by Paul Levine
Or did she? She hadn't said. It shouldn't make any difference, but it did. Okay, so I'm not that enlightened.
"Are you saying you weren't with someone else or that I have no right to ask whether you have been?"
"Jake, must you?"
"Yes."
"Very well. I have found a lover."
And what am I, chopped liver?
"I see," I said softly. A look of martyrdom.
"Really, Jake, you're acting very immature. It is not as if we pledged ourselves to each other."
"So I shouldn't have a sense of loss."
"You can't lose what you don't have."
It made sense to my brain, but the rest of me wasn't listening. My eyes were watery.
"Who is he?" I asked. "Do I know him?"
"Oh, Jake. Don't go looking to be hurt."
She was right. No need to look. The pain would find me soon enough.
CHAPTER 33
Metamorphoses
Professor Gerald Prince thrust his chin forward, and in his best upper-crust Rex Harrison voice intoned: "The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls, in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another." I hobbled to my customary spot in the back row and wondered if I'd get in trouble for not doing the homework. On the stage a young woman read Eliza Doolittle's lines as they worked their way through the final act.
When Prince told the community-college Eliza that he'd grown accustomed to her face, I believed him. He was a damn fine actor.
They wrapped up the final scene and the class applauded politely. "What is Shaw telling us in the play?" Prince asked.
"It's about abolishing the difference between the classes," said an earnest young man up front.
"Perhaps that is the result, but the mechanics of the change?"
"Language, clarity of thought and speech," said the woman next to me.
The class mumbled its agreement. They had learned something since my last visit.
"Quite so," Prince said. "The play is unapologetically didactic. Shaw sincerely cared about the language. He-"
"I don't get something," interrupted a student near me. "In the movie the professor gets the girl. Here…"
"Here, she leaves to marry Freddy Eynsford Hill," Prince said. "And why? Because Higgins is a confirmed bachelor more attached to his work than to a pretty face, even one to which he has become accustomed."
"And his mother thing," the young woman said. "Higgins was a momma's boy."
"A mother thing, indeed," Prince said. "In his notes Shaw discusses the mother as rival. As intelligent and articulate as he was, Higgins was not fully developed emotionally."
Prince looked toward the clock on the wall, nodded his head, and the students obediently closed their notebooks. I gingerly worked my way to the front. Prince was stuffing some papers into an old briefcase.
He saw me and bowed formally. "Did you fancy my reading of Higgins?"
"First rate. Much lighter fare than Edmund Tyrone. Not all that in-love-with-death stuff."
He beamed. Like trial lawyers, actors never hear too many compliments. The professor wore a checked shirt under a blue blazer with a rakish yellow ascot. His eyes were clear. "You were worried about me, weren't you? I am moved by that, Biff. Have no fear. I am sane, stable, and as happy as can be expected. As for Edmund's speech, in drama, if one looks hard enough, there is the antidote to every expressed emotion:
"' No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death. '"
"Good to see you so chipper. And I like the line. Shakespeare?"
"No, Alfred Tennyson."
Him again.
Prince smiled slyly. "Your policeman friend was here yesterday. He apologized for unfairly accusing me. Then he showed me printouts of someone calling himself Passion Prince chatting with Miss Rosedahl and Mrs. Fox. Some very good poetry, if you like that sort of thing, taken badly out of context. I thought I'd get a rise out of you with the reference to Tennyson."
"You did."
"The policeman said you always believed in my innocence. That means a lot to me, Biff. If there's anything I can do for you…"
Of course, there was.
I ordered an iced tea and Prince said make it two. I gave him a look.
"There's a repertory company auditioning in Lauderdale," he explained. " Inherit the Wind. The collision of blind faith with the inquisitive search for truth. It wouldn't hurt me to show up sober."
"Henry Drummond?"
"But of course. Would you care to hear his cross-examination of the self-appointed prophet, Matthew Brady?"
"Maybe later."
He looked great. The silvery hair was swept back and combed. The blazer was either new or freshly pressed, not a gravy stain in sight. Best of all, he was cold sober. He had acknowledged his problem. So few do. A doctor asks a patient how much he drinks and how often he has sex. To get the truth, multiply the former by two and divide the latter by three.
The waiter brought our broiled snapper and fried plantains. We were in a bayfront restaurant two weeks old that tried hard to achieve the dilapidated sea-shanty look. Unpainted, knotholed boards were bolted to walls of sturdy concrete block. Lobster traps and colorful buoys hung from the ceiling, and an old dinghy sat wedged on the roof, as if a hurricane deposited it there. None of that bothered me. I could even tolerate the plastic pelican on a Styrofoam piling. But the snapper had that too-late-frozen, too-early-thawed, four-day-old fishy taste.
A sad truth: it is hard to find good, fresh local fish in a city that sits on the sea. I used to visit the docks in Bayfront Park when the fishing boats came in. The fishermen would fillet yellowtail, grouper, or dolphin that had been caught an hour earlier, and an hour later, you could be home marinating the catch in pineapple juice and soy sauce while the charcoal turned white. Then the city fathers evicted the fishing boats and built a trendy plaza of shops and restaurants, where we now sat, eating last week's fish.
"What did Rodriguez want?" I asked.
"The poetry. What it might mean. I told him what it meant to Tennyson was quite different than what some warped soul might read into it."
"What did the poet mean when he wrote, 'Woman is the lesser man'?"
He smiled at me and finished the stanza:
"' And all thy passions, matched with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.'"
What do you think it means, Biff?"
"I don't know. It contradicts most people's beliefs. Most would say that women's passions run deeper than men's, though my recent experiences would belie that."
Prince didn't seem interested in my personal life. Instead, he began the lecture. "The poem was written shortly after Tennyson's unhappy love affair with Rosa Baring. Her marriage to another man may have prompted the bittersweet imagery."
"So jealousy is the emotion."
"The poem is more complex," he continued, "and frankly, a bit whiny for my tastes. If you're looking for a theme, Tennyson's important later poetry was naturalistic and Utopian. He saw mankind's struggle as an ascent to a nobler life. His poetry hinted of evolution even before Darwin's Origin of the Species."
"Henry Drummond would approve."
"Yes, and he also wrote of evolving to a new happiness. Man was still unfinished, still evolving. Tennyson was optimistic to the end. In his last poem, 'The Dreamer,' an old man speaks to a despairing Earth, which is wailing of its destiny, 'darkened with doubts of a faith that saves, and crimson with battles, and hollow with graves.' But the poet tells the Earth that 'less will be lost than won. Whirl, and follow the sun.'"
I wanted to know more. I showed Prince the printouts from Pam's conversation of the night before.
Prince frowned. "Someone's still using my handle. Perhaps I should sue. Know any honest lawyers, or is that an oxymo
ron?"
I ignored the insult. "What about the poetry?"
He read part of it aloud:
"' Till back I fell and from mine arms she rose,
Glowing all over noble shame; and all
Her falser self slipt from her like a robe. '"
He considered it a moment, then said, "It's from The Princess. It was written about ten years after the lesser-man diatribe of Locksley Hall. It's Tennyson's view of feminism, women's aspirations juxtaposed against the requirements of marriage. The poem raises numerous questions about sexual identity but the answers are left somewhat open."
"Sexual identity?"
"In the beginning, the gender of the prince and princess are confused, each taking on characteristics of the opposite sex, perhaps even hermaphroditical, at least figuratively. The prince has blue eyes and hair 'of yellow ringlet, like a girl.' The princess is a dark and masculine woman. She wants to live apart from men. Her identity needs to be adjusted. At the end-"
"'Her falser self slipt from her like a robe.'"
"Right. She became womanly, he manly, but only in an androgynous way idealized by the Victorians."
I read aloud from the printout:
" ' Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man.'"
"That's it," Prince said, "man into woman, woman into man."
"Would Professor Higgins agree?"
"Perhaps to the extent he believed in a relationship with a woman at all. When Eliza threatened to leave, he told her to come back for his good fellowship."
"Not very romantic," I said.
"No, not like his progenitor."
"Shaw?"
"Pygmalion."
It took me a second. "But Pygmalion wasn't real," I protested. "He was a figure from myth."
"And what was Higgins or the princess or the old man speaking to the Earth, or even Biff? Mythical characters who represent universal thoughts, common experiences. Do you remember the Metamorphoses? "
"Something from high-school biology?"
Prince grimaced. "Ovid's Latin poems, written at the time of Christ. Surely you read of Echo's ill-fated love of the selfish Narcissus, Apollo's pursuit of Daphne, and of the sculptor Pygmalion."
"I missed it in Latin," I said, thinking of Charlie Riggs, "but caught it in Classic Comics. Pygmalion carved a woman from ivory and fell in love with her."
"Galatea by name. He prayed to Aphrodite to bring her to life, and she complied. He created his beauty and willed her to live."
Now there's a sexual-identity issue for you, Tennyson. Statue into woman. Hang some rhymin' on that, Al, baby.
CHAPTER 34
Pink Flamingos
Max Blinderman was right where he was supposed to be, next to the fountain with the statue of Citation.
"Hello, shyster," Max said, taking the last drag on a cigarette.
"Hello, shorty," I said.
Citation didn't say a word.
Max's shifty eyes flashed from me to Charlie Riggs and back to me again. The ex-jockey wore a baseball cap and a nylon jacket in the ninety-degree heat. "Whacha want? I gotta lay down fifty on the turf feature, so hurry the hell up."
"Blood, Max. Yours."
"Whaddaya mean?" He flipped his cigarette butt into Citation's fountain.
I cranked up the volume a notch. "I'm looking for an impostor, somebody logging in as Passion Prince. The women he talks to are ending up very dead. I'm giving you a chance to prove you're not the guy who bangs 'em and strangles 'em."
His sneer wrinkled his mustache. "I don't have to prove nuthin.' I know my rights."
"Sure, you do. They've been read to you a few times."
"Go piss in the wind."
I heard Charlie's disapproving tsk-tsk.
"I've seen your rap sheet," I said.
"Bad luck, a couple businesses went bad. Like a horse going lame, nothing you can do about it. An airline goes bankrupt, nobody gives a shit. A small businessman can't make it, he gets thrown in jail."
"Issuing worthless checks, mail fraud, buying, receiving, and concealing…"
"Big deal. Restitution on one, probation another, dismissed on the BRC. I've never done time, you can look it up."
I already had. A thief and a con man with no history of violence. But every killer has to start sometime.
From the other side of the bleachers a man in a red tunic and black boots was blowing a bugle. In the walking ring the jockeys mounted their horses and prepared to enter the track.
"C'mere," Max commanded, and we turned toward the ring. "Whaddaya think of number two, Radar Vector?"
"I think he's a big, brown horse," I said. "And he uses more tape on his ankles than I used to."
Nobody knows something about everything.
"Good blood," Charlie Riggs interjected. "By Diplomat Way out of Hawaiian Love Star. Florida-bred. But out of the money the last four races. He did finish strong the last two, however, and at a mile and a half, he should like this longer distance. He may be overlooked and go off at ten or twelve-to-one. So…"
Almost nobody knows something about everything.
"Yow," Max said, "but you left out something."
"Bellasario's up," Charlie continued, "in the money sixty-two percent of his mounts. Wouldn't mind laying two dollars across the board."
"The jockey," Max agreed. "Never overlook the jockey. The horse gotta have the blood and gotta have the heart, and the horse carries the jockey on its back, not vice versa, but a lousy jock can still ruin a great horse, and a great jockey can get the best out of a fair-to-middling horse."
Made sense to me. I nodded. So did Charlie. So did Radar Vector, who was prancing his way on the parade to the track.
Charlie started packing his pipe with tobacco and said, "Mr. Blinderman, I saw you ride Pax Americana in the Flamingo a number of years ago. To this day I believe your protest should have been upheld."
Max's dark eyes brightened. "Damn right! I moved left, Salazar moved left. I moved right, he moved right. When I took the inside, son of a bitch whipped my horse and nearly drove me over the rail."
"A shameful, dreadful decision, or should I say non-decision, by the stewards." Charlie clucked, pushing all the right buttons.
"Yow, you said it. C'mon. I'll introduce you to the fifty-dollar window. Forget that two-dollar stuff."
They took off for the stone staircases with the carved balustrades. Purple bougainvillea spun down the mezzanine, clinging to the green-and-white latticework. Hialeah Park was a place of old terrazzo floors and unpretentious lawn chairs, a graceful faded garden of pink flamingos, green shrubs, tropical flowers, and sweet-smelling earth.
I sat on the edge of the fountain next to Citation. He stayed on his pedestal. He was by Bull Lea out of Hydroplane II, bred at Calumet Farm. He won the Triple Crown. I was by a nomad shrimper out of Katy Lassiter, raised by my granny. I was a triple threat, just good enough in baseball, basketball, and football not to get good enough at anything else. By the time I learned that games were not forever, I had a lot of catching up to do.
Maybe I was just a step too slow to ever be good at this. I was starting to feel sorry for myself, which is not the most endearing of my qualities. But let's look at the facts. Nick Fox was right. I'd been spinning webs for Rodriguez and Fox, and they were clean. They said they'd humor me, take the blood tests. They did, and young Dr. Sanford Katzen, mathematician and geneticist, brought his autoradiograms and his scientific mumbo jumbo to my office. I told him to spare me the lecture about chopping up the DNA and he did. He held the X-rays up to the window and showed me, by golly, there wasn't one chance in a quintillion that either man's DNA matched that of the semen from Mary Rosedahl or Priscilla Fox. If that wasn't enough, Fox said, they'd each take polygraph tests. It was enough.
So I asked Charlie Riggs to spend a buck and hop on Metrorail for the ride to Hialeah. He had agreed, and we sat there, gliding above the treetops, past the marble-and-glass skyscrapers of
Brickell Avenue, past the downtown government buildings, through the cheerless streets of Overtown, looking down at the tar-patched roofs and asphalt courts where skinny kids dropped a ball through netless rims. From a distance I peered into the Orange Bowl, my own house of pain. We shot by the civic center, Allapattah, Brownsville, and Northside, and came to rest in the parking lot beside the old racetrack.
The winter and spring dates go to Gulfstream and Calder, leaving Hialeah with the stifling summer season, smaller crowds, slower horses. Like many aging institutions of charm and character, the Hialeah track was also going broke. The summer meet would be cut short, closed without ceremony, and already there were plans for plug-ugly condos around the flamingo pond. Inside the clubhouse, amid ragged, curling photos of Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons and the litter of discarded tickets, an elderly barber sat in the reclining chair of his empty shop beneath a stained-glass window of a pink flamingo. He studied the Daily Racing Form. Just memories now, hundred-dollar tips from grateful bettors in need of a shave.
And here I was, trying to bully a tough monkey who used to steer thousand-pound beasts with his knees, and he tells me to shove it where the sun don't shine. But old Charlie Riggs, master of the microscope and the anecdote, found common ground with the little weasel. When they came back from the window, I was sure, Max would be rolling up his sleeve and asking if we wanted a drop or a pint.
And how about my personal relationships, as long as we're engaging in self-flagellation? Ms. Pamela Maxson, where is she now, oh man of many charms? In a hotel room, ocean view. Do not disturb.
I'm sorry, Dr. Maxson is not taking any calls. Would you care to leave a message?
Yeah, tell her she wasn't that great, either. No, never mind.
Okay, Lassiter, you've struck out before. You've had good relationships go bad and bad relationships get worse. There've been lady executives who cared more for their work than you, new-age types who declared you obsolete, touchy-feely artistic types who found you impenetrable, and a couple of cocktail waitresses who thought you had a cute tush.
