blurt out the truth. She carried her coffee mug to the couch near her father.

“The thing of it is,” she said, “I'm not going back to Pomona.”

Philip tilted his head as if he were afflicted with otosclerosis and in need of a hearing aid. He said, “The English Department's good at Pomona.”

“Great. At ripping apart my favorite novels.”

“Alix, are you saying you're dropping out?”

“No-no. I wouldn't do that. There's this other school I found.”

“Oh?”

“Baltimore College,” she said.

“Baltimore,” Philip echoed. His deep tan was fading to putty color.

Roger gazed out the window. A red-and-white sail moved along the finger of water. From this comfortless chair he couldn't see the boat, and the sail might have been a stage prop pulled by ropes.

“Well,” Philip said, “there's plenty of time to think about it.”

“There isn't. I'm transferring this semester.”

“That's impossible.”

“Not if I start now.”

“Your dorm fees and tuition are paid.”

“They'll refund the dorm.”

“I'm, afraid, they, won't,” Philip said. His separation of words was faintly sarcastic.

“They will,” Alix said. “I'm pretty sure, Father.”

“No. It's in the contract.”

“Maybe if I apply for the refund before—”

Philip rose. “We can discuss it tomorrow.”

“Daddy—”

“Alix, later.”

Roger stood, his arms dangling awkwardly at his sides.

“But we must talk if I'm going to enroll now.”

“You aren't, hon. So there's no rush, no rush at all.” And he extended his hand to Roger, saying it had been a pleasure. Roger, flushing, took the outstretched hand.

As Alix kissed her father good-bye, she was smiling. So was Mr. Schorer. Affectionate. Serene. Roger wondered if talent for concealment were an hereditary trait, like the excessive beauty, like sickle cell.

Earlier they had decided to go from her father's to his home so he could, if possible, check in with Vliet. They headed for Glendale.

“Look,” Roger spoke first, fifteen minutes later—they were on the San Diego Freeway, carving into the Valley. “I shouldn't have been there.”

She raised her dark glasses, looking at him.

“The association with Baltimore was pretty strong,” he said.

She kept watching him.

“You're the one who said to keep the sex under the blankets,” he muttered.

She replied, pleasantly, “Say you weren't there. He would've assumed I'm under them with Vliet.”

This was his father's Saturday off. The house smelled of bacon, and his parents were eating late-lunch sandwiches in the breakfast nook. Roger introduced Alix to Sheridan.

Em, after her initial greeting, did not offer bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, or even coffee. She didn't look up.

She couldn't look at Alix. Vliet had come home from Arrowhead to announce he was dropping medicine. Then (after a certain amount of what Sheridan called interference from Gene) Vliet had made it public. The entire Family now knew that Vliet was not finishing Johns Hopkins but going to work in Van Vliet's, a training program, Gene called it, but Vliet would be less than a checking clerk! And who was to blame for all this? Em and Sheridan together had ferreted out the few known facts, discussing the matter exhaustively: they had come up with an answer. Alix. Alix was to blame. And after this discovery, Em knew she hated the girl now standing in the doorway, hated her for so many different reasons that she, Em, couldn't begin to sort them out. Alix obviously had slept with both her sons—and who knew how many others? Alix was a tramp. Alix had caused a split between the twins. Alix was too beautiful. Alix wore her pants too tight and her skirts too fashionably short. Alix's mother, although a former friend, was an adultress, a divorcée, and married to a man Em couldn't abide. Alix was a Jew—this normally wouldn't have bothered Em, Sheridan yes, but not Em. Alix had caused Vliet to drop out of Johns Hopkins. Alix had stopped Vliet from finishing what he had started. Alix had made Vliet unhappy and Roger happy. In Em's distraught mind it wasn't clear which of these last two was worse. In either case Alix was a tramp. Roger was a serious boy, and maybe, over Em's dead body, would end up trapped into marriage with Alix. Alix Alix Alix. Em's mind was a weighted mass of loathing that never could hurdle her high standard of fairness. She couldn't stand being under the same roof as the girl.