Then Janice Lippert called: which made one too many things happening at once. Janice had no frigidity problem, no sir. Her problem was, the sweet young man she married had become a coke head. Tom Lippert was a man born hostile and getting nastier with every line he snorted. He soon found it downright fun to abuse her. He had uncanny luck finding women who enjoyed the challenge of a rotten man. He hit on Janice’s girlfriends, he came home smelling of other women, he said things to his wife like the last tart he’d paid gave better head than Janice did at her horniest. She needed her ego repaired and that night, on the sofa, I gave her exactly what made her feel like a woman again.
Afterward she said, “Next time you need your ego massaged, Robert, give me a call—I owe you one.”
During a blue period I took her up on that offer. Our friendship quickly deteriorated into purloined intimacies hidden from Tom and mutual friends by canny acting.
Friday evening was another matter. Tom had slapped her around. He was to be out of town Saturday, and Janice asked if I would help her think through leaving him before he strangled or shot her.
I couldn’t say no, though I didn’t want to say yes, I had arranged another Saturday cook-out with Mary Clare, a couple of T-bones I’d already bought, along with a Caesar salad and crusty San Francisco sourdough, the best Chianti classico I could afford.
“Wait till he leaves town,” I said.
“He’s leaving Saturday after dinner.” She thought it wasn’t a regular business trip, she suspected he’d become a mule to support his drug habit.
So I would have to see her Saturday after dinner with Mary Clare. Which, in a way, might be a break, although I wondered how ready I was to come clean about Janice when I explained that I had to go home at a reasonable hour.
It could be, it might be, too much.
And then, Saturday evening, sipping a gin and watching me cook, Mary Clare said life these days had become so good she was thinking about going back to Brandeis, at least starting the process of appeasing the powers-that-be back in Waltham.
I took a big slug of my own gin and it curdled in my stomach. Were I still an assistant vice president I might handle that; being a janitor, I didn’t have the plane fare for one trip to Boston.
“I quit in the middle of my first year of grad school,” she explained, “—only I didn’t formally withdraw.”
“I assume you had a good reason,” I said, sure it was the same reason that propelled her into Meany’s penthouse.
“It was the lousiest reason you can imagine, only I’m not ready to tell you about it yet.”
So I told her about my career as a university bureaucrat, hoping it would make me sound trustworthy. I too had some things I wasn’t ready to talk about and they didn’t come up, so we ate, chatted about movies and books, our tastes defined a lot by the difference in our ages and where we went to school. After dinner I looked into eyes as candidly sensual as Salome’s after she dropped the seventh veil. I was suddenly glad there was a friend I had to help out, to exit before she dimmed the lights and the Calvados she served after dinner went to my head.
Much as I wanted her, I couldn’t face getting involved to the point of sexual intimacy if she was going to leave town in the foreseeable future. It would break my heart.
Too much, too much.
Late Saturday night, as La Morinda began to cool down, I partially redeemed myself from accusations of moral turpitude, I foreswore the comfort of Janice’s bovine hips and told her that from now on I would go back to being a real friend.
Which was, actually, what Janice was looking for. She didn’t want her marriage to end because there was an easy pair of arms to fall into. I was glad for her, but now, determined to be firm and final with Marta as well, I was celibate when sex might have mitigated the Meany-generated jitters. I needed a couple more slugs of gin to dope me into a restless sleep.
By Monday I’d formulated a plan, which calmed me a good deal. I would decline Meany’s plant manager job, and later I would meet Marta and comb her out of my hair for good. Then, looking at a clean slate, I’d ask Mary Clare for an old-fashioned date, like a movie and a soda afterwards at the Superconfectionary in Walnut Creek, invite her to bed. Let us both know what I was made of.
two
The final item to fall out of Fibber McGee’s closet was Homer Smith, a Quail Run tenant with an office across the corridor from Jake’s. Jake thought I might be railing about Homer because he was the safest target for my frustrations. Jake dismissed him as not worthy of my anger, an inconsequential collection of protoplasm.
Jake was betting on Meryl as my “last straw,” after I went into the office with no clear idea how I was going to give Meany my ‘no’ answer and she told me he wasn’t coming back to town until late that night. No explanation, just those impish eyes watching me come down from high anxiety.
Jake reminded me that last straws were ipso facto inconsequential, and Homer was definitely that. He had taped a note to the utility closet door, instructing me not to touch anything in his office. “Who does he think he is?” I growled. Jake poured me a shot of Tennessee sippin’ whiskey and let me rant a while.
“You don’t get paid by the office,” he said when I paused, “so what’s the difference?”
“He makes more demands than any other tenant and do you think he ever says ‘thanks,’ much less invites me in for a drink? Not that I'd accept. He’s an ingrate, and shifty-eyed to boot.” Before I reached the bottom of Jake’s generous pour I was telling him about Marta and Janice and pondering how was I going to support myself when Meany gave me the boot.
“And none of that would be making you irritable with Homer, I suppose.” He touched up my glass. “The job is irrelevant. Makes no difference if you’re on his payroll or under contract, you’re hung up on honor, the pure masculine kind that really boils down to regarding women as property—no, don’t interrupt me. You wouldn’t dream of treating Miss Penthouse like that, I know, except that’s what your dilemma amounts to.”
I swallowed so much whiskey at a gulp that my eyes watered. I couldn’t believe Jake was saying this.
“Look. The lady can do whatever she damn well pleases, Robert, with you or some other guy, maybe one without your kind of scruples. If she’s fallen in love with you, she’s already wondering what she’s doing mixed up with him, no matter how wonderful the education’s been, she’s probably got the opposite of your dilemma, feeling guilty about accepting his protection any more, feeling the way she does about you, even though he had no right to her affections in the first place—assuming what he was giving was really a gift, and I have to assume that’s what it started out being.”
His eyes never left mine. Nor was he apologetic about stepping on my tender nerve endings.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “if she can’t let go of the security blanket, if she’s too piss-poor of spirit to bail out, then your dilemma’s different, and I don’t even need to put it into words.”
Up to my eyeballs in frustration, I set down my glass, thanked Jake for his tea and sympathy, and went out to see what mischief I could get into in Homer Smith’s office.
*****
I was never mentored by a journeyman janitor. Jake admitted that, when he worked as one at the university, he snooped. He didn’t open any drawers, he didn’t open any desktop files, but if a document was lying out in plain sight, he figured it was fair game. Not very interesting stuff, usually. He found out ahead of the public who was going to paint the outgoing governor’s portrait, he knew which member of the art faculty had had a painting hung in the Museum of Modern Art, that sort of humdrum.
Snooping relieved tedium. I wasn’t too proud to do menial work, but I had one brain cell too many to be content with routines repeated over and over with little variation. And, when my heart wasn’t involved, I was pretty good at calculation. Other than Jake, Homer and the Reproduction Clinic, the occupants of the offices on Bobwhite Court were mainly real estate developers or broke
rs. I often wondered if they’ moved into Bobwhite Court hoping that some of Meany’s shine might rub off on them.
Jake and I had come up with a taxonomy of real estate developers. Like angels, there was a hierarchy—archangels, principalities, dominions, though I just called them real estate developers of the first, second and third kind.
I told Jake, from my snoopings, about a developer of the first kind, who had an office on the second floor, a guy named Cooper Ivey. He came a cropper over a century oak. Got all sorts of ordinary people mad at him, had city council chambers filled to overflowing with people protesting his building condominiums that necessitated his cutting down a tree already living when Sir Francis Drake sailed up the California coast.
They brought Cooper Ivey to his knees not with chain saws but with a thousand paper cuts—it took three years.
I told Jake he could write a novel about Cooper Ivey.
He said, “Why don’t you.”
“Not me, boy—too maudlin.”
“You could pepper it with biting social commentary.”
“You want bite,” I said, “let me tell you about real estate developers of the third kind.”
The real estate developer of the third kind had the shrewdness of the first, the hard nose of the second, but, being closer to God, like a cherub or a seraph, he had an asset the other two didn’t possess. He had vision. He didn’t get into the kind of binds a Cooper Ivey did, because he didn’t mess with the lay of the land, wasn’t an inside dopester, he sought allies. He sought allies who had the quintessential ingredient to smooth the road to success: money.
“Like V.M. Meany?” Jake asked.
“No,” I said, “Meany’s in a category all by himself. He’s Contra Costa County’s sole representative of the real estate developer of the fourth kind.”
“Explain that.”
I said, realizing I’d had more sippin’ whiskey than I needed to allay my frustration, “That is a whole other conversation, and I better get the hell out of here, Jake, my friend, while I can still handle a vacuum cleaner.”
I would have told Jake that Meany had everything any real estate developer needed, but he’d started out with the most valuable of all tangible assets, he had land. He learned early that you only give up land if it brings you power. Power was getting the other person to do what you wanted him to do. Power was keeping those who wanted something different from doing what they wanted. His most brilliant ploy was giving half of the family’s ranch land to the county for a park, in return for a concession on the application of the zoning law to his biggest development, Ravenswood, a retirement enclave for the very rich. By the time he rescued Mary Clare, he was more powerful than any supervisor or councilman in the county.
*****
Homer Smith did not belong with angels, was not a real estate developer of any kind. Homer Smith was an imp of personal property, a demon of chattel. He bid on the contents of abandoned storage units, on dead freight, cruised estate sales. He bought retired Postal Service vehicles by the half dozen, he had foot baths and electronic components piled in his office sometimes, once a dozen cartons of vibrators from Hong Kong. He had had crates of foot treadle sewing machines tarped in his parking space until Meryl threatened to void his rental agreement if he didn’t store them elsewhere.
He had never left me notes about vibrators or foot baths, so whatever was in his office this time was illegal or dangerous, or both.
My mind wasn’t on snooping when I tossed off the last nip of Jake’s whiskey and crossed the hall from his office to Homer’s. I was going to give Homer a piece of my mind. I could hear voices through the door, and that put me off for a moment, but then I recognized the modulated hype of a commercial. Homer had left a radio on, possibly to discourage my entering his office. After knocking a third time, I let myself in.
Large pine crates, creamy white with rosy knots, were piled around Homer’s desk. The stenciled legends on the end pieces had been blacked out. Other crates were stacked on the desk itself, of a size to hold two automobile batteries, painted military gray. They hid the radio on the credenza behind the desk, which sang, “Datsun Saves” at me.
The bigger crates reminded me of six gun shoot’em-ups I’d seen as a kid, where the skulking whiskey peddler goes beyond mere skunkhood to undiluted evil, by supplying the Comanches with repeating rifles. I was looking at what Jimmy Stewart or Randolph Scott saw when he threw back the tarp on the whiskey peddler’s wagon.
Sitting atop these crates was a fat gray envelope that no doubt contained a bill of lading and invoice, describing what was inside. I had half a mind to open it. All that stood between me and knowledge was an old-fashioned figure-eight string closure.
The only problem was, I was due to meet Marta in five minutes, just enough time to hoof it over to the coffee shop. I’d break my snooping rule and open that envelope as soon as I’d had my séance with Marta. It would serve Homer right.
three
Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry
If a tree don't fall on me, I'll live till I die
Just before I left I hefted the envelope. It was heavy with mystery. There wasn’t just one document in there, or two, it was an accumulation of permits and customs declarations, translations of bills of ladings. It created more curiosity than all the memos on Cooper Ivey’s desk put together.
Because they could be repeating rifles, my gut told me.
I backed out of the office, singing “Whiskey, Rye Whiskey” under my breath, leaving it to the talk show host, vowing to peek in the envelope when I got back. I had a right to know what it was I wasn’t supposed to touch, didn’t I? What if it was from some quarantined dock in the Orient?
I was to meet Marta at Cup O’ Java on Main Street, three blocks from Bobwhite Court. Despite its prosaic name it served the best coffee in La Morinda, always two varieties, French roast and Mocha Java, say, or Viennese and Sumatran—it varied with the day of the week. At one time I could have recited which bean went with which day, but by the time of my last rendezvous with Marta, I was pleasantly surprised to be offered Guatemala Antigua and Colombian Supremo, both friendly varieties.
Marta’s Chevy Nova was parked in front of the shop. Through the window I saw her in the booth we always sat in, chatting with the waitress.
Marta looked as magnificent as the coffee smelled. She was of that minority of pink-complexioned, delicate-boned blondes who keep looking beautiful long after the average blonde has faded.
I suddenly wanted things to be right for her. Because of my role in her quest to conquer her lack of libido, I’d never had to face how committed I was to our relationship; in fact, deep down inside I knew I was a technician, like a physical therapist, or a mechanic even. I was no more. I prayed she’d had a breakthrough, an insight that would lead her to break the connection between us.
Then why did I have that feeling you get in the ring, when your opponent hasn’t shown you his left hook yet? Why did I sense I was about to get clobbered?
Something was in motion, something emanating from her besides good genes. Even as we exchanged hellos something was changing. She handed me a folded and age-worn piece of paper I recognized as a love poem I’d composed for her once and written out painfully in chancery script. She’d said, after she read it the first time and shed a tear, that she’d keep it forever.
Without a word about the poem, Marta said, “You look older.”
I didn’t quibble, but I didn’t accept the aging, though I did look different. I was a little thinner; I was wearing my hair a little fuller; I was tanner than when I lived in Berkeley. And surely she must see the love light in my eyes. I didn’t look older, I must look younger; I felt younger.
But maybe she saw nothing in my eyes. She was on a toot of her own. When I pulled out a pack of cigarettes she said, “I’d rather you didn’t.”
I put the cigarettes away. “I have a reason,” she said.
“Oh I’m sure.”
“But first t
hings first. —Guess what, Robert, I’m getting married.” She sparkled like an engagement ring when she said it, and I looked for one on her left hand, but there was none.
As if to punctuate her happy news there was a pop off in the background, a sound like a water heater being relit before all the unburnt gas had dissipated.
What could that be? I asked myself. Marta was describing her fiancé, a man I felt some gratitude towards, but I was still parsing that pop: not a gun, not a backfire, and not a water heater either, a big sound far away rather than a little sound close by. Blown truck tire on the freeway? At a pause in her description of her future husband I had the sense to say, “He sounds like someone special.”
A police siren tuned up just at the edge of hearing. I folded the sound into my recognition of what made Marta look so radiant. It wasn’t character, it was chemistry.
Closer by, a fire engine whoop-whooped through an intersection and continued an obbligato to the police siren.
“You’re pregnant,” I said.
“How did you know?”
I said, “It shows—in your face, I mean.”
“That’s why I didn’t want you to smoke.”
I said, “I thought it was because I used to smoke after sex and you didn’t want to be reminded.”
She said, “Did you really think that?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “Robert, I really think I’ve got that whipped.”
I could imagine. I could imagine her survival instincts were strong enough she could reshape sex into a social event rather than a biological one, not make a lot of fuss about it, wriggle her butt some, arch her back once in a while, her partner wouldn’t be dissatisfied, she’d have spent a lot less emotional capital. And who knows? With that attitude a little pleasure might creep in around the edges, if nothing else at a charade well played.
The waitress, witness to a dozen such conversations, came over and touched up our cups. She said, “The police car went into Bobwhite Court.”
By then the fire engine had turned onto South Main and was soon abreast of the coffee shop, flashing and honking, soon to fall silent. From another direction, when it was quiet, came an ambulance siren, and then another police car or perhaps a Fire Battalion Chief’s.