Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  She said, “I don’t have to move right away.”

  “I don’t want you living under his roof, Clare.”

  “It’s not your choice. He won’t touch me, if I tell him not to—if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Good God, it isn’t that, you know I never meant to say . . .”

  “I know, Bobby.”

  And after a while she said, “I have some money stashed.”

  “His?”

  She shrugged. “If you want to get technical.”

  “Oh.”

  After an even more painful pause she said, “I don’t see what difference it makes. You took his money for almost a year.”

  “I worked my butt off for that money.” I could feel my muscles tightening despite the meds.

  “And all I had to do was flop on my back—is that it?” But when she saw the agony in my eyes she said, “Sorry.”

  After the longest pause of all she said, “There’s no deus ex machina, is there.”

  “No Divine Accident,” I said.

  “Not that, either.” She lit me a cigarette, looking around the drawn bed curtain at the patient zonked out on the other side, a man—wheeled in from post-op while I was in a morphine nod—likewise doped out of his gourd, hooked to an IV, his shoulder and the side of his face bandaged. He emanated that mildly pleasant aroma of fresh surgical dressings and adhesive, of phenol and acetate. For a while it would trump the pervading, ugly hospital smell.

  “We’ll think of something,” she said. “We’re two smart cookies.”

  “Just as long as you don’t go back up there.”

  She said, “What am I supposed to do? I’m not on speaking terms with my family, and I’m not independently wealthy.”

  We might have spiraled into helplessness and depression, trading impossible expectations, when someone whom neither of us had in mind as a deus ex machina intervened.

  Meany walked in.

  four

  In my field of vision was Mary Clare in her preppy disguise, a pongee blouse with puffed sleeves, a kilted skirt and tassel loafers over stockings. Meany was in a gray sharkskin suit, carrying his panama hat, revealing slicked-back hair showing the imprint of the hat band, the rimless glasses with the bifocal lenses.

  Meany had a style all his own. No matter what he wore he looked like the antithesis of “in,” the antithesis of “mod.” Whether “out” or “fuddy-duddy,” he looked as if he wore giant shoulder pads in his suits. He favored pleated pants with cuffs, double-breasted suits Meryl confided he had custom made. He always wore suspenders. He looked like his father’s generation, or how he imagined they’d look if they were tycoons rather than ranchers.

  Fingering his hat, Meany nodded to Mary Clare, ignoring me.

  “Clare?”

  “Hello.” She didn’t use his name. She wouldn’t have used a pet name in front of me, and he’d made her promise never to reveal his first name to anyone. So she just said “hello” from half-turned in the chair next to my bed, losing hold of my hand as she turned.

  “Have you had breakfast, Clare?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  She turned and looked at me, her eyes pleading for understanding. “Could you excuse us?” she said at last, turning back.

  “I’ll be out in the hall,” Meany said.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” she said in a half whisper.

  “Go eat. Have it out with him.”

  “You and I haven’t even settled anything between us, Bobby.”

  “You said we’d think of something.”

  “That’s just what people say. What is there to think of? If I go with him he’ll work on me, he’s so damned practical and logical. All we’ve got on our side is love.”

  For once I realized what an easy ride I’d had for most of my life. Something always turned up. I had pledged myself to someone who didn’t have that jaunty attitude, for whom disaster lurked as close as the road’s next turning.

  It was time for more pain meds. I pushed the call button.

  “He isn’t ready to let go of you, but you get him mad and he’ll kick you out. You gonna wait till he does? What earthly basis is there for you to be under his roof now that you’re . . . you’re my . . .”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it. You’ve got me but you don’t know what to do with me. Well, don’t worry about him touching me. For two years he never laid a finger on me, he never expected anything in return for taking care of me. All we did was talk, that’s all.”

  “You can’t go back to that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Stop and think. How did you stop having sex with the last man you were with? You left him—am I right?”

  “You want to know the truth? Meany rescued me from him. Fact.”

  “You mean the guy was screwing you against your will?”

  She held her hands to her ears and said, “Stop it!”

  Suddenly the nurse was there. “Need a pill, hon?”

  “How bout a hypo?”

  The nurse smiled at Mary Clare, who smiled back as best she could.

  “I could sell my truck,” I said.

  “Bobby, I’ve got a car stashed in a garage in Berkeley that’s worth more than your truck.”

  “That truck’s a classic.”

  “This is absurd. I hope you don’t expect any sympathy from me,” she said as she began to crumble, “I may only be a kept woman, but you’ve been dicking around with this janitor job like there’s no tomorrow, you’re as bad as I am.”

  At another point, standing with her forehead against the sliding glass door to the patio, she said, “This sounds like a fucking soap opera.”

  Meany came in again, shifting the hat in his hand, like a Turk with his worry beads, round and around. “At least do me the courtesy,” he said to her. “Naturally you’re free to do whatever you want, but at least do me the courtesy of a talk.”

  “Go,” I said.

  She kept standing there, paralyzed, and Meany said, “Now that the hoopla’s died down, you have to kid yourself this is the right thing to do. If you stop and think, it’s pretty foolish.” Of course he didn’t name ‘the thing.’

  She started to raise her hands to her ears again, eyes closed, in deep distress, but dropped them, looked from me to him and back, any civility erased by trapped animal fear. “Why don’t you two talk to each other and leave me the fuck out of it?” She stomped into the corridor, not looking at either of us again.

  “You see what you’ve done?” I said.

  “Me!” Meany bellowed.

  “Let her go, for God’s sake.”

  “That’s her decision.”

  “No sir, you’ve got to push her out of the nest.”

  “You’re deranged, you’re goofy on those pills the nurse been giving you.”

  “She’s a happy dependent, Mr. Meany, you’ve let her be dependent on you way past the time it’s been good for her—”

  “—You got a degree in psychology, son?”

  “Stop the Big Daddy bullshit, will you? You helped her out. I don’t know what her problem was, but you got her through it. Now her problem is you—can’t you see that?”

  Meany had bent the rim of his hat and then the crown between his massive hands; he was poised as if to spring. “What I see is, you got no idea just how delicate she is.”

  “In a pig’s eye she’s delicate. It’s like dope: you’re the pusher, she’s an addict. Let her go—cold turkey.”

  “I’ll deal with you later.”

  “I’m sure you will,” I said to his back as he exited.

  “Whew,” said the nurse, sticking her head in the door. “What did you do to that one?”

  “Nothing. It would take an elephant gun to make an impression on him.”

  Not quite. It took a good deal less, when the time came.

  five

  I could make a pretty good story out of Jake’s life, in part
because he and I had all these parallels. Amanda was his Lana but more refined. Lana was beautiful in a way that made fraternity boys drool, using the time-worn compliment of “built like a brick shithouse,” using adjectives like “curvaceous” and “well-developed” with frat boy winks and grins. In a way, her physique shaped her personality. She took for granted men’s heads turning as she went by, looking to see if her charms going away were as winsome as coming at them. She never took the lead during sex—wasn’t it enough that you had in your arms all that comfortable pulchritude? You do the work, lover, I’m all yours. Lana probably didn’t know what a hetaera was, but she was something like that—easy grace of an earthy variety, good with flowers, good with food, an adept with small talk that put you at ease. Men were sparkly-eyed but at ease in her presence.

  Amanda was more complex. She would have made the fraternity boys turn away, abashed. Cool, in her case, didn’t mean “really neat,” it meant aloof. But beautiful. Delivering two children had changed the outline of her pelvis, but it hadn’t spoiled her figure. She looked good in a bathing suit—she was lithe enough to wear a Speedo. Swimming to her wasn’t showing off, though, it was her main way of staying in shape. She also looked good in frothy summer dresses and tailored pants suits. With many women, the clothes enhance the person beneath; with Amanda it was the opposite: she enhanced the clothes.

  But what I’m talking about isn’t the physical being, it’s the tension that develops between spouses when the wellspring of union is neither tradition nor blinding passion.

  (Do I sound like Jake? Sorry, he’s rubbed off on me, and I for one am proud to sound like Jake—that Berkeley education, the years around health care and bureaucrats.)

  As the irritant that led to tension between Lana and me was, to say the least, dramatic, we reached the breaking point quickly. By the time our tour of Mexico ended, she could hardly look me in the eye. Making love was no longer an option. Far less dramatic was the event that punctuated Jake and Amanda’s early relationship and therefore the tension was more diffuse, chronic as opposed to acute. But it was there. That they had a social life before Mary Clare and I barged in on them always amazed me. Couldn’t friends, colleagues and neighbors sense the truce that held these two together? I found the tension palpable, even contagious.

  Which is a preamble to visiting Jake’s memoir of Bobwhite Court again, because of his perspective, his ability to add the context I couldn’t see at the time and only accede to now because I know he was right.

  *****

  From the Jake tapes:

  Easier when Robert was just a renegade janitor, holed-up in a studio apartment. Easier, too, when he was still a dreamer, discovering, as an endless succession of dreamers before him, a fundamental truth: it is only beauty that we love. A poet’s heartfelt words turned cliché, they were engraved on his heart, alongside a sepia image of the Penthouse Lady. He carried them around and used them as insulation against the world’s wintery cold.

  He hadn’t made a move yet, still stood clear of the merry-go-round, avoiding attachment and commitment the way he avoided bureaucracy and dissidence these days, but owning The Truth. And owning The Truth made life hopeful.

  Hope was the beloved, the person one day totally unknown, the next a shimmering image in a dull winter landscape: a daffodil popping through soot-darkened snow. And this time circumstance reinforced hope and one day Robert’s heart pumped to the cadence of her name: Mary Clare Mary Clare Mary Clare. Each red corpuscle entering his brain carried her image as if reflected on a soap bubble.

  For some, the psychic experience of love is enough to change life completely, fire up the creative engine and drive him forward, like Dante, to works deep as hell and eternal as Heaven’s Multifoliate Rose. But I have more, Robert reflected, and he did. He had that sine qua non of human intimacy, the will, or at least the glowing desire, to give and take in equal measure, which poor Dante never had with his Beatrice, and many another lover either. Robert had discovered reciprocity on his way to achieving transcendence. Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last it had come within his grasp.

  This would have been incredible enough, luck as you and I can only dream about. But there’s more. There came an opportunity to prove the love, it was time to make his move and he did. His love waxed glorious in courage and daring-do, proving not only its vitality but its sanctity.

  Wow! A real hard-on, folks.

  Of course there’s a catch, there always is. In his case there were two, the minor catch a delay in the physical manifestation of true love, due to an uncanny accident. The second catch some might call a Berkeley intellectual bugaboo, but for Robert it was a lot more formidable than that: after a decade of inurement to violence of every conceivable form—more bombs exploded in the United States per year than in the century before, terrorism discussed like the weather or traffic congestion on television, assassinations and massacres—the problem, proving love through weathering violence sixteen miles east of Berkeley, is not what you do for an encore, it’s how you keep your conscience from saying, ‘Me too?’ (or in Robert’s case, though I would have been too ignorant just then to have guessed it, ‘Not again!’)

  Instead of blasting away with a handgun, like Dirty Harry, Robert had dealt with the violence du jour with a timber-shivering left hook, taken out the gent with the .45 jammed in his waist band, the terrorist, the mad bomber of Bobwhite Court.

  His Mosaic sin was striking the madman twice—or trying to. If he hadn’t violated the Marquess of Queensbury rules and tried to lay another lick on the prostrate Homer, he might have been home scot free, the ghost from his past exorcised through the imposition of symmetry to his cosmos. But Robert’s unnecessary tugging on the unconscious Homer to make sure he was really ‘out,’ even if triggered by an excess of adrenaline, induced a secondary explosion more devastating to him than Homer’s bomb.

  He paid. Like a Parzival in a trance of longing for his mate, he could picture her on the parapet, not just unable to get past the dragon down below, but unable to get past her knight-rescuer turned knight-captor. It drove him half out of his skull.

  *****

  When Meany, from the doorway of my hospital room, without raising his voice, labeled her romance with me as “pretty foolish,” she made one last grab for her disappearing courage: “I may come to that conclusion myself,” she said, “when I’m used to being my own person again, but at least give me that chance.”

  I flashed on an image: a lioness on the kill, two shag-maned lions, one old, one young, waiting to move in and help themselves to it. The old lion claimed the carcass he’d happily devour for her was her old, pre-penthouse life, while the younger lion wanted her to believe the kill was her dependence on the old lion’s protection. Either way, she had no right to claim it for herself, she “owed” it to another.

  *****

  Maybe it was the drugs, but I found myself, alone again, with two not necessarily compatible feelings: jealousy and self-pity. Yes, I was jealous of Meany, suddenly wishing I were well-healed enough to put up Mary Clare, if not in a penthouse, at least in comfortable quarters. Okay, I was also a tad jealous of Jake, who, without me around to bug him, could sit at his typewriter and chase his Muse all day. As if I had any such ambition. But being hospitalized makes you believe you would if you could. Whoever said jealousy was rational?

  I was also feeling sorry for myself, which is incredibly childish. I couldn’t jump on the merry-go-round again. What kind of bullshit is that? Now that I was on an enforced vacation, I wanted to get back to work. Janitoring? Nah. The lifting and bending would do me in. Negotiating with kiddies on behalf of the university? Let the Blue Meanies (no relation to our Meany, it’s what the student protesters took to calling the police) roust the draft card burners, the mental stress would do me in. I just wanted to be free to look in the want ads for a job. Caretaker at a Jackson Hole winter getaway, I could keep the wolves from the door, Mary Clare could serve the mulled wine and Brie.

  Finally,
mercifully, the painkiller likewise killed negative feelings and I fell asleep, all too soon to be awakened by another gent from the last generation.

  He was about to tiptoe out again when I muttered, “Sergeant Rutledge. It’s okay, come on in.”

  six

  He’d had a haircut since I saw him last, which deemphasized his white sideburns. He still looked like a character actor playing plain clothes cop.

  “I hear we had a close call,” Sergeant Rutledge said as he approached the bed. Like Meany, he always wore a hat, and like Meany he took his off in hospital rooms, I guess part of their generation’s hat-wearing etiquette. If my father, who wore a fedora to work every day, were still around I'd ask him about it.

  We did a perfect macho exchange about our last encounter, you know, the “aw shucks, ‘tweren’t nothin’” routine, as if we were often that close to getting shot. Maybe he’d been. He said, “You did a good job of acting, Gattling, and then you nailed the bastard to boot. When the Feds get through with him, we’ll try him for kidnapping you.”

  “Christ, he’ll be locked away for good. —Have you figured out what was going on?”

  “It was, as you suspected, guns and ammunition in the crates. The Feds haven’t traced the arms to a source, but Treasury agents don’t think it will be hard to find it. The consensus of everyone working the case is that Homer Smith is as nutty as you suspected, a genuine paranoid, who didn’t much care who he blew up, just about everyone living deserved to die.

  “If one of the buyers hadn’t blown himself up, Homer would probably have taken the bomb home to use another day.”

  When Rutledge finished telling me what he knew about the people who were supposedly going to buy the assault rifles—the forensics team had found an intact finger of the dead man and had matched the fingerprint—I said, “I have a confession to make.”

  “Should I be hearing this? You want to talk to a lawyer first?”

  “It’s not that kind of confession. It’s just that I was going to open that envelope when I got back from my coffee break, that’s all.”

  Rutledge gave me a look that said, Let that be a lesson. “What stopped you from opening it before you went on break?”

  “An old girlfriend called, needed to see me.”