Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  It doesn’t matter; those are all words. I saw Mary Clare and I was a goner. All other women in the world retreated into the background. The only figure in the foreground was Mary Clare. Before I went into a total trance I knew I would never possess her, possession is for persons who need to dominate. I needed a Thou for my I. I needed to be the Thou to her I. Had I died a second after first seeing her, I would have gone to Heaven, and I don’t even believe in Heaven. She was my Bach, my Michelangelo, my Homer and my Eleanor of Aquitaine all wrapped into one.

  I told myself, reaching for my bootstraps, I had to cut off my conscience to let my soul back into the human race. I tried. The coward in me scoffed.

  four

  Jake had seen me on television, back in the days of the Free Speech demonstrations. When he’d strung together enough anecdotes from my past he said, “Oh. You were the guy who would come out on the steps of Sproul Hall and give the demonstrators the University’s latest offer, while the placards waved and the chants echoed—that was you?”

  I allowed as how it was.

  He said, “And you’re afraid of asking Miss Dream Queen out on a date? Seriously? If it’s your funky truck that’s the problem, I’ll lend you my car. Shit, I’ll lend you the money.”

  There was always some further excuse, though I knew that Jake knew it was more fundamental than the accidentals of time and place.

  *****

  This is Jake’s forthright assessment of me, right from his tapes:

  Robert wasn’t used to taking ordinary risks. He might toy with a muscle-bound loud-mouth in Coogan’s because he knew he could rearrange the jerk’s face before the fellow got his dukes up, but Robert wasn’t used to being rejected. His paradigm for defeat, prior to his retreat to La Morinda, was that beating he took at the hands of Jethro Greene in the Golden Gloves.

  This was the down side of his Divine Accident theory: it left him with no sense of personal adversity. He had no goals early on and no program, no disadvantage, physical or social, to make up for. The major turning points in his life were the Divine Accidents. It was his substitute for God, an accident that reverberates as if it were wired into the central switchboard of the Universe. There had been two, actually, that outclassed all others: one launched him on a career that peaked at an assistant vice-presidency, the other the dark event he couldn’t tell me about, the awful ordeal from which all else flowed downhill.

  *****

  Sorry Jake, I will defend my use of the theory, though the name distracts people. The first event he referred to really was like a Divine Accident. From my sophomore year I worked in the laboratory of two wizard biochemists who all but invented molecular biology. As a laboratory assistant, my job was to wash and sterilize dirty pipettes and Erlenmeyer flasks and such. One day these two geniuses got into a fight, shouting, one throwing dry ice chips around the lab to express his ire. The other lab assistants cleared out when the fight broke out, but I was fascinated. I stood by and listened for a while and realized they were arguing about who was going to write the research grant proposal that was due in sixty days. The Gold Dust Twins, as they were called, had more grant dollars than Croesus had drachmas, but it came in dribs and drabs throughout the year, a grant here a grant there.

  The two paused the argument long enough to catch their breaths, glaring at each other and thinking up further insults, when I cleared my throat and said, “May I make a suggestion?”

  They weren’t even aware someone had been eavesdropping on their fight. They simultaneously turned to me and asked, in so many words, “What the fuck do you know about it?”

  A sophomore, and thus unflapped by these two minor deities growling at me, I made a suggestion as startling to them as that made by the legendary stranger who told the Coca Cola people to “bottle it.” I said, “Why don’t you combine all the little grants into one big grant? Then you’d just have to go through the renewal process once a year.”

  “You’re so fucking smart,” said Gold Dust Twin One, “you think you could write the application for one big grant?”

  I did, and I said so, and then the two of them started fighting about whether they would put any eggs at all in the basket of a mere dishwasher.

  “Give me a week to prove myself,” I said.

  It wasn’t the science that was hard— for models they gave me their successful grant applications, plus every piece of paper that explained what they were studying and why. It was the logistics of phasing in the one big grant to replace eight little grants that started throughout the year. That’s where I shone. I composed a grant proposal which assumed that these two were going to be funded by the NIH if they wrote their grant applications on toilet paper. But I wrote a protocol for phasing out the little grants, complete with a budget that had the staff paid for the number of months they were to be employees on the big grant. It didn’t seem that big a deal, but the Gold Dust Twins thought it big enough they included me on a conference call with the gent at NIH who had his hands on the purse strings, a man who cherished logic and order. He immediately bought the notion, okayed it in concept after five minutes’ conversation. I had a moment of panic when Mr. Money referred to me as ‘Dr. Gattling,’ but the Gold Dust Twins had enough sense to keep mum and I wasn’t discovered to be a mere dishwasher.

  From then on I was the Gold Dust Twins’ grants manager. I didn’t mind being paid as a laboratory assistant while doing work far above grade, it was fun and it kept my hands out of stuff potentially pathogenic and therefore scary.

  After a couple of years of this I announced that, come next Commencement Day, I would be hitting the road. I’d done my time, I was getting my sheepskin.

  “You can’t,” said Gold Dust Twin One.

  “What about graduate school?” asked Gold Dust Twin Two.

  I reminded them that my major was English Lit, and that I wasn’t inclined to be an academic.

  They told me that if I got a PhD in any subject whatsoever, including English, they would make me the permanent Chairman of their department and no one would uncover the deception.

  “You know,” I said, “the university gets a big hunk of change, known as overhead, on every research grant. They ought to provide a service like mine to all research investigators.”

  “Damn right,” said Gold Dust Twin Two.

  And I won’t bore you with the details of how that played out. It should be noted that the Gold Dust Twins, the premiere biomedical researchers on campus, swung enough weight to shoehorn me into the university hierarchy over the objections of Stu Katz, my eventual boss. It took some years for me to metamorphose from administrative analyst to assistant vice-president, but I was from the first the de facto grants management czar for biomedical research.

  Some nights I couldn’t believe my luck. But if I am due any credit, it was for being smart enough to continually make Stu Katz look good while staying out of the limelight.

  *****

  According to Jake, the only real Divine Accident in my life was getting to my thirtieth year before I had a real setback.

  This is Jake on tape on that subject:

  Since the shooting that cost Robert his confidence until Mary Clare came along, all his ordinary little accidents had negative results. He had no philosophy of coping, no notion, like Mary Clare’s theory of the Great Accountant in the Sky, which I came to know of later, that saw the ledger periodically balanced between good luck and bad, much like double entry bookkeeping. For all Robert knew, he’d had his allotment of “good” Divine Accidents, the rest of his life might be downhill.

  Except. Except she was so pretty. Except he had this instinct for hope, the pupa sensing the nectar out there beyond the chrysalis. Except for this latter day belief thing. He’d buy Providence if it would buy him, he wasn’t a rabid atheist. In fact, one day he acted like a True Believer, a thing like Ghost Dance Indians riding into the white man’s bullets.

  *****

  One evening—God, what a fool I was—I bounded down the stairs fr
om the third floor and ran into Jake’s office. “I’ve got it, Jake.”

  Jake looked up from his typing, not revealing whether my interruption was of a sentence of priceless prose, and scanned me with a jaundiced eye.

  “She’s a bean counter. She makes economic analyses for high rollers.”

  He said, “Where did you get that hogwash?”

  “If she were a neurosurgeon, your wife would know her. Amanda doesn’t know her, does she?”

  Jake shook his head. He told me later the thought crossed his mind that I was one dumb shit, seeing two and two and forever adding them to five.

  “Okay, so it’s something she can do up there, maybe in her PJs. She’s got a smart terminal and she’s hooked into a mainframe computer, maybe at Livermore, more likely Berkeley, and she keeps her fingers on the economic pulse of the community. She gets population data from the Association of Bay Area Governments, and projections from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Commerce Department and the Social Security Administration’s Division of Research, she crunches them all together, using nifty charts and graphs, and tells Meany, ‘Buy cabbage patches! Sell condominiums!”

  He stared at me for a moment and said at last, “Why Meany?”

  I told him I’d seen Meany’s Cadillac El Dorado parked behind her Jag a couple of times. It made sense, I told him. Meany didn’t have to crunch numbers in his head, he just had to be smart enough to know whose statistics to trust.

  “Maybe,” Jake said, “she designs jewelry, Meany goes up to her place now and then to buy trinkets for his sweetie.”

  “Meany with a sweetie?” I wondered aloud. It seemed all too preposterous.

  “Why not?” asked Jake.

  Because, I told him, Meany looked like the large economy sized Pat Brown, referring to the former Governor of California. Meany with a girlfriend? I said, “Look, Jake. That guy doesn’t twitch a muscle without a payoff. He goes up to see her, it’s because she’s got something he needs. He puts out a couple of pawing jabs, be sure it’s setting up the old right cross.”

  Damn Jake’s skepticism; I vowed I'd prove my thesis. I would wait and watch until I saw her drive off in her XKE, then I’d take my pass key and ride the elevator up to the penthouse. Surely there would be some kind of placard on her door, a name or something. A message scrawled on her letterhead, taped to the door, telling the UPS guy she had a pick-up. I would settle her occupation once and for all.

  The Klutz

  one

  Jake commented on my ability to put two and two together and get five. I was also guilty of putting two and two together and getting three. Was I reprising adolescence?

  One morning when I was getting in my walk on the Southern Pacific right of way, I spied the Jag accelerating away from its reserved spot. It wasn’t until I’d successfully opened the ground floor elevator door and pushed the button marked ‘P’ for penthouse that it occurred to me she might forget her sunglasses or check book and show up again before I came down and got away. I started puffing the way I used to, dancing in my corner, before the first round bell: adrenaline pumping, palms sweating.

  “Com’on,” I coaxed the elevator, “com’on.” It ignored me, ascending nonchalantly.

  Even before the door slid open at the top I had my finger on the Hold switch, to do a fast shuffle out the door and into the lobby to satisfy that Old Devil, Curiosity. When the door did slide open, there stood (yikes!) Mary Clare, looking like a picture out of a Land’s End catalog.

  No foyer, no plaque on the wall, the elevator opened directly into her apartment.

  I said, “Oh shit!”

  My intrusion was more than a raging social faux pas, it was incontrovertible evidence of great need and greater cowardice. And a childish belief in magic solutions.

  Where was the Jag?

  The folks at the service garage picked it up, dummy.

  Where was the plaque, the shingle, the business license, for Christ’s sake?

  What business, dummy?

  She hesitated long enough to change her expression from fear to surprise to accusation, then boarded the elevator, forcing me to step back as the door slid closed.

  “You think all I am is a monumental klutz, don’t you.” I said as we started down.

  “A second story man?” she suggested, helpfully.

  “I didn’t think the elevator opened right into your living room. I figured you’d have a little elevator lobby up there, a foyer. I just wanted to know your name, or the name of your company, even.”

  “Company?”

  “Look, I’ve seen Meany coming out of this elevator, I know enough about the man to know he doesn’t do anything for nothing. I figured you had to work for him. I thought maybe you did market research for him.”

  “Market research?”

  The face she turned on me was at once bemused and wistful. I noted the mixed emotions and I also saw that she had on no makeup beyond lipstick. She didn’t need more.

  “You thought I worked out of my home, and Meany was a customer?”

  I hemmed, I hawed, I tried to explain. The explanation sounded lamer than my initial idea. “I don’t see the great V.M. Meany dropping in on tenants just to pass the time of day. I mean, time’s money with him, he makes more every tick of the clock than I make in a year. I just assumed . . .”

  The myth crumbled. Enlightenment came on like the Black Death spreading through a medieval village. “I just assumed . . .”

  She said, “Well, you’re partly right,” wondering how in hell to tell a naïve klutz the facts of life. “I do work for Meany.” Down the driveway she walked, with me a step behind.

  “But where?” I blurted. “And when?”

  “Right up there,” she said, pointing towards the penthouse without looking at it. “Any time Mr. Meany wants me to.”

  And then, Jake, I understood what you’d been hinting at all along. And then I knew too much.

  *****

  The tape continued:

  Robert strode into my office without knocking. He bristled the way some dogs will who’ve been stuffed with human anger and must carry it even though they don’t understand it. He said, “She works for Meany all right, she works directly under him.”

  The bristling reached me with more impact than the words, clever words he’d borrowed from somewhere. I started to snap back at him but settled for silent eyes to punish him for his surliness.

  “She’s a whore, Jake.”

  He threw himself on the couch staring ahead at my treasured Kokoschka drawing, that of a woman intently listening to an opera. He mimicked the attitude of her head but his eyes held their fury: Adam imbued with knowledge; Adam cast out of Paradise.

  *****

  I don’t remember it quite that way, I know I was equally furious and hurt, a dream shattered, which, even if it was puerile and unrealistic, was heartfelt. It had been part of the impetus to cut back on the gin, to try to rejoin the human race.

  I do remember his eyes as angry as mine and my asking anyway, “What shall I do, Jake?”

  “Quit being so goddam righteous, quit being so naïve. You can quit calling people names that don’t fit.”

  “What would you call her?”

  “Paramour? Sweetheart? What the hell difference does it make? You had so many cockamamie ideas about her and here you go with another. You don’t know beans about their relationship.”

  “Oh come on. Penthouse? Jaguar? They hold hands up there do you think? How do you get to be the object of an rich old man’s largesse?”

  I stormed out of his office, rattled up and down the corridors banging trash cans, slinging steno chairs aside, slamming doors. I go to Jake for solace, I get salt in my wounds.

  *****

  Jake-on-tape intoned:

  So Mary Clare wasn’t some Beata Maria Virgine with a halo glowing above her mantilla. So what? What was so goddam important about the past that you let it block your access to the future?

  Robert
wasn’t so pure himself. He’d never violate a confidence, but I gleaned from casual conversation he’d not one but two affairs of convenience hanging fire while he mooned over his penthouse queen. Did that bother him? Had he foresworn the easy lay in advance of knowing for sure he would be well received by Mary Clare?

  His pettish tantrum had nothing to do with sexual ethics at all, it was the frustration of an unconfessed sinner, who gathers no grace while his soul is blackened by mortal sin. Naming her ‘whore’ meant he didn’t have to test whether the effects of the ‘Divine Accident’ were vincible or invincible. He’d let himself off the hook.

  In the end I would hear his confession—hers, too. I learned what made her take shelter with Meany. I was reminded that some persons’ concept of sin is so much more stringent than any religion’s, they’d take the whole world’s guilt on their shoulders.

  But this was after their mutual passion burned bright as a grain of stardust in the Perseid shower that marked my meeting Robert, two lovers fervently and unabashedly in love. He, with daring-do and dumb luck, became a minor hero while demonstrating his fervor. Never mind that it landed him in a hospital bed, he had washed away the darkness that stained his soul, erased the past—or so it seemed.

  And she, with the native impulse to leap before looking, had forsaken the security of Meany’s protection and pledged herself to Robert forever and ever.

  two

  I had a couple of friends left in Berkeley, and sometimes I contrived to run into them. One was a bartender: a sitting duck. So easy to run into. He poured generously and listened with a compassionate ear. The other was a librarian I’d worked for at the University before I got my lab assistant job. A genuinely sweet woman, she had a congenital hip problem and spent a good deal of time I worked for her wearing a cast that encompassed her pelvis. This sometimes invoked prurient thoughts of how a man might make love with a woman with such a c0mplication.