“How luxurious!” escaped from Reeves as greeting.
“Bel is the only luxurious thing in this house. Let me introduce you to Bel Benedict,” his friend replied, motioning to the servant, who resembled an African sculpture.
Gregory at last met his friend’s father, about whom he had heard so little good, a pompous, wizened patriarch who could not utter two sentences without parading his authority. That night would have been detestable for Gregory had it not been for the orchids that both saved the evening and opened doors for his career. His friend Balcescu had initiated him into the vice with no return—flowers—which began with a passion for roses and with the years extended to other species. In that palace replete with precious objets d’art, what most attracted Gregory were Timothy’s mother’s orchids. They flourished in a thousand forms and colors, planted in jardinieres, clinging to tree bark suspended from the ceilings, and growing like a jungle in a garden room in which the grande dame had reproduced the climate of the Amazon. While others were having coffee, Gregory slipped away to admire them and there found an old man with diabolical eyebrows and impressive bearing who was similarly taken with the orchids. They chatted about the plants, each surprised at the other’s knowledge. The gentleman turned out to be one of the nation’s foremost lawyers, an octopus whose tentacles embraced the entire West, who when he learned Gregory was looking for a position handed him his card and invited him to come have a talk. A week later Reeves was working in his firm.
Gregory Reeves was one among some sixty attorneys—all equally ambitious but not all equally determined—under the direction of the three founding partners, who had become millionaires from the misfortunes of others. Their offices occupied three floors of a tower in the center of the city, from which the bay was framed in squares of steel and glass. The windows could not be opened; the air was circulated mechanically, and a system of lights hidden in the ceilings created the illusion of an eternal day at the Pole. The number of windows in each office determined the occupant’s importance: at first Gregory had none, but when he left the firm seven years later he could boast of two corner windows offering a glimpse of the building across the street and an insignificant scrap of sky; that glimpse, however, represented his ascent in the firm and on the social ladder. He had, in addition, several potted plants and a handsome English leather sofa that suffered heavy use without losing its stoic dignity as various female fellow lawyers and an undetermined number of secretaries, clients, and friends lightened the burden of the boring cases involving inheritances, insurance, and taxes it was his duty to resolve. Gregory’s boss soon visited him under the pretext of exchanging information about a rare variety of fern, and then once or twice invited him to lunch. Observing Gregory from a distance, he had detected his new employee’s aggressiveness and energy, and he began to send him more interesting cases to sharpen his claws on. Excellent, Reeves; you keep it up and before you know it you could be my partner, he would congratulate him from time to time. Gregory suspected that he told his other junior members the same thing, but after twenty-five years very few had achieved senior rank in the firm. He had no vain hopes of significant advancement and was aware he was being exploited; he worked twelve to fifteen hours every day, but he considered it part of his training to fly solo one day and did not complain. The law was a web of bureaucratic intricacies, and the trick consisted in being the spider and not the fly; the judicial system had become an aggregate of regulations so entangled they no longer served the purpose for which they had been created, and far from expediting justice had made it extremely difficult to achieve. The aim had shifted from the pursuit of truth, from punishing the guilty and compensating the victim—as he had been taught in his law classes—to winning by any means; to be successful you had to know the most recherché legal loopholes and use them to advantage. Hiding documents, confusing witnesses, and falsifying information were common practices; the challenge was the degree of efficiency and discretion you could achieve. The force of the law should never fall upon clients able to pay the firm’s clever lawyers. Gregory’s life took a turn that would have alarmed his mother and Cyrus; he lost most of his illusions about his profession and began to see it only as a vehicle for getting ahead. He had similar disillusions in regard to other aspects of his life, especially love and family. Samantha’s divorce had ended without undue hostility; they had arranged the settlement in an Italian restaurant, over two glasses of Chianti. Since he had nothing valuable to share, Gregory agreed to pay Samantha alimony and child support for Margaret. As they said goodbye, Gregory asked Samantha whether he might have the wine barrels with the roses; after long neglect they were nothing more than dried sticks, but he felt duty-bound to revive them. Samantha had no objection and even offered to throw in the wood tub of the unsuccessful aquatic birth, which one day might serve as a container for an indoor jungle. At first Gregory made weekly trips to see his daughter, but soon the visits grew farther apart; he always found the child waiting with a list of things to buy, and once her whims were satisfied she ignored him and seemed annoyed by his presence. He did not communicate with Judy or with his mother, and for a long time did not call Carmen, justifying his neglect with the excuse that he was too busy with his practice.
Social connections play a fundamental role in a successful career, and your friends can smooth the way, Greg’s colleagues told him. You have to be at the right place at the opportune time and with the right people. Judges belonged to the same clubs as the lawyers they later heard in court; friends understand each other. Sports might not be your forte, but golf is obligatory because of the opportunity for making contacts. As Gregory had planned, he bought a boat, dreaming of yachting whites and sailing with envious colleagues and enviable women, but he never seemed to grasp the caprices of the wind or secrets of the sails; every outing on the bay was a disaster, and the boat died a sorry death, abandoned at the dock with nests of gulls in her masts and a coat of hairy algae on her hull. Gregory had known an impoverished childhood and indigent youth, but he had also been nurtured on movies that instilled a taste for the grand life. In the barrio movie theater he had seen men in dinner jackets, women dressed in lamé, and four-candelabra tables attended by liveried servants. Although all that belonged to a Hollywood that was hypothetical to begin with and had no practical application in reality, he was fascinated by it. That may have been one reason he fell in love with Samantha: it was easy to imagine her in the role of an aloof, famous blonde movie star. Gregory had his suits made by a Chinese tailor, the most expensive in the city, the same one who dressed the elderly man of the orchids and other VIPs, and he affected silk shirts and initialed gold cuff links. His tailor was an excellent arbiter of taste and forbade two-toned shoes, polka-dotted ties, checked trousers, and other temptations, and little by little Reeves refined his sartorial tastes. He also was fortunate to have a proficient teacher in interior decoration. At first he used his credit to buy every gewgaw that caught his eye—the larger and more elaborate, the better—attempting to reproduce on a small scale the house of Timothy Duane’s parents, thinking that was how the wealthy lived, but even exploring every avenue for credit, he could barely finance his extravagances. He collected antique furniture, teardrop lamps, urns, even a pair of life-size bronze Abyssinians, complete with turbans and slippers. Gregory’s home was on the way to becoming a Turkish bazaar when he met a young woman decorator who saved him from the consequences of bad taste. They met at a party and that same night began an impassioned, if transitory, relationship that was very crucial for Gregory because he never forgot the lessons learned from his designer. She taught him that ostentation is the enemy of elegance, an idea totally contrary to precepts learned in the Latino barrio and one that would never have occurred to him, and she peremptorily discarded almost everything in his house, including the Abyssinians, which she sold for an exorbitant price to the Saint Francis Hotel, where they may be found today at the entrance to the bar. She left only the imperial bed, the wine barrels of roses, a
nd the wood tub, now converted into a planter. In their five-week romance she transformed Gregory’s house, giving it a simple, functional look; she had the walls painted white and the floors covered in sand-colored carpeting, and she personally accompanied Gregory to buy a few modern pieces. She was emphatic in her instructions: few but good, neutrals only, minimal adornment, and in case of doubt, abstain. Thanks to her counsel the house took on the austerity of a convent, and it remained austere until its owner was married some years later.
One reason Reeves never talked about his experience in Vietnam was that no one wanted to listen, but he also believed that eventually silence would cure him of his memories. He had gone to defend the interests of his country with the image of heroes in his mind, and he had returned defeated, not understanding why his people should die by the thousands and kill without compunction on soil outside their native land. By then the war, which in the beginning had received euphoric support from the public, had become a national nightmare; the protests of pacifists had swelled to shrill defiance of the government. No one could explain how it was possible to send men into space and yet not find a way to stop this open-ended conflict. Upon their return, instead of the respect and admiration promised when they were recruited, soldiers met hostility more ferocious than enemy fire; no one cared what they had been through. Many who had endured, and survived, the rigors of the war cracked on their return to the States when they realized there was no place for them.
“This is a country of winners, Greg; the one thing no one can forgive is failure,” Timothy Duane told him. “It isn’t the morality or justice of this war we question, and no one wants to know about our own dead, much less that of the enemy; what royally ticks us off is that we’re not winning and are going to have to slink out of there with our tail between our legs.”
“Not many people here know what war is really like, Tim,” Reeves replied on the one opportunity he discussed the subject with his friend. “We’re never been invaded or bombed; we’ve been engaged in hostilities for a century, but since the Civil War not one round of mortar has fallen on United States soil. People can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a city under fire. They would change their ideas fast if their children were being blown apart and their houses bombed to the ground and there was no food to be had.”
Reeves did not, however, waste any energy in complaints, and with the same determination that got him out of Vietnam alive, he vowed to overcome any obstacle in his path. He did not swerve a hair’s breadth from the decision he had made in the hospital bed in Hawaii, and he succeeded so well that by the time the war was over, several years later, he had become the paradigm of the successful man and was managing his life with the same juggling skill Carmen had shown in keeping five knives in the air at once. He had achieved almost everything he had aspired to: he had more money, more women, and more prestige than he had dreamed of . . . but he had no peace. Because he had the arrogant and self-confident air of a master con man, no one suspected the anguish he carried on his shoulders—no one, that is, except Carmen, from whom he could never hide anything. But she could not help him either.
“The trouble with you is that you’re in the bull ring but you don’t have the matador’s instinct for the kill,” she had told him.
What was I looking for in a woman? I’m still not sure. I wasn’t trying to find the other half of my soul in order to feel complete, not by a long shot. In those days I wasn’t mature enough for anything spiritual, I was after something entirely earthly. I demanded something of the women I dated that I myself couldn’t name, and when I didn’t find it was utterly depressed. Divorce, war, and age would have cured a more clever man of romantic notions, but not me. On the one hand, I tried to lure almost every woman to bed out of pure sexual appetite; on the other, I fumed when these women did not respond to my secret sentimental demands. Confusion, pure confusion. For decades I was frustrated; after every coupling I was ravaged by melancholy and wanted only to escape as quickly as I could. That was true even with Carmen. She had good reason not to want to see me for a couple of years; she must have hated me. Women are black widow spiders; if you don’t stay free of them you can never be yourself and will exist only to please them: so Timothy Duane warned me. He met every week with a group of men to talk about how masculinity was being threatened by all the feminist shit going around. I never paid much attention to Timothy, because my friend is not a very good example of abstinence. When I was young, I didn’t have the poise or the knowledge to have a system for chasing girls; I chased them with all the finesse of a bear cub and with unhappy results. I was faithful to Samantha until that night I drew the arithmetic teacher whose strawberry-colored bathrobe I had no desire to remove, but I take no pride from the loyalty Samantha did not return; just the opposite: I was stupid, besides being screwed. When I was a bachelor again, I set out to profit from the revolution in mores; all the old strategies for conquest had been dissolved: no one feared the devil, sharp tongues, or an untimely pregnancy, so I put to the test the bed in my home and in countless hotels, even the Britannic springs of the sofa in my office. My boss curtly warned me that I would lose my job on the spot if he received a complaint from any female employee of the firm. I ignored him, too, and was lucky that no one came forward with a grievance, or at least that the gossip didn’t reach his ears. Timothy Duane and I had specific nights during the week programmed for partying; we used to exchange information and draw up lists of candidates. For Timothy it was a sport; for me, a kind of madness. My friend was a handsome fellow, polite and wealthy, but I was a better dancer, could play a number of instruments by ear, and knew how to cook—tricks that captured certain women’s attention. We thought we were irresistible, but I suppose that was true only because we settled for quantity, not quality; I can’t say we were selective, we went out with anyone who accepted us. We fell in love the same day with a covetous, self-assured Philippine girl whom we besieged with our attentions in a race to see who would win her heart, but she was way ahead of us and openly announced that she planned to sleep with both of us. That Solomon-like solution failed at the first try: we couldn’t take the competition. After that we shared girls in such prosaic fashion that had they suspected, they would never have gone out with us. I had several names in my little black book that I called regularly; I wasn’t serious about any of them and made them no promises. It was a comfortable arrangement for me, but it was not enough; as soon as I met someone new and slightly interesting, I ran after her with the same urgency with which I later dropped her. I suppose I was propelled by the dream that one day my search would be justified and I would meet the ideal companion, just as I drank wine, in spite of my allergies, hoping to find the perfect bottle, or traveled through the world in the summer, running from city to city in the exhausting pursuit of the one marvelous place where I would be idyllically happy. Searching, always searching, but searching outside myself.
During that stage of my life, sex was like the violence of the war; it was a malignant form of contact that in the end left me with a terrible emptiness. I didn’t realize at the time that in each encounter I learned something, that I was not wandering in circles like a blind man but in a slowly ascending spiral. I was maturing, although at great cost, as Olga had prophesied. You’re a strong, stubborn animal, you won’t have an easy life, she warned me; you’ll take your share of lickings. She was my first teacher in what was to determine a large part of my character. When I was sixteen she taught me more than erotic antics; her most important lesson was about what makes a true couple. She taught me that in love, two people open to one another, accept one another, yield to one another. I was fortunate; few men have the opportunity to learn that when they’re young, but I didn’t know enough to understand it and soon forgot. Love is music, and sex is only the instrument, Olga told me, but it took me more than half my life to find my center, and that’s why I had such a hard time learning to play the music. Relentlessly, I pursued love where I could never find it, and on the few o
ccasions when it was right before my eyes, I was incapable of seeing it. My relationships were ferocious and fleeting; I could not give myself to a woman, nor could I accept her. That was what Carmen knew intuitively the one time we were together in bed, but she herself had still to know a complete relationship; she was as ignorant as I; neither of us was ready to lead the other along the paths of love. She had never experienced total intimacy; she had been mistreated or abandoned by all her lovers; she trusted no one, and when she wanted to trust me, I, too, disappointed her. I am convinced that she tried with good faith to take me into her heart as well as her body. Carmen is pure affection, instinct, and compassion; tenderness comes easy to her, but I wasn’t ready, and later, when I wanted to try again, it was too late. Useless to cry over spilled milk, as Doña Inmaculada says; life deals us many surprises, and in the light of things that have happened to me recently, probably it was for the best. In that earlier stage, women, like clothes or cars, were symbols of power; they succeeded one another without leaving a trace, like fireflies in a long and pointless delirium. If any of my women friends secretly wept over the impossibility of drawing me into a lasting relationship, I don’t remember her, just as I have forgotten the roster of my casual companions. I have no wish to evoke the faces of the women who were my lovers in those years of libertinism, but if I tried, I think I would find only blank pages.