Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  I asked him what ‘otherness’ has to do with the student uprisings of the Sixties.

  —Their parents, he said, made the students feel like ‘others,’ so the students banded together to prove they weren’t the Others, they were the Us.

  —So, their Us was bigger than our Us.

  —Not so, Jake said. They won because they were willing to take the chance of writing new rules. The University kept playing by rules that had been evolving since Aristotle’s time, and one of the rules allowed the faculty to think freely but not the students. When the students pointed out that the faculty hadn’t had any original ideas since graduate school, the faculty—some of them, anyway—felt guilty enough to back the students’ ideas. This made news and the liberal press made the radical students into romantic heroes.

  —You ought to write my book, Jake.

  He took my notebook and flipped it open. —‘Otherness,’ ‘Squandering,’ ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Death.’ It’s all there. Your brain is eight years less ossified than mine.

  —Except I don’t know what the fuck it means.

  —Don’t worry about it. You have to take a leap, let go of doubt.

  —But how?

  —Quit trying to lead a separate life, Robert. You don’t, you’ll end up an eternal vagabond, spiritually and emotionally. Take up Mary Clare. Sure, dabble in other things, especially after she can afford to support you. Take some time off and emulate Graham Greene, write entertainments. Have fun and don’t worry about being published, and you will be. But make Mary Clare your life, because she is a soul sent into this world to further mankind, and she would very neatly fit as your life’s ambition.

  *****

  After lunch I was pensive. I took my notebook along, heading for Peet’s on Vine Street. Balancing the coffee of the gods on my knee, I sat at a tiny table and, after my Four Fundamentals of Smashing Fiction, I wrote: ‘Remorse’ and ‘Grief.’

  Jake, the imaginary interlocutor, said, —Do you really want to go there?

  —Uh, why not?

  —Might they not be mutually exclusive?

  —Oh, com’on, Jake, I think I can have remorse while I’m grieving.

  —Like you felt for the vagabond in the desert. But is it a universal duo? I think not. You bomb peasant farmers from thirty thousand feet and you have remorse: Merry Christmas, Ho Chi Min. You grieve for the fifty thousand dead GIs and the million dead Vietnamese. It’s only when you see the victim expire, hear his death rattle, close his eyes, that you might just combine the two feelings—and remember, they’re just feelings, electrical impulses in your brain.

  I drank the last of the Guatemalan Antigua and walked up Shattuck Avenue. Where it crossed University Avenue, a great number of people thronged, enough I wondered if there were an event—a protest or a happening.

  I was just on the verge of naming a new emotion, between remorse and grief, when Johnny, the page from the Phillip Morse ads, slipped through the throng, walked up cheerily in his pillbox hat and white gloves, all the brass buttons on his little chest gleaming, and said, “Call — for — Robert — Gattling!” I rubbed my eyes and shook my head.

  Saluting, Johnny said, “Call the Pritchett residence, please.”

  I jumped a mile. Johnny disappeared into the throng. I stood to one side and tried to look around a bevy of cute, happy girls coming towards me.

  On the southwest corner were two phone booths. When the light changed I sprinted across the street and called the Pritchetts’ number. Nora answered. What was Nora doing there on Saturday?

  “Bobby?” she said. She never called me Bobby. She pronounced the O like the O in remorse.

  “What is it, Nora?”

  “There comes a call from the hospital. about don Jacobo. You better go there. ¡Vete, vete!”

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “Yes. I stay with the children and I pray. You go with God, Bobby, before it is too late.”

  I cradled the receiver and ran.

  two

  Sprinting up University and onto the campus, up to the eucalyptus grove with the benches hewed from felled redwoods, I passed a single drummer starting to beat his deep-throated drum, tempered beat, drumming for a proud king dying. Ten beats into the lament, a second drummer, bongos between his knees, added soft grace notes. They stared at me without missing a beat as I turned uphill, crossing Campus Drive. Their music followed me. I went through the grounds of the President’s residence, under the cabled-braced arches of the stone pines’ gigantic boughs, over the wooden foot bridge, Strawberry Creek adding its contrapuntal plash to the disappearing drum beats. At Hearst and Euclid, just beyond North Gate, I ran out of steam, stood with my hands on knees, panting audibly.

  An old man waiting for the light to change approached me, a hand out, as if ready to catch me if I fell. “What’s the matter, son?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You looked so frightened.”

  “Frightened?”

  “Frightened,” the man repeated.

  “A friend . . . hospital . . . afraid he’ll die.”

  His eyes, so old that white rings had formed inside the rims of his irises, showed both sternness and compassion. He said, “You friend wouldn’t like it if you died too, trying to reach his side.”

  “Thank you,” I said, but immediately resumed my dash, crossing before the old man could, past the drug store, the Northgate Theater, splitting cadres of coeds, stumbling across Ridge Road, unable to run any more.

  I remembered as I walked, how, as a child, I came down to breakfast and everyone was sitting around the kitchen table except my mother. Don’t remember who told me she had died. It meant nothing to me. What did I know then about death, except a tiny skull I found in a vacant lot, a rat or a gopher, who knew? “What’s for breakfast?” I asked.

  I remember nothing of the first half of the drive to the hospital. I may have sped, I don’t remember traffic or weather or the state of the hills’ grasses. A newsreel ran in my head, Jake and Robert, Robert and Mary Clare, Mary Clare and Jake, Meany and Jake and Mary Clare and Robert, a summer’s night with stars falling.

  Jake and I had been on separate paths that converged. Something grew between us more intimate than brothers, or father and son, a sense of the never-ending things we shared. Not just a matter of me and thee, because there was also I, the subject acting upon the object, which was what me and thee were. And thus . . . and thus there is a sort of triangle in every two person intimacy. Never exclusiveness, which is what Suzanne Arnold wanted more than sex, nothing closer than the points that marked the ends of a bigger line where it had been cut into two shorter ones. I wanted to weep.

  I could smell myself, the sweat of all the unaccustomed running, and my back hurt, tension and jarring. I ran into persons I knew or had been introduced to, and I made my way to a room in the ICU. Amanda was coming out of the room as I approached. I braced for scalding vituperation; none was left in her. I looked past her into the room just as golden Theresa was pulling the curtain around the bed, and I saw just his face, eyes closed, jaw slack. Amanda put a hand on my chest and stopped me from going in.

  “I want to see him.”

  “You will see him.”

  She unexpectedly took me by the arm and led me away, into a quiet room, the room where doctors tell families a loved one hasn’t made it.

  “Before he died he said, ‘I’ve called off the truce, Mandy.’ He begged me to make up with you.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  She said, “He whispered the words of a spiritual I didn’t know he knew. He said ‘My latest sun is sinkin' fast.’ And just at the end he squeezed my hand ever so slightly and said, ‘I hear the sound of wings.’”

  “I don’t know that song,” I said, but it brought tears anyway.

  “I’m going to have someone sing it at his memorial service.”

  “He wasn’t a religious man,” I said, trying to put everything together in my head.

  “I suspect it w
as an echo from his childhood, when his religion was whatever his parents’ was. —How did you know to come?”

  “Remember Phillip Morris cigarettes? Remember the page boy, Johnny?”

  “Yes.”

  “He found me on a street corner in Berkeley.”

  “I don’t understand,” Amanda said.

  “He came up to me—I know it’s pure nonsense, but he came up to me and told me to call the house. Nora said I should come.”

  “He smoked them when I first met him, because of the cork tips.” She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t going to cry. As long as she didn’t, I wasn’t going to break down.

  “You better go home, hadn’t you?”

  She said, “I have some things to do here, first. Where will you be?”

  “I’m going to go home and call Clare.”

  We walked out into the hall together. “Poor girl. This is the second time this has happened.”

  “Amanda, I’m glad you two made peace.”

  I saw tears forming. She said, “Isn’t it a pity it happened so late. I was so jealous of you, being happy with him. He could have had an affair, I wouldn’t have minded it as much.”

  I shrugged, what else could I do?

  “Oh hell,” she said, “walk me to my car, will you? I can’t take any more of this.” She put a hand to her face for a moment and closed her eyes.

  Outside birds sang, a breeze blew, it was hot and dry. I could hear the hardware on a flagpole clanking erratically. There was some message in the click of Amanda’s heels on the pavement. “Children are so lucky,” she said at last.

  “How do you mean?”

  “They can let go. They don’t have any integrity to protect, if you know what I mean. It’s all right to go to pieces.”

  I said, “They’ll go to pieces if you let them know it’s all right to do that.”

  Just as we came to her car she said, “Theresa told me something he said before I got there. He said, ‘Tell him it’s the Divine Accident for sure.”

  I smiled.

  “What does it mean?”

  I told her, as best I could.

  “Okay, I understand the words, now what does it really mean?”

  “It’s God versus the random universe. Free will versus predestination. I don’t know—blind luck versus purpose?”

  She said, “I suppose I’ll never understand it, then.”

  “It was something I started. I used it to mean an event you can’t pin on anyone but it affects the hell out of your life anyway, so you blame the gods for it.”

  “Did he think that?” Amanda asked.

  I shook my head. “He believed you could incorporate every accident into your life if you supplied enough will.”

  She emitted a small laugh and shook her head.

  “In character, wouldn’t you say?”

  She said, “I wouldn’t know.”

  She turned and embraced me; I smelled the woman of her, the Southern belle and the doctor.

  She said, sadly, in my ear, “I hated you, oh how I hated you, but I would be spiting Jake if I kept on hating. It’s practically against the Hippocratic Oath.”

  She sniffled, as you do when you’re crying. She held on to me a few seconds more, to gain composure, and stepped away, saying with her tear-reddened eyes what we said as kids, ‘King’s ex?’

  three

  Apt outtake from Jake’s recordings:

  You wonder what people are afraid of, they are afraid of letting go. Letting go is giving up all ties that bind, being as free as every smart, healthy, autonomous adult thinks he is as he locks himself into taxing, boring, demeaning, ritualized roles, such as planner, vice president, president or legislator. The English are frank about not wanting to fuck up or appear to fuck up. Brits accept the ties that bind. We do the same thing, we just pretend we don’t. We, too, move carefully, not making mistakes.

  The ultimate rap on bureaucrats: they dare not make mistakes, which means they take no chances. If you never woo the fair lady, you’ll never be rejected.

  —You’ll never be accepted, either.

  Robert hadn’t had to let go of anything in the first part of his life. You may ask if I’m forgetting that he lost his mother at six, but did he ever really let go of her? I guessing not. I’ve never really been inside his head, I’ve just pretended. From all he’s said, though, I get the idea he’s carried mama around, fresh and pure, to hold up to every woman he met, got the hots for, bedded or even loved, with the verdict that none could ever fill the place of MOTHER, even when, like all of us, he needed some mothering once in a while. The rareness of Robert’s life, its genuine Divine Accident, was its congruity. It all fit, everything matched up, end-to-end, from birth to majority to the one great trauma of his psychic life, which was not a beginning, it was a climax.

  That was when the baggage train plunged off the end of the track into a chasm that wasn’t even on the map.

  This is how I thought as I lay waiting while the body mechanics debated when they best go in and do their business, or, rather, undo whatever had been fucked up when they had to do it on the fly.

  I discovered, too, in the same package as the insight into Robert, the empty cocoon of my anger towards Amanda. I don’t mean the truce, I mean the hurt on which the truce was based. It had, like the hidden moth, flown the pupa. I searched in dark places and couldn’t find it.

  The waking clarity was so different from the first operation, when I was out to breakfast and dinner as well as lunch for days. This time I was able to speak without anger or shame to Amanda.

  “Don’t keep Robert away this time; he needs me.”

  She said, “Robert needs you, Mary Clare needs you; they’re a couple of leeches, they’re bleeding you white.”

  “I’ve got the energy, Amanda, trust me.”

  “Jake, Jake, Jake. Will you have enough left over for me and the kids? I’m worn out . . . almost twenty years of this.”

  “I know, I know. Poor Mandy, forgive me. And forgive me for being so cavalier with my hide. Forgive me for the stiff-arm out front since the beginning. If I survive this, let’s make a new beginning. I’ve shed enough blood for both of us, dear. Let’s make peace for the rest of our lives.”

  —Another observation: it is easy to let go of one’s life. With all the poking around inside my chest, and then the flat tire repair on my aorta, I felt ready to let go and just skip the pain and dementia (I was cuckoo for a while) and the requirements of healing my body. At some point in there, I realized I was more afraid of going on living than of dying. What was I to do?

  Robert had been right in what he told Sergeant Rutledge: I wanted to stay alive to write. I just worried about having enough time for a million word apprenticeship, having the self-discipline. The hunger for accomplishment was the hardest thing to have. I knew, as surely as I knew my name, being the best writer or the best health planner or even the best human being of my age didn’t justify my existence. There was nothing to justify.

  The only thing I could think to do, second time facing the knife, was to clean up loose ends. Then, if I lived, I would be maximally useful to my world, and if I didn’t, no one would accuse me of dying of unfinished business.

  I don’t know that much about death myself, I have never killed anyone, I have stopped at least one person, an inmate of the army psychiatric facility, from killing herself, an act more prompted from fear than compassion: it would have been more merciful in that case to let her go ahead.

  I know more about suffering—I’m human, I know as much as the next man—and I knew that Robert suffered more than anyone of my acquaintance for an act in the past. It was as if he had rolled into the guilt of that desert death the human responsibility for everything that happened since he was born: tanks against spears in Abyssinia, the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, the Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  One time we talked about it he said, “Berkeley graduate, you’d think I coul
d handle it a little better, wouldn’t you.”

  Handle what?

  Handle confession.

  I wanted to raise my hand in the sign of the cross and intone the proper words: “. . . te absolvat . . .” but I could no more absolve him than I could raise my hand.

  Mary Clare, Robert; Mary Clare will have to do it.

  *****

  His voice had been getting fainter and fainter until the last minute, when it was almost impossible to catch. His breathing was a series of sighs. There were long gaps between the sentences.

  Of course I hadn’t listened to the tapes then. I listened to the darkness inside me until the darkness of the night descended, and then I called Mary Clare.

  A man answered, a man I could tell was Zev. He sounded like a Zev—a bull fighter or a pirate. I expected him to challenge my right to talk to his daughter. He didn’t even ask who I was.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “It’s me.”

  She said, “What’s up?”

  “Jake died today,” I said.

  There was a noise as if she got up and closed a door. “How could he? He made it through the operation okay.” Indignation in her voice. At me? As in, How dare you let him die? Maybe mad at her Great Accountant in the Sky?

  I said, “Congestive heart failure. Just not enough oomph to keep pumping. The pump broke, Clare, the pump broke down.”

  She said, after a long silence, “I’ve done everything I wanted to here. I’ll get on the first plane I can. —How are you holding up?”

  “Hasn’t sunk in yet. It’s like he faded away, blew away on the wind. Where has he gone, Clare?”

  She said, “He’ll come back, more real than the stars above. —Will you pick me up at the airport?”

  “Of course; why wouldn’t I?”

  “You know.”

  “I haven’t touched a drop. It wouldn’t seem right.”

  *****

  I spent years being a competent social drinker—until Nevada. It was after that the booze became a problem. And it was the worst problem when I was alone. If I could do something active it was better, so, in this case, waiting for Mary Clare to call and tell me when to pick her up, I went out and, under Abe Melnick’s motion activated lights, hosed off the truck. One of these days, I told myself, you need to buy a car, a plain old car.

  I washed the outside and thought about the debris that was accumulating in the back of the truck, “stuff,” things we had no place for inside the cottage. Like my hand tools, like the leftover cleaning tools I was never going to use again.