The Man Who Cancelled Himself

by David Handler

  Always a Cadillac. New one every two years. Always bought, never leased. Leases were for salesmen and con artists. “What did you tell her?”

  “That I’d be happy to take care of it.”

  “Great. And while you’re waiting on line at the DMV you can fill out your application for sainthood.”

  Merilee’s jaw tightened, red blotches forming on her cheeks. “Hoagy, I’m trying to be patient and understanding, because I understand just how painful this is for you. But you’re not making it easy for me. In fact, you’re not making it easy for anyone, including yourself.” She waited for me to say something. When I didn’t she took a deep breath and kept going. “She also wanted to know if we’re coming by on Sunday. She said he really, really looks forward to it. Tracy makes him so—”

  “I don’t know,” I broke in curtly. “I have to go to the city for a couple of days. To see Ruth.”

  “You’re going to try and patch things up between them. Is that it?”

  “I don’t think anyone can do that.”

  “But you’re going to try,” she pressed.

  “I’m going to see her. If she’ll see me.”

  “And what of our guests?”

  “They’ll entertain themselves. Particularly in the afternoon.”

  “I didn’t need to know that, darling. I really didn’t.” She poked at Tracy’s tummy with a long, slender finger, eliciting giggles. “I do think it’s rather odd, Hoagy,” she said softly.

  “What is, Merilee?”

  “How you can care so much about the health and well-being of other people’s families. And so little about your own.”

  “I don’t think that’s odd at all, Merilee. In fact, that’s my idea of totally, perfectly normal.”

  The air got warmer as I got closer to town, the cool drizzle turning into a steamy tropical rain, with sudden gusts of wind and lightning crackling angrily across the sky. Most of it had blown over by the time I left the Jag in the garage around the corner from our seven rooms on Central Park West. Just the sticky heat was left. It felt like summer all over again.

  It’s always jarring to be back in the city after a while away. The people seem to move so furiously, with such grim intent and so little purpose. Briefly, I stand apart from them, wondering what invisible current propels them forward. But within moments the current lifts my own feet from the pavement and sweeps me along and I am one of them.

  Pamela, our British housekeeper, was delighted to see me. Pamela’s plump and silver-haired and possesses the most unflappable disposition I’ve ever come across. Lulu adores her. But then Lulu adores anyone who will make her kippers and eggs. I ditched the turtleneck for a lavender broadcloth shirt and cream-colored bow tie, and the cheviot wool for a lighter-weight silk and wool hounds-tooth. Then I sat down and picked up the phone and found out Clethra had just been Gilloolyed.

  This was the day the home video broke, that infamous X-rated video of little Clethra performing her little striptease for Thor in some hotel room. One of the tabloid shows, Hard Copy, had gotten ahold of it and planned to show it in all its sleazy glory that evening. Already, there had been no small amount of horn-blowing on their part. Every television news outlet in the country had been rushed a tasty five-second snippet in time for the noon news. Plus, the tabloid’s giddy producers had held a raucous morning press conference at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on Forty-second Street, where they flatly refused to say how they’d landed the tape—just that it came from a source close to the family. The tape went for between three and six hundred thousand dollars, depending on who you heard about it from. Me, I heard about it from Ruth, who claimed she’d known nothing about it until the producers called her that morning for her comment. She sounded worn down by this latest dirty installment. She told me I was welcome to come downtown for a talk, provided I was alone. She wasn’t referring to Lulu.

  Baby Ruth Feingold lived in the bottom two floors of a brownstone down on Greenwich Street, the same apartment she’d lived in back when she represented Greenwich Village in the U.S. Congress. Greenwich is all the way over on the west side in the middle of the old meatpacking district. There was still a meatpacking house right next door to hers. Loud, burly men were busy loading and unloading sides of beef at the curb, a battalion of tabloid cameramen and reporters competing with them for precious sidewalk space—and losing. You don’t mess with meatpackers. Not in New York. Not anywhere. These are men who know what goes inside of hot dogs. And eat them anyway.

  A cop in uniform was watching it all with glum resignation. I elbowed my way through the crowd to him, my Borsalino down low over my face, and told him I was expected. The cop went into the vestibule and buzzed Ruth. She let me in.

  “It’s been a long time, Ruth,” I said, bending down to kiss her cheek. The last time was when I had interviewed her for Esquire, back in both of our heydays. “How are you doing?”

  “It stinks out loud is how I’m doing,” Ruth fumed, her voice a raspy, defiant snarl. “It’s humiliating, it’s painful and it’s so typical. He does whatever he goddamned wants and I have to swallow it to the last drop and pretend I like it, just like women have been pretending they like it for centuries.”

  At our feet Lulu let out a moan. Any allusion to oral sex has always horrified her.

  “It’s still a man’s world, Hoagy,” Ruth raged on. “Nothing has changed. Not one thing. Did you know that the average amount a divorced man pays in child support has fallen by twenty-five percent in the past fifteen years? That the number of women in domestic violence shelters has doubled? That the largest percentage of working women in this country are still entry-level clerks and typists?” Typical Ruth Feingold scream of consciousness, this. Only occasionally did the woman come up for air. “Everyone acts as if we won the war. Baloney. Working women all over this nation are still being shat upon.”

  “I’ve got some bad news for you, Ruth. We’re all being shat upon.”

  She stood there in the doorway with her hands on her hips, scowling up at me. “Are you getting taller or am I getting shorter?” she demanded accusingly.

  “Never fear, I’m getting taller. Deep down inside I’m still a growing boy.”

  She let out a snort and closed the door while Lulu and I tried to maneuver our way around her in the hallway. Not so easy. Ruth Feingold was very close to being a perfectly round human organism—no more than an inch or two over five feet and no less than two hundred pounds. You didn’t know whether to go around her or over her. Not that you’d make it either way. There wasn’t so much as a hint of give to Baby Ruth. She was pure attitude—blunt and passionate and tough. A New Yorker in the truest sense of the word. She was wearing a somewhat ratty cardigan over an EARTH DAY—DO MORE IN ’74 tie-dyed T-shirt, slacks, and shearling slippers. Her shock of frizzy hair was silver now, and a pair of reading glasses was suspended from a chain atop her mountainous bosoms. But she’d lost none of her fierceness. The black eyes were still piercing. The fire still burned.

  Her apartment smelled of chicken soup and mothballs. Lulu headed straight through the kitchen into the garden out back. She can’t stand the smell of mothballs. Don’t ask me why. Ruth and I went into the living room, which seemed a lot more Upper Montclair, New Jersey, than it did West Village. There were plastic slipcovers over the somewhat assertive chintz sofa and armchairs. There was thick gold shag carpeting on the floor. There were heavy burgundy velvet drapes over the front windows, blocking out any light from the street. Several lamps were on. There were more plastic slipcovers over the lampshades. One wall was nothing but framed photographs of Ruth with Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, with Mailer and Breslin, with Gloria and Betty and Bella and the Shirleys, MacLaine and Chisholm. There were empty spaces on the other walls, outlines of where Thor’s pictures used to hang. It was not a tidy room. Dirty dishes and newspapers were heaped on the coffee table, shoes and socks and jackets strewn about the floor.

  “As you can see, there’s a teenaged b
oy in the house.” She sat, puffing out her cheeks. “Plus I’m still traveling two, three days a week on the lecture circuit. That’s how I make my living now. And believe me, it hasn’t been easy lately, being a public laughingstock. Women candidates all over the country used to beg me to come speak on their behalf. Beg me. Not anymore.”

  I sat, crossing my legs. “How’s your law practice?”

  “It sucks,” she answered sharply. “Who the hell would hire me?”

  “And Arvin?”

  She hesitated, swatting at some crumbs on her sweater. “He’s been better. We all have.”

  “I wonder if I could spend a little time with him this afternoon after school.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “To talk to him.”

  She bristled. “And maybe pass along a message from Thor?”

  “Not at all. I have no message.”

  “Let’s get one thing straight, Hoagy,” she said, shaking her finger at me. “I regard you as in the enemy camp. I agreed to see you out of courtesy and because you’re an old family friend and because I didn’t have any other reason to get dressed today. But Arvin is off-limits, understood?”

  “If you insist, Ruth.”

  “I do insist,” she said, struggling to get comfortable on the sofa. It wasn’t easy for her—her feet didn’t touch the floor and she wasn’t supple enough to fold her legs under her. She finally settled for a Humpty-Dumpty position, footsies swinging in midair. “I cannot believe that that man actually stooped so low as to peddle a film of Clethra taking her underwear off.”

  “You think he’s the one who sold it?”

  She stared at me. “Don’t you?”

  “I’m trying not to think.”

  She shook her head at me disgustedly. “Listen to yourself, Hoagy.”

  “I’m trying not to do that, either.”

  “There’s nothing that man won’t do to get what he wants.”

  “And he’s got her,” I pointed out.

  “But he hasn’t got Arvin,” she fired back. “And I’ll fight him all the way to the Supreme Court to make sure he doesn’t get him. That’ll cost him hundreds of thousands in legal fees. So wake up and smell the coffee, Hoagy. Ask yourself who else in this whole miserable affair has had their assets frozen. Ask yourself who else has—” She stopped short, her eyes bulging at me. “Isn’t that his bracelet you’re wearing?”

  “It is.” I twirled it around my wrist, examining it.

  Ruth glared at me witheringly. “I can’t believe you’re helping him.”

  “Actually, I’m helping her.”

  Her face darkened. “What does the little tramp have to say for herself?”

  “That she can’t please you. That you’re always in her face.”

  “Oh, please,” she huffed, thrusting her chin at me. “I am what I am, Hoagy. My parents were German Jews who got off the boat in 1936 without three cents in their pockets or a word of English in their heads. My father, who pressed pants in Washington Heights until the day he died, taught me to aim high for myself. So I aimed high. I was valedictorian of my high school class, first in my class in Radcliffe, editor of the law review at Columbia. When I was twenty-five I defended a black woman in Little Rock who’d been accused of murdering a white man—a white man who happened to be raping her in the alley behind her beauty parlor at the time. When I was twenty-six I helped form the National Organization for Women in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton. We had a treasury of one hundred and thirty-five dollars. I’ve marched in every city in the world. I’ve been thrown in jail seven times. Elected to Congress four times. When I ran against Abe Beame for mayor of this city I lost by two percentage points. Two. Strictly because I wouldn’t cozy up to the goddamned unions.” She was waving her arms now, the words spilling out in a juicy torrent. “Am I in Clethra’s face? You bet I am. She’s a straight-A student with a first-class brain. I want her to use it, not sit around on her fat duff watching reruns on TV and spouting all of that Generation X crapola about how pointless and empty life is. I despise that whole goddamned mind-set. I despise laziness and self-indulgence. Do I expect a lot of her? Yes! I expect a lot of everyone.” Bitterly, she added, “But this new generation doesn’t want to listen to me. I don’t tell them what they want to hear.”

  “Which is what?”

  “That they aren’t to blame for whatever happens to them in life. That it’s somebody else’s fault. That they’re victims. Crapola! Crack babies are victims. Bright, healthy, middle-class women aren’t. They’re self-indulgent weaklings is what they are, weaklings who blame their mommy and their daddy and their nursery school teacher for every goddamned thing that goes wrong, instead of looking in the goddamned mirror. Let me tell you something, Hoagy. Before I came along, the women’s movement was just a bunch of neurotic, overprivileged kvetches in search of the perfect orgasm. And that’s precisely what it has gone back to. But don’t listen to me. I’m old-fashioned. I believe if a woman wants equal rights then she has to take responsibility for herself and stop pointing fingers.” She paused, a rare thing, and narrowed her eyes at me. “So you’re helping Clethra with her book?”

  “I am.”

  She sighed wistfully. “It was always my dream that she’d someday be an author.”

  I grinned at her. “Spoken like a true Jewish mother.”

  “Hey, I told you—I am what I am,” she fired back indignantly. But with a hint of thaw, too.

  I studied her face. “Did you ever physically abuse her, Ruth?”

  Ruth studied mine, flaring her nostrils at me. “Never. That’s something they cooked up so they can get Arvin away from me. Let ’em try.”

  “How about Arvin?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did you ever beat him?”

  “I spanked him once when he was four,” she answered, turning sardonic on me. “Does that count?”

  “You said you expect a lot of people,” I mentioned, shifting gears.

  “So?”

  “What did you expect of Thor?”

  She puffed out her cheeks, considering this a moment. It was quiet in the room. I could hear the mantel clock ticking. I could hear the reporters outside joking and laughing. “I expected him to grow old with me,” she replied. “I expected him to be by my side. To be true to me—instead of to that goddamned heroic quest of his. Which wears mighty thin as a daily diet, believe me. He’s insane, you know. He’s totally lost control.”

  “He claims he’s in love.”

  “Oh, please! The man’s phallus is in wonderland. He’s found the proverbial honey pot. She’s young. She’s voluptuous. She’s flattered by his attention. What college girl wouldn’t be? He happens to possess one of the finest minds of the nineteenth century.”

  “Do you hate him?”

  “Out loud,” she affirmed. “He killed me, Hoagy. I’m dead inside. If he walked into this room right now I’d claw his goddamned eyes out.”

  “And Clethra?”

  “She’s just a child rebelling against her mother,” Ruth said mildly, rocking back and forth on the sofa. “Nothing more, nothing less. How’s Merilee?”

  “Tired a lot of the time.”

  “Drag her away from that baby if you can,” she advised. “Set aside one evening that’s just for you two—flowers, wine, a romantic supper. It’s vital for young couples.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call us a young couple.”

  “She was a wonderful campaigner,” Ruth recalled fondly. “So passionate. When she believes in someone, she believes.”

  “Yes, I suppose she does.”

  “Cherish her, Hoagy. What you two have together is priceless. You don’t realize it until you’ve lost it like I have. Because you can never get it back. Never.” She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her sweater, shuddering. “Know who’s been like a rock through this whole thing? Barry. I guess because he knows from public humiliation. Went through so much himself when he came out after our divo
rce. Marco’s been incredibly supportive, too. Gay men, they know what it means to be ostracized, to suffer. If it weren’t for those two I’d never have made it through these past few weeks, believe me. Barry has a country place out near you, in Essex. He and Marco have invited Arvin and me out for the weekend.”

  “How do we fix this thing, Ruth?”

  “Fix it?” She gaped at me, incredulous. I couldn’t blame her. “We don’t fix it, Hoagy. We go to court. When we do I’ll win sole custody of Arvin. And I will win. And then, one of these mornings, Clethra’s going to wake up and realize she has absolutely zero interest in sharing another day of her promising young life with an aging lunatic. And when that happens I’ll take her in my arms and we’ll cry and we’ll laugh and then she and Arvin and I will get on with our lives. We’ll survive. Hell, I don’t blame Clethra. How can I? I just feel sorry for her, that’s all.”

  “I feel sorry for Thor, too.”

  “You can afford to,” Ruth Feingold pointed out. “He hasn’t ruined your life. Yet.”

  Barry Feingold and Marco Paolo shared an airy twelfth-floor corner apartment in a pre-war building on Riverside and Seventy-ninth Street. Their view, which soared all the way up the river to the George Washington Bridge, was to die for. Their decor was not. You’d call it eclectic if you were being tactful. Kitschy if you were not. Not so much because of the marble cherubs and the gold-veined mirrors. Or the overstuffed, over-the-top Victorian rosewood chairs and the matched pair of fainting couches. No, it was their collection of antique dress mannequins from the 1930s—those two dozen life-sized plaster men and women, fully costumed, who were positioned about the living room as if in the midst of some scintillating smart set soiree. And who were exceedingly—well—unnerving. Unless, like Bill Clinton, you can get used to being watched over constantly by a Greek chorus of dummies. I know Lulu found them totally unnerving. She never stopped growling at them the whole time we were there.

  The sun was still rather high over the New Jersey Palisades but we decided on martinis anyway, heavy on the olives in my case. Marco went clomping off to the kitchen to make them while I sat across from Barry, who was draped languorously across one of the fainting couches with his ankles crossed. On the stereo Janet Jackson was going ooh-baby-ooh with what I suppose she thought was feeling. And, compared to Mariah Carey, I suppose it was.