The Jag, the clothes, the walk: a woman beyond my current means. That speaks to the top of the brain, but something underneath, in the storm cellar of the mind, ignores those practicalities. God, how I wanted to see her face. Something in her motion, her carriage, in her cockiness, spoke to the old me. Married once to a woman who’d folded all too quickly in the face of adversity and cared not at all if her succumbing dragged me down, too, I longed for a woman able to stare down hard times.
It didn’t occur to me then, building my fantasy of the Penthouse Lady, what she was doing up there. Neither Meany nor his bodyguard, Meryl, had said someone was moving in up there, not at the same time as Meany moved his offices. A collaborator? A colleague? A silent partner? I got the ‘hands off’ message, I just couldn’t come up with a reason why. Oh well.
*****
After we got to know each other, Jake Pritchett mentioned he’d watch me on the back porch of the office building, taking a smoke break and staring up at the penthouse. He, too, had spotted the Penthouse Lady’s swagger, but more accurately parsed it as bravado. Nor was he fooled for one instant about what she was doing up there. He didn’t need her to be a mystery woman, because he didn’t need another woman in his life. He didn’t for an instant find her unattractive. He was, though, content to admire her virtues without moving close enough to probe their origins.
Next door to Meany’s suite of offices were those of an outfit called the Reproduction Clinic: offset printing, copying, binding, that sort of thing. Meany used their services often and wanted them close-by. He’d made their space to their specifications. I met the owners, Jane Chen and Margot Parmedes, the day they moved in, and we came to an immediate understanding about what cleanup they did (I hadn’t reckoned on such a tenant) and what I did. It was a good omen. They could have played me—I wasn’t, after all, a seasoned operator of a janitorial service—but they did the opposite. It was as if they guessed I was new to the business.
After our initial meeting Jake and I didn’t have a real conversation until one night in August. I was ferrying trash out to the dumpster and turned on the flood lamps, to discover him standing on the back porch in the dark. Suddenly illuminated, he looked like a possum fixed in headlights. Realizing instantly that he’d been looking at the stars, I turned out the lights again. I stopped beside him until my eyes could adjust to the dark. I lit a cigarette.
Then I saw what he was looking at. In short order a half dozen bits of interplanetary debris died in brilliant slashes across the sky.
“It reminds me of our mortality,” Jake said. “In some grand scheme we’re just streaks of light through the world’s night sky.”
“Are you a poet?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “Not usually. Maybe as much a poet as you are a janitor.”
I said, “You won’t blow my cover, will you?”
He chuckled louder. “I don’t know if Mr. Meany has figured you out, but the ladies at the Reproduction Clinic have.”
I said, “It ain’t much, but it’s about what I can manage at this point in my life.”
He said, “You’re too young for a mid-life crisis.”
We both paused and oohed and aahed at a succession of sparklers dashing themselves out in darkness.
“I was always precocious. But seriously, there are crises that alter your values—and how others value you.”
“I’m not a poet, but are you a psychotherapist?” he asked.
“Touché,” I said.
I could see my way to the dumpster without trouble and proceeded to dump my trash. As I came back I paused a moment more and was moved to say, “The tall stars held their peace,” a quote from a poem I loved.
He instantly responded, “And things were as they were.”
Well, I thought, going back to my rounds, any statistician who can quote James Wright can’t be all bad.
Later, up on the second floor, I wondered if he thought the same about me.
*****
The next time I saw Jake was in the men’s toilet. He told me later that I walked in looking bloodhound sad. He was washing his hands and he quipped, “How do you tell a Harvard kid from a Yalie?”
I gave him the required answer, how one washed his hands after he peed, the other beforehand. It was a chestnut from my undergrad days.
“And what about a Berkeley grad?” he asked.
I said, “The current bunch don’t wash at all.”
“When I was there we did. We were the last of the guys on the World War II GI Bill, we washed before and after.”
“Germophobes?” I asked.
“Partly conspicuous consumers, partly hedonists—we dug warm and squishy. It went with the split-level ranch house and the new car every third year.”
I said, “You were at Berkeley?”
“Class of Fifty-five.”
I said, “I graduated in Fifty-nine. Pardon me for saying, but there’s more than four years between us.”
“Add four years in the Army.”
I was just about to leave when he said, “You know, when a Berkeley grad of your years throws over his nine-to-five career and starts pushing a broom, the only thing that can make him look anything but dumb and happy is love. You look like you’ve got it bad.”
I thought, boy, is he getting personal. I wondered what could prompt that much empathy. Was he queer? Was he a busybody? Or was he just lonely as hell. I didn’t feel threatened but I did feel curious.
“You get done with the trash and the dust mop, stop in and drink coffee—or hooch, if that’s your preference—and tell me about it.”
“I just may do that,” I said, though inwardly ambivalent. Reluctant to let someone crack my shell yet longing for someone to say ‘there-there.’
six
Now I have a confession to make. No, not really a confession. It’s just that an accident of fate (neither a Divine Accident nor the Hand of God, as you shall see) changed what this piece I’m writing would have been. Dr. Deary said, “Go forth and write a novel with a Jake Pritchett in it,” and after all the angst about not fulfilling Jake’s deathbed wish, I was going to do just that, as a way of atoning, the penance that would go with her absolution. And I will write that novel. Only now the nature of the work has changed.
I had one hell of a time retrieving Jake’s manuscript and notes. His wife, Amanda, blamed me for his death and she was not about to honor a deathbed wish she hadn’t had confirmed by Jake himself. I had to grovel and plead in a thoroughly unvirile way to get the manuscript and everything associated with it. I actually had to rescue it from the trash can, one step ahead of the garbage truck. In the rescued trash bag I heaved into my old panel truck that day, menaced by a strapping scavenger, I found not only the partial manuscript of “The Witch’s House” and its attendant notes, I discovered a smaller plastic bag in the bottom. From it, abracadabra, thirteen tape cassettes emerged. None was labeled as to contents, only “1,” “2,” “3,” etc., the sides labeled A and B. More visual than audial, I read the manuscript and notes first, and it was only after my last session with Dr. Deary that I rummaged around and found tape 1 and put side A into my clunky cassette player. I was jolted by the voice of Jake Pritchett talking about me.
Mary Clare was up in the loft of our cottage, sprawled on the bed, her favorite studying venue save the typewriter. She came clattering down the stairs and looked over the railing and said, after she took in the scene, “Turn that off,” her voice simultaneously choked and strident.
I did. I admit, I wasn’t prepared either. A voice from the grave is a dodgy cliché, yet the modulated baritone voice, known to me as well as any in the world, came across as ghostly. In one way it was no different from hearing the recently deceased Duke Ellington at the piano. In a more particular way, it was the words of a man I’d come to regard as my mentor.
My urge to keep listening was tempered by the idea of listening to thirteen tapes dictated by my deceased friend. And there was a practical problem: airing Jake tapes w
hile Mary Clare was studying. It was a subliminal irritant she didn’t need to suffer. I knew that among my unpacked rummage I had a handheld portable cassette player which, with earphones, would let me listen anywhere without disturbing my mate or anyone else.
All I had heard on the tape before I shut it off was, “Like the hero of a Forties movie, Robert had it bad.” My God, I thought, when did he record that? No time signature, no context, unless it was the next thing on the tape.
Upstairs Mary Clare rolled over on her scattered papers as I reached the loft and said, “What was that?”
I told her.
“Sorry I overreacted. I heard that voice and I swear my heart raced. What’s on the tapes?”
I shrugged. “I just heard the one sentence. I have no idea if there’s anything else. They’re surely not all about me.”
“All about us, you mean. We were his pet project in his last days.”
I shrugged; I shuddered. “I don’t know if I can take it.”
She said, “I know I can’t. It’s too soon.”
“I’ll buy some earphones. —Listen, why don’t we trade places and I can get some sleep.”
Alone in the loft, lights out and covers under my chin, it took forever to fall asleep. I did the arithmetic in my head: if Jake used sixty minute tapes, that’s seven hundred minutes; if they’re ninety minute tapes that’s over a thousand minutes. If Jake had spoken at an average of , say, a hundred and fifty words a minute, that was . . . novel-length. I got up and took an antihistamine, the kind that are supposed to put you to sleep, but it didn’t. I wrestled covers until, late in the night it seemed, a familiar nose nuzzled into the back of my neck and I mumbled, “Night-night.”
“They’re all about you,” she said in a sleep-bound voice. “And me. And some others you can guess.”
“You listened to them, you rat,” I muttered.
“I couldn’t help it, Bobby. It’s good stuff. He loved you.” Her soft crying shook the bed; she took a large sip of air.
I turned over and got nose to nose with her. “He loved you, too.”
“He did indeed,” her voice still sleep-bound behind a sniffle.
“Tomorrow I have to figure out what to do.”
She said, “Take the day off and listen to the tapes.”
“No, with earphones I can listen to them tomorrow night. But what do I do with what’s on the tapes?”
“You’ll do right by them.” An emphatic command followed by a big yawn.
*****
At work the next day I was off my game. On quick outs I dropped passes. I got faked out by stupid little incidents that should have meant nothing. At noon I ate a sandwich on the run, cruised University Avenue until I hit an electronics retailer and bought a cheap set of ear buds I was told were just right for voice recordings. I bought an eight-pack of batteries for the hand-held. The afternoon went smoother and faster than the morning. I usually stopped in the boss’s office before I went home and reviewed the day’s events, but that night I gave him a wide berth as I ducked out it just after five.
Mary Clare wasn’t home when I got there, dinner had to be cooked, and I decided, as long as I was cooking it, I’d listen to Jake’s tapes instead of news.
Tie off, apron on, I prepped veggies for a salad, to go with a chili verde I’d made Sunday to last till Friday. I drank wine as I prepped, only I kept stopping and listening, beginning with Jake’s opinion about why I wasn’t waltzing up to the penthouse and sweeping Mary Clare off her feet. I got the impression he was vicariously living a romance he wished he’d had in his life.
And suddenly the pauses weren’t to take in Jake’s words, they were to take stock of whether I wasn’t still in the limbo of a lover who lacked unreserved commitment.
Why?
Luckily I was saved by my mate walking through the door, bringing fresh air and vitality with her. She ran upstairs, yelling as she went, “Pour me a vino, will you, baby?”
By the time she’d changed and reached the kitchen I’d turned Jake off and turned on a new news program, “All Things Considered.”
We heard righteously huffy denials of anything untoward happening at Watergate. We heard commentary about what would have happened if the timing had been different. Would the voting public, knowing the extent of Nixon’s dirty tricks, have reelected him? The commentator thought yes. And still, everything was denied.
I poured myself more wine and topped off Mary Clare’s.
“So what are you going to do?”
“About Nixon?”
“About the tapes, dummy.”
I said, “For now, keep listening.”
*****
At first I tried to take notes, but after stopping and starting the first tape and jotting, I decided I had to listen to all of them before making notes, or I’d lose the continuity. It was exasperating but rewarding work in one sense; in another it was as harrowing as thirteen hours on a psychoanalyst’s couch.
By the time I went to bed I gathered these tapes had been recorded after Jake was shot, but covered the period since we first met. Jake couldn’t type after his surgery, and he gave up any pretense of working as a consultant. With him home, Amanda could scrub onto more surgeries while Jake took more responsibility for the children. The Pritchetts had help, he wasn’t getting the kids ready for school, he was there to make decisions, to settle squabbles, and to reassure and otherwise nurture. Which left him, must have left him, a fair amount of time to talk into his recorder.
A couple of cassettes into this memoir the temptation to transcript Jake’s words and make it into a roman à clef about a fictionalized Robert Gattling. It would be finishing a work by Jake, though not the witch novel. Aren’t you supposed to write about what you know? Well, I certainly knew myself better than I knew anything else in the world.
Except I began to sense that Jake knew me better than I knew myself. He may have known me better than I wanted to know myself.
I kept listening and pondering. I couldn’t shake the fear that the closer I came to confronting myself the more likely I would end in fleeing myself.
The Pritchett Tapes
one
I never go around wondering what people think about me. I never imagine conversations over coffee about my past or future. Oh, I’ve made some embarrassing missteps in my life and was sure all my friends knew about them and censored me for them. When I took the fatal misstep in the Nevada desert that ended my University career, many persons did know about it—all of Berkeley in fact. Many acquaintances were embarrassed for me. Some were judgmental enough to cross the street to avoid bumping into me. One friend, a CPA who looked more suited to boarding Spanish galleons in pirate movies, said, when I tried to explain what went on, “Robert, you don’t need to explain it to your friends and your enemies aren’t going to believe you anyway.” Amen.
It’s when we’re shamed or embarrassed we wonder what others are thinking about us. Jake’s tapes went beyond shame and embarrassment, they were hours of reflection on the subject of myself. If Jake hadn’t been a friend, in the truest sense of the word, I would have felt as if I were being stalked.
*****
Jake referred to me early on tape 1—I think as a rhetorical device more than a certainty—as “my friend, my boon companion.” This is what makes me date the tapes from after his wounding. He recited this, too, on tape 1: “We’ve only known each other a little while, but I know Robert better than anyone in the world. By chance we selected paths in life with uncanny synonymy—both the things we did and how we did them: boxer, janitor, bureaucrat; his marriage shattered by a single traumatic event, mine too.”
He goes on to say, “Before I met Robert I never stopped to think about how we learn about ourselves. We learn about ourselves reflected in others—his triumphs compared to mine, his defeats, his catastrophe. Otherwise, how I play to the rest of the world would be a complete mystery. I watch Robert from afar and see myself, eight years younger. I see my double, and invisible fin
gers pluck icily at my spine.”
His first curiosity—God, I must have been transparent—was my instant and thorough attraction to Mary Clare. No, not the attraction, my reluctance to do something about it. Eventually my curiosity about Jake’s nighttime occupation led me to take him up on his offer of coffee or hooch. I was straightening his office when he repeated the offer, and I said, “I have the foyer to clean after this, and putting away my gear, then I’ll be back—if you’re still going to be around.”
“I will,” he said.
I declined the coffee as too close to bedtime and he smiled and brought out a bottle of what at first glance looked to be scotch. “I’ve been waiting for an excuse to try this.” It wasn’t scotch, it was Irish, from a distillery I’d never heard of. He said they aged their product in Madeira casks.
We sipped it from glasses shaped like Scottish thistles. “Very chi-chi,” I said.
“Chi-chi Irish?”
“No,” I said, “the whole set-up: the rare Irish, the uncommon glasses. It surprises me—not exactly what I expected.”
“You must meet my wife, Amanda. The whole set-up was a birthday gift from her. These glasses, I discovered, would each buy you another bottle of good Irish.”
“Here’s to Amanda,” I said, raising my glass.
He said, “Amanda would surprise you.”
“Oh?”
“She’s every bit as beautiful as your Penthouse Lady. Different model altogether, a limousine compared to a sports car, but striking.”
“Limousine. That’s an interesting image.”
“Longer of line is what I meant—tall, angular.”
I sipped and reflected. I saw a woman with legs up to here, sitting in a leather easy chair, lithe limbs demurely crossed, skirt just to the knees. Finally, I asked him how they’d met.
Well, he was invited to a meeting of the Redwood Empire Medical Association, to explain a project he was doing with the county public health departments in their area. She was on the association’s board.