Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  He said, “I don’t usually have carnal notions about a woman until I’ve known her long enough to decide whether I’d want her to have my children. She was an exception. I think she felt the lust emanating from my eyeballs.”

  “I've had that experience,” I said.

  “I went up to her afterwards and asked her if she knew a good orthopedist or physiatrist.”

  Amanda told him she was an anesthesiologist but asked, anyway, what ailed him. Jake told her—a half-truth of opportunity—he was having ephemeral lower back pains.

  “If it were from muscle spasms I could shoot you up with curare and relax them.”

  “Wouldn’t it relax everything else?” Jake asked.

  “I’m quite good. I wouldn’t stop your respiration or circulation. You’d probably suffer a spontaneous erection, though.”

  “But I probably wouldn’t notice it, would I.”

  “Probably not.” Her expression purely clinical.

  He asked for her card and she reached in her purse and produced one, but also produced a smirk. “Mr. Pritchett, if you’re interested in me as a woman rather than a medical practitioner, I wouldn’t be put off. I’m not seeing anyone of late.”

  “So the attraction was mutual,” I said.

  “You bet.” Jake was sitting on the couch at the end opposite me and sat back and threw a jaunty arm across the top of the couch. “You know,” he went on, “it might be so with the Penthouse Lady.”

  “She’s out of my league,” I said.

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  I said, “Jaguar? Penthouse? I’d have to check my credit card balance before I took her to dinner at Denny’s.”

  Jake said, “If the Jag and the penthouse signify great wealth, how come she isn’t off skiing in the Alps, or snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef?”

  “I’m not saying she doesn’t have to work for a living. She probably does market research. Meany’s got an exclusive on her output, which is why he’s rented her the very convenient penthouse. Another tenant of convenience, like the Reproduction Clinic.”

  I didn’t understand why Jake shook his head and grimaced. “She might also have a rich uncle or something.”

  While I was imagining a bachelor uncle, her father’s older brother, say, indulging his favorite niece, Jake said, “Well, you may find that she places no great value on money. Maybe it’s a millstone around her neck and she’s waiting for some handsome lad to come along and love her for herself alone and not her Jag or penthouse.”

  That was about all the wisdom I could take. I trusted that Jake’s intentions were good, and I knew he was right: she probably didn’t place that high a value on money or its benefits. But worshipping from afar was all I was up to just then, and the difference in economic status was as good a dodge as any.

  “Another?” Jake asked as I downed the last of the whiskey.

  “No thanks,” I said, “I wouldn’t want to get used to something this rare.”

  “It’ll be here the next time. Drop around.”

  I thanked him and walked out into an incipient valley fog, feeling needled but not mad at him. So why don’t you pull a Jake: just walk up to her and tell her you have a bad back? I really did; not a bad back, but a bad case of what got Jake wrapped up with his Amanda.

  I thought about missing the opportunity to buy up the abandoned Bobwhite Court development. Would it be the same with Mary Clare? Would Meany beat my time?

  two

  Here is some of what Jake recorded about me and the Penthouse Lady:

  It occurred to me, the Penthouse Lady’s presence on Bobwhite Court was about to make a believer out of Robert. He wanted to attribute it to fate or even Providence. He never mentioned what had sent him into exile, but he admitted that mooning over this Penthouse Lady since the last days of Indian Summer had wakened a longing to rejoin the human race.

  What worried me about this latter day attack of hope was how shattering the truth would likely turn out. Was it cynicism that made me see a sugar daddy real estate tycoon in a liaison with a beautiful young woman with no apparent means of support? The return of Robert’s hope was born of no great virtue. It was lust—Robert’s, it’s true, not spoken of but certainly implied. But it was also V.M. Meany’s. His was veiled, hidden by age and status. You have to ask yourself, would he have gone to the planning commission for a zoning change to add the penthouse if Mary Clare were a spoiled niece?

  *****

  It is time, amplifying Jake’s remarks, I spoke of the Divine Accident. I truly do not believe in a Providential God, one looking down on each and every one of us six billion souls on Earth (and maybe more—maybe there are six hundred earths in the Milky Way, let alone the myriad galaxies scattered through the universe.) If there were an omnipotent God, overseeing billions or trillions of souls, it’s likely He or She would give us credit for being able to work things out. Maybe He or She could just look out for infants and fools. It’s a nice thought, but I still don’t believe it.

  I believe our lives are ninety-five percent more-or-less safe routines and five percent accident. Among the accidents there are a few which change our lives forever—call them twists of fate, ironic pratfalls, the demonic banana peels in our paths.

  I happen to call them Divine Accidents, not to attribute them to God or Vishnu or Allah, but to denote them as game changers, the event after which nothing is the same as before.

  One day I had such a Divine Accident on Bobwhite Court. I’d been cutting back on booze (not fancy Irish whiskey but a decent enough gin). Every time I didn’t have a drink, I deposited six bits in an institutional-sized mayonnaise jar. When it was about two-thirds full, I got some coin wrappers and started wrapping quarters, ten dollars per tube. I’d begun this before I began working on Bobwhite Court, and by the time it was almost too late in the year to bicycle over from my Walnut Creek pad, I bought myself a decent enough used road bike. Now I could have bought a new one for twenty-five hundred dollars (I had wet dreams about that bike) but I settled for a used one that I talked down to a hundred dollars.

  That was not the Divine Accident. I tested the bike out on the street in front of the bicycle shop, received a quick tutorial on changing gears (it had ten) and stashed it in my truck to take home, to immediately ride it over to Bobwhite Court and my nightly duties.

  I was headed down the driveway towards the parking lot behind the penthouse building, feeling exuberant and even cocky. I accelerated to some awesome speed, like twenty miles an hour, and just as I entered the parking lot saw the Penthouse Lady’s primrose yellow roadster heading straight for me. In my alarm I forget what bike I was on, in what decade of my life. As with the balloon-tired, chrome-fendered coaster I rode at age eleven, I reacted by tromping on the pedals to engage the coaster brakes . . .

  . . . spinning the pedals backwards just as I hit the speed bump crossing the driveway at the parking lot’s boundary.

  I might have recovered, not elegantly but intact, had it not been that my feet were trapped in steel toe clips, an accessory I wasn’t yet used to. I went airborne, nose up and then nose decidedly down, just as the Penthouse Lady realized I was a complete klutz and could not avoid her car. In my canted position, my flesh and blood nose far beyond the handlebars, I banged into her bumper, bounced back, —literally not figuratively—and flopped on my side.

  Jake speaks of this on the second tape. He had spies watching Mary Clare and me, Mrs. Birnbaum and Mrs. Clarke, who witnessed the whole thing.

  These ladies—I do not use the term loosely—had found Jake’s listing in the yellow pages, mistakenly placed, by the yellow pages folk, in the section on medical insurance. While, on first consulting Jake, they were soon disabused of his helping them find affordable insurance to supplement Medicare, they did become friends. Jake understood the value of well-brewed tea and excellent cookies. Out of their mistaken inquiry came a delicate bond. He knew enough more than they to help them understand the ins and outs of Medicare supplementals
, and even took on Mrs. Clarke’s ophthalmologist when he double-billed her for a hundred dollars worth of tests.

  Thereafter, about once a month, he would invite the ladies to his office for tea. When Mrs. Birnbaum called to move up the date of their next get-together, he imagined some gritty question, like the odds of surviving a hip replacement operation. Nothing of the sort. Halfway through a plate of madeleines, Mrs. Clarke approached the real reason for the visit by asking Jake if he’d noticed the janitor on the premises.

  “As a matter of fact, we’ve become friends,” he intoned on the tape.

  “Oh, thank God,” said Mrs. Birnbaum, “that makes it so much easier. —Did he tell you about the accident?”

  “Accident?”

  “Vehicular accident.”

  Jake admits to being confused.

  “It’s not his body we’re worried about, Mr. Pritchett, it’s his heart. He’s met that woman.”

  “What woman?” Asking but already knowing.

  “A certain friend of the landlord,” said Mrs. Birnbaum, lifting her chin in a knowing way.

  “The female in the penthouse,” said Mrs. Clarke.

  Jake said, “I don’t understand.”

  Mrs. Birnbaum’s hand fluttered to her bosom. “They are about to fall in love.”

  Mrs. Clarke took over. “What Ruth is saying is, she is a wanton hussy and he is a very nice young man, and we wouldn’t want to see him hurt.”

  Jake relates that he was reminded of his college boxing coach admonishing a teammate, “If you want to keep a pretty face, don’t get in the ring.” He decided the analogy would pass them by. Instead he said, “Maybe he’ll discover for himself that they aren’t suited—if they indeed aren’t.”

  “He is in a precarious state of mind,” Mrs. Clarke said. “He is not a janitor and he is not used to living in a little apartment with a fold-down bed and a hotplate.”

  Concealing an urge to laugh, he suggested they were exaggerating, he was not a poor waif with a hotplate.

  “He’s just not up to an affaire d’amour with ‘that woman,’” said Mrs. Clarke.

  “She is wayward, Florence, but she isn’t the devil,” Mrs. Birnbaum corrected. “But that doesn’t discount his delicate condition. I tell you, Mr. Pritchett, his heart has been broken to smithereens. You can see it in his face. His wife died or she ran off, his children were taken from him; he is not with all his defenses.”

  “And the vehicular accident?”

  Ruth looked at him as if he were a dingbat. “He rode his bicycle into her runabout.”

  They told him in great detail what they had happened to witness. She was going an excessive speed. He bounced off her bumper, several feet in the air.

  “No injury, I take it,” Jake said.

  “Miraculously, no; but great distress, great distress. Shame, the worst injury of all.”

  “She wasn’t distressed,” Mrs. Clarke added. “And if she’s any kind of human being at all, she can’t help but fall for him. She helped him up and brushed him off. She touched his hand.”

  “Did she look at the damage to her car first?” Jake asked.

  The women exchanged glances. “I told Florence you would understand. She did not so much as look at her car. Can you ever?”

  Jake asked me about it the next night. “Did you really go several feet in the air? Were you really dying of shame?”

  “Just about,” I replied.

  “You shouldn’t have, my boy, you should be grateful to heaven for this random encounter, you should thank your guardian angel and your patron saint, not to mention your lucky star. You’ve been handed a cubic centimeter of opportunity.”

  I said, “Have you gone bats, Jake?”

  three

  I pitch my tent with Hamlet’s in only one respect, that “. . . Conscience does make Cowards of us all.” I bow to Shakespeare’s far superior understanding of human nature in using those words, ‘us all,’ for I can only vouch for my being enfeebled by conscience.

  From his dictation it’s clear Jake was on to my mountain-sized stumbling block but ignorant of its nature. Okay, Jake, I would have said, were I ready to confess, I killed a man once. I’m enough of a statistician to know that’s a pretty rare event. My father never did, my uncles, two of whom made it through WWII, were never sure they killed an enemy combatant. A neighbor who flew B-17s from England, bombing German cities, probably killed many but knew only little mushrooms of debris sprouting on the ground when looking down from twenty thousand feet.

  I landed on top of the man I killed, I saw and smelled him up close. I heard his death rattle. I heard his bowels move after his last breath.

  I might have shaken off the images of his passing had I not been reminded of the event time and time again. By officialdom first, by my former spouse, Lana, every time she looked at me with that expression that said that killers were truly of another genus. I was reminded, too, by the newspaper account in the Berkeley Bulletin, a gratuitous front page condemnation that had just enough truth in it to keep me from screaming my innocence from the Campanile’s observation platform.

  And then, finally, there were the righteous sons of bitches, from my erstwhile boss, Stu Katz, to the nodding acquaintances who found it expedient to cross the street when they saw me on Shattuck Avenue, rather than facing the possibility that I might make them listen to my side of the story.

  Booze helped. Tequila was cheap when Lana and I toured Mexico, and I liked it. I liked even more the cheaper mezcales I drank in Oaxaca, and by the time we’d traveled that far south, I’d developed a hollow leg and drank lots.

  —As you may notice, I rather neatly digressed from the painful subject of the drifter dead up a Washoe County arroyo, having taken much of a load of twelve gauge single-ought buckshot in his head and neck.

  Maybe later I’ll fill in the details of an awful event that would not quit burgeoning: the homicide itself, the police investigation, the trip through Mexico with the memory of a dead man in the truck’s cab between my Lana and me. Then there was the end of the marriage, the public castigation at the hands of a twerp of a Berkeley Bulletin reporter who happened to be in Reno vacationing when it happened, and finally the suggestion I resign from my University post. Conduct unbecoming they called it. Resigning was a bad idea for a psyche in need of healing. There were many days and especially nights, after I did resign, when I had way too much time to remember. Did I deserve it? Hadn’t I done yeoman duty on the steps of the Admin Building? Did that count for nothing?

  A hundred times I told myself, “Enough, Robert, just numb out some evening on double martinis and wake up the next day with a dry mouth and no memory.” Not an exaggeration, at least a hundred times.

  Before the hundred and first time I met Jake Pritchett and then Mary Clare Morrison. Jake noted often that he and I had had strangely parallel lives. We both went to Berkeley. I had done a stint as a boxer starting when I was just fourteen, and only gave it up when I almost had an ear torn off in the Regional Finals of the Golden Gloves by Jethro Greene. Jake boxed for the Gold and Blue, his last bout the year the NCAA discontinued sanctioning intercollegiate boxing because of a ring death during the national finals. As a student, Jake worked for the University as a janitor, cleaning now the Art Department, now the locker room in the Women’s Gymnasium. We both have troublesome backs, mine betraying me in the course of my courting Mary Clare. And that’s another parallel: two guys, neither an Adonis, ending up with mates at the upper end of the ‘oh my’ scale.

  Jake never killed anyone, though.

  We all know someone who’s had chronic bad luck in life. Some persons catch every infectious disease going around. Some break bones like adulterers break vows. Some have freak car accidents, not once but at intervals throughout their lives. My Aunt Lucy was one of the latter. Had two cars’ brakes fail at very wrong times and was damn near killed on a mountain incline by a run-away truck with failed brakes.

  Another aunt, a nasty drunk, accused me of k
illing my mother, the correlation tenuous, as my mother died when I was six. I nonetheless believed her reasoning: my mother died of a thrombosis; she delivered me after age forty; auntie claimed the blood clot had something to do with my delivery. Probably pure bullshit, but when you’re six and you overhear the accusation—in a nasty drunk’s loud voice—you take it to heart. Six year olds think everything in the world happens because of them, why not a mother’s death? Precocious conscience or pre-reasoning egoism?

  Then the guy in the desert, my complicity confused by too much beer and marijuana, complicated further by an illicit weapon, a sawed-off shotgun: chalk up another death. Another notch on the old conscience.

  Two more deaths are part of this story. I would rather be the victim of multiple failed brakes than multiple premature deaths, but there you are.

  *****

  There’s no direct connection, mind you, between the things that had been and those that were to come. I did not go around mopping restrooms on Bobwhite Court with one hand while beating out mea culpas on my chest with the other. It was that I’d fallen into a comfortable rut, a rut of booze, which I was seriously working to get out of, as evidenced by the bicycle bought with saved booze money. It was a rut of avoidance, making sure not to know if the University community had got tired of whaling away on me. It was a rut of too much casual sex with women who had complimentary emotional needs. And when I wasn’t with them, I was watching old movies or football on TV. I couldn’t have told you, just before I met Jake, the last time I’d read anything novel more serious than a murder mystery.

  As long as I stayed in that petty limbo, I would have got further and further out of shape, more and more inured to poverty and its attendant lack of cultural stimulation—in other words, a high class bum.

  Then I ran into Mary Clare. Figuratively and literally.

  *****

  There is a wonderful poem by Yeats, a little ditty that goes:

  WINE comes in at the mouth

  And love comes in at the eye;

  That's all we shall know for truth

  Before we grow old and die.

  I lift the glass to my mouth,

  I look at you, and I sigh.

  I know a tad more about wine than about love, but I assert the truth of Yeats’s poem because I met Mary Clare. Many beautiful women walk the earth. The older I get the more there are, because my prejudices keep falling away. Why did this one so bowl me over? It’s more than beauty, it has to be. It’s some message in those dark and loquacious eyes that bored through my eyes into my brain and stirred up long dormant truths. Some resemblance to my mother? A Platonic memory of the perfect face and perfect form? Was I, like the Orfeo in the film, Black Orpheus, aware I’d met a mate destined from long ago to shake the core of my emotions?