The Peace Process

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  The Impulse

  In the years to come, Dwight would ask himself: “What on Earth possessed me to do such a thing?”

  It was so out of character.

  Or was it?

  He had just left the banquet and was walking along Forty-Sixth Street in a light rain, looking for a car service that was scheduled to pick him up on the southwest corner of the avenue. But perhaps he’d said the southeast corner. He had begun to make that kind of mistake.

  Normally, he would have tried to hail a cab. The car service was expensive—he used it only on special occasions. The event he’d attended, a dinner in honor of the publisher who had fired him some months back, fell into that category. There was always the chance that Dwight would be rehired when “things picked up.” He’d gotten the invitation, which meant he hadn’t been forgotten. Best to show up and stay on the publisher’s good side.

  As he floundered around looking for the car, an elderly woman appeared at his side. She was breathing heavily, as if it had been an effort to catch up with him. But once she did, the woman, surprisingly, was able to match his pace, step for step.

  What he noticed first was her gray, scraggly hair (it had once been blond), her deep—exceptionally deep—wrinkles, her brightly colored designer dress, and her jewelry. The dress had a flamingo pattern that fell just short of being gaudy. It would have blended in nicely at a Palm Beach cocktail party, but not Manhattan in the fall. She wore several necklaces; the most noticeable was a pendant with a giant ruby at its center, encircled by tiny diamonds. Dwight was no expert on precious stones, but he had once been the editor of a coffee-table book on the subject. He would have wagered that the jewelry was worth a fortune. She came across as being scattered. Ditzy.

  Had he seen her at the dinner? Possibly. She reminded him of the central character in a play he’d seen as a boy, The Madwoman of Chaillot.

  As they walked, she stared at him, making him feel uneasy. Elderly people had that effect on him, although, by strict definition, he could be described as elderly himself. He was sixty-eight.

  “Do we know each other?” he asked.

  They walked together in a matching cadence and might have been mistaken for a couple. Her legs were like sticks.

  “Fleming,” she said, extending a bony hand. “Antebellum.”

  Was Fleming her last or first name? As for “antebellum,” he guessed that she was conveying something about her lineage. He recalled meeting a novelist from India who told him her name and quickly added: “I’m high-born.”

  “Dwight,” he said, taking her cold bony hand. “Fisher. … From the Bronx.” He’d been self-conscious about his beginnings in the boroughs, but of late he’d been throwing the facts of his hardscrabble youth around boldly, feeling he had nothing to lose at this point in his life. It might even work to his advantage. Thus far, this new openness hadn’t done much for him. He was unemployed, had little in the way of savings, was barely getting by. His prospects were slim. His wife had hung in with him. She loved him, but there were probably limits.

  He assumed that he and his unexpected companion had attended the same event.

  “Did you enjoy the dinner?”

  “Stank,” she said.

  He feared she was about to hold her nose.

  “And the company?”

  She pointed a bony thumb downward. This time she did hold her nose.

  That’s enough of that, he thought.

  “I guess I’ll be moseying along,” he said to her. “Pleasure meeting you.”

  The rain came down a bit harder.

  “But what then?” she said vacantly.

  He may have been overdramatizing the moment, but he feared that she might sit down in a puddle of rainwater. Jewelry, designer dress, and all. As if she were a patient at some institution. And he would be forced to look at wet granny underwear.

  There was a pause while he struggled to respond. Then, in a streak of gallantry or compassion—he was not an unkind man—he said he had a car that should be waiting at the end of the street.

  “Perhaps I can give you a lift.”

  She waved a hand, as if his offer meant nothing to her. Go ahead and desert me, she seemed to say. I’ll just stand out in the rain. Or sit in it, for that matter.

  He was off the hook but didn’t feel that way. She did not seem capable of hailing a cab. How, in any case, would she get one? The street was blocked off by a construction project, which was why he was having all this trouble finding his car. And anyone who’s lived in Manhattan knows that the cabs go into hiding at the slightest hint of rain.

  Finally, he located the car. The confirmation number was displayed on the windshield, which was a happy circumstance for him. He opened the rear door for his new acquaintance.

  “Mmmm,” she said, and muttered something that sounded like “gemmumms,” a variation, he guessed, of “gentleman.”

  Was it possible that people in her circle—some Palm Beach circle, or perhaps one in Memphis—addressed one another in baby talk? Wouldn’t surprise him a bit.

  She lived on the Upper East Side. His apartment was to the extreme West, which was no small issue in terms of logistics and added cost. Still, he’d made the offer and there they were. Dwight adored his wife. His dog. And his flat, if only he could hold on to it. To them. He longed to get home. But for the moment, he felt that he’d been fated to go driving off with this strange elderly woman.

  She lived in a compact two-story townhouse. He saw her to the door and stood by to see that she got inside safely. She was surprisingly adept at retrieving the keys in her handbag. He’d expected her to spend a few minutes fumbling around for them and then to drop them on the sidewalk. Or to have left them somewhere. She surprised him by asking if he’d like to come in for a drink.

  “There’s wine and some milky. I think it’s fresh.”

  The “milky,” of course, was distasteful to him. That awful cuteness. Were there people who enjoyed it? Considered it charming? Charleston people came to mind. Perhaps wealthy Charleston people said “milky” to one another. And were awarded points for cleverness.

  “I really should be going,” he said. And then, unaccountably, he heard himself add, “maybe for just a minute.”

  Why had he accepted this invitation? Was he looking for a new experience, the nature of which was not clear? At a recent dinner party, one that had run out of gas, the guests had been asked to reveal their favorite word. Dwight’s was “adventure.” His life had not been filled with derring-do, but there had been a few episodes. He’d been a POW at the tail end of the Korean War. And there had been a two-week period of madness with a Senegalese actress in Santa Monica. Neither of them wore a stitch for the length of the romance. But his was not a long list of daring adventures. He joked to his wife that, at this point in life, his idea of a wild night was a Szechuan dinner and a low-budget movie.

  Yet here he was accepting the invitation of a somewhat daft octogenarian (she might have been ninety) to join her for a drink in her townhouse apartment. Did he see it as an adventure? Or was there some other motive? He had no idea at the moment.

  Further along, he might realize that he had always known what he had in mind. But not just then.

  “Oh, good,” she said, once he’d accepted her invitation. “Drinkies.”

  There it was again. The cuteness. And it was Palm Beach. He was sure of it now. Wealthy Palm Beach people in all their baby-talking cuteness. How Noël Coward would have adored them. Or so they felt.

  The interior of the first floor—he never got to see the second—surprised him. Somehow he’d expected a garish décor—a Halloween theme, or perhaps a collection of dolls, eerily lining the walls. A parrot in a cage. A wooden horse from an old merry-go-round. What he discovered instead was a large and handsomely appointed living room with an immaculate Town & Country feel to it. How he loved to be w
rong. The furnishings were spare, but each piece would appear to have been selected with great care. “Tasteful” did not do justice to the look of it. A designer and perhaps a collector had been at work here. And there was no way the woman could have maintained the place on her own. There had to be servants who had been given the night off.

  There were more than a few photographs mounted on the wall of a short, portly gentleman with a neatly trimmed beard, holding the reins of a horse, a prize-winner, garlanded with a floral wreath. In other photographs, he stood beside a giant fish, a marlin, or perhaps a tuna, on a dock in Key West, or some such location. The fish looked to have been a trophy. Perhaps the man had nosed out Hemingway in a competition. Dwight had the feeling that the dapper little man was no longer on the planet, though his money had stayed behind.

  The woman, Fleming—he still wasn’t sure if this was a surname—more or less confirmed the demise of the gentleman in the photographs.

  “Mr. Barnes,” she said to Dwight. “Poor Mr. Barnes.”

  Then, staying in character, she put her hand to her midsection and said: “Tummy.”

  She tiptoed into a kitchen, high-tech in design, opened the refrigerator, and sniffed at a container of milk. “Eeeuww,” she said, putting it back quickly and making Dwight wonder again what he was doing in this apartment. As if sensing she was about to lose him, she switched to a normal conversational style.

  “Would you care for a glass of wine?”

  “I’d like that,” said Dwight, cautiously accepting her offer. He noticed her manner of speech kept altering, going from the bizarre to the simple and straightforward—as it suited her.

  He sat on a couch and tried the wine, which wasn’t half bad, considering it had come from a bottle that had been opened perhaps days before. Months?

  She poured a glass for herself, sipped it, and sat primly beside him. Then she leaned in close and said: “How’s about a li’l ol’ blowjob?”

  Good Christ, he said to himself in horror.

  And then, blandly, he said aloud, “I don’t believe so.”

  He did not, it should be pointed out, have a long history of turning down such invitations. Then he added, idiotically, but perhaps to show good manners, “Not just now.”

  “We could clean you up and flip you over on your bell,” she said.

  Then she looked off languorously with her gorgeous blue eyes.

  “Mr. Barnes trained me in the technique. He said a gentleman enjoys it.”

  “I’m sure a gentleman does,” said Dwight, outwardly unflappable. “And Mr. Barnes must have been quite a chap.”

  Chap? Had he said chap? Where had that come from? Bertie Wooster? Though he was a fanatic when it came to British satire, the Wodehouse novels were not among his favorites. (This puzzled—and annoyed—his friends.)

  Perhaps he had channeled Mr. Barnes’s verbal style. Or there may have been a class struggle in play. The woman, in all her confusion, with an elegant past. The boy from the Bronx reaching up to a higher social tier.

  With gnarled and bejeweled fingers, she reached for his crotch. He countered—was this a counter?—by snatching the ruby-centered pendant from her neck.

  “Ooooh,” she said, rubbing her neck. “That hurt.”

  She rubbed it some more.

  “Boo-boo,” she said. “Kiss boo-boo.”

  “Hold on a second,” he said, dropping the necklace into his jacket pocket. There was no way he was going to kiss a turkey neck. He found a washcloth on the kitchen counter and ran some water over it. Then he returned to the couch and gently rubbed the reddened part of her neck. When she covered his hand with hers, in gratitude, he held her wrist and yanked a huge diamond ring from her big knuckled finger. He slipped it into his pocket beside the necklace.

  “Oooooh,” she said again, rubbing her finger this time. “Big boo-boo. Hurt suppin’ awful.”

  “I’m sure it does,” he said without thought.

  Using the same cloth, he rubbed the finger gently and got to his feet.

  “It’s nothing serious. I should be going.”

  “Ooooh,” she repeated, then got to her feet and looked at her reflection in a wall mirror. “And my maquillage,” she said, in horror, ignoring her injuries for the moment. “Just look at me.”

  “You look fine,” he said, wondering where he’d heard the term maquillage before. Must have been years back. Some fashion person in the Hamptons.

  “You’ll feel better in the morning,” he said as he edged slowly toward the door.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” she said, stamping her foot.

  “Well, you should,” he said mindlessly.

  And then he was gone. He searched for a cab. With remarkable ease, he found one. When he had settled into the darkness of the backseat, he reached into his pocket to feel the jewelry and to make sure he hadn’t been daydreaming.

  As the cab entered Central Park, his heart began to flutter and he could feel his pulse rising. And why was there all that heat behind his neck. His physician had mentioned that a pacemaker might be a good idea—when Dwight felt up to it. Does anyone ever “feel up to” a pacemaker? He had conveniently forgotten the conversation. Not that there was any right moment, but this was no time to have a heart attack.

  What had gotten into him? What had possessed him to do such a thing? “Possessed” was the right word too. Did he have his eye on the jewelry the moment he saw her on the street? Possibly. And now that he had the swag, what would he do with it? Where did “swag” come from? Did they still have swag? Or did it disappear with old Warner Bros. movies? And weren’t you supposed to have a “fence” for a situation like this? Someone to convert the stolen goods—the swag—into cash? Where would he find one? Did they still have them? A fence? He could not think of a single person he could call and ask, “Do you know of a good fence?” Or even a bad one.

  The Diamond District was a possibility. He imagined a Hasidic individual—cherry-red lips in a snow-white beard—with a glass magnifier affixed to his eye. Squinting at the jewelry—the swag—and evaluating its worth. The ruby pendant would be of particular interest. With a sigh, as if it was a nuisance to bother with such trifles, he would say that rubies were not much in demand these days (a lie). Sensing, knowing, that the jewelry had been stolen, he would then quote a price that was no doubt a tenth of its actual worth. Dwight, nervous, close to panic, probably a first-timer, would be happy to gobble up whatever crumbs were offered to him.

  But wouldn’t there be papers to be signed? Traceable papers? And security cameras? Unless Dwight fled to Uruguay, or someplace like that—it did cross his mind—he’d be a sitting duck for the police.

  As the car approached Riverside Drive, his behavior, his act of madness, continued to nag at him. The central character in a novel he’d enjoyed was asked why he was about to run off with a friend’s wife. “Because I can,” came his answer. That made literary sense, but it wasn’t useful to Dwight as a practical matter. He hadn’t taken the jewelry because it was possible. He was sure of that. Then what was it? He was on shaky financial ground, but a sudden jewelry heist, and it barely qualified as a heist, wasn’t going to bail him out. Especially when he had to fork over a large slice of it to a fence. Or a diamond dealer. Six months’ rent would be about the size of it. Unless he’d underestimated the value of the two pieces. In any case, he would soon be off to federal detention.

  Dwight did have what he himself described, amusingly, as a mild case of Tourette’s syndrome. But was it all that mild? At a literary award ceremony, he’d heard himself ask a distinguished Polish poet, a future Nobelist, if he knew of a restaurant that served great pierogies. On another occasion, he’d been assigned to accompany a visiting school administrator around the city. On the steps of the New York Public Library, he yielded to a compulsion and asked the middle-aged woman what kind of underwear she had on. The term “brain fa
rt” had come into much-too-common use at the time. Dismissing Dwight’s remarks as falling into that category, she smiled thinly, then continued along with their discussion of Byzantine architecture. Caught up in a celebratory moment at a cocktail party, Dwight had lifted his publisher—a small man—off the ground and danced him around the room as if he were a tango partner. Though the man seemed to accept all of this with equanimity, there was a chance that the episode had led to Dwight’s dismissal. Now that he thought about the incident, it had led to his dismissal.

  At no point that he could remember did Dwight want the jewelry. He certainly didn’t want it at the moment. He could have returned it, but the prospect of facing the woman and her maquillage at two in the morning was daunting. He could, of course, just throw it out the window. Or simply hand it over to the driver—a Bangladeshi.

  “Here,” he could say, “do what you want with it. Maybe your wife would like it.”

  Once again, the theft would be traceable back to him. And why enrich a strange Bangladeshi, who probably did have a fence? A Bangladeshi fence.

  As they approached his building Dwight tried to pull himself together. He was fairly certain his wife would still be awake. His treasured wife. The therapist. The calm, sensible one. She knew him. Again and again she’d seen him through choppy waters. The tango episode that had cost him his job. Scraping up every dime they had to invest in a Canadian start-up that had gone belly-up within a month. (The two crisp young executives had been entirely convincing on the financial channel.) Then putting a few dimes together and making another blunder with a chain of Midwestern furniture stores. Turning down the lucrative directorship of a London publishing conglomerate because the personnel manager had made a remark about his thinning hair. She had suffered through all of that and more—and stuck with him.

  As soon as she got the drift of it, she would know exactly what to do. And she would draw up a sensible and conservative plan. One that would keep him out of prison.

  He turned the key in the lock. The dog, a Havanese, came running up to him, ready to forgive him anything. Much like Hitler’s dog Blondi, who licked the Führer’s face after he’d ravaged Czechoslovakia.