At lunch, Bech confessed he was getting scared. Ohrbach was being painted as a saint, and in fact he did look awfully sweet, and rather touchingly shabby. He had worn a linen suit with a yellow sheen, and a sad little bow tie that called attention to his neck wattles.
Rantoul snorted, “And Ah bet you think a Gila monster has a friendly face.” He had taken off his coat and turned back his sleeves to dig into some cafeteria corn on the cob. Flecks of starch dotted his jaw.
“There is something friendly about his face. Something sensitive and shy. When he came in, he seemed so outnumbered. Just poor old Sergeant Kepper and him, against all of us.”
“Us-all ruthless Eastern-establishment types,” Rantoul filled in. “You got the message he was sending. Ah’m sure glad, Henry, you ain’t on that there jury.”
Rita laughed, showing dazzling sharp teeth. “It is you who are sweet, Henry, to see in such a way.” Like Lanna Jerome, she had a mole near her chin. In Rita’s case, it looked genuine.
“To me,” said Gregg Nunn, “his face is weird. I get queasy and dizzy, looking at it. There’s no center. It’s like he’s a hologram. And his eyes. What color are his eyes? Nobody knows—we’re all too spooked to look, and if you notice, even when he seems to be smiling at you, his eyes are downcast, like he’s trying to see through the lids. He’s an alien—he can see through his eyelids!” As the boy expanded on his fantasy, his small round hands made wider and wider circles, and his voice attained so excited a pitch that several heads in the cafeteria turned around.
Kepper and his client were not here; they were off, perhaps hatching more character witnesses. Or witnesses to expose Bech, his whole discreditable career. His refusal to learn the diamond trade at his father’s knee. His restless resistance to his mother’s intrusive love. His failure to become a poet, like Auden and Delmore Schwartz, both of whom he had met in his post-war phase of haunting the Village, or a critic, like Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg, who also had been caught in his skein of acquaintance. He had felt that what critics did was too pat, too dictatorial; he preferred, lazily, to submit to his subjective inklings and glimpses, and to turn these into epiphanies briefer than Joyce’s and less grim than Kafka’s. He had failed his publisher, hearty, life-loving, travel-tanned Big Billy Vanderhaven, by refusing to deliver, in the wake of Travel Light’s mild succès d’estime, the “big” novel just sitting there, in the realm of Platonic ideas, waiting to take the public and the book clubs by storm; he had failed his first editor, dapper, fastidious Ned Clavell, by refusing to remove from the sprawling text of The Chosen all those earthy idioms and verbal frontalia that chilled, in still-prissy 1963, the book’s critical and popular reception. Bech had just refused to pan out, as author, son, and lover. One woman after another, having given her naked all, stridently had pointed out that he was unable to make a commitment. Behind him stretched a chain of disappointments going back to his grade-school teachers at P.S. 87—kindly Irish nuns manquées, most of them—and his professors at NYU, whom he felt he had usually wound up disappointing, after a flashy first paper. He failed, or declined, to graduate. He was not a superb human being. He was a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times. In the courthouse cafeteria, he lost his appetite, and left half of his tuna-salad sandwich untouched, and all of the butter-almond ice cream he had taken for dessert, homesick for the Italian restaurant’s spumoni. Rantoul, having consumed a platter of meatloaf, gravy, mashed potatoes, and peas, delicately inquired after these remnants, and made them disappear.
The next character witnesses were other agents, who praised Ohrbach as their mentor and inspiration, as an immensely creative and concerned thinker on behalf of the film industry. It was Ohrbach, claimed one rough beast in a tieless silk shirt and a number of gold chains, who had originated the valuable concept of total agent involvement—no longer could one rest content with forging advantageous deals for the client, but one should follow up and make sure that the rewards, in the always uncertain and sometimes abbreviated career of a performing artist, were secure and themselves performing up to capacity. Not just career management, but total life-assets management was the basis of the concept, traceable (in the rough beast’s view, his ringed hands chopping the air and chest hair frothing from between his chains) to the genius of Morris Ohrbach. Then secretaries—ex-bimbos with plastic eyelashes and leathery, bone-deep tans—testified to Ohrbach’s generosity as a boss, and told of days off granted with pay when a mother died, of bonuses at both Christmas and Passover, of compassionate leaves of absence during spells of health or man trouble. Clients—sallow, slightly faded and off-center male and female beauties—confided how Morris would tide them over, would reduce his cut to 12 1/2 percent, would give them fatherly advice for free, out of his own precious time.
Throughout this torrent of homage, its object, who sat beside Sergeant Kepper at a table six feet in front of Bech, actively pursued his good works, scribbling away on pieces of paper and annotating small stacks of correspondence and financial statements and occasionally dashing off and sealing a letter, with a licking and thumping of the envelope so noisy as to cause the court stenographer to glance around and the judge to direct a disciplinary stare. Was the judge, from his angle, receiving the same piteous impression, of vulnerable elderliness, that Bech was gathering from behind? The cords of Ohrbach’s slender neck strained, the shirt collar looked a size too big and not entirely fresh, the overgrown ears had sprouted white whiskers. The entire frail skull gently wagged in decrepitude’s absent-minded palsy.
Abe Bech had not allowed himself to appear old, though he had been seventy when he died. He had used a rinse to keep his hair dark, sat in the winter under a sun lamp, and gone off to the diamond district each day in a crisp white shirt laundered at a place that sent them back to you uncreased, on hangers. Like all salesmen, he gave his best self to his prospective customers, and saved his rage, sarcasm, and indifference for his family. Though circulatory problems had for some time been affecting his legs and hands, his cerebral hemorrhage had come out of the blue. In death as in life he had been abrupt and hard to reach. His last impact upon the metropolis—the only one to make the newspapers—was a half-hour delay underground at rush hour, inconveniencing thousands. Since the service elevator at the Clark Street station in Brooklyn Heights was out of commission, the stretcher bearers had brought his father, inscrutable and implacable in his body bag, up all those dirty tile steps, through the flood of exasperated commuters. In Bech’s mind it had the grandeur of a pharaoh’s funeral procession up from the Nile, into the depths of a Pyramid where the soul’s embalmed shell would lie forever intact.
By leaning forward and reaching with his arm he could have tapped Ohrbach’s thin hunched shoulder and asked his forgiveness for calling him an arch-gouger. But the gesture would have admitted ten million dollars’ worth of guilt, and betrayed his team.
The team was less impressed by the plaintiff’s accumulating case than Bech was. Rantoul even rose to indignation about Ohrbach’s chiropractor, an autocratically bald man who from the witness stand claimed to have observed a marked psychosomatic deterioriation in his patient immediately after the Flying Fur article had appeared. Solemnly turning over leaves from his files, in a cumbersome ring binder, the chiropractor described lower-back spasms and attendant pain that incapacitated the sensitive agent for months thereafter and perhaps permanently impaired his professional effectiveness. Rantoul had asked to examine the pages that the chiropractor consulted and saw terms like “mental-stress-induced” and “spastic depression” inserted in a smaller handwriting, in a fresher ink, into the records of two long years ago, when “The Only Winners Left in Tinseltown” had appeared. At lunch, Rantoul boasted, “Ah asked the judge to admit the file in evidence and Kepper turned pale as a goose’s belly. He withdrew the testimony. We would have had ’em for perjury sure as sugar.”
The last word was a modification, in Southern-courtly fashion, for Rita’s benefit.
As his stay in Los Angeles moved into its third week, Rita had become clearer to Bech. Her Hispanic rat-tat-tat way of thinking and talking had been softened by North American entrepreneurism, its willingness to smile and to explore possibilities. One day when Rantoul and Nunn had some other legal fish to fry, he and she had gone out to lunch at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away from the courthouse. To her he had unburdened himself of his qualms, his growing sympathy and pity for the plaintiff, who seemed to be the defendant. “I feel so guilty,” he said.
“That is a luxury you are allowing yourself,” Rita explained. “Some kind of Jewish thing, identifying with the people trying to destroy you. A way of making yourself superior to a fight. That’s fine, Henry. That’s very lovable. That’s why you have us, to do the fighting for you.”
“Ohrbach’s Jewish, too. Maybe he feels the same way about me.”
“Don’t you wish.”
“How do you think it’s going?”
She shrugged, making her hoop earrings wobble. “Their case is basura, but that doesn’t mean the jury won’t buy it. Juries go for underdogs and you haven’t yet established yourself as one. Ohrbach is doing that. We think he’s buying his shirts with the collar a size too big deliberately, and has developed on purpose that piteous head-waggle.”
“Really? Then that does make me mad. Rita, let’s nail the slippery bastard. May I call you Rita? Tell me, what do you do nights?”
His own nights stretched long and empty, moseying about his skyscraper hotel—a futuristic round tower arisen where two freeways met—with its many levels of under-patronized restaurants. One night he would sit at a counter watching nimble Japanese in chef hats slice steak and vegetables into a kind of edible origami; the next night he patronized the Chinese in their trickling grotto, with its small arched bridge guarded by a silk-clad hostess. He tried walking out into the night, but the downtown was eerily empty, and felt dangerous. There was only the rustle of palm trees and the roar of freeway traffic. He could never figure out where the movie houses were, or the little Italian restaurants, or the corner newsstands so ubiquitous in New York. In the mornings, however, as Bech climbed up a concrete hill above a chasm where cars vibratingly pummelled the earth and made the air quiver with carbon dioxide, he could feel in the fresh sunlight, faithfully delivered from a cloudless sky, what had fetched and held millions here: a desert clarity, a transparency that ascended from the fragile panorama of pastel buildings to the serene glassy nothingness at the heart of the heavens. No amount of reckless development and ruthless exploitation could hopelessly besmog such sublime air. This was the Promised Land; this was what Israel should have been, not some crabbed, endlessly disputed sliver of the Arab world. The Spanish had been ousted, yet remained, in the architecture, the place names, the ochre tint, the fatalism of this splendid mirage. He would arrive at the courthouse steps with a light sweat started across his shoulder blades, and a faint breathlessness of expectation.
“Oh, you don’t care,” Rita told him. “You must have a lot of girls back east, terribly clever and attractive East Coast girls.”
“I care,” he assured her.
“I do legal homework and cook for my parents and take care of my sister’s kids,” Rita answered. “She performs nude water ballet in a big tank at a businessmen’s bar over in Venice.”
“How about my taking you out to dinner, some night when she’s drying off?”
“Henry, let’s wait until after the verdict. You may not have enough left to pay for a single taco.”
Back in court, the plaintiffs had produced their most amusing witness, who had the jury laughing until tears came; he even elicited a smile from the court stenographer as he pattered away, his fingers falling—like a pianist’s more than a regular typist’s—in chords. The witness was an enormously fat and beautifully spoken process server, a virtuoso of court testimony who, in attempting to subpoena Lanna Jerome, had hid in the bushes and howled outside her condo wall in Palm Springs like a dog, mewed like a kitten, and chirped like a wounded bird. The singer and screen star was notoriously fond of animals, and he had thought thus to create a window of opportunity and slap the papers at her over the sill. No soap. She never stuck her head out. He demonstrated the howl, the mew, and the chirp.
“What is the relevance of all these sound effects?” the judge asked, when the jury’s laughter—slightly forced and sparse at the end, like canned laughter—had died down.
Sergeant Kepper was on his feet. “We have reason to believe, yeronner, that Ms. Jerome has changed her mind and now harbors a more favorable opinion of Mr. Ohrbach’s professional services on her behalf than she did at the time wherein on advice of her unscrupulous counsel he sued her. I mean she sued him. I misspoke myself, yeronner.”
“Objection. Irrelevant and immaterial and unproven hearsay,” Rantoul said.
“Sustained.” The judge directed the jury to forget the exchange they had just heard, and the process server pulled himself from the witness chair with the practiced skill of a wine steward easing out a champagne cork.
Up in the cafeteria, Rantoul was jubilant. “They keep opening up that Jerome can of worms like dogs returning to their mess,” he gloated. “She shows up, their case is toast.”
Gregg Nunn said excitedly, “Did you all notice how through that whole fantastic performance, with the animal noises and everything, Morrie never looked up and kept scribbling notes to himself? He’s given up on this one and is working on his next finagle. The guy never rests; he’s a spider, he spins lawsuits!”
Bech was grateful to Nunn for voicing, in his fey way, his own sense of the plaintiff as a transcendent phenomenon. At night, lying unsleeping and agitated in his hotel room, he felt Ohrbach enclosing him suffocatingly. This room was in the shape of a slice of pie. Bech’s head lay in the narrow end, near the shaft at the core of the round tower, in which elevators throbbed and hummed at all hours: high-priced hookers riding up with their junketing clients from the Pacific Rim, and then riding down alone. Beyond Bech’s twitching feet, gold curtains hid a forest of other glass skyscrapers, in L.A.’s eerily empty and abstract downtown. Ohrbach and his implacable lawsuit had brought Bech here, wedged into this unreal corner of the continent, just as his father had irascibly moved him, on the delicate cusp of puberty, to Brooklyn. The parallel made Ohrbach seem vast, and somewhat benign, as all the forces that create us must, in our instinctive self-approval, seem benign. In spite of his legal team’s warrior spirit, Bech harbored the sneaking suspicion that he and his enemy could strike a deal—indeed were, beneath all the vapid legal machinations, invisibly striking a deal. Ohrbach, Bech knew from the way the elderly man’s misty, evasive gaze tenderly flicked past the defendant’s face every morning, loved him; his apparent mercilessness hid a profound, persistent mercy.
Sure enough, the white-haired agent, brought to the stand to testify, oddly dissolved. He scotched his own case. In Rantoul’s phrase, he stopped minding the store. His eyes were now as shy of the jury as they had been of the defense team; he kept gazing down at some three-by-five cards he had brought to the stand, and as the lawyers and the judge sought to resolve some question of procedure, he would compulsively begin annotating them, with an old-fashioned fountain pen that audibly scratched. Kepper tried to lead him through the mental agony of being libelled in Flying Fur, but Ohrbach seemed no longer much interested; rather, he wanted to speak of Lanna Jerome, how much he had loved her and her then husband for the many years of their association, how wounded he had been when she inexplicably sued him at the instigation of her new, bouncer husband, and how entirely his affection and admiration for her had survived the mere “legal wars” that he and she had been obliged to wage. He would lay down his life for her, Ohrbach confided to the jury, and down deep he was sure that she felt the same about him.
Had she ever, Kepper asked him, sweatily trying to keep the testimony on track, called him a “gouger”?
“Oh, she might have, but only in fun. In affectionate
fun. Exaggeration was her style—a performer’s stock in trade.”
Kepper blanched. Had any of his clients, he asked Ohrbach, ever accused him of gouging, to the best of his recollection?
“There’s always a discussion,” Ohrbach smilingly allowed, “before the exact terms of any arrangement are ironed out. Things are said in heat that neither party actually means.”
Had anybody in his entire life, Kepper asked, almost shouting in exasperation, ever called him a “gouger,” let alone an “arch-gouger”?
These were creampuff pitches, Bech could see, meant to be knocked out of the park; but Ohrbach was letting them pop into the catcher’s mitt.
His waggling white-crowned head thrust even lower from his oversize collar as the talent agent said, in a shaky, slanting voice that still kept an edge of New York accent, “Well, in fifty years of working the Hollywood mills I’ve been called any number of things. I don’t recall ever seeing it in print, though, until the article by this nice young man.” And his shifty eyes dared follow his withered hand, for a second, in its shy gesture toward the place where Bech had been sitting and stewing day after day. Ohrbach was reaching out. David and Absalom. Joseph and his brothers. The Prodigal Son. Forgiveness, the patriarchal prerogative. Bech fought an impulse to leap up and go kneel before the witness and bow his head for the touch of the blessing his own father had denied.
“Shit,” said Sergeant Kepper. His stubby arms lifted from his sides and slapped back down, like a penguin’s flippers. “I give up.” To the electrified court he apologized, “Sorry, yeronner. I misspoke myself.”
“Didn’t that break your heart?” Bech asked Rita that Saturday night, at a Polynesian restaurant in Venice Beach, where great flaming things were hurried back and forth on platters that sounded wired to amplify the sizzle. “His own lawyer giving up on him.”