BREAD TO THE WISE
A Novel by
ANGUS BROWNFIELD
***
Published By
Also by Angus Brownfield
The Day’s Vanity, The Night’s Remorse
The Mechanic of San Martín
Pool of Tears
She’s Got Her Own
Abrupt Edge
Copyright © 2015 by Angus Brownfield
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To Don Meyer and to
the memory of Art Holstein
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
nor bread to the wise. For man does not know his time.
Ecclesiastes
Little Bill Daggett: I don't deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house.
Will Munny: Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.
From the movie, Unforgiven
Table of Contents
About The Libertine
Bread to the Wise
Bonus First Chapter, Río Penitente
The Libertine . . .
Bread to the Wise asks whether Robert Gattling is the most amoral man in nine Bay Area counties, or just oversexed? He’s handsome and charming, but attracts women more because they believe he cares for their wellbeing and sexual pleasure as much as his own. Conversely, memories haunt him that make monogamy seem futile. He’s blown by an ever-shifting wind, and it will take a mentor of superior wisdom and a lover of superior sensuality to anchor him.
In Río Penitente, as Gattling turns fifty, he has become a near caricature of himself—handsomer than at thirty-five, financially secure, still a magnate for women. He’s haunted by the death of that wise mentor and by that sensuous lover’s rejection, and a jolt of clarity binds those two losses to all the sins he’s committed since his mother’s death when he was six. So he goes on a quest for redemption, choosing as his venue Mexico, where he meets two kinds of fates.
Finally, a dignified elder in Monogamy, Gattling has eschewed his libertine ways, settling down with a woman who returns his love with interest . . . until she dies prematurely. Now he finds himself tempted to return to his former life style, tempted by three women: an old love, a woman as dangerous as she’s beautiful, and one who is taboo but also the only person who can keep him from becoming a foolish, decrepit Don Juan.
The Beginning Is A Hole In Time
one
I met Jake Pritchett in May of 1972 and said goodbye to him, at his interment, in September of 1973. If he hadn’t taken the initiative, I might never have got to know him. He occupied a ground floor office at 45 Bobwhite Court. I was a one-man janitorial service and my one client was V.M. Meany, who owned everything on this cul-de-sac in La Morinda, California, just south of where California Route 24 dumps a couple of hundred thousand cars a day into Interstate 680.
I walked into Jake’s office, expecting to find it empty as it had been the night before and the one before that. The man I hadn’t expected to be sitting at his desk said, “Would you like me to clear out for a few minutes?” Not a pro forma question: his body language said he was ready to leave his chair.
When, in a former life, I had sat at a desk like his working late, I never cleared out for a janitor. Blue collars don’t ask white collars to accommodate them. It’s the law of the land.
“I can work around you, if it won’t disturb you,” I replied.
Though a humble occupation, being a janitor, even a faux janitor, a man hiding out as a janitor, actually, yields minor rewards. One is that no one is around to bother you as you dust and sweep. You can whistle, you can sing, you can swear if you spill ashes on the rug, you can cut the cheese without offending.
The man sitting at his desk said, “When it’s time to vacuum, yell, I’ll make myself scarce.”
“I don’t vacuum every night.”
I emptied his ashtray and wastebasket and dusted his bookcase and file cabinets, sensing he was watching me. He hadn’t moved in but a few days before, so the place still had that new smell. As I aimed my cart for the door he said, “I'm liable to be in your way most every weeknight. I've begun writing a novel in my spare time, you see. My latest calling.”
“You know,” I said, slightly uneasy with his admission, “I haven’t been at this janitoring business long enough to have a hard and fast routine, so I could start on the third floor and work down, do your office last, if you like.”
“But then I'd feel obliged to clear out when you got here,” the gentleman said. “I'm new to this writing business, too, so I'm trying to figure out how many hours a night I'm good for. I'd sure like it if you’d just clean around me. My day job takes me out of town once in a while; you can do the heavy-duty stuff then.”
He wasn’t being a sidewalk superintendent, in fact, he was really trying to be nice, so I smiled and nodded. Again I started for the door and this time he said, a hint of irony in his voice, “You haven’t asked me what my novel’s about. People seem to want to know.”
I turned in the doorway and said, “Once upon a time I majored in English Lit. They taught us that novels aren’t about anything, they’re things unto themselves.”
He said, “I majored in statistics and business, and I didn’t know that. My name’s Jake Pritchett, by the way.”
I had not once introduced myself to a janitor when I sat behind a desk, and I wasn’t sure how to respond, but he got out of his chair with his hand offered, so I hastened to shake it. “Robert Gattling.” If I’d been a real janitor I probably would have been abashed.
Jake was an inch shorter than I, a little round in the shoulders, balding. His grip was firm without being a macho statement. His eyes were sad as if from too much wisdom, and I was struck by them.
“See you around,” I said, finally to escape. Pushing my cart down the hall I debated if that was too chummy for a janitor, but I'd blown my cover anyway, admitting my college major, so I shrugged it off. I thought, if a statistician can write a novel, a former academician can be a janitor.
*****
That was the beginning of our very short lifelong friendship. I didn’t pursue it at first, I’d come over the hill to La Morinda to escape my former Berkeley colleagues and erstwhile friends—in other words, to find refuge. I had made one friend of a sort since then, a neighbor named Janice Lippert, who was “of a sort” because we’d become something more than friends, we wrestled each other into frantic sweats now and again, when her cokehead husband was out of town.
Another friend was John Barleycorn, or rather his genever cousin, which I drank in quantity with a twist of lemon, it being the best sleeping potion I knew of (or perhaps the most forgiving sleeping potion, seldom causing more than a washed-out feeling the next morning).
Janice was not the kind of friend Jake became, she was my crutch and I hers. True, we shared confidences, such as why she put up with her husband, whose cocaine habit made him regularly nasty and sometimes downright cruel, and what had gone on not in Berkeley but in the wilds of Nevada that caused me to flee into exile. She was the only person I'd confided in about that since my wife, Lana, divorced me over those same Nevada goings-on, and I think it meant a great deal to Janice that I'd let her in on it. She guarded the secret.
Gin was the lubricant that allowed such confidences. That and, somewhere between the first gin-over and sloshedness, tussles in the sack that left us both panting and me cursed with mixed feelings.
I was thirty-five when we met; Jake, it turned out, eight years older. It is a tricky time to become friends for life. In the sandbox tots make ad hoc alliances or enmities, a mother or a nanny encouraging the former and discouraging the latter, sharing the daily mantra, names not exchanged, often simply playing in tandem, solitary games played side by side. Beyond the sandbox—say when you’re old enough to ride a bicycle—there are friendships without any awareness of emotional investment, though there are hurt feelings and, at times, angers and jealousies. You play, you explore, you argue about trivia (“DiMaggio was better than Gehrig any day”), you begin to expose isolated tidbits of your soul, longings for things or places, dreams of the future, but without any scrutiny of the me and thee.
After that comes a time when friendship is a serious pursuit, one without a road map, but quite full of emotion, the kind that will make you back up your friend in a fight, even if the odds are bleak and you know you’ll take a pounding. You share the quart of beer you were able to score, you confess your passion for Carol or Jeanne, and your friend commiserates or encourages. You go on double dates, you lend him your last five bucks because your friend needs it. Some people sustain those friendships through the fortieth class reunion and beyond.
For adults—men, at least—making new friends is not so easy. It’s not that you are much more aware of the emotional investment, it’s that to invest at all takes weighing so many commitments, so much detritus: creeping inertia.
Foremost for Jake it was this new career of writing serious fiction. He had clients from his old career—he was a planner of hospitals and health systems—he was not going to abandon as he eased into his new writing career, he was going to gently wean them. He had a wife with her own profession, two young children, he had, I discovered towards the end of his life, a secret lover. So little time, so many commitments. He seemed to have a premonition that his time would be short, so he put out the extra effort to keep all these commitments. And finally one to me as well.
I, on the other hand, was relatively free of commitments but was not only in self-imposed exile, I was under a severe self-imposed sentence for the sins that had forced me there. A lot of self-loathing and not a little of self-pity are a twin handicap that might have made friendship impossible had Jake not been such a generous man. And too, I wasn’t sure I knew how to make friends, even if I should admit I needed one.
Soon after we met I needed one but didn’t know it.
two
The summer of 1972 was a newsy season: the Watergate burglars were caught, the Supreme Court suspended the death penalty and, of course, there were the usual shootings. Most headline-grabbing shootings took place overseas: eleven Israeli Olympians and their handlers kidnapped and killed in Munich; twenty-six civilians massacred at the Lodi Airport in Tel Aviv. And, though it only made the local papers, my friend, Jake Pritchett, died prematurely from complications of a gunshot wound.
Jake wasn’t in the wrong place, nor was it the wrong time; it was the shooter who was guilty of both blunders. Since death came not days but months after the bullet left the gun, the shooter had already pled out to a felony charge far less serious than homicide. The DA thought it impossible to get a conviction for anything more and would not retry him.
Which left a number of us with the question: who’s to blame?
Jake blamed himself for getting shot; Jake’s widow, Amanda, blamed me and, incidentally my true love, Mary Clare; Mary Clare insisted it was pure accident—if you can call anything an accident when gunshots are exchanged. More on accidents later. Mary Clare could have said ‘Fate’ and had as much credence.
I side with Amanda but only in relation to myself. Like a quarterback who audibles a pass in the last minute of the fourth quarter, only to throw a game-losing interception, I accept the blame.
You can decide who was right; I had to decide what to do with the guilt that attended the blame.
*****
You can read about Watergate and the death penalty ruling in high school history books; there have been reams written on the two terrorist attacks. Only a scattering of people, besides me, remember Jake’s shooting. I talked to some of them about it—with a couple I still do. We endlessly sift the ‘what ifs,’ as people will. What if it had happened ten years later (when, presumably, cardiovascular surgery had advanced)? What if he’d been helicoptered to Moffitt Hospital in San Francisco, perhaps the best trauma center in the land? What if the bullet hadn’t shattered? What if Jake hadn’t been carrying a shotgun from his car to the garage, freaking-out the sleep-deprived prick who shot him from ambush?
You can noodle around all you want. Both of Jake’s parents had bad hearts, and, not surprisingly, so did Jake. It was the kicker in the complication.
Blame Mom, blame Dad for passing on bad genes?
Maybe.
Blame the guy who hired the prick who shot Jake? I’ll give him a piece of the action. A consummate poker player, literally and figuratively, for once in his life V.M. Meany didn’t know when to fold. He couldn’t let go of Mary Clare, whose life he’d saved a couple of years before, a woman whom he had selflessly sheltered, no strings attached, but had to fall in love with at an age when most men look back to their youth for fond memories of such feelings.
You really can't blame the surgeon who opened Jake’s chest to remove a bullet fragment resting against his heart. Mary Clare will count as part of the accident that the cutter discovered something more alarming than that piece of lead, an aortic aneurism which he judged to be a ticking time bomb. If it ruptured it could cause death in minutes. Since he was in the patient’s chest already, the man felt morally bound to repair it. It was no accident that, Amanda, an anesthesiologist, was quite familiar with the usual risk-benefit analysis in situations like this. “Fix the damned thing,” she told the surgeon.
I was old enough when this happened to be inured to life’s more random exigencies. So I didn’t blame God or anything like that when Jake died. It’s just that I’d got used to him in my life, a warm, kind alter ego with enough added years to be a lot wiser than I. Now I had to get used to him not being in my life. I thought, well, I’ll just do it; I’ll find my own wisdom. I told myself, you don’t get all that attached to someone in a few months. Or do you? I debated this with Mac, the bartender at Berkeley Square, as I stopped in for a quick one on the way home from work a few days after the funeral.
At that time I was working in the basement of the Claremont Hotel, where the Association of Bay Area Governments, my employer, had its offices. There is more than one bar upstairs, but no Mac. Mac had known Jake, known him back when he was courting Amanda the anesthesiologist, and kept current with him. Furthermore, Mac kept under the bar a yellowing photocopy of Jake’s rules for living. The third rule read, “Remember, nobody owns tomorrow.” Just about every other time I sat at his bar, if we weren’t talking 49ers or Giants, Mac would bring out that piece of paper and we’d talk what Mac termed ‘philosophy,’ by which he meant life’s eternal verities.
Jake was one
of Mac’s favorite customers, though not a regular, and it grieved Mac that Jake had become an exemplar of his own third rule.
The person I talked to most about Jake’s demise was Mary Clare. When he died we were sharing a cottage behind a house on Milvia Street, walking distance to the UC Berkeley campus, where she was working her way back into the academic life. The cottage was a gem, designed by Bernard Maybeck and there is a story in that, too.
It became evident that I hadn’t dealt well with Jake’s death when I began waking in the middle of the night, sometimes in tears, and Mary Clare would say, “What is it, baby?” and I couldn’t say for sure: nightmares, a sensation of pressure around my heart. Accepting blame is a social norm; it’s guilt that shrivels your soul.
Clare was very patient. She studied early and late, kept in shape, she did her share of the housework. She needed her sleep. But she would coo at me, there in our little Maybeck doll house in the middle of the night, and hug me. Sometimes she would make love to me, even if we’d made love earlier, because she knew it would put me back to sleep.
She offered it as a solution preferable to the premixed martinis I kept in the freezer. She said, “I love you, Robert Gattling, but I swear, I’m not going to sit around watching you drink yourself shit-faced as a way of avoiding whatever’s eating at you. If you’d rather dive in the bottle than fuck me, okay, but it’s adios if you do.”
That street-talking ultimatum set me straight for a while. I’d been through an ordeal in order to share a cunning cottage with the girl of my dreams, and I was not going to lose her because I couldn’t stop lambasting myself over Jake’s death.