The picture he’d painted of his marriage caused Tom to slip back into the funk that had brought him to Guido’s in the first place, which was something different in degree and kind from the normal depressions that lurked around the two of us like pigeons around a park. Although there were a thousand reasons not to—my desire to preserve my friendship with Tom and the fact that I heard enough of other people’s troubles during the day to cultivate them when my meter wasn’t running, among others—I resolved to keep probing until I discovered the source of his torment. I didn’t have anything to do the rest of the night, anyway. Or even the rest of the week.
“How did you meet her?” I prompted.
“We met in college. She was a senior at State and I was back from the war and earning a G.I. Bill living taking some courses in Asian history in the hope that what I’d seen and done over there would make sense if I put it in a context that didn’t originate with the Defense Department and the CIA. Clarissa was a music major—she’s known she wanted to be a singer since she was eight years old and her family trotted her out for every remotely appropriate occasion and made her sing ‘Alice Blue Gown’ and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’”
Tom paused to enjoy what I imagined was an image of his wife as a budding Shirley Temple, but the vision didn’t last. “I was trying to decide what the war meant—whether it meant eternal damnation for all of us because man’s unquenchable inhumanity to man was the ineluctable stain of original sin, or whether it was just another exercise in barbarism so routine and unexceptional there might still be a place for me in the world, that I hadn’t forfeited my right to function in what passes for civilized society the day I failed to put a stop to the castration ritual that certain members of my unit were so enamored with.” He blinked. “I must say, by the way, that the recent events in the Gulf incline me toward the latter view.”
Tom paused long enough to give me a chance to ponder what twenty years of physiological and psychological excess would do to the psyche, what Tom must have had to become in order to endure and even thrive in such a life, whether that was something better or worse than what I had become myself. Like most things I ponder, I gave up before I had an answer.
“Clarissa,” he repeated softly. “We were in the same Global Studies class, only nodding acquaintances till we ran into each other at a concert in Stern Grove. I was a semi-roadie for one of the bands on the days I wasn’t too drugged up to function, and she was a part-time singer with a group called Ozymandias. She was trying to be another Janis Joplin in those days, though her talents were more like Lena Horne’s.”
Tom sighed, more with pleasure than its opposite. “It was a Sunday. She was standing backstage waiting to go on, and I was fiddling with a balky amp and a drunken drummer, and we got to talking. I must have been less strung out than normal, because when I asked her to go out for a drink after the show, she said she would. It turned out we didn’t live that far from each other—patronized the same grocery and all that—and we started dating.”
“Nice.”
He met my look. “She saved my life, is what it came down to. Clarissa’s the one who realized the only way I could survive with all the Vietnam baggage I was carrying was to keep doing what had kept me sane in Nam—keeping people alive. Literally, she meant: being the first one on the scene, the one who stops the bleeding and reduces the fracture and treats the shock and stuffs the guts back where they came from so someone somewhere else can figure out a way to make it permanent. And she was right. Medicine—emergency medicine, street medicine—gave me the kind of focus I needed to keep the compromises I’d made in the war from eating away at everything I believed about the world and about myself. She was right on, was dear Clarissa; I’ll owe her for that forever.”
Tom’s lips wrinkled into a wry grin. “Of course, in her view the EMT phase was temporary. After we got married, she decided I could do better—med school, hospital administration, osteopathic college, something. She still brings it up; her ambitions are not solely egocentric.” His smile turned charitable. “Clarissa thinks anything’s possible if you make up your mind to do it. I, on the other hand, think all of us are pretty much etched in stone. I mean, if est or TM really worked, no one would have ever heard of Joseph Campbell or this Bradshaw character, right? So while I stumble around uncertain about everything from the implications of the budget deficit to the safety of irradiated food, Clarissa has made up her mind about virtually everything. And right now she thinks her mind is telling her that she’s in love with another man.”
Tom banged his snifter on the bar so hard I was afraid it would shatter in his palm. When it didn’t, I went back to worrying that his soul was about to do the same.
When he’d wiped the spill and drained the dregs and signaled for another round, Tom looked at me and shrugged. “I love her, Marsh. I mean, we’ve never talked about this stuff before, but the main thing about me is, I love my wife. I want to be with her every minute. I don’t come to Guido’s to get away from her, like a lot of these guys; I come to get away from being home alone without her. It kills me that she sings her heart out for a bunch of drunken strangers six nights a week. I should be used to it by now, I know. But I’m not. I guess I never will be. Which I suppose is part of the problem.”
Guido brought another brandy. Tom sniffed and sipped. For a moment, I was sure he was going to cry.
“We’ve had a good marriage, you know? I mean, it’s weird—she works nights, I work days—so we’re not together that often, but when we are, it’s great. The sex, the talk, the fun—everything. We’ve had problems, sure—money’s tight, she wants a kid and I don’t, I want to move to the country but she still likes the city, I want her to cut back her schedule but she says she’s got to give it all she has while she still has her pipes. But we talk it through, and compromise, and it works out. Most of the time. How many great marriages do you know of, Marsh? Ever?”
I thought about it. Harry and Ruthie Spring. The Kottles, maybe. And … “Three or four,” I said optimistically.
“Well, we were one of them. Till he came along.”
“So who is this monster?”
Tom sighed. “Richard Sands.”
I squinted to get him into better focus. “The Richard Sands?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s the guy who’s after your wife?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
Tom shrugged. “Because he loves her, supposedly. Because he was smitten the first time he heard her sing.” His lip twisted sardonically. “‘Because he needs her to make sense of his life.’ And I quote.”
I raised a brow. “You’ve talked to him about it?”
Tom shook his head. “Clarissa reports in. It’s not like she’s sneaking around behind my back—she tells me everything they do. They’ve got it down to a routine—he calls for her at the hotel after the second show, then spirits her away to his private club, where he uses his wiles to seduce her away from me till she’s had her fill and asks him to take her home, where she climbs into the bed I’ve just vacated and gets her beauty sleep. Twelve hours later, the merry-go-round starts up again. And it’s driving me fucking crazy.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Six months. That I know of. You ever see him on TV?”
I nodded.
“What did you think?”
“Lots of brass, lots of ego. Lots of money, lots of guts.”
“A man who gets what he wants, in other words.”
I nodded before I considered what it meant.
“Well,” Tom said miserably, “what he wants is my wife, goddammit. So how am I going to stop him?”
THREE
Although I both hoped and suspected Tom was exaggerating his problems, it was easy to understand the panic underlying his concern: His rival for his wife’s affections was no ordinary swain. Richard Sands was a true tycoon, a corporate raider, a man who had used the relaxation of the rules and the buccaneer mora
lity fostered by the Reagan administration, along with the brass and bravado that came to him naturally, to threaten, coerce, intimidate, and ultimately invade and occupy a series of corporate boardrooms up and down the West Coast. His real and threatened assaults on undervalued companies and overly complacent managements had yielded a fortune that placed him well up the Forbes listing of the world’s richest men and made Sands the stuff of envy or outrage, depending on whom you talked to.
Sands wasn’t a publicity hound like Trump or an obsessed crusader like Lorenzo; he was more a mystery man like Lungren or Buffett. Not much of his story was known, at least to me, but I did know Sands’ rise was hardly rags to riches—his father had owned a small but lucrative business that catered primarily to the market for snack foods. Sands had attended Stanford and the Wharton School, then spent some years in Europe running the Hamburg branch of the family company, the Germans apparently possessing an unquenchable affinity for the charms of beer nuts and popcorn. But the snack trade soon became too tame for young Richard, and he set out after bigger game.
His initial success was at the form of legalized extortion known as greenmail. In the early eighties, Sands used a portion of the family fortune to accumulate stock in a company that specialized in updated versions of Murphy beds and convertible sofas. Two months later, he came away with $12 million in greenmail when the company bought out his position at a premium in order to prevent Sands from taking control of the board.
With the profits and publicity from that transaction, Sands was on his way. Two more greenmail forays yielded similar returns, along with a blip of adverse publicity when the founder of a target company killed himself rather than see Sands dismantle his dream. Casting about for bigger game, Sands hooked up with a protégé of Michael Milken’s, and the two of them used Sands’ brief but impressive record to persuade a host of mutual-fund managers and go-go S&L executives, whose jobs depended on achieving record levels of short-term performance regardless of long-term risk, to buy more than a billion dollars’ worth of 16 percent junk bonds that constituted little more than a war chest for the raids of Richard Sands. Armed and eager, Richard Sands went hunting.
When greenmail became too outrageous even for the pirates of the eighties, Sands made the switch to LBOs. In a series of lightning moves, many involving established West Coast businesses, Sands helped managements take their companies private by buying up the stock at a price that was more than market but less than book value—advancing management’s interests over those of the shareholders they were sworn to serve, in other words. Once the deal was done, Sands would aid the new owners in selling off enough of the company’s assets to satisfy both the debt obligations incurred in financing the buy-back and the enormous fees that Sands and his battery of lawyers and accountants deemed their due for alerting management to the opportunity and arranging the funds to finance it. It took only a few years of such maneuverings to boost Sands’ personal worth above eight figures and his reputation into the stuff of legend.
Sands wasn’t stupid, obviously; he wasn’t even crooked by the definitions most recently at work in the world. He’d played by rules that made millionaires out of twenty-five-year-old investment bankers and billionaires out of people like Boesky and Milken for doing nothing more valuable than persuading the government that it was foolish to follow a lot of Depression-era notions about antitrust and insider trading and fair disclosure and due diligence, let alone notions a lot older than those, notions of the sort you can find in the Bible if you consult passages other than the ones read on TV by slick-haired preachers who see the Good Book as a come-on rather than a code of conduct.
As far as I knew, Sands had never been indicted or convicted or even criticized very much, certainly not by the newspapers and politicians who operated within the generous ambit of Sands’ corporate headquarters, a long, low slab of slate and cedar that lay along a reclaimed strip of land on the edge of San Francisco Bay directly east of the hill on which I lived. Over the years, Sands and his bright white helicopter and his pearl-gray limousine and his silver and gold Gulfstream had become as familiar to San Franciscans as the Golden Gate and, as Sands swept off in search of yet another corporate coonskin to hang on his well-hung wall, apparently inspired the same degree of awe.
Richard Sands was a San Francisco titan. Now that he’d conquered most of the Western world, what he apparently wanted next was the wife of the morose young man seated across from me, whose tears had finally begun to flow.
I patted the back of his hand, which lay on the bar between us, as helpless as a fish out of water. “Hey. It’s not that bad. She’s still with you, isn’t she?”
Tom Crandall blinked at the tears, but the effort was ineffective. When he swiped at them with his palm, the streak across his cheek was made metallic by the reflection of the bar lights. “You know where I was this afternoon?” he managed after a minute.
“Where?”
“Down in the Tenderloin, helping my partner pull some poor bastard out of a fleabag on Eddy Street, then rushing him to S.F. General even though I knew he had AIDS and that whatever opportunistic infection had laid claim to him was so advanced that even if he was alive when we got him there he wouldn’t be for long.”
“Rough.”
“Sure—there’s lots of rough out there these days. AIDS is as bad a way to die as there is. But that’s not the point at the moment. The point is, while I was doing business on Eddy Street, guess where my beloved Clarissa was?”
“Where?”
“Los Angeles.” His grin turned sly, even close to evil. “Mr. Sands flew her there. For lunch.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. The occasion was the grand opening of some place in Malibu owned by a bunch of talent agents and movie stars. She says it could be a great boost for her if she fits in with the Colony swells. That’s what they call Malibu—the Colony. Isn’t that interesting? Do you suppose it’s anything like a leper colony? And isn’t it thrilling that the brilliant Mr. Sands has taken such an interest in my wife’s career?”
The tortured ripple in Tom’s voice caused several of the faces at the bar to turn our way, which in itself was saying something—one night a guy in the front room got stabbed in the throat by his wife, who was in turn punched in the face by his mistress, and no one in Guido’s moved an inch.
I tried to be as comforting as I could. “Maybe that’s all it is, did you ever think of that? Maybe Sands is just trying to get Clarissa a break in the business.”
Tom’s voice fell to a funereal pitch, albeit an Irish funeral. “You’re like Chamberlain at Munich; you don’t quite grasp the dimensions of the problem. Sands has proposed to her. Get it? He doesn’t just want to sleep with her, or squire her around to the chichi watering holes, or turn her into his private plaything; he wants to make her his wife.”
“I thought he already had a wife.”
“He does; apparently, like me, she’s excess baggage. Either that or he’s going to take them both to Utah and set up shop with the Mormons. Howard Hughes was big on Mormons, you know. Maybe it’s a fetish with rich people.”
I laughed. “You’ve got one thing going for you, at least—Clarissa’s not eligible for marriage at the moment.”
Tom waved at the suggestion. “Sands has that covered. He’ll choreograph the whole thing—divorce on demand, all expenses paid; lawyers provided by him, one for each; a financial settlement that will be eminently fair to the miserable wretch she’s married to—all very civilized and mature. Hell, I even come out of it with a profit, which would make marriage the only decent investment I ever made. In the meantime, he’s shedding his spouse as well, so they’re cleared for nuptial number two. After an appropriate period of recuperation and regret, of course.”
I let Tom’s bitterness swirl for a while, hoping the air would absorb or at least dilute it. But from the expression on his face and the clench to his fists, I could see his anger still fed on itself, and silence was an appetizer.
I spoke hurriedly, without thinking where I was going, which turned out to be a mistake. “It could be just talk, Tom. Maybe Sands thinks he has to talk marriage to get her to …”
“What? Let him into her pants?” Tom’s lip twitched meanly. “I told you, he won’t be satisfied with that. He wants to make it legal—hell, he’s already got the ring. Five carats, I understand; formerly on the finger of Barbara Hutton.”
I was amazed in spite of myself. “She’s already wearing his ring?”
Tom shook his head. “Not yet. But it’s there when she wants it.”
“Clarissa’s told you all this?”
“Are you kidding? Every night she comes home with a new chapter; she makes it sound like ‘Héloise and Abélard Hit Hillsborough.’ Last week he told her he’d buy her any house between San Diego and Seattle. If she wanted one that wasn’t on the market, he’d do what it took to see that it was.”
“That’s just talk—rich guy bragging about his money. I don’t think they can help it.”
“Yeah? What about this? He says he’s going to buy her a club of her very own. Clarissa’s, featuring the vocal stylings of Clarissa Crandall. And that’s not all. Seems that among his holdings is a small record label in L.A. that specializes in reissues of old standards—right up her alley. So he’ll not only give her a venue, he’ll make her immortal as well. Now how the fuck do I compete with that?”
His voice rose to the edge of hysteria. I said the only thing I could think of. “If she loves you, the rest of it won’t matter.”
Tom closed his eyes. “Come on, Marsh. Live in the real world. Love is sloppy sentimentality, an immature indulgence. You can’t let it stand in the way of the good life.”
“I doubt very much that Clarissa’s that kind of woman. If she was, you wouldn’t have married her.”
In the face of my implicit praise, Tom’s ire seemed to cool a tad. When he spoke, it was a hum of reminiscence. “She used to love me. A lot, I think, hard though that may be to believe. Then this bozo came along. He turned her head, Marsh; there’s no getting around it.” Tom blinked and indulged in rhetoric. “And who can blame her? No one in their right mind would choose a life with me compared to what Sands is offering.”
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