Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  I said, “Would I lie?”

  Robert stood, looked down at his polo shirt and Levi’s, and said, “Order me the baked turbot. I’ll be back in a flash.”

  two

  I stopped in the doorway of Howie’s office and said, “Hi, Howie,” as if I’d seen him the day before. We’d been tennis buddies until a sports doctor told me to give it up to save my back, and Howie got bitten by the running bug.

  “What are you up to, Bob?”

  “Not much. Recuperating. I hurt my back.”

  “I read about that. No good deed goes unpunished, only for real. What’s this janitor bullshit?”

  “Actually, Howie, I was pursuing the American dream. I owned a janitorial service.”

  “How’d you like a real job?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He told me how he’d cajoled the University into a joint project aimed at predicting the number of doctors needed in the Bay Area ten years hence, county by county, specialty by specialty. They jointly hired someone who was as good as you’d expect, being hired by a committee. When he bombed out, the committee let Howie fire him. “You want the job?” he asked me. “You’ve got the right credentials for it, you know all the UC people involved.”

  “Jeez, Howie, I just came down here to say hello.”

  “Okay, be a janitor the rest of your life. I’d say this is an opportunity.”

  “Actually, I’m not a janitor any more, and I’m not lacking in appreciation of the opportunity. It’s just my life is complicated in other ways.”

  He said, “A woman.”

  “I’m serious about this woman, Howie, but timing’s the real problem.”

  He said, “That’s my problem, too. This thing is funded by a National Science Foundation grant and it’s a half year behind schedule already.”

  “How long does it run?” I asked.

  “Another year and a half. I can’t guarantee anything beyond that. Although, if the funds hold out, we could probably get an extension.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Give me a résumé. —Where are you living?”

  “I’m staying with Jake Pritchett and family in Moraga while my back heals. Can you give me a little time to think about it?”

  He said, “Till Friday. That’s when I want the résumé.”

  “Shall I bring it up to date? Shall I put ‘janitor’ as my last employment?”

  Howie said, “If you can’t think of something to put on the résumé besides janitor, maybe you’re not ready for this job.”

  I changed the subject. “How’s the wife and kids?”

  “Kate’s taken up running too, and it suits her—she looks like a million. I wouldn’t let you around her without a steel jock on. Morrie’s now six-foot-five and playing forward for St. Ignatius. He’s going to Cal next year on an athletic scholarship.”

  “Time sure does fly. Has Morrie figured out if he’s a Jew or a Catholic?”

  “He’s a Catholic as far as St. Ignatius is concerned and a Jew as far as Kate’s concerned.”

  “And how’s Sara?”

  He said, “Sara’s meshuggah right now. She’s a cheerleader and she’s going steady with the star running back of the Berkeley High Yellow Jackets.”

  I said, ‘That doesn’t sound meshuggah. Sounds a little different for her, but not meshuggah. What happened to the precocious protester? Civil rights of the downtrodden fifth graders?”

  “Sara’s living civil rights these days. The star running back is black as the kettle’s bottom.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said. “Is he a nice guy?”

  “Jason’s great, but he can have any girl in school, so you can bet Sara’s putting out for him. I don’t want any guy screwing my little girl, but especially I don’t want a black guy.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, Bob, it just bugs the shit out of me. I guess in spite of all my high-flown ideals, I’m prejudiced.”

  “We’ll talk about this when there’s time. I have some folks upstairs I’m having lunch with. I’ll get back to you by Friday.”

  “I really need you, Bob. At a minimum I need to know whether this thing is a dead duck or if we can salvage it.”

  “Sounds like I could have a job for less than a year and a half.”

  Howie said, “That’s up to you. Take care, and call me.”

  I sat down with Mary Clare and Jake and said, “This is where I came in: someone’s offering me a real job.” I was referring, of course, to Meany offering me the job managing the mall. I related my conversation with Howie Manheimer.

  Jake, casual as a sunning cat, said, “Considering it would be like falling off a log for you, I suggest you take it.”

  Mary Clare said, “If you can do that you could go to work for Rand Corporation or somebody afterwards.”

  “I dunno,” I said. “It would mean working with my old buddies at the University.”

  “So?”

  “I’m not sure I care to. Those sonsabitches threw me to the wolves.”

  “Then get off the dime,” Jake said, “and make a million dollars, or write a book about the campus revolts in Berkeley, or do whatever, but get off the dime.”

  I said, “I’ll have another martini,” wondering what they’d been talking about while I was downstairs. It occurred to me Jake might be tired of my squatting on his manse.

  We sat and looked out the window from a dining room where all of us had eaten at one time or another, on Berkeley, the city I still considered my home, despite all the crap that had gone on since Sixty-four. Beyond lay The City, which Jake and I and countless others considered Mecca. An early autumn hazed the air. It festered between the Claremont and the Golden Gate Bridge, the Campanile bisecting the picture, and Alcatraz like a surfaced submarine, dead in the water. Mist rose from the Bay’s shallows. An inversion layer kept haze and mist in place, and between them lay a clear band where you could almost make out the hands on the Ferry Building clock, which tourists were told had said the same time since the earthquake of 1906. We could see the middle but not the top of the Transamerica Tower. You could see enough to know it was a pyramid.

  I paid for the lunch. I didn’t have a lot of cash reserves, but I still had some credit card leeway, and Jake had been treating Clare and I for three weeks now.

  Back at the garage the Triumph sat in a mechanics bay, idling with a slight rock to the chassis. Jake and I followed Clare home. Going up Ashby and up the grade to the Caldecott Tunnel the exhaust pipe puffed black smoke. Downhill from the tunnel the black smoke disappeared. Then there was a little puff of black each time she accelerated from a stop.

  “What do you think?” I asked, “a tune-up, squirt some cleaner down the carburetor?”

  “Could be the stuff they flushed the crankcase with,” Jake said. “She’ll make it back, Robert, don’t worry. If she has to thumb, she’ll make it back.”

  three

  Were we going to leave well enough alone? Nah. It was too tempting. So Jake borrowed the Whitworth wrenches from a neighbor who owned an MGY. We started in on the Triumph, two bad-backed amateurs dividing the work according to what wasn’t likely to hurt us. We went over it from snout to asshole, reminiscing about cars we’d known, their many odors, new car interior perfume, the leather in status cars, gasoline, motor oil, the smell of parts washed in diesel. I voted for rust-proof primer as my all-time favorite car smell; Jake voted for ethyl gasoline.

  It was fun: we worked well together. Jake was an advocate of charming frozen nuts and other such impediments by the way he positioned his tongue, usually with the tip showing in a corner of his mouth: right corner for the foolish object being obstreperous, left corner for conquering the silly impediment. Less couth, I advocated clever combinations of oaths, as when I skinned my knuckles and called the TR3 ‘a jack-rabbit-fucking bug collector.’

  I’d been a serious hot-rodder; Jake owned a 1957 Mercedes 190SL roadster—a classic despite its relative newness?
?? a lustrous black on black, so shiny you could see your reflection well enough to shave by. When we’d changed all the Triumph’s belts and hoses, tweaked the timing, replaced spark plugs and leads, he wanted to knock out all the dings and paint the damned thing. Amanda put reality back into our love duet by wondering aloud how soon Clare could test drive the little darling. “And I forbid you, Mr. Gattling, to spend any more time tinkering. It’s the worst thing in the world you could do for your back.” It was not said good-naturedly.

  That evening I took Jake aside and asked him if that outburst meant Clare and I should vamoose.

  He said, “Amanda thinks Mary Clare is spoiled—that is, more spoiled than she is—but actually I think she’s a little jealous. You can’t hide it, chum: love has got you both sparkling. You were her special project, now she see you as Clare’s special project. Anyway, yes, Clare should get going and you should find a place as soon as you have a paycheck. I, for one, will miss you; and so will the kids.”

  “And here I thought it would be Clare not liking all the attention I paid to Amanda.”

  I overheard the continuation of their discussion when I was washing up on the mud porch.

  Jake said to Amanda, “As I see it, we have ringside seats to a transformation like Saul of Tarsus getting knocked on his ass—or was it off his ass?—by lightning. Maybe I’ve reached my dotage, but I’m rather fascinated.”

  “She doesn’t confide in me the way she does in you,” Amanda replied. “I don’t think she likes me.”

  “Dear, she concedes the title of ‘fairest in the land’ to you. She wouldn’t mind having your easy graces, either.”

  I had to face it: Clare was a man’s woman, she preferred men for everything but shopping and what she called ‘spa-ing.’

  *****

  This is Jake on tape about the dilemma:

  In the end the two questions, Mary Clare’s tenure and Robert’s back, were interconnected, which was more important than how any one of us felt about the other. If Mary Clare left the next day it would be for a motel; she still had hoops to jump through for the court before they’d let her head east. As long as she was around, she would get Robert’s higher quality attention. Because she and Robert were going through the phase of courtship where they unfold what they think is their true self to the beloved. And that was my rationalization for Clare staying. I wasn’t about to interrupt their colloquy as long as there was the least chance he’d drop the last veil and tell her about the Nevada desert.

  Pitted against my rationalization was Amanda’s own set of imperatives: not just her unspoken hankering for Robert’s attentions, which a blind man could have spotted, nor the challenge to the hegemony of her beauty, which the scintillating Clare represented. There were deep caverns of jealousy (“Do I need to shoot someone to get a little attention around here?”)

  She had proposed that Robert come stay with us. I had invited Mary Clare the night I found her attorney, Tony Arcata. I was reluctant to send her back to an apartment where she’d just shot her benefactor. I did it without consulting Amanda, not from thoughtlessness, I just was being thoughtful towards a beautiful young woman to the exclusion of my wife. And yes, I was dazzled by her: she changed daily, learning that life could be a holiday and a celebration. She danced for a time along the edge of losing her freedom, feeling all the while freer than she ever had in her life. After years of spinning in eddies of fear and self-loathing, she could see progress: one step of atonement, one step of improvement, for her they went hand in hand and they kept the books of the Great Accountant in the Sky balanced each step of the way.

  She did a good job of guarding against smugness, not so good a job guarding against euphoria. And the euphoria lit up her eyes so that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind of the love it represented. It was almost painful to see, the zeal, the quest for in-othering as she had had with no other man. Not only had they been through more for each other than most couples would ever dream, they had bestowed on each other, until new kinds of reality invaded their limbo, a more mature fantasy of immortality. Nothing would die, not love, not, certainly, the persons they loved, including each other. By the time Clare began the next phase of her life, her rescuing Robert from death had become a mythic act. They couldn’t recall the smell of whiskey or burnt gunpowder, the sick fear under police questioning, Meany’s arm poised to squander her lover’s handsome face.

  Another thorn in Amanda’s side: our son, Jimmy, who not only looked like Amanda but had always had her love lavished on him, fell in love with Mary Clare. Everywhere she went that he could, Jimmy would follow. He sat opposite her at dinner. She flirted with him, but he was too young to get it, he just talked more to her than he ever had to his mother or father.

  The evening after we picked up Clare’s car we made a trip to La Morinda to start retrieving personal belongings from the two apartments. Jimmy sat at the table after his sister was excused, the adults finishing their wine. He asked Clare, his brow furrowed with seriousness, “Did you really shoot a man?”

  Amanda’s brow furrowed too, deeper than the question merited. “You mind your mouth, young man.”

  He said, those replicas of his mother’s eyes fixed on his plate, “I just wondered if she still had the gun,” to which Mary Clare replied, “Sorry, Jimmy, the police took it away from me.”

  After dinner we piled into Robert’s truck and Amanda’s Saab, divided by sex, to descend to the freeway and snake over two sets of hills to La Morinda.

  I said to Jimmy on the way, “Do you understand why your mother was upset by your question at dinner?”

  “No.”

  “Mary Clare’s shooting Mr. Meany would be like Robert shooting me. Mr. Meany wasn’t a burglar, he was a friend.”

  Jimmy said, “But wasn’t he about to kill Mr. Gattling?”

  “She had to shoot him but she didn’t want to. Your mother is assuming she wants to forget the shooting, and asking her about it makes her hang on to the memory longer.”

  Jimmy turned to Robert, “But wasn’t she saving you, wasn’t she?” He was struggling to understand a part of the adult world.

  “Maybe,” Robert said, “if there wasn’t a gun handy she’d have done something that didn’t hurt Mr. Meany so much. You know, if the bullet had been an inch to the left, he’d be dead.”

  I said, “That’s why you should never own a handgun.”

  “What kind of a gun is a hand gun?” Jimmy asked.

  At Bobwhite Court Jimmy lugged one suitcase down the hall to the elevator and I carried Robert’s typewriter and another bag. When we reached the parking lot the three women were already piling boxes and bags into the Saab. Robert said, “How many more trips do you have to make?”

  Mary Clare said, “That’s it. I’m moved out.” What she was leaving with fit into the back seat and trunk of the Saab.

  “That was fast,” Robert said.

  “I never did unpack from moving down to your place.”

  Which prompted Robert to say, when we went back to clean up the apartment, “One thing about being a kept woman.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You get ready to go, you just vamoose. You don’t worry about cleaning up or the security deposit, you just vamoose.”

  Robert had left a number of questionable things for the last load, along with his cleaning materials. He had intended to pick up his janitor’s cart next door, and drive the truck back to Moraga.

  I said, “What do you need it for? Talk to the DA before you pick up the cart.”

  “What the shit, Jake, it’s mine.”

  “It just isn’t worth it. Something happens, the police will assume you went to provoke Meany.”

  He shot me a look that said he wished he would provoke Meany, he wished he were facing him for a rematch.

  four

  In the end we made two piles: keepers, to take down to the truck, discards, to take to the dumpster. Jake did the toting and hauling while I cleaned—mindful of the tricks the o
ccupational therapist had recommended for such tasks. I left Jake the floors and baseboards. When we got back to La Morinda I opted for leaving everything we could in the truck. Out on the patio we slugged down gin and tonic, stuff left over from my apartment. I groaned and griped about my back and Jake seconded the motion. I asked him how bad his back was.

  He made a ‘comme ci comme ça’ gesture. “It’s highly variable.”

  He told me about the time, in the army, he was on the base boxing team and pulled muscles in his back moving furniture in a day room, getting ready for inspection. The doctor taped him and it felt good enough to work out the next day. There was a meet with a visiting Marine team, and he was supposed to have an easy win.

  “The night of the meet I was nervous and conscious of the tape irritating my skin, so I told the trainer to peel it off.”

  “What happened? I asked.

  “Opening bell, I went out in the middle of the ring, the Marine throws a right hand lead, which I slip nicely—and my back goes out again.”

  “No shit.”

  “I couldn’t sit down between rounds. The whole fight I was reeling around like a drunk. The Marines in the audience thought he was beating the shit out of me. The judges, too.”

  “Patterson vs. Ali,” I said. Patterson had thrown out his back early in that fight.

  “About as humiliating as anything in my life—Patterson’s, too, I bet.”

  Earlier, when we had stashed the cleaning supplies in the truck, I said, “Why don’t you wait for me in the truck, Jake, I’ll go next door, turn in the keys and tell Meryl where to send the deposit.”

  “Do it by mail,” Jake said.

  ‘What’s wrong?”

  “You know damned well what’s wrong.”

  I said, “He won’t be there.”

  “You don’t know that, and even if he isn’t, it’s still provocative.”

  “Is it?” I turned my back and walked away. I sensed Jake behind me, which sent a twinge through my back muscles. At VMM Enterprises, Meryl was on vacation. A pretty young woman was subbing for her. She made no connection between me and why Mr. Meany wore his arm under his shirt. She smiled and said, “How can I help you?” bright and cheery, when Meany walked out of the inner office.

  Though one-armed, Meany’s step was firm. He weighed twenty pounds less, his neck no longer filling his collar, his jowls sagging, the lines in his face deeper. I was reminded of an angry samurai in Nineteenth Century Japanese woodcuts.