Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  And hence, having saved up, from the money they gave her to buy drugs, enough for a basic black dress that hid her increasing weight, she sneaked off to Representative O’Reilly’s fundraiser, to see her old boss from San Diego, an advertised speaker at the event, who explained he had no position for her on his staff, not in his district nor Washington. He said it in such a way she guessed it was her father’s campaign contribution that got her the job while he was winning his seat the autumn before.

  The Golden Gate bridge was next, except this man with the perpetually depressed eyes behind his rimless glasses, not the featured speaker but the principal moneybags at the event, in the one spontaneous gesture of his arch-conservative life, saw a creature who touched his encastled heart and made him want to save her, which he did.

  three

  Jake’s tape continues:

  Meany took her to the front desk of the hotel where the fundraiser took place and told the assistant manager to give her a room and anything else she wanted and charge it to him. “Anyone else but me calls for her, shoot him.”

  Though she didn’t witness what happened next, her account of it was vivid enough—it meant something to her, this bear of a man going off in quiet fury to sever the ties she couldn’t. He carried a pistol to the house in the Berkeley hills where he collected her personal things. It was not the pistol he later gave her and taught her how to shoot at the Richmond Police Department’s pistol range, a gun to fit in a purse, slim-line .38 snub nose, five shot and bobbed hammer. The one he carried was a good deal more sinister but he didn’t have to use it. He towered over ‘the boys’ and informed them that there were still laws on the books in Berkeley (where he knew the mayor and chief of police) against doing what they were doing, including the drugs, and though there were many folks ignoring those laws in this burg, he could get them enforced—and would. He also told the lad Mary Clare had followed across the country that he knew his dad, even though they were politically at opposite poles, he still would drop a dime on him, who might have some financial ties to the old man and not want him to know about his filthy goings-on.

  I pictured the scene in living Technicolor, two young men sharing glances but keeping one eye on this giant who might just be a homicidal psychopath, they weren’t going to test him.

  In other words, Meany put the fear of the Lord into her boys. Then he put her in a drug rehab program, starting with inpatient detoxification in Stockton, where no one knew her or (with a couple of exceptions) him. Her graduation present was the Jag. Still not making a move to touch her, he would not even visit her uninvited. She figured that out and made the invitation nearly universal. He would knock, he would ask if he were interrupting anything important and only when informed he wasn’t would he, removing his hat, cross the threshold of the apartment he paid for, first one in Walnut Creek and then the penthouse, until at last, after she’d already noticed the younger man down at the pool who had Andy’s broad shoulders but more intense eyes, she coaxed the shy bear into her bedroom and made a small gesture of gratitude.

  “Which I assume you wish now you hadn’t,” I said.

  “Why on earth?” she said. “I meant it.”

  “But now there’s a shy bear who’s got you in a bear hug.”

  She looked into her wine as she sipped the last of it. “I’m not ready for him to let go.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’m not; I should know.”

  “I thought you loved Robert.”

  “Oh yes—which is why I want to leave him in peace.”

  “Spare me,” I said.

  “I have no backbone. I don’t know how to take care of myself.”

  “Have you gone back to the drugs?”

  She said, “Heavens no.”

  “You have backbone, lady.”

  “Bobby needs someone who can be a brick right now. I want you to tell him for me he’s better off without me.” She looked up from her empty glass and quickly back down again.

  “You want me to tell him; me?”

  “Will you?” I think she was trying to bat her eyelashes at me, but she hadn’t the knack.

  I said, “That’s what this conversation was about? Have you told him all these things? Not just about your decision to stay in the penthouse, but about the rescue and all?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Don’t spar with me, young lady.” She was as many years younger than Robert as he was younger than I, so chronologically she could have been my daughter, though she was, at that moment, twice as old as my flesh and blood daughter.

  I said, “I’m sad but not shocked. There’s nothing in your past Robert can’t cope with—except your propensity to lie down and die when things get tough. If you’re going to give Robert the kiss-off, tell him yourself.”

  She looked at me with an absolutely blank face, her usually talkative eyes for once mute. Then she reached into her emotional tote and pulled out the ‘poor me’ mask and her eyes and mouth changed subtly.

  “Bobby said you were so sensitive.”

  “Sorry, I spent all that kind of sensitivity on Robert.”

  She said, “I’ve made a fool of myself, then, parading my dirty linen.”

  “No, my dear, you’ve just made yourself perfectly human and me your understanding but unswayable friend. You can ask me for anything but to do your dirty work for you.”

  She smiled a sad smile while I beckoned the waiter over to settle the check.

  “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  We were across Market and just down a little from the Tenderloin. “I insist,” I said. “I’ll have Meany to answer to if you get mugged, and, one of these days, Robert as well. He won’t be bed-ridden forever, Clare. He’ll be out and you’ll have to deal with him. I suggest now.”

  “Would you at least tell him I’m coming and why?”

  “That I would consent to do,” I said, and we walked out into the tattered fog of a San Francisco summer’s dusk.

  four

  Jake said, as he came through the patio door, “Feels like earthquake weather out there.” In the last twilight he looked more flushed than merely from a successful stint before an APHA audience, and he spoke more loudly than usual.

  I put my finger to my lips; the gent in the next bed was sleeping, as he did, it seemed, most of the day. A wifely woman in a fringed buckskin jacket kept vigil at his side.

  “What’s up?” Jake asked, still a little too loudly.

  I told him about Rutledge’s visit. As I told it it became clear to me—and Jake, he picked up on it immediately—the sergeant had been telling me I had Meany by the short hairs and was asking me not to yank.

  “What a crock,” I said.

  Jake’s eyes came alive. “No, no, my friend: he’s right. That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s your leverage, your way to get Meany.”

  I said, “I don’t want to get Meany, I want to keep Mary Clare.”

  “You’ll have to fight to do it”

  “From flat on my back?”

  He said, “That’s the way the world’s choreographed it.”

  “And exactly what am I to do?”

  I got it: he was tipsy: the pink glow, the loud talk.

  “You tell Rutledge’s niece, when she gets here, the most interesting story you can about the capture of Homer Smith, and you make the mistress of the Great Tycoon Meany the indispensable star of the capture.”

  “Besides being chickenshit,” I said, “it’s too late. She’s come and gone and she’s so pissed she’ll never be back.”

  I told Jake about that visit, too.

  After lunch I chatted with one of the nurses about the man in the next bed, who had fallen asleep at the wheel the night before. There was a temporary “full moon” shortage of beds in the ICU, and this gent seemed sturdy enough to put in a semi-private room with a nice, quiet
patient on a med-surg ward.

  “A room for two victims of ignorance about invincibility,” I quipped to the nurse, and we laughed.

  He was also the perfect excuse. Or so I thought. But when Suzanne Arnold arrived, I realized she was not the type to be put off, not even to speak softly. Rather, she was shrill, in part because she was angry, in part to compensate for her diminutive size. She was also, as the good sergeant had warned, smart-assed. I debated whether the smart-assedness also came from being small. Soon what had been a false reason not to talk became a real concern. I envisioned a nurse coming in to throw out the cranky Miss Arnold, whose back, clothed in a practical car coat, was stiff and whose shoulders were set to impart her annoyance at her uncle’s part in stonewalling her. She reminded me of a saw-whet or a burrowing owl awakened from her daytime sleep.

  After precious few pleasantries, none of which included sympathy for my injured back, she asked me, “Who was the woman in your room when you captured Homer Smith?”

  Though forewarned by her uncle, I was still caught off guard. I had rehearsed telling the story of the capture as it happened, minus Mary Clare.

  “That’s incidental,” I said. “Don’t you want to hear how Homer kidnapped me first?”

  “I talked to your neighbor, Mrs. Clarke. I gather this ‘naked lady’ gets a lot of credit for Smith’s capture.”

  “I disarmed him,” I said.

  “And she kept a gun trained on Mr. Smith.”

  “I did need a little help.”

  She opened and closed her reporter’s notebook and opened it again. “I won’t spar with you, Mr. Gattling. We have other ways of finding out.”

  “We? You just pulled that shit on the wrong person, lady,” I said. “You and whoever else makes up that ‘we’ can take a flying leap at the moon. I’ve been reamed by the press before, and I’m not going to let it happen to a friend. Back then I listened to what I thought was wise advice: ‘Just let it go, Robert, it’ll blow over.’ Not this time, no ma’am.”

  Her nostrils flared. “I know this much, Mr. Gattling. I know the police wouldn’t be trying to keep her identity from me if she were just the ordinary girlfriend of an ordinary janitor, who just happened to be sleeping over the night you got lucky and took out that crazy bomber. I’ll bet my professional bippy she’s no more an ordinary girlfriend than you’re an ordinary janitor.”

  I said, “What would you know about that?”

  “I was in my last semester at Cal when they reported that unfortunate incident in Reno. And yes, you got reamed. Trust me, Gattling. I’m better than that.”

  *****

  I saw a light bulb go off over Jake’s head. He was going to let me finish my story, and he was going to explain what he meant by fighting Meany to win Mary Clare, but I’d let the mangy cat out of the bag, the one that had been pussy-footing around our relationship since Jake first asked me what I was doing pushing a broom on Bobwhite Court. Like Suzanne Arnold, he could visit the county library and go through archived newspapers until he found the article I was referring to as my reaming.

  *****

  At Miss Arnold’s reference to my Reno Affair little pings of light flashed in the corners of my eyes. Despite my trussed-up helplessness, I hissed, “You better not use that, lady. And you better get your ass out of here.” I jabbed the call button several times.

  “I can see you’re not going to cooperate.”

  “Cooperate? I’m gonna sue your ass off if you cross the wrong T or dot the wrong I. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll think of something more suited to a smart-ass snippet.”

  The nurse came rushing in. She looked at me, saw the distended vein on my forehead, she looked at Miss Arnold and saw her deadpan fury, and would have politely asked her to leave, but I had to add, “Think about this as if it were a juvenile crime or a rape; think about withholding her name to keep from doing some harm you can’t imagine to someone who doesn’t deserve to be smeared.”

  “You’ll have to leave, miss,” the nurse said in an authoritative tone.

  Suzanne channeled her fury enough to say, “Why don’t you start from the top. I didn’t have my recorder on when you threatened me.”

  I said, “Please, Nurse?”

  The nurse threw Suzanne Arnold out firmly but politely. As I watched her settling the strap of her purse on her shoulder, jamming her notebook in her car coat pocket, I realized she was not a testy saw-whet at all, she was a Gila monster.

  *****

  At the end of my account, Jake said, “Get her back.”

  When I saw that he was serious I said, “No way; I can’t.”

  “Sure you can,” he said. “—Or I can, if you want.”

  “After what I said to her? I don’t hate Meany—at least not that much.”

  “Meany’ll have the same opportunity to counter what you tell her as you had with whatever went on in Reno.”

  “I can explain that,” I said.

  “Later.”

  “Well, the newspaper didn’t give me any chance to counter it. Can I explain?”

  “I’m fresh out of ears. I just had a three martini conversation with your girlfriend.”

  That stopped me. I was no longer so interested in Miss Arnold. “She’s giving me the gate, isn’t she.”

  “She’s coming around to talk to you,” he said.

  “But you wouldn’t be suggesting I fink on her if she hadn’t told you she was leaving.”

  “You’ll have to fight to keep her. She loves you just as much as ever, it’s just she’s down right now.”

  I sighed. “I’m tired of fighting.”

  “This ain’t the gym, buddy, it’s a dark alley, you don’t get to decide if you’re going to fight, you’ve been jumped, goddammit.”

  “Clare’d be hurt, too.”

  Jake said, “She’d be hurt if you shoved a tube down her throat and pumped her stomach, but you’d do it if she’d ODed.”

  “You’re a cold sonofabitch when you’re lit, Jake.”

  “Someone has to look at this with a beady eye, and lying there feeling sorry for yourself isn’t the best vantage for casting a beady eye.”

  We were pushing up against the limits of our friendship; I shut my trap.

  He got up to go. He said, “When you’re caught between knowing you’d lose by doing nothing and not knowing the outcome if you tried to do something, the odds aren’t hard to figure. They stack up in favor of fighting. Don’t crap out, Robert. Fight.”

  I looked about me, trying to find a rebuttal. I looked at the bland pastel walls and the Sierra Club reproductions hanging on them. Nothing came to me.

  “I’ve got family I haven’t seen all day,” he said. “You think about it.”

  As he slid open the patio door I managed to say, “”Would you see if you can get that Suzanne Arnold lady back in here to see me?”

  five

  The third time I woke in the hospital, I woke to routine. Mornings, before any visitors, they took me out of traction long enough to minister to my body, during which time I pretended I had the same lithe frame I’d had when I fought at the Olympic Auditorium, because I had no choice about showing it to a lot of nurses, almost all of whom, at that point in history, were women. I ate prone; someone fed me. I could urinate by myself but my bowel movements were attended. My bowels cooperated with my modesty for a while but were soon overcome by modern technology. Any sense of autonomy was wrung out of me.

  “What’s up?” Jake asked, breezing into my room.

  Preoccupied with the meeting in San Francisco, he’d had no time to go by my apartment, but he put together a toilet kit from spare Father’s Day gifts. And I received lots of attention from the nursing staff. I got the impression that, even if I didn’t measure up to the cut welterweight image any more, I was in better shape than most men on the floor. I was a good patient, I add immodestly, and a minor hero to boot. When it came out that I knew something of doctors from their end of the stethoscope, being responsible for some
of their education, the RNs began to gossip a little about the attending staff.

  Jake told me they’d also picked up on the Robert-Mary Clare-Meany triangle and were rooting for youth and beauty.

  One nurse, a serious Christian, suggested Providence had had a hand in laying me low.

  “It can’t be to test my faith,” I said, tempering an urge towards irony, “so do you think it might be punishment for my sins?”

  “How about,” she said, “preserving you from worse harm?”

  I thought about that a lot. It started a counter-melody to my hymn to the Divine Accident. The counter-melody’s dominant theme stated that, even if there were no Benign Patriarch “up there,” His beard streaming across the firmament like the Milky Way, there was a pattern. There were as many universes as there were persons, each of us at the center of his own, each motion you or I impart to the ether sending out ripples in concentric rings, mingling with those emanating from others’ universes, some creating harmonies, some discords, but it all worked out. With Mary Clare I’d been in close harmony, with Meany not at all. Jake and I made rings like contrapuntal melodies, a set, a pattern within the grand pattern.

  What a consolation it would be to believe that, I told myself.

  In the evening after visiting hours, one nurse or another would stand in the doorway of my room and interrupt my musings with questions about the doings on Bobwhite Court. If the nurses changed, the questions did not: what was a Homer Smith really like? Did he slaver and roll his eyes? Was he a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weathermen? When they heard that he wore double-knit polyester and drove a big old Cadillac convertible they would say, “You’re kidding,” and shake their heads. Several were in awe of Jake’ efforts to save the man who’d been killed by the letter bomb. Wondering, even with all their training, if they’d have tried to do what he did.

  All the nurses tut-tutted that I had no family nearby. They acted as if they must make up for this lack by treating me extra well. I didn’t mind at all, although I wouldn’t have minded some complete ‘down time’ either.

  Actually, there were more visitors than I cared to receive. Wednesday’s parade started with Meryl Destrier. She came in wearing a dress Lana Turner might have worn, fitted except for a draped bodice. She bent down and kissed me on the brow while I eyed the strain her breasts were putting on her foundation garment. Was this Meryl trying to get to me? It didn’t work. For once I had not an ounce of lust for her.