Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  It struck me, as I was washing, I had plenty of time to have a couple of drinks and metabolize the alcohol before I had to go to the airport. I went in and mixed a new batch of Robert’s Martinis—mediocre gin, good vermouth, exactly four to one, with a half teaspoon of bitters per bottle. The first couple I do over ice, and it is a different drink, the ice diluting the booze, easier to get down.

  I told myself as I mixed, Robert, you aren’t afraid of dying. I would gladly have traded places with Jake, gladly. Except for Mary Clare. It was not that I hadn’t been matter-of-fact about death, either. I remember watching a lab tech, a microbiologist by education, exsanguinating a rhesus monkey. The monkey, that particular monkey, was valuable as a source of hyperimmune serum, I forget against what antigen. The microbiologist very gently and calmly strapped the animal down on a gurney, and the monkey watched as she inserted the needle into its vein, and kept watching, until its eyelids began to droop and it went to sleep. I remember thinking at the time it was not a bad way to go. Clean. Neat. Guaranteed painless.

  Further back in my life I remember going out on the desert near Palm Springs with Bert, shooting rabbits. Why? Do you really need to ask a thirteen-year-old with a .22 why he’s shooting rabbits? There’s this gun, and it needs something to shoot at, and the boy needs to feel in touch with manhood, loading, aiming, firing.

  It was a north coast day, not a desert day, fine mist of a rain. My brother and I. Only our contact with the ground and the brush broke the cathedral-like silence. Then the far-off cry of a hawk startled us, and there it was, silhouetted against the leaden sky, so startling my brother shot wildly after the sound and the silent wings. Prisms of moisture stood on the tips of greasewood boughs, on the tips of single leaves. And yet the ground sucked up the moisture, so that there was nary a puddle, much less a rivulet or the torrents of a flash flood.

  And through this magic came the swift flash, the long-legged hare running silently, flashing the deception of his white underside, changing direction. Bert whistled; the rabbit stopped; I fired. A kick, cavorting, a playful bounce. I went over to the animal and he was stretched out, his mouth open, the rodent incisors isolated, the jaw muscles taut, rictus signaling the bite of mortality.

  Imagine, then, the thrill engendered by a sawed-off shotgun, which is to a .22 what a golf cart is to a Corvette. The gun was smooth and curved and compact, a pet cobra. I knew I’d made a mistake committing to buying it, but secretly I wanted it. I became angry when Lana suggested it could go off accidentally. Is a clumsy move in the ring the boxing shoes’ fault? Those feather light black shoes never falter.

  The phone rang. One more sip. One last skip of a heartbeat. Reality returns.

  four

  She boarded the Midnight Special, although it wasn’t midnight until it landed and took off again from Los Angeles, the last PSA flight to Oakland until the morning commute.

  Flew with lights off and seat back, feigning sleep to forestall neighbors’ small talk, but watching lights go by below, the bedroom lights of Southern California’s megalopolis sliding in and out of the clouddark.

  Through the needling whine of taxiing jet engines, she saw her mate before I saw her, not yet hiding my own clouddark. She waited for the tired and expectant to pull down their shopping bags and attaché cases from the overhead. And so wasn’t the first off the plane, nor the fiftieth. I had edged up the boarding ramp, impatient now that succor was nigh, while her face asked if I would recognize her in the new clothes Zev gave her as she snipped the strings usually attached.

  Of course I did. Recognized her despite the tailored pea jacket and cowboy boots. Composed. Not ready to let go of stern repression. I pecked her cheek, took her carry-on, only a squeeze of the hand betraying the discomposure inside me.

  We ascended the ramp through knots of reunited lovers and returned warriors, up the pastel concrete tube from gate to terminal, breasting eddies of Hari Krishnas and Moonies selling flowers and Vedas, when Clare, no doubt tired of waiting for me to disburse them, intercepted a sweet young viper about to pin a carnation on my lapel and said, “Fuck off!” and the swirls of unwashed beggars parted.

  “How was the flight?” I asked, that hurdle passed.

  “Squalling babies. Were you ever on a plane at night when there weren’t squalling babies?”

  As we walked across the parking structure she said, “I only broke down once, in the ladies’ room at Lindbergh Field. I got mothered by a pair of blue-haired dowagers from Phoenix—they were marvelous. They never got how I was connected to Jake, but it didn’t matter. I needed mothering and they were, by God, going to mother me.”

  Abreast of Emeryville’s clam-reeking mud flats, the Clorox building lights reflecting off the lagoon opposite, I said, “Tell me about your folks.”

  She asked, “Do you want it in a nutshell, or do you want the five-ninety-five special version?”

  I didn’t know what to ask for, I was just breaking the silence.

  She said, “Did I ever tell you that my grandfather was the Harbor Master of Port Arthur, in Siberia?”

  “Zev’s father? Is that pertinent?”

  “Everything’s pertinent.”

  I said, Give me the TIME magazine pithy overview.”

  “On the off chance that you’d ask me to do that, I thought about it while we were flying over all the swimming pools in Los Angeles, waiting to land. Here’s what it boils down to: you can tell the worst things about yourself and if you tell them right, they won’t sound horrible to your listeners.—Unless they have a case of jealousy. Miriam was fascinated but pretended to be horrified. Zev didn’t do so well—he really does have a thing for me, he’s horribly jealous. But that’s his problem now. I didn’t heap one teaspoon of ashes on my head and I didn’t rend the hem of a single garment.”

  “Doesn’t sound too satisfying.”

  Clare said, “Oh but it was. I had to keep my dukes up the whole time, or Zev would have had me wrapped up for the rest of my life. So I went for it. I cleaned the slate. I must have covered every single hurt and resentment and scar—and they’re gone.”

  “What about the piano?”

  “You would think of that.” Zev bought her a piano when she was eight. The ten years she played it, it was always her piano. When she married Andy and wanted to sell the piano to help him out of a financial jam, Zev threw a tantrum, would not let anyone take it away. He wasn’t going to finance the goddam goy who violated his little girl.

  She said, “I gave it back. I made sure it was when I was talking to both of them—there were things I wasn’t going to say in mixed company, you know—I made him a gift of my piano.”

  “And how did he take that?” I asked.

  “He was too punchy to get it. You have to realize, the last time they saw me was Thanksgiving, four years ago. And they knew as much about me as most parents know about bratty daughters, which is highly superficial stuff. So it was sort of nonstop, heavy-duty harangue from the time Zev picked me up at the airport to the time my sister, Poppy, took me back.”

  “Miriam didn’t come to the airport?”

  “Daddy decided it would be too much for her. Truth is, he wanted me to himself long enough to sink his claws into me again. I was supposed to tell him everything and her nothing, she was still going through the change, don’t you know, and he didn’t think it would be good for her.”

  “You had a couple of busy days. —What’s the footnote to the bottom line?”

  “Footnote?”

  “I assume your parents survived the raking-over without expiring or having a falling-down fit.”

  “Ah,” Mary Clare said. “It occurred to me somewhere along the way—out walking the beach with Poppy, as a matter of fact—there’s damned few persons could have pulled off what I did. And the only reason I could was that I’d been in the castle keep long enough to know I need to be hooked into people. I need ties, I need family. So my really elegant achievement was wiping my slate clean without doing theirs. In o
ther words, we’re still on speaking terms.”

  “Not the way I would have done it.”

  “Nope. I could no more have done it your way than I could become a nun.”

  “I’m only slightly changing the subject when I ask if I can change,” I said.

  “I have,” she said.

  “But you see what happens.”

  “What happens, Bobby?”

  “You get used to someone in your life and they have the bad grace to have had an aneurism when they were shot.”

  She shifted around in the seat, tucking a knee under her. We came to the light at Shattuck, where I stopped for a blinking red. She said, “Look at me, mister.”

  I looked at her.

  “I am going to outlive you, buster. I am going to bury you. So forget about some Divine Accident doing me in, you’re stuck with me.”

  I turned left and proceeded to the Melnik’s house. I parked so that we were not activating Abe’s security lights. “I’ve abandoned the Divine Accident, Clare, so you don’t need to worry.”

  We sat in the dark for a moment before she said, “You know, I thought I was making real progress, accepting the Divine Accident. I mean, it isn’t exactly Twentieth Century ontology, but it’s getting up there with Spinoza, maybe. Why’d you drop it?”

  I said, “I kept toting it up, whole damned thing was my fault—all the deaths.”

  “The guy Homer blew up with his booby trap?”

  “If Marta hadn’t called me, I would have gone in there and detonated the letter bomb myself.”

  “Marta?”

  “I told you about her. I took my break when I did because Marta asked me to meet her for coffee.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I was one of Marta’s loose end, and she was tying up loose ends before she got married.”

  “And that doesn’t qualify as a Divine Accident? I’d say being tied up as a loose end while the bomb went off qualifies plenty.”

  “But see, if I throw over the Divine Accident, then I’m only responsible for one death. Not Meany’s, not Jake’s, not José Garcia’s.”

  The engine’s cooling produced a ping that was out of phase with the fiddling of a cricket slowing down as the ante meridian earth cooled.

  “Will you help me, Clare?”

  She slid across the seat and put her arms around me. “That’s what I came back for.”

  She held me and rocked me and slowly the tears came, and then they came faster, until I was wracked with sobs and still she rocked me, while I clung to her like a waif afraid of losing he last refuge.

  five

  My waking heart missed a beat: cricket chirrups replaced by the distant hum of Berkeley rising from sleep: subliminal lullaby for an ex-janitor. And then, the initial salvo of Monday’s wind-up alarm routing Sunday night dreams of skipping work to wallow in mourning.

  At nine o’clock my advisory committee would meet for the first time, and anything short of being run over by a garbage truck would not excuse me, who had, in effect, thrown down a gauntlet at Stu Katz’s feet.

  I lurched into the shower, to have Mary Clare step in as I exited, neither of us up to talking yet. I shaved, wiping the mirror often with pruned fingers. I hadn’t a pressed suit. Saturday’s breakfast dishes still lolled in the sink. I pressed while Mary Clare cleared and cooked, the dimensions of the cottage leaving us in earshot of each other; she talked over the gurgle of percolating coffee.

  In a sleepy voice she made commentary on her tale of the previous night, wondering aloud where she’d be—and whether she, Mary Clare Morrison, would even be—if the Bolsheviks hadn’t chased her grandfather out of Port Arthur. Or if Zev had been born a day the longshoremen struck instead of six months earlier.

  I burned my finger on the iron and said, “Shit,” louder than the burn merited.

  “What, dear?” Mary Clare asked, beginning to understand the language of my expletives.

  “I didn’t arrange for any refreshments this morning.”

  My dip into reality cut short her commentary. I called out, “Did you tell your dad about me?” I needed her to keep talking.

  She said, “After Miriam softened him up.” (At my elbow with a cup of hot coffee, her voice modulated.) “He wanted me to promise I wouldn’t marry you.”

  “Is that all?”

  “He wanted me to move to La Jolla” (returning to the stove) “and mix with their friends, so I’d bump into some nice Jewish boy and get married and have a nice life.”

  I asked her how she responded to that.

  She said, “I told him all the nice Jewish boys my age were married to fat little Jewish housewives my age and anybody left over was either queer or just checked out of Sonoma State Hospital.”

  “I bet that pissed him off.” I was touching up the last dress shirt I’d worn.

  “Didn’t it, though. He ranted and raved about how well I’d been brought up and how badly I’d turned out—all the things I needed to hear.”

  “And then what?”

  “He took me off to one of his shops and loaded me up with clothes and tried to give me money. I took the clothes but refused the money. I told him he could put it in a trust fund for his first grandson.”

  I went into the galley. “You aren’t pregnant, are you?”

  “Not even in jest.”

  “And then what?”

  “Zev and I got home in time for your call, which interrupted the visit, probably at a good stopping point, although not the one either of us was particularly aiming for.” She called the airport and dashed around, trying to pack all the new things her father bought her, as well as the old things, with Zev telling her he wouldn’t allow her to be seen in “those rags” and interfering with her progress in general, feeling her slipping out of his grasp, until she told him to go fuck himself.

  “That’s why Poppy had to drive me to the airport.”

  “Your sister still lives at home?” I asked.

  “No, but she and her husband live right on the other side of the coast highway. Daddy helped with the down payment.”

  “You mean, one daughter bought into his game.”

  “Right on, bunky.”

  “No wonder he’s pissed.”

  “He has to get used to the idea that the head of my household is named Bobby.”

  I was touched. I felt like a family man for the first time in my adult life.

  *****

  It occurred to me, down-shifting to a crawl driving past the School for the Blind, domestic comedies always end before the dishes are done. I’d been doing them for a good long while, but this and that, like Johnny, the hallucinated page boy, and dashes across Berkeley, made me realize the sink would always be cluttered, and there’d be special moments I’d feel the way I did this morning, appreciating what Mary Clare had overcome to be with me.

  Happily-ever-after was dishes in the sink Monday morning. It was the screech of brakes on Claremont Avenue reminding me how the world was as unforgiving as my mate was forgiving.

  Of course happily-ever-after is no different from any simple-pretty. Compassionate embraces of repenting sinners (an analogue to recovering alcoholics) give way to this-ums and that’s-ums and, so, we didn’t make it to the sleeping loft before fucking each other silly. Sin washed away in a novel communion wine.

  I walked into the Claremont telling myself, “It’s okay, I actually felt grief last night, not remorse. Now if I can just feel grief about all the others, maybe it can banish guilt.” The truth was, last night’s grief was just as evanescent as the afterglow from last night’s love making.

  Sleep’s bulwarks crumbled under successive salvos of reality. I descended into ABAG’s basement offices like Don Juan into hell, kicking and screaming. Howie Manheimer calmed me enough to go on, dashing off and buying every uncommitted Danish in the bakery’s truck from the salesman calling on the hotel’s coffee shop. Howie understood how committees run on sugar.

  And I’d worked at the University
long enough to run committee meetings in my sleep. The agenda was simple if representatives of three of the four medical schools showed up and no unanticipated fights broke out, the meeting would be over in an hour and everyone would come away from it with something positive—except maybe Stu Katz.

  Everyone showed, though Stu Katz was ten minutes late and I had to suspend my opening pitch to introduce him around the table (“This is Dr. Katz, University of California Vice President for Medical Education—Mrs. Greencarpe, Berkeley City Council, Mr. Kino, Bay Area Health Planning Council; I believe you know the others.”) I watched Stu shaking Mr. Kino’s hand—blond, myopic Stu affected asceticism, not frail but like a dedicated vegetarian, which he wasn’t—I had a sudden churn of my stomach contents, knowing this was the person to blame for the years of back-pedaling I’d been through.

  I corralled my stomach but couldn’t my cerebral cortex. Images rode the pathways of my memory to create a movie montage: bright flash across a desert night—an ex-janitor running across the Sunday campus—hospital rooms, mine and Jake’s superimposed—a mayonnaise jar full of quarters turning into a ten-speed bike. It went on and on for the rest of the meeting.

  I teetered on the brink, mindful of the bureaucrat’s need for balance: if I thought too much about the meeting I might clutch; if I thought too much about Katz as the author of my ills I might come unhinged and carry on like Hitler at the podium, embarrassing myself and ABAG.

  I tuned into a Stu Katz monologue, Stu doing what he did best, summarizing and synthesizing everything he heard, a device by which he both subtly colored the discussion and organized rebuttals. It dawned on me, as I half listened that, had Stu been following the newspaper, he would know the death on the Nevada high desert wasn’t the last of my sins. Elitist, reactionary, sarcastic, Stu would find me a white Black Panther, a sunny day Weatherman, the personification of pipe bomb fragments, napalm and massacres.

  I signaled I’d be back in a moment and went out in the hall to lecture myself on the priorities of the day: survive; come out of this meeting with a win; don’t go to bed without resolving that Stu Katz may be a snake but he was not in any way the primary author of my sufferings; and, don’t make a frigging fool of yourself. I paced and ticked these off on my fingers.