A Judgement on a Life

by Stephen Baddeley

  For a woman to sleep with a married man, and with a man she knows is married, doesn’t stop her from being a nice woman, and it doesn’t stop her from being a decent woman either. Wives may find that hard to believe, but it’s true.

  Joe remembered all the women he’d had affairs with. His affairs were never spur of the moment things. They were thought about and crafted things. They were artistic and gifted things. It was a lucky woman who was chosen by Joe. He made sure that, with the women he chose, he was lucky too. He was a gentle and considerate lover, and when it was time for the affair to end, it was ended gently and considerately. There was often sadness, but never anger, when the affair was over. So it was a lucky woman who was chosen by Joe

  His wife’s affairs were not like that. They were selfish and hurtful things. They were discordant and ugly things. They were Arthur Schoenberg while Joe’s were J.S. Bach. They were loud and ugly things and there was always much anger and unhappiness when they ended.

  He knew when his wife’s affairs were ended. He was a sensitive man and could sense ugliness as well as beauty. It was why he was so good at what he did. It was why Sir Peter employed him. When his wife’s affairs were over, there was much unhappiness and door slamming, much yelling at the maid and eating in her room.

  Joe couldn’t remember the moment he stopped loving his wife. It may not have been one moment. Things like that often happen slowly, and it isn’t always possible to remember the one moment when they happened. All that Joe was sure about, was that he didn’t love his wife anymore and their daughter was the only reason he stayed with her. Without their daughter, he would have divorced his wife.

  But then, one day, he came to realise that he didn’t like his daughter either. That his daughter was what her mother was, and that one day she would probably be worse. The realisation of that didn’t stop him from loving his daughter. He had to love his daughter. It was written on his soul that he had to love her, and that he had to protect her, whatever sort of person she may be, or may become. He knew that she, whatever she may be, or may become, must survive and if necessary survive on the bones of his sacrificed corpse. Joe was a good man and he would have died for the daughter he didn’t like.

  Joe remembered all the women he’d had affairs with. All of them meant something to him, and none of them meant nothing to him. His memories of them fitted together like a mosaic floor. Some pieces of the mosaic were bigger than others, and some were brighter than others, or more coloured than others. But they were all there in his memory, fitting together with their different sizes, shapes, colour and brightness.

  That’s the way life is, isn’t it? Not everything has to be the same as everything else. There are high points in everything and low points too. If life was a flat plane I’m not sure it would be worth the effort of getting through it. The highs are good, the lows aren’t so good, the highs are only good because there are lows to compare them with. We all know that, and if we don’t, we should. If we don’t know that, we haven’t been paying attention to life. It’s important to pay attention to life. If we don’t pay attention to life, we miss bits. Some of the bits tie the rest of the bits together. If we miss those bits we don’t get what life’s about. If life is about something, about anything. Some people are sure that life is about something. They may be the lucky ones. I’m not sure. I think it’s best not to be too sure about things like that.

  Benny was sure about everything. He lived in a simple and certain world. Benny was happy with his world.

  Joe remembered all his affairs. He remembered some more than others. When he remembered them, he felt good. The ones he remembered most were the ones that were the best. The biggest ones, the brightest ones and the ones with most colour.

  Joe was a tall man. He liked making love to tall women. He liked tall women, and the reason he liked tall women, was because tall women liked tall men. Or was it that tall women didn’t like short men. Perhaps it was a bit of both. Joe wasn’t sure. He didn’t think it mattered much.

  Joe liked the women he had affairs with to be happy. He knew he could make tall women happy. Joe was a considerate man and the women he had affairs with knew he was. It was part of the reason there was never unhappiness at the end. Just sadness, just a lack of the happiness that there had been before.

  Joe remembered a Russian woman. He met her in St Petersburg. She was his guide at The Hermitage. She came from Yekaterinburg and had high cheekbones. He was there to buy a van Houbraken. He was there for a week. She was tall. The tallest woman he ever made love to. Taller even than him and he was tall. They met often. When he was working in Europe, she came to wherever he was.

  He remembered a Finnish woman from Turku. She wasn’t as tall as the Russian woman, but she was tall enough to play basketball. She liked him to make love to her in her sauna. He liked that, and then he liked to swim with her in the freezing lake, and then he liked to make love to her again in front of the log fire. He tried hard, but never managed, to learn Finnish. Finnish is a hard language to learn, however hard you try. Her English was good, like it is with Finns.

  He remembered an Australian woman. She was almost as tall as him. She was the only woman he ever thought about leaving his wife for. She had once been Sir Peter’s mistress, but wasn’t anymore. Joe knew she once was, but wasn’t anymore. He met her because Sir Peter had asked her to help Joe find sites for his Australian galleries. It was the longest affair he ever had. It went on for years. He knew he nearly loved her, and he knew she nearly loved him too, but it was never quite love, or so he thought at the time, so, in the end, it settled gently into sex and friendship.

  He was glad when she got married, and glad she remembered him enough, and liked him enough, to invite him to the wedding. He could see that she was happy being with Tom Lodge, the man she called ‘Tommy’. Joe knew it was the first time she’d been truly in love and, he suspected, the first time she’d been truly happy. Joe was a good man, and other people’s happiness made Joe happy too.

  He could see that Tom Lodge loved her too.

  It wasn’t until later that he realised he loved her too.

  Exit Chorus.

  Two

  I was working at the uni on next week’s lectures, sorting the right slides for the carousels. The door swung open and the Major walked in. He looked around the room and smiled at my blind eye. Then Peter walked in and sat in the opposite chair. The Major walked out and the door closed shut.

  Then Peter spoke, and he spoke slowly and precisely, and I knew he was making sure that I understood every word he said, and understood every threat he made to the people I loved, and that I understood what I must do to stop the threats from coming true.

  That was how the nightmare started. Not the nightmare of my dreams, the nightmare of my life.

  Three

  When we first came to live in London, I liked it lots. We both did. We’d been living in New York for years. I’d been working at the Frick on Fifth and we had an apartment on Madison. New York isn’t an easy place to live and it’s harder if you’re from the Midwest. It’s even harder if you have children. We didn’t have children, but we had a daughter and we wanted the best for her. All parents want that, so we weren’t anything special.

  My wife was a teacher when I met her in Milwaukee. She was smart and taught math.

  We call it math because it’s a singular noun. The English call it maths, and that has to be wrong. It’s not a plural. It would be like teaching histories or Latins and stuff like that. It doesn’t make sense to call it maths. I thought I should explain that, because we Yanks come in for a lot of damn flak from the English word-police because of that. The English can be a mighty strange lot. They pretend to love their language and then say “sumfink”. I don’t mind the Brits, some of them, but, when you get them onto words, they can be assholes.

  I think this obsession the Brits have with words is part of their goddam class system. It�
�s what helps them sort out who’s worth getting to know. They don’t have to find out if someone’s worth getting to know by finding out if they’re worth getting to know. They listen for the dropped ‘h’s and the glottal-stops. It’s easy that way. They must miss out on getting to know people they would like to know, but that doesn’t seem to worry them a whole heap. In the US we don’t do that so much. A few Ivy League preppies might, but our class system, if we have one, is all about money. That may not be great, but it’s as sure as hell better than how some guy says stuff. Having a whole heap of money usually means you’ve worked hard and, somewhere along the line, been smart. Not always, but, I guess, most of the time. And, what’s more, having a class system, based on who your frigging ancestors were, seems crazy to us. Well, us Midwesterners anyway, maybe not some of the good old Puritan folks in New England, you know, the Cabots and that God-fearing crowd.

  I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Australia over the past few years, and they seem to have missed out on all that class crap. I don’t know how they tell who they want to know from who they don’t. Maybe they just get to know people, then decide whether they wanna keep on knowing them. It sounds like an okay system to me. I think it’s because of all the Irish Micks they got in the beginning.

  The Aussies got the Irish Micks and that’s why they laugh a lot. The Kiwis got the Scottish Prods and that’s why they don’t.

  Good Lord! Save us from the Puritans.

  What is it about some religions that make people so judgemental? So unchristian? So unattractive? Why is it that some religions, when they should be helping us be better people, make us so much worse, and so much less than we could be?

  I was brought up Catholic and I know there are good things about that. Being Catholic removes a lot of the uncertainties of growing up. Not all of them of course, but quite a lot of them. It did for me. It gave me a moral platform, stable ground to grow up on. It gave me the certainty of eternity and immutability. The certainty of God’s love and the even greater certainty of God’s wrath.

  For as long as there’s been a God, he’s been keeping children in line better than anyone else. I guess God’s been keeping everyone in line better than anyone else. Maybe that’s why kings liked God. He kept the peasants in their place, with the promise of heaven and the threat of hell. “Don’t rebel now, just because your children are starving. Wait ’til they die and they’ll eat manna with the angels.”

  But then, when I was older, I found out more about God. Ma always said Father Flannery and Father Higgins were ‘God’s men on earth’ and that was why we all had to treat them different to everyone else. It was just one of those things you accepted as a child and the thought of asking ‘why?’ never occurred to me, or to any of us, I guess. Then I found out about Father Flannery playing with Billy Kulbac in the vestry after choir practice. Then I found out about Father Higgins screwing Mrs Peoli after her husband died. Then I learned about the Pope and the Nazis.

  Then I thought more about God. Lots of kids do that at ‘that age’. The priests taught us how God was eternal and unchanging. How he was all seeing and all powerful and the rock of ages. He scared the crap out of me.

  So how was it that God went from the revenge freak type God of Exodus, with his ‘eye for an eye’ stuff, to the warm, fluffy God of ‘love and forgiveness’. You know, in all those New Testament bits? And how did he go from the polyphobic control nut of Leviticus to the God of ‘mercy and compassion’ of Mathew and Luke? It was PR, had to be, and Americans know, more than most people, about PR. I knew it was PR by the time I was twenty. There’s no one more certain about things than a twenty-year-old fallen Catholic.

  One of the funny things about Jesus, and there are more than one, is that no one takes any notice of anything he said. They still don’t, and the priests are no better than the rest of us. Sometimes they’re goddam worse. That probably goes for all religions, I guess, but I don’t know a whole heap about Buddha so I may be wrong there.

  I guess Christians, and that means me, have done just one hell of a lot more unchristian acts than all those relaxed, non-angsted, ‘whatever-turns-you-on’, atheist type guys ever did.

  So I’m a fallen Catholic, and I’ve learned to live with that. Ma isn’t too happy about it, but I can’t do anything about that. She refuses to call me a ‘fallen Catholic’, so she calls me a ‘lapsed Catholic’. I think it gives her hope that I may return to the fold, one day. That God, one day, may forgive me. I know she doesn’t want me to go to Hell. I don’t want to either. So to avoid going to Hell, I decided not to believe in it. Not to believe in any of it, heaven, hell, the whole goddam lot. It helped me, when I did that.

  So we moved to London and I travelled the world finding the stuff Peter wanted me to find. The stuff Peter wanted to own. The stuff he wanted to own so he could hide it away.

  The stuff Peter wanted, was the stuff Peter got, period. I learned that early on. It was a good thing to learn, and a good thing to learn early on. I guess I’ve always been a fast learner, and I’m proud of that.

  Peter liked owning beautiful things and looking at the beautiful things he owned, so I guess he got off on looking at the beautiful things he owned.

  I was a fast learner, and I learned fast, that owning things and looking at the things he owned, was only part of it, and that his biggest get-off was knowing no one else owned the things he did, so no one else could look at the things he did, not unless he let them, and I know he didn’t do that a whole lot. So what was his, in every way, was no one else’s, in any way. It wasn’t good to be like that, and there wasn’t a whole lot about ‘Sir’ Peter I admired.

  I guess I was in England too long. The whole place was giving me a pain in the backside. I missed the old US of A more than I ever thought I would. The English were too hard to read, too closed up and rigid, too uptight, like they even had their hair clenched or something. It was like they had a poker up their ass.

  So I was stuck living where I didn’t want to live, with a woman I didn’t love, a daughter I didn’t like, and working for some crazy guy who made my skin crawl. It wasn’t a good time for me.

  So, I’d been in England too fucking long and it was giving me a pain in the butt. That’s the goddam truth of it.

  But, as I said before, I was a fast learner, and I learned fast that ‘Sir’ Peter was an asshole, but an asshole not to be taken lightly. (Why do the English do all this ‘Sir’ this and ‘Lord’ that crap? Who in hell do they think they’re fooling?)

  Peter was a serious asshole, and needed to be taken seriously. It was a good thing I learned that, but then I guess, most things are good to learn, but, for goddam sure, some things are better to learn than others. That I needed to take this guy seriously was one of the better things I learned.

  I’ve never met a guy who could be so polite and so threatening at the same time, so generous, selfish and exacting at the same time, happy and grim at the same time. I’d never met a guy like him before. I never have since. I think that’s because guys like him aren’t everyday guys, and that has to be a good thing. Guys like him are frightening, and he certainly frightened the crap out of me.

  I kinda knew the sort of guy he was, right from the start. From the time he came to see me at the Frick and offered me the job in London. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, and he knew I wouldn’t.

  He wasn’t offering me a job in London. He was telling me I had a job in London, and these were the conditions I would accept. They were good conditions, but even if they weren’t, I don’t think I’d have had the balls to say ‘No’.

  If I wasn’t a fallen Catholic, would I have had the balls, the moral courage, to have said ‘No’? I don’t think so. Religion doesn’t give you courage, moral or otherwise. It doesn’t give you any sort of courage. It just gives you solace in your cowardice.

  All, most, a few, maybe some Christians would like to be like Jesus Christ, even though they
know they don’t have the guts to do any of the things he did. Some, a few, most, maybe all Christians lack the courage to be anything but what they are. And sometimes, often, they don’t even have the courage to be that. That’s why they stay with ‘the Church’. They feel safer in ‘the Church’.

  To be a Christian doesn’t take a whole heap of courage, not in the way most Christians go about it. Religion thrives on weakness and cowardice and inadequacy. I guess that’s how religions survive. I left ‘the Church’, but that didn’t mean I had courage. All it means was that I was pissed off with all the bullshit.

  At his most polite, there was still menace. It was the thing Jack Palance was good at, but with Peter it was for real, and there was no acting going on. I was frightened of him, and it was the smart thing to be.

  I learned that, the more polite he was, the more dangerous he was, and the more frightened I should be. It wasn’t a silk glove over an iron fist. It was an iron fist in plain view. There was no silk glove, and no pretence of one. It was an iron fist in an iron gauntlet. Politeness was his iron gauntlet, his soul was his iron fist.

  Four

  I knew I’d crossed him over the Melancholy, and I knew that was why he’d arranged for me to be raped, crucified and generally bashed about, and let me assure you, they aren’t nice things to have happen to you, especially when they’re being done by two disgusting, stinking bikies, and especially when you know they’ve been arranged for you by a man you once thought might have cared for you. But I’d come to know the sort of man Peter was, had done years before, so I wasn’t really surprised that it happened. I knew what I’d done to upset Peter’s plans and getting Tommy acquitted wouldn’t be something Peter was ever going to forgive me for or leave unpunished. That doesn’t mean that I was in any way happy for it to happen, or prepared for it to happen when it did. It was just that I had no choice when it came to crossing him, because, if I hadn’t crossed him and exposed his plot with the fake, it would have meant Tommy being sent to jail. I knew I loved Tommy by then, even though he didn’t love me anymore, or thought he didn’t, and the thought of me letting that happen to him, when I could have stopped it, was a thing I didn’t have any choice about. So when I went to see Karlsberg in his hotel and told him the things I would do if he didn’t do the things I wanted him to do, I never thought much about what might happen next, and even if I had thought about it, and even if I had known what Peter and the Major would arrange to have happen to me, I would still have done what I did. It was one of the few good things I’d done in my life, up until then.