Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  “About the same chance as cancer spontaneously remitting. And it could suddenly get worse, too. —I’m going to have one more drink tonight, before I have to give up booze for the duration. You care to join me?”

  “Wish I could,” I said, “but I’ve got to get back.”

  Getting back? A lie. Fear made me leave, and fear made me obsess. I couldn’t think of anything but Jake dying. Instead of going home, I drove to La Morinda, to find Beatrice Hennessey’s letters. It was doing something, a tiny something, for Jake.

  It was my first time on Bobwhite Court since my final meeting with Meany. On first glance the offices looked unchanged. The new construction smell was gone from Homer Smith’s former office, the new paint blended with the old, you’d never know staid La Morinda had had its own little terrorist incident right in there.

  What was different, the signage on Meany’s office was bigger, calling itself VMM Enterprises, Robert Meany, President. A logo had been added, a moose’s head. It was a sign to fool those who never knew the old man into thinking the son was a competent successor. I smiled, having once tried to fool the old man with a sign myself.

  Meryl had changed, too—a tad slimmer, wearing what secretaries wear in the executive offices of Kaiser Steel or Sears Roebuck. Not showing provocative flesh, she was an old picture in a new frame.

  “I thought I might see you at the funeral,” she said.

  “I felt I might be persona non grata,” I said.

  “That hasn’t stopped you in the past.”

  And she was right: that wouldn’t have stopped me were I not so involved in the death, weren’t the last person to see Meany alive. I let that remark go with a shrug. I told her why I had dropped in.

  She said, “You still have your keys and we haven’t had time to change the locks.”

  I handed her the keys and invited her, with a gesture, to let me into Jake’s office. As she opened the door she said, “It’s all yours. —By the way, how is he?”

  “Mending,” I lied, trying not to give anything away with my face.

  “Does he blame Mr. Meany for his shooting?”

  “He never lost his grip on reality, Meryl.”

  “I think my boss got the worse end of the deal.”

  “Deal? There was no deal, Meryl.” I wanted to slap her silly, or grab her by the shoulders and shake her till her teeth rattled.

  At home that evening I poured myself a premixed martini from a jug in the freezer. I told Mary Clare about the turn of events.

  She said, “Are you worried Jake might die?” looking up from a learned journal.

  “Of course.” I explained how he wasn’t physically strong enough to be operated on but he could die if they didn’t operate soon.

  “Sounds more likely he won’t survive if he doesn’t have the operation.”

  I slugged down the martini and poured another. Mary Clare went back to reading.

  “Sure, just go back to your journal.”

  This time she lay the journal aside and looked me in the eye, brows narrowing in a frown. “I’m not stewing about things that haven’t happened yet. I can’t do that and go on living—I don’t have the emotional energy. I’ve got just enough of that to handle going back to school and having a life with you.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, “that’s good.” Remembering how Lana refused to admit, even to me, she’d been in any way involved in killing the drifter. But that wasn’t it, either. It was Mary Clare doing what I couldn’t, seeing death from God’s point of view, Sergeant Rutledge’s mere bagatelle.

  But if a friend’s mortality was something you could simply pass off, what was there worth sweating in this world? Should I have just shrugged when she shot Meany? Should I have said ‘so what?’ when Meany’s hired gun cut loose on Jake? Is that what our world was teaching us? Evers Kennedy Malcolm X King Kennedy.

  Jake on his tape remarks that I thought Mary Clare was being casual about his condition. She wasn’t. She was watching black clouds of pain and depression descending to envelop me.

  “Don’t close me out,” she said, rising and catching hold of my wrist.

  “Never mind,” I said, breaking her grip.

  “Is it a sin my emotions aren’t the same as yours?”

  “No,” I said, not able to look her in the eye. “Let’s drop it.” I went to the fridge and poured out more martini.

  “I can’t drop it, Bobby. I can’t stand it when you shut me out.”

  In a conversation about the Nevada drifter’s death, Jake had warned me that not telling Mary Clare about it might have consequences, and now I knew he was right. I was panicking about Jake’s possible demise and she didn’t understand the etiology of guilt as it relates to the dead. She didn’t know to what I hooked that possible demise. And if I told her now, it would seem contrived.

  “Bobby, Jake isn’t dead.”

  two

  Behind the ice cold mercy of vermouth-tinged gin, a suspicion lurked: Mary Clare was reconsidering. In the strip mall of my mind was a shop called Paranoia, and in the shop window hung a sign: “She’s moved in with a madman.” She was getting less consideration than my ghosts, whoever they might be. They were all tied together and I was scared shitless. Psycho scared; very unpleasant to be around. I would tell myself to snap out of it and the thought of facing my ghosts head-on sent me back to the bottle. It was all poppycock, of course, but there’s nothing like fear to dunk you in a load of poppycock.

  Mary Clare had managed to collect from the detective agency’s insurer for the biguglyBuick crushing her Triumph. They paid her enough to replace it with an MG Midget, which had a shorter wheel base and smaller engine than the Nash Metropolitan, the subcompact of the Fifties. I cautioned her to make sure the rubber band was wound tight before she drove it. One day, not long after learning that things were not well in Jake’s chest, I came home from work to find she and her Midget had ventured out into the world. A note on the fridge asked me to start dinner and she ‘d see me when she’d see me.

  She’d got a call from Jake: he was back in the hospital. They had inserted a drain between the outer walls of the aneurism and the graft they’d stitched through it. They were transfusing blood and supplementing his diet intravenously, getting him ready to go back in and repair the leaking graft. There was no more leeway—it was now or never.

  From Jake’s memoir on tape, it was clear he was going to keep adding to the record even when he was feeling like a rat shaken by a terrier. He had something to say about Mary Clare’s visit that day.

  *****

  From Jake’s taped record:

  Clare and I had become, in one way, better friends than Robert and I. There would never be the synonymy of backgrounds that made Robert and I “brothers under the skin,” but on the other hand, I didn’t have to dodge any ghosts, as I did with Robert. When she came to see me she was clearly unsettled by the recent spate of his ghost-wrestling.

  “What is it, Jake?” she asked me. “It’s as if I haven’t felt sufficiently guilty about shooting Meany—no, not my shooting him, about Meany shooting himself. I’m supposed to beat my breast over that. What’s he so scared of, Jake?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I asked, testing to see if he’d told her about the incident up the Washoe County arroyo.

  She didn’t bite but she wouldn’t be brushed off. She sat by my bed, looking into my eyes, not letting me off the hook. I squirmed until I couldn’t stand the awful, stony judgment of those eyes.

  “There’s more, Clare, but I’m not the one to tell you.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “How can I cope with what I don’t know?”

  I said, “Like the terror that sent you down to his place in the middle of the night not so long ago?”

  “I could explain that now, if you wanted to hear it.”

  “My only point is, Robert didn’t ask you the size and shape of your ghost, he took you in.”

  “He told you about that?” she said.

  “He tells me
lots of things, none idly. And they’re his things, not yours, not anyone else’s.”

  She exhaled with a deep sigh. She rose and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Thanks for reminding me.”

  So she waited while Robert went about the business of finding out what his business was in this world, and incidentally wrestling data into statistics, creating an advisory committee, rereading everything about physicians he’d found pertinent in his old job as Assistant Vice President.

  *****

  She came back after dark, the Midget’s little four-banger making that trademark sound like a loose tailpipe bracket. I was walking about in the backyard, on my third martini, the Melniks’ outdoor lights, on motion sensors, tracking my every step. I was crying, and if you’d asked me why, I couldn’t have given you a precise reason. I just didn’t want Clare to see it. But the lights caught a glistening on my cheek and she came up and wiped it away. I turned away from her.

  “Don’t be ashamed, Bobby.”

  “I’m sorry to burden you, but this is my only home, you’re my family now.”

  She held me while I sobbed against her shoulder. She made cooing sounds.

  At last I said, not looking at her, “I spent years trying what the Peaceniks advocate, unilateral disarmament. Only Death doesn’t play fair.”

  “Which death, Bobby? Did you love someone once who died young?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t love him, and he didn’t just up and die, either. I blew his brains out.”

  She waited for more, not asking, trying patience, afraid of the terrible words I’d used, not sure if I were speaking literally: hit man, CIA assassin, member of a firing squad?

  I took her hand, the tears suspended, and led her into our doll house. She said, trying to reconnect with me, “Well, at least it couldn’t be like Jake.”

  “No, it wasn’t like Jake. In Jake’s case I didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “No, no: you miss my point. Jake’s wounding set him free. He’s gotten right with the Universe at last, and that’s not chopped chicken liver.”

  “Yeah, a lot of good liberation does you if you aren’t around to enjoy it.”

  “Bobby, you don’t measure the value of a life in years.”

  And gradually, by discussing Jake, we got beyond the near collision with the truth I wasn’t ready to share. Jake, she contended, had been a captain on the bridge of a sinking ship, wearing the flimsy life jacket of a half-written novel. The gunshot wound in the chest, she argued, had absolved him of the moral obligation of staying on the bridge while the ship sank.

  I suggested that, having found his Beatrice, he might have found salvation another way. “But of course that doesn’t solve the problem of Amanda.”

  Clare said, “That’s only if you cast Amanda as a problem. What if she’s only an element in the creation of a whole new life?”

  I gave out with one of those shuddering sighs people sigh after crying. She’d somehow talked me past the ghosts—at least for the moment.

  “Just think,” she said. “If you had to pick the moment of your death, could it be better than finding enlightenment and love in the same year?”

  I said, “I’ve found the love part, anyway.”

  “That you have, laddie,” she said, and I laughed at her calling me ‘laddie.’

  three

  More from Jake’s tapes:

  I tried to explain why I loved Beatrice; Mary Clare tried to explain why she loved Robert. Both of us said it was something inside the loved one that comes shining through, something not shared by the rest of our species. That’s the best we could come up with. We concluded that love isn’t explained, it just is. So we left it at that. I wasn’t able to tell her what Robert had confided to me. Indeed, I didn’t know all of his back story. A man nearly dead from misunderstood intentions, I had my point of view. I hadn’t, until Clare came to see me, put myself in Robert’s place, a man who’d almost lost a friend because of an unnecessary lark that ended in a misunderstood gesture. I thought I knew a lot, knowing about the desert intruder, but I hadn’t added to it the impact of Moose Meany’s suicide, the destruction of an indestructible totem, exemplar of the most evolved species of real estate developer. It hadn’t dawned on me what was dawning on Robert-the-Phenomenologist: maybe there was a pattern in the Universe, maybe these events weren’t random, maybe he was the link, a mini-Angel of Death, the Samael of Berkeley.

  I’d read Crime and Punishment as an undergraduate and remember being moved with a sense of belonging, belonging to those who knew. Knew what? Knew Ginsberg’s “Howl” to be, somehow, the funeral dirge for 1950’s innocence. Knew why Hazel Motes, in Wise Blood, blinded himself and walked about with barbed wire wrapped around him.

  Funny, for me guilt was not as big a plague as shame. Guilt is attached to the heinous act; shame is getting caught in the act—others knowing. In a book that was big in my generation, that was called being “other-directed.” Robert—bad luck—was inner-directed and that tapeworm-like sentiment, guilt, chewed away at his innards. If only he’d remained a Catholic and was able to take that guilt to the confessional. Or, possibly better suited to his temperament, grown up in New Mexico in the heyday of Los Penitentes and spent Lent lashing himself.

  Robert slogged on, in his new role as janitor-cum-out-basket. Clare, meanwhile, eased herself back into Berkeley, defying the fear of running into Sandro or his playmate. And more, she bravely negotiated Telegraph Avenue between Sather Gate and the Mediterraneum, ready to meet the dealers from whom she’d bought coke and hash, finding, gratefully, none was there. They were, like bad dreams, banished from the new day in her life.

  When bravery seemed too easy, she actually tried to track down Sandro Tate, preferring an intentional confrontation to an unexpected one. He, too, was gone: back East once more? Japan? across the Bay in San Francisco? He wasn’t in Berkeley.

  She took to jogging the perimeter of the football practice field, liked watching the big, sweating animals go through their paces, the grunts and the clash of pads. She talked informally with the Director of Admissions about why the dean at Brandeis hadn’t yet come through for her. She was advised to be patient, nothing in the realm of changing official academic records came about quickly. She learned to be ingratiating without seeking out coattails to hide behind. She reported to her probation officer on schedule. She would not make it into graduate school this fall, but she had permission from the Chairman of the Sociology Department to audit one seminar and from the Chairman of the Department of Far Eastern Languages to use the language laboratory on a space-available basis. She wasn’t officially a scholar but she was a scholar in fact.

  It fit her. She was living proof that you could be beautiful and a scholar at once. Robert told me that, of an evening, he would glance up from his work and meet her eyes, to discover the granite look of someone whose brain works in ways not all of ours do, able not only to worry a problem but to solve it, a cross between a computer and an oracle. He didn’t for a moment begrudge her her brainpower.

  *****

  Before he was shot, advancing age had transformed Jake into a solid middleweight. In the hospital a second time, he was back down to junior welterweight. He let his whiskers grow out past the unkempt to a carefully trimmed beard not unlike Sigmund Freud’s in the portrait on the cover of TIME, though with the white broken by large black parentheses framing his chin. He resembled Freud superficially. The big difference was in the eyes. There are no pictures of Freud with eyes as benevolent as Jake’s. While Mary Clare thought it was “cute,” Amanda thought the beard was a terrible addition. It was the most visible sign of change since he’d been shot, seeming to grow whiter daily, and there had been too much change in their world already to suit Amanda.

  He told me, the second time I visited him while he was waiting for the second operation, the beard was a pledge. “No more dallying to satisfy what others’ expect of me. I’m through with bureaucracy and with bureaucrats. Let them find their own simpl
e-pretties.”

  “What if you suddenly need to bring in an income? What if you have to be the breadwinner?”

  “You mean if Amanda croaks before I do? Or runs off to South America with an orthopod and leaves the kids behind? I’d sell the house. Moraga has gained in cachet since we bought; I could live on the equity for many a year. And believe me, Amanda will not croak first—unless she gets run over by a garbage truck.”

  “The kids need a home,” I said.

  “Were I a single parent, I might take the kids down to Costa Rica, live off the interest.”

  “Would you?”

  He said, “That would depend.”

  He told me about Costa Rica. He and Amanda went there after she finished her residency. The kids were pre-school age. He said, “They spend more on education in Costa Rica than on infrastructure. Adults are expected to vote, and if you don’t, they consider you, legally, an infant. You can’t enter into a contract, including marriage. The voter turnout is astronomical, compared to ours; the literacy rate is higher than the United States. I took the kids there, they’d be well educated and they’d see how a democracy is really supposed to run.”

  “I’d miss you,” I said.

  “I’d miss you, too. You could come down and see me while Mary Clare was gallivanting around China.” He got a faraway look in his eye when he said that. As if it was not something likely to happen. A pipe dream.

  four

  I soon had reason to miss Mary Clare for real. Her language lab was ad lib, her sociology seminar met on Wednesdays, so she decided to take off on the next Thursday to visit her parents.

  “It’s a fact: you’re a masochist.”

  “No,” she said, “I’ve faced up to Vatche, I faced up to Sandro and his pal, I marched down Telegraph, ready to stare down the dope peddlers. Now I’m going to my parents’ and I’m going to drag my dad over the coals and maybe my mom, too. I may kick him in the nuts while I’m at it.”

  “Could you wait?” I asked.

  “For . . . ?”

  “Till Jake has his operation.”

  She looked off to the horizon. “Tell me when it is.”

  I broached the subject with Jake, being careful not to imply there was anything remotely as important. That morning Jake had had a briefing by his doctor, who drew him a diagram that looked like something out of Econ 1A, charting supply and demand. Only in the case of Jake’s insides, the lines showed the deterioration of the shunt/aorta connection and Jake’s vitality. The two lines intersected at a point after which the likelihood of survival went down sharply.