The Peace Process

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  Alone in his office, he looked for her card. Where on Earth had he put it? Momentarily panicked, he searched around and recalled he’d tucked it away in his address book.

  He found it easily enough.

  DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, FAMILY AND PARENTING

  DR. ANNA KOVACS, PSYD, MA, LMHC

  Any Number of Little Old Ladies

  “What do you think?” he asked when she had finished reading the manuscript and begun to stack the pages, crisply, neatly, as if she were a blackjack dealer handling a fresh deck of cards in Las Vegas.

  “I like it,” she said. “How could I not like it? It’s some of your strongest work. But you can’t possibly put it on the stage.”

  Despite the gravity of what she’d said, he continued to stare at the blank wall of his new study, wondering if he ought to mount the same old theatrical posters related to past victories—or try a fresh approach.

  “And why is that?” he asked, still concerned about his wall but focusing at last on her response to his new play.

  “For one thing, because I’m instantly recognizable.”

  “Are you now,” he said, feigning surprise, returning the ball to her court.

  “I know, I know,” she said, “you’ve given me flaming red hair and a job as a museum curator—”

  “And a house in Greenwich, not to speak of twin sons—”

  “And a speech impediment,” she said, wrapping up the list for him. “It was darling of you to go to such lengths.”

  She came around the desk to rumple what was left of his thinning hair and to kiss him lightly on the forehead.

  “But you’ve included my mannerisms,” she went on, “you’ve got my style, my speech pattern … anyone who knows me, anyone who’s been with me for twenty minutes will know that it’s clearly and unmistakably me. And, of course, I behave disgracefully. Forgive me, my character behaves disgracefully. Socially, morally … sluttishly.”

  “I don’t know about morally,” he said. “I think she’s moral in her own way.”

  “Yes, of course. Sluttishly moral.”

  “It’s never bothered you before,” he said, taking a new tack. “And how many other women do I know? How many women can I actually refer to?”

  There was frustration in his voice, since he would not have minded knowing a few. And there was also an implication that she had kept him away from other women, which wasn’t quite true. He had his opportunities. It was always naked fear that he would lose her.

  “I don’t have mistresses,” he said, trying to keep the bitterness out of his tone. “Ever since we met I’ve used you as a jumping-off point for my female characters, and then gone on—successfully—to protect your privacy.”

  “You’ve never been this blatant,” she said, looking out on the leafy West Village street that reminded them both of Saint-Germain. “You’ve had the good grace not to go on about things we do in bed. Things that I do in bed. But not this time. Perhaps I’m being overly sensitive, but if you don’t mind, I’d rather the whole world didn’t know about the yodeling when I climax, or the Girl Scout costume. I’m not just a jumping-off point in this play, I’m a landing strip as well.”

  “Was that yodeling?” he asked thoughtfully.

  “I never thought so, but you did.”

  He’d lost all interest in the wall, thinking perhaps he’d keep it blank, try a minimalist look for a change.

  “I can’t believe that you of all people would take this position,” he said. “You’ve always supported me, defended me, pointed out that everything I do is in a spirit of make-believe. You’ve quoted Faulkner to your girlfriends: ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of little old ladies.’ And I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me that I haven’t written an ode to any fucking urn.”

  “No. I’m delighted to report that you haven’t.”

  “Thank you. And nor did I intend to. That’s not the point. The point is that when your friend Andrea came to you in tears and told you her daughter had written a memoir portraying her as an unfit mother and a hopeless drunk—what did you say?”

  “I don’t recall,” she said, fingering the jeweled clip he’d given her for Christmas.

  “How convenient, but I do. You said—rather theatrically—‘Darling, you’ve got to develop a thick skin. I’ve been written about for years. It’s practically become my profession.’ That ring a bell?”

  “Not particularly. But if those were my words—which I seriously doubt—all I can say is, that was then—”

  “And this is now. Excellent,” he said, violating their pledge never to use sarcasm. “I wish I’d made that observation. And I suppose you want me to pull back, water it all down, fuck it up. You and your vaunted love for me, for the theatre … your passionate concern for the arts. All of this to protect your darling ass.”

  “I don’t want anything of the kind,” she said, coming around once again to kiss him sweetly on his forehead. “I do love you, and I enjoy the theatre and support the arts. But if you go ahead with that play, I’ll leave you.”

  With that, she turned and walked, or rather swept, out of the room, moving with what he felt was an admirably confident if not buoyant stride.

  Oddly enough—and perhaps swinishly—his first thought, after she had left, was of his new study and the apartment they had just bought, which had soaked up virtually every penny they had saved. He couldn’t very well ask her to leave, since obviously, he was the “offending party.” Besides, pushing her out the door was not his style. His daughter, who was away at school, would shoot him if they sold the place, though she used her room only once a month, if that. So he would have to leave, and where on God’s Earth would he go? Some one-room flat across the river in Hoboken, most likely. He’d often declared that all he ever needed was a typewriter (defiantly, he still used an old Remington) and an idea and you could put him anywhere. Still—when faced with that scenario, his bravado tended to subside.

  There was his health as well. Lately, he’d been having trouble getting to the top of a breath. After a recent bike ride to the Holocaust Memorial in lower Manhattan, he’d had to walk his racer back to Prince Street.

  Of course, it might have been the stiff wind.

  His age weighed on him too. Though he had written of loneliness—claimed to be an expert on how to deal with it—he hadn’t had much luck in actually being alone. He always seemed to need someone around. He was sixty-two now. What was he supposed to do—pretend he was forty-five and go to mixers for middle-aged professionals? There were actresses, of course, always one in the company who favored him—generally some bit player he didn’t find especially appealing. But even an attractive actress would be a handful. He might be able to shake one loose, but he’d been down that road before—his first marriage—and had the scars to show for it.

  Finally, there was his wife—and not just the scent of her and the silk of her hair, and knowing that he could turn over in the middle of the night, as he fought for breath, and hold her hand. The crazy outfits she slung together out of odds and ends that everyone thought were designer creations and wanted to copy. It was just her that he’d miss. In the years they’d been together—and until this recent ultimatum—never once had she passed a single judgment on his behavior. (When it came to cigars, he often wished she had.) He wasn’t as crazy as some, but if he wanted to take off suddenly for Budapest, or let a fugitive hide out in the linen closet (which he’d done) or watch porno movies on Rosh Hashanah—her only concern was that he take care of himself. Replace her? He might as well try to dig a hole to China.

  His play wasn’t much. He knew in his heart it had no center. He’d slapped it together with odd scraps of experience—so as not to waste them. It might amuse an audience. But wasn’t this the play he needed to get out of the way so he could begin work on something “important”? He’d met a young playwright—someone bein
g hailed as “the new Albee”—who said he’d enjoyed his work, but wondered why he’d never taken on “The Big One.”

  He found this offensive and told the man to mind his own business, to worry about his own work. But he knew what the fellow meant. Why not set aside this play, remain where he was, and get started on “The Big One” straightaway?

  Better than losing his wife. His daughter too, for that matter. (Though she generally sided with him, that would change when she found out what the dispute was all about.)

  Better than being holed up in a one-room rat trap with forty cents in the bank, eating take-out food, fighting for his next breath, and trying to inject confidence in a ding-a-ling actress so she could face a horseshit audition for some ninth-rate production of The Cherry Orchard.

  These were his thoughts as he put his poor play in an envelope, addressed it to his producer, then looked around his study and wondered why he could never find a stamp when he needed one.

  The Movie Buff

  He had a set of false teeth, which was unusual for a young man. Real choppers, they were. Other than that, he was thin, sallow-complected, a harmless-looking fellow. Your basic choirboy, or so it seemed until a background check revealed that he’d posted a blizzard of hate mail on the web. He had deep ties to virtually every racist group known to the authorities, and some they’d never heard of. The common theme was clear enough: Kill Jews, kill Muslims, kill this one, kill that one, so long as you kill and keep us white. Odd, since all of the people he took down—that is to say massacred—were white and innocent as the day is long. Day campers. The fair flower of what we thought of as our innocent nation. He had more guns beneath his overcoat than you would think one slender fellow could carry. It must have been awkward for him to reach for them, but he had managed it smoothly and achieved his task as if he’d been in the shooting gallery of one of our many amusement parks. When it came to capturing him—two parking lot attendants had accomplished this—the young man put up no resistance. “May I have an ice cream cone?” he’d asked, after he’d been apprehended. “One scoop of vanilla, the other chocolate.” This after slaughtering seventy-five picnickers. It was a wish that would be granted, much later, at the hearing.

  He was remanded, if that’s the word—this is not my field—to custody in a psychiatric institute and immediately put under examination by the best of our world-renowned mental-health professionals. After forty-eight hours of intensive interviews, he was declared to be insane, incapable of knowing what he was doing. Slaughtering innocents? He might as well have been washing dishes.

  I hesitate to call the hearing and the sentencing that followed a farce, though both were predictable and a waste, in my view, of our precious taxpayer dollars. Relatives of the victims turned out in great numbers. Now and then there was a forlorn cry of outrage. But for the most part, the group was numbed, knowing in advance the nature of the so-called sentence. An insanity defense is as easy to achieve in our country as getting out of a traffic ticket is in others. He was to be kept in a secure facility for a period of five years, during which time he would be studied virtually day and night by—once again—the finest minds in our psychiatric community. At the end of his confinement, if he were to be found completely free of violent tendencies … if the killing spree were deemed to be— as the Americans put it—a one-shot, he was to be set free to go about his business. And a grisly sort of business it might be, or so it was felt by many of us. This enlightened incarceration was, of course, thought to be an absurdity by many around the globe. It had taken root many years back when a group of our (unelected) elders concluded that there was no point to a long confinement—or a death penalty, for that matter—if the individual, the offender, could be “cured” and no longer deemed a threat to the community.

  And thus, after five years and some muffled sounds of unrest at a hearing, Bernhard Asmund was set free and returned to his cabin in a remote forest area of this country of ours, one that had won awards for being the most enlightened nation on the planet. The voters were citizens of countries that still held fast to the death penalty and no doubt would have administered it to the likes of Bernhard Asmund.

  I was outraged by the whole business, though I confess that, even though I am often in a boil about some senseless tragedy, I’m one of those people who never gets around to doing anything about it. I might fire off a letter to the editor of one of our presses. But then, in time, my outrage tends to taper off and disappear into a fog of helplessness. And I do nothing.

  This was about to change.

  Five years passed. Nothing more was heard from Bernhard Asmund. It seemed as if we had justifiably earned our kudos. (There’s a word for you.) Our benign system appeared to have worked. And then Asmund was heard from again. With a vengeance. The killing field (what other phrase was suitable?) was a small church near the very cottage to which Asmund was thought to have retired. There were seventeen parishioners at the fateful service. The “reformed” Asmund took a seat in the rear of the small house of worship, listened attentively to a good part of the reverend’s sermon, and then, almost as if he were bored, went about his deadly routine. The assignment he’d given to himself. None of the parishioners were spared. The reverend would live out his days as a quadriplegic. Asmund was found in a woodshed close to his cabin and seemed puzzled by the caution and apprehension of the police who took him into custody.

  Though we have been geographically blessed—with mineral riches and a great expanse of territory—our population is sparse. It is not an exaggeration to call us a nation of cousins. Thus, it was far from astonishing that a nephew of mine was among the victims of one of Asmund’s killing sprees. The second of them. I did not see much of Albert. He was a scientist who spent much of his time in a laboratory. He was probably gay, not that his orientation meant much to me. He studied some obscure tissue sampling and was likely searching for a cancer cure. And why should he do anything different? Weren’t countless numbers of others doing the same? I liked him—I am a widower and have no children. But I did not love him. He had a kind of nose-in-the-air academic style that annoyed me, a way of sniffing at my work. The owner of a film distribution company, I was in “commerce.” Though he never said so, this put me in some lesser category. Still, he was my only blood relative. And to have him swept away like dust by someone I consider to be … what? Vermin? Here is where I become choked with rage and unable to communicate effectively. Of course I’m aware that there are those who consider even the Asmunds among us to be part of the human family. As such, it is our obligation to redeem such individuals rather than to consider them worthless (vermin?) and rid ourselves of their existence.

  In a sense, Asmund had made his statement. Now it was time to make ours—and it was obvious what it would be. More mental-health geniuses. These days, the very word “psychiatrist” makes me ill. (Though one did give me relief in the past.)

  More tests … more studies … more compassionate confinement and an eventual return to normalcy and freedom.

  Asmund laughing all the way.

  I felt I had do something. Not necessarily on behalf of my poor nephew, though I had more affection for him now that he was gone. Did I feel I had to act as a “responsible citizen”? The very phrase makes me laugh. Perhaps it was the influence of the Hollywood westerns that I’ve imported successfully for our local theaters. At some point, a homeowner, terrorized by thugs and robber barons, rises up and says “enough.” Takes up arms in the cause of justice and self-preservation. That didn’t sound much like me. I wouldn’t know where to find arms even if I wanted to take them up. And who would I shoot? Asmund himself? Even if this were possible, it would not have addressed the issue. What I wanted to point to—and bring down if I could—was our weak-kneed, and in some ways reprehensible, approach to outrageous criminality.

  I’d had enough of sending off letters. And rather than approach some powerless local functionary, I decided to go straight
to the head penal administrator. The man who actually pushes the buttons—and here I go again with my Americanisms.

  I decided to call in a favor from a well-placed individual in our judiciary. The result was immediate. In virtually no time at all I had a meeting scheduled with a Dr. Lars Olson, who was the top official in the area of criminal justice, or lack thereof.

  Olson occupied a modest and sparsely decorated office in our Justice Building. There were a few modernistic sculpture pieces artfully placed about the room. He was a slender, immaculately tailored individual with a slight accent, which I took to be East Asian. How he had arrived in his position was of only casual interest to me. I was prepared to dislike him, the better to sustain my outrage, but I found this to be difficult. He had a shy and gentle style and a manner that I (irritatingly) found ingratiating. There went my fury—at least for the moment. He offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted. After preparing and pouring out two cups, he took a seat opposite me and crossed his legs neatly. (I would have bet that his knees were bony.) It troubled me that he might spoil the crease in his expensive slacks. We exchanged pleasantries.