Berger isn’t an experimental writer in any of the usual senses of the word. But in his ferocious devotion to paradox and irony as investigatory tools, his fiction consists of an endless, irresolvable experiment into what can be translated out of the morass of lived human days into useful and entertaining stories—though Berger would likely argue that no story can be useful, and then jibe that no one was intended to be entertained beyond himself. Berger’s uncertainty is his being, and his implement. The uniquely vertiginous nature of a page of his fiction is testament to the daily experiment of his art.
In the Bergerian world, masks are often peeled away to reveal further masks, yet just as often what was mistaken for a mask turns out to be a face. No irony is conclusive enough not to give way to a deeper irony, and the deepest of all is the realization that first impressions are sometimes adequate, or that it is the rare quandary that is actually improved by sustained pondering. Fate is for the embracing. As a Berger policeman once wisely remarked, “Death can happen to anyone.” No one, however grotesque or ill-mannered, is so remote from the human predicament that he is ineligible for the occasional epiphanic insight, yet no one, however saintly or patient, is likely to be able to make use of the insights at hand in the flurry of a practical transaction involving another person. Just when Bergerian loneliness seems ubiquitous, contact is unexpectedly made, and though Berger’s sex scenes are often barren and harsh his tender evocations of romantic hope and yearning may be the least appreciated aspect of his books. No grace can ever be earned, in Berger’s world, but it does fall like precious rain here and there.
Meeting Evil is on the unmerciful side of his shelf, but odd, sunny moments break through even so—it wouldn’t be Berger otherwise. It is also relatively spare, in the manner of all his later books apart from the Little Big Man sequel. The structure, hard to discern on the first roller-coaster plunge through, is elegant and ironclad: In the first section John Felton is persecuted and harassed by the police, by bystanders, and by his wife; in the third section, he is abandoned by all of them. Richie’s incursion is the only consistent note in his reality, and it is one of purest mayhem; the only person responsive to John is a madman. Between, in the book’s second section, Berger delves into Richie’s self-justifying viewpoint, in pages as lean and shocking as an X ray of the brain of a shark. In those, we learn that the madman listens to John for the simplest reason: he likes him.
Berger is now seventy-eight years old. It’s a rare privilege to witness a great novelist’s arc beyond such an age, but Berger is still unflagging, and it may not be too much to wish for several more novels. The most recent books are gentler, more forgiving, and often serve as overt or covert consolidations of earlier sequences in his work. In this manner, Orrie’s Story returned to the midwestern panoramas of Sneaky People and The Feud, while the almost completely overlooked Suspects (has it even had a paperback edition?) revisits the sincere and troubled (though, in inquisitory method, malicious) policemen of Killing Time while excusing them the duty of confronting an existential superman. And, just as the fourth Reinhart novel, Reinhart’s Women, sheltered that beset character from the historical strife of the first three books, his newest, Best Friends, may be seen partly as a gentle capstone to the three novels of menace that include Meeting Evil. In it, the twinned characters, usurper and usurpee (can you tell them apart?), meet not as strangers but as lifelong friends who uncover the strangeness hidden inside familiarity. But it is also a pining love story, another Kafkaesque parable of shifting perspective, and much more: Berger has insisted, in his letters to me, that Best Friends felt to him, in the writing, like nothing he’d ever done before. As a fellow novelist this nearly brings tears to my eyes. I can only pray that at such an age I’ll be not only working at all but working in Berger’s manner, without presumptions, without a safety net constructed of all the good reviews he’s gathered over a lifetime. Each time Berger writes he ventures out with only his style for courage.
As a favor to my friend I have avoided the word which has dogged his years on this planet: I have not called him comic. But I would fail here if I didn’t report that his books have made me laugh harder, over my years on the planet, than any others on my shelves. I predict that you will laugh too, and that you will find, as I have, that this laughter sustains itself even after the contemplation, inevitable after absorbing more than one or two of Berger’s books, of the vast distress at the universal human plight (though it is an even-keeled, contemplative distress, as in the way of the Buddha) which necessitated their writing. Berger isn’t comic. He, like life, is merely, and hugely, fucking funny.
Table of Contents
Chapter: I
Chapter: II
Chapter: III
Meeting Evil
I
PERHAPS John Felton had got married too young, but he really did love Joanie and, besides, she was pregnant and came from a family which, though believing abortion was wrong, would have been disgraced by an illegitimate birth, with several of its members active in local church affairs and one in the politics of the county. So he became a father the first time almost simultaneously with becoming a husband.
Then before Melanie was quite three years of age she was joined by a newborn brother they prudently named for her mother’s uncle Philip, a small businessman who had retired on the tidy sum paid for his prime-location premises (where he had sold floor coverings) by the firm that intended to demolish them along with neighboring structures and build a medium-sized mall on the property. But Uncle Phil was conspicuously healthy and still not nearly old enough to be considered a prompt source of financial relief for his presumed heirs. They were paying too much for a house though John was himself a real-estate salesman—at the moment in a buyer’s market.
John worked weekends, showing houses to potential buyers when there were such, and took Mondays off, which permitted Joanie to catch up on her sleep in the morning, and in the afternoon shop or visit the hairdresser. Even so—and whenever he was home he shared in the chores, including wee-hour calls from baby Phil—having to care for two small children was leaving its mark on his young wife, who, he had to admit to himself, already looked as if she had been married twice as long as was actually the case.
It was on such a late Monday morning when, with the two-tone sound of the front-door chimes, the worst day of John’s life began, though he had already been up for hours, feeding the children and running the first of two loads of laundry through the washer/dryer and folding the garments while they were still warm. Joanie, in rumpled pajamas, was breakfasting on sugar-coated cereal at the kitchen table. She wore no makeup, in which state her eyes looked very small, and her hair was tousled. There had been a time, not long before, when in a similar condition she would still have looked like a schoolgirl.
“Why don’t you try one of those blueberry muffins?” John asked her now.
“Aren’t they stale?”
“I just bought them yesterday, at Liebman’s.”
“I don’t know,” Joan said, pushing away at least half a bowlful of sodden cereal. “I’m just not that hungry.” She drank some black coffee from her favorite mug of brown ceramic, with the yellow chipped place at the rim to avoid which she held the vessel in her left hand. “I always thought you were supposed to acquire a tremendous appetite when you quit smoking. It’s just the opposite with me. I always looked forward to eating when I knew I had a cigarette coming.”
John had never smoked his life long, the odor of burning tobacco having always been nauseating to him. It was not because of him, however, that Joanie had lately given up the habit: she had at last been scared off by a series of antismoking exhortations on television. She really did take seriously her responsibilities as a mother.
“Spaghetti okay for dinner?” He made it every Monday evening. It was one of his specialties. He boiled it up and added the canned white clam sauce.
“Why not?” rhetorically asked his wife, supporting her head with her right hand, between
sips of coffee from the mug in her left.
Melanie wandered in and said something her father did not hear distinctly, for it was at this point that the door chimes sounded.
“Be right back,” he told his daughter, touching her button nose ever so lightly with his index finger, but she was not mollified by the gesture and began to complain.
John had inherited his mother’s anxiety with respect to electric summonses: the sound of bell or buzzer was perforce an emergency to which one must give precedence over hemorrhages, flash fires, and all human importunities. Being way back in the kitchen, he now headed for the front entrance at the run, lest the unseen applicant have to undergo the horror of ringing again.
Owing to the same anxiety, he never took time to peer through the little gauze curtain that covered the rectangle of glass set high in the door for that purpose, but, as now, hurled open the portal without regard for the cautions about strangers that one heard so frequently these days. His father-in-law, for example, made all comers state their business to the tiny microphone installed above the bell-push, while they stood for inspection through a closed-circuit TV camera mounted near the ceiling of the porch.
The present caller was a man of about John’s own age, a tall fellow somewhere between thin and sinewy. On the back of his head was the kind of billed cap worn nowadays by more people than just ballplayers. John himself had two: one purchased for the golf course, the other a promotional gift on the opening of the local branch of a hardware chain.
“My car stalled out, right in front of your house.” A clump of dingy fair curls filled the space between the forehead and the bill of the cap.
“You want me to call the auto club?”
The man’s smile displayed only his upper teeth, so that it took an instant to identify it as a smile. “You could just give me a push.” He gestured with his shoulder. “Just to where it starts down.”
The descent so signified began in front of the third house from John’s. Once over the crest of the hill, you could probably coast without power for more than a quarter mile.
John accompanied the stranger to the curb, where he asked him, “You think that will do it?”
The man seemed not to understand the question. “Hey,” he said, “in this baby I can smoke anything on the road.”
John had never been fascinated with cars, but he recognized this one as being powerful, with its air scoop on the hood and its long red snout. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s hot-looking. Where do you want me to go, side or back?”
The man opened the door and got into the driver’s seat. “Right here by the window.” He slammed the door, and John braced himself against the frame and pushed.
The car rolled more easily than he had anticipated. He had the natural strength associated with a stocky build. But he had done little in the way of recreational exercise (playing golf maybe three times a season) since leaving high school, and he noticed nowadays that physical effort caused him to breathe harder than he had once had to.
Just as John was feeling a certain satisfaction with his current effort, the man behind the wheel complained. “Can’t you give it a little more steam? We’re hardly moving.”
John was chastened. Could that be true? Maybe he should look at the ground. He lowered his head, staring at the asphalt under them, and put all his strength against the door-jamb. The vehicle certainly moved: there could be no doubt of that. But the driver was apparently one of those people who go public only with negative observations.
Now he shouted, “Hey! Will you stop!”
John looked up. It was quite true that they had gained the crest and there was no further need for exterior force. But the implication of emergency was unwarranted. This was the man who had lately chided him for doing too little.
“Just step on the brake.”
The man snarled, “I don’t have any brakes, jerk.”
There was no call for nastiness, and though usually an amiable sort, John would have stepped back and replied in kind—had he not now discovered that the tail of his old work shirt, which, casually, as befitted his day off, he was wearing outside his old paint-stained chinos, had been caught in the door of the car when the other man slammed it shut at the outset.
Luckily the car was moving slowly as yet. Trotting, John seized the door handle. It was locked. He reached inside to pull up the button, but there was only an empty hole. He shouted through the open window, right into the driver’s ear, but the man was preoccupied. John reached farther inside and tried to find and work the mechanism by touch, but he was unfamiliar with it, and now the car had begun to roll faster. He had to pick up the pace. Near panic, tethered to the mass of steel as it gathered momentum for the long downward slope, he gave up on the lock and struck the driver on the shoulder cap, and then, when the man made no response whatever—John was running now—he put both hands around the driver’s skinny neck and would have throttled him had the car not quickly come to a shuddering stop.
Relieved of fear but even angrier than before, John took the hand from the man’s throat but kept in place the one at the nape.
“Open the goddamn door!”
The driver obeyed the order, twisting away from the grasp.
John should simply have turned and walked away at this point, but he stayed, incredulous. “This was a joke? You had brakes all the while? What’s wrong with you?”
The driver frowned. “I don’t have any brakes. I stopped by putting it in gear.”
“You didn’t know my shirt was caught in the door?”
“I was busy! Wasn’t that your business?”
Now that he had calmed down somewhat, John could see a certain justice in the other’s argument, but he had invested too much of himself to admit it.
“Look,” the other man said, “I can coast down from here. But where’s the nearest gas station?”
“Turn at Randolph,” John said. “That’ll be at the bottom of the hill. Take a right on Walton, to Church. There’s a station on the northeast corner. But how are you going to stop if you have to? Keep putting it in gear? That can’t be good for your car. For that matter, it’s level ground down there. Once you’re stopped, you won’t be able to get going again.”
“Well, it’s my problem, isn’t it,” the man said genially. “Thanks for this. Sorry about your shirt.”
John reflected that only a moment earlier he had been trying to choke this fellow. The memory was embarrassing to him, though his victim seemed not to bear a grudge. On a guilty impulse, he said, “I better come along, just in case.”
“If you want.” The man worked the gear selector, and the car began to move. “Hop in. I can’t stop again.”
This seemed rude, in view of the charitable offer. By the time John got around to the other side, the vehicle was rolling at such speed that it was all he could do to reach the passenger door, open it, and hurl himself within, painfully bruising his knee on some projection.
Despite the speed, however, the driver was in no hurry to engage the gears. Which failure, by the time they were halfway down the slope, was inexplicable to John.
“Why don’t you kick it in?”
The young man in the cap was steering now with one hand on a loose wrist—the left one, at that. He did not seem at all concerned about the state of the car. At last he lazily turned his head.
“You want some juice, is that it?” Still looking at John, he worked the shifter with his free fist. The car came to life with a thunderous noise. They had already reached a fast roll; with the new thrust the car plunged downhill like a rocket. Inertia held John against the back of the seat, though there was not much he could have done anyway but what he did: shout in indignation.
He fell silent when he saw, not half a block beyond them, the rear end of a commercial van, backing into the street from a private driveway. He was not wearing a seat belt, and his fantasies of instinctively knowing the right thing to do in an emergency proved useless. He was sure only that the imminent collision would be l
ethal for himself, and that certainty was paralyzing.
In fact, no crash occurred. Still steering only with a casual left hand and disdaining the use of the horn, the driver effortlessly swung wide, so wide his wheels must have been in the far gutter, and continued to blast downhill at an ever greater velocity.
John recovered his anger. “Are you crazy? If there had been any oncoming traffic—”
“But there wasn’t any,” the man crowed, slapping the wheel and hee-hawing.
John intended to get out when they gained level ground, where the car could be brought to a stop by using the gears. If the fool ignored the order, the use of physical force would again be justified.
But on reaching the bottom of the hill, the other man performed a conservative turn, at a speed that had somehow subtly been brought to a moderate rate, and drove the block to the gas station before there was a reasonable opportunity to demand that the vehicle be stopped en route.
On stepping from the car, faced with a substantial walk back home, most of which was uphill, John discovered that his knee still ached from the blow it had sustained in his leap into the rolling vehicle.
“Wait a minute,” said the driver, hopping out. “I’ll give you a lift soon as I get the tank filled.”
John turned his back on the man. He had limped to the edge of the concrete apron before he was struck by the implication of what the guy had said. He stopped and turned around.
The driver, who had been watching his departure, smiled and said, “Can’t you take a joke?”
“You mean the brakes?” John asked angrily. “Your brakes are okay. You just used them now to stop, didn’t you?” The car, furthermore, was at the pumps, not positioned for entrance to the garage, where it would have had to go for work on the supposedly ailing engine and the allegedly missing brakes. “And nothing’s wrong with the motor.”