by Anna Porter
“Doctor Meisner told me he was planning to change his will in your favor. Perhaps that’s why he called?”
Arthur shook his head forcefully. “No. He did the new will in January. He was going to bequeath me a couple of million dollars, not a whole lot, but it might have gone some way to soothe my grief.” He chuckled. “Trouble is a man changes his mind once, he can change it again, and that, I’m told, is what he did. He changed the will again.”
“And you believe that?”
“If you’re asking whether I’m planning to contest the will, the answer is, I’m not. That’ll save you the embarrassing question.” He stifled an imaginary yawn. “I’m not interested in spending the next two years mucking about in some Toronto courtroom. I don’t like Toronto, and I don’t like courtrooms. I particularly dislike lawyers. First one I met was Philip Masters, and as far as I’m concerned, the legal profession never recovered from that initial shock. This on the record?” he inquired with affected coyness.
“Yes, for the record,” Judith said, continuing to make notes in her book. “Why do you hate Philip Masters?”
“Because he is a despicable, puny-minded, self-serving, immoral, dishonest son-of-a-bitch, a fact that has been a constant with him for more than 25 years, but only became apparent to my father, the sharp-eyed business wizard, in the past couple of months.” He was speaking with such animation and so fast that spittle formed on the corners of his mouth. He wiped it with the back of his hand, elegantly. “That, presumably, is why he fired his ol’ buddy, finally, a couple of weeks ago,” he continued. “The trouble with a bloody pirate like Zimmerman père is he cannot conceive that he is not the only son-of-a-bitch on the block. He had so little integrity himself that he had to believe that Masters had enough for both of them. You know, the old friend, come-what-may, stick-with-you-right-or-wrong syndrome. All that shit.” He seemed fatigued after his outburst and relaxed back into the softness of the white couch.
“I suppose you know why he was fired?”
“You suppose right. And I’ve been expecting it for years.” He gestured, palm upward, eyebrows shooting upward. “Have you seen where he lives? You haven’t? The mansion on Bridle Path, the condominium in London? Do you know how much he’s stashed away for those rainy days—may they come on him soon? You don’t? Well, this should give your avaricious readers something to chew on: about six million, all to himself and the dreadful dragon Jane. And you’re going to want to tell them how he did it, but the pity of it is you can’t prove it, because what he did was push-pull financing. You can get Zimmerman to underwrite your costs, but before you count on that going down, you’d better grease my palm, because I’m the fixer. And once you start playing my game, all the wild cards are mine. Only I can make sure the funding doesn’t dry up. If you bleat, you lose everything—that’s how he operated all these years, or since his wily mind cottoned onto the opportunity. It’s not very original. Regular heavy-duty flimflam game.” He giggled. “Get it?”
“I think so. I went to see Chuck Griffiths yesterday. He told me—”
Arthur interrupted. “He didn’t!” he shouted, and clapped his hands together, like a child. “He didn’t. He didn’t,” Arthur repeated, giggling with enjoyment. “He told you about Martha and the old goat, did he? Well...”
“Not in any detail,” Judith said and waited for more. She had been about to tell him what Griffiths said Masters’s designs were on the Senate, but Martha sounded more interesting.
“Randy old bastard he was, but she’s quite a piece herself. My, did the lovely Brenda hit the matrimonial roof. Whoof! A rocket. Took two double martinis to calm her. But then it takes that much just to oil her wheels. Poor baby can’t get the juices going without a big one. Now that reminds me, Miss Hayes— Mrs. Hayes, right? I’m sorry. Perhaps you’d like a small libation? Scotch, gin, vodka? What’s your pleasure?” He was already out of his couch and bending from the waist, overly solicitous, to take her order.
“Coffee, I think,” Judith said. She followed him into the kitchen. It, too, was painted white with black outlines, and it gave the impression of having been cleaned by Spic and Span for a commercial about to be shot. Not a spot of dirt, not one dish out of place. The tiles were genuine inlaid stone, not the plastic imitation James and she had laid down on their first kitchen floor in darkest Leaside. There was a plethora of handy gadgets, the kind all housewives are advised to have. Microwave, meat grinder, Mixmaster, Cuisinart, toaster, griller, ice-maker, quick-and-easy broiler, miniature gas barbecue, and a wall of esoteric kitchen instruments that included a fancy Russian egg scooper, like the one Jimmy had bought Judith for Christmas. In the corner a bean grinder and percolator.
“Brazilian? Vanilla-flavored? Armagnac? Chocolate and coconut for the sweet tooth? Yankee blend? What’s your poison, my dear?” He moved with a light, easy dancer’s walk, a bit too close to a mince, and pirouetted to face her when he reached the percolator.
“No-frills black,” she said, “and you can call me Judith. It’s simpler.”
“And you’re divorced, besides. Probably don’t much like him, so why would you like his name? Been living alone for ten years now, with two kids, on Brunswick Avenue. No known vices except for the occasional romance—”
“How the hell do you— Damned im—” she spluttered uncontrollably.
“Not me. Not me,” Arthur said, his hands up in a palms-forward gesture to ward off her anger. “It’s Paul you should damn. But you’re too late for that. He’s already damned. Paul had you investigated.” When he saw she had stopped spluttering, he turned to the coffee, measured three spoonfuls into the grinder, then faced her again. “It was his normal behavior. Can’t blame a chicken for laying eggs, or a rat for eating its young. I’ve just finished telling you, the only person he ever trusted was Masters. Everyone else was taken apart, examined, scrutinized, categorized, labeled, and shelved.” He poured the ground coffee and some water into the percolator, switched it on, and perched on a chair by the white lacquer table. On the wall above his head there were framed New Yorker cartoons and an embroidered kitchen towel hanging from a thin piece of wood. It was cross-stitched rather crudely, she thought, for effect: “A home is a place where two people fool each other for a while. Good luck, babies...” There was a happy-face in one corner of the cloth, and a face with a downturned mouth in the other end. The downturned mouth was kitty-corner from “babies.”
“I didn’t know,” Judith said.
“He wasn’t exactly excited about seeing reporters,” Arthur said. “After he checked you out, he thought you’d be safe. You know. The kind who records what she’s told. Not a specially inquiring mind.” Arthur sighed contentedly. “But he was wrong, wasn’t he?”
Judith took two white porcelain coffee mugs from the shelf to the right of the percolator and set them beside the machine.
“I’m having vodka,” Arthur said. “Sure you won’t change your mind?”
“If you don’t contest the will, how do you plan to avoid working for a living?”
“Simple. I’ve reached what we might call an amicable settlement with Brenda. She will continue my modest level of support, unchanged, during my lifetime, which, to give the lady her credit for smarts and forbearance, she estimates at less than the aggregate of whatever her legal costs would have been together with the whole or a sizable chunk of the original two million. Do not underestimate the lovely Brenda. She thinks she has a bargain, first-born son and all.” He poured the coffee, then asked her to follow him into the study. Once there, he went behind the black leather bar in the center of the room and mixed himself a generous Bloody Mary. “Besides,” he said, swirling the ice around with a finger, “she assumes I’m not long for the world. She’s been reading about AIDS of late.” He stubbed his cigarette into a black and red ashtray shaped like a hollow bull.
The whole room had suffered from someone’s overwrought interpretation of Spanish style. There were black iron lattice-work dividers on either side
of the bar, which looked like something out of a Sears assemble-it-yourself Barcelona special, the wallpaper was red and black flocked, the carpets Moroccan, black leather chairs, heavy mahogany tables, incredibly clichéd toreadors and bulls in frames on the wall, and a tourist poster of the Costa del Sol. The contrast between the conscious kitsch of this room and the stark design of the other was jarring, contradictory. Arthur was obviously enjoying her consternation. He leaned over the bar, his long fingers clasped around the glass, head slightly tilted, the exaggerated smile etching itself more deeply into his features.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“About what?” Judith asked noncommittally, taking in the sights.
“Not about the room. About the AIDS idea. You think she has a fighting chance?” Arthur affected a flirtatious look.
“I don’t know,” Judith said, a touch embarrassed. “I’ve only researched your father.”
Arthur shrugged. “As you like,” he said. “It used to drive the old man crazy, my flagrant gaiety. His being dead will take some of the enjoyment out of it. Maybe all the enjoyment out of it. A pity, when you’ve evolved a whole life around a single theme, don’t you think? The old man told me the Nazis tried to exterminate all homosexuals, lest we infect the master race. He thought them wise, except for botching the job. They left too many alive. He told me in loving detail of the experiments they conducted using homosexuals. He loved stories of torture and debasement.” He hissed the words, slowly, savoring each sibilant and observing Judith for reaction. He seemed pleased when he saw her wince. “He used to tell me about them when I was a kid. His idea of bedtime stories. Thought it would frighten me off.”
“I thought his own parents were killed by the Nazis,” Judith said.
“I doubt if he had parents.” Arthur finished his drink with a loud gulp and fixed himself another. “He bought me a butterfly net when I was five and taught me how to catch and kill the poor sods. Gave me a daily quota. He made me watch them flex and stretch their bodies, thrash their wings trying to escape the pins he’d thrust through their thoraxes.” He demonstrated by flapping his elbows up and down, erratically, and jerking his neck back and forth. “Amazing how long it took some of them to die.” He relaxed again, smiled, put his elbows on the bar, and intertwined his hands under his chin. “Did he show you the butterfly collection?”
“There was a big glass case full of butterflies near the entrance.”
“We used to have four of those,” Arthur said. “I remember the day I decided to become a homosexual. What I actually wanted to be was a raving, strutting cross-dresser, a drag queen. I tried on my mother’s evening clothes and waited for him to come home. I sat on a bar stool, like this, dangling my stockinged feet. Mother’s black sling-back shoes had slipped off, I had her feather boa wrapped around my neck, the dress off the shoulder, coquettish.” He arranged himself on the bar stool, knees crossed, one shoulder turned toward Judith. He smoothed down the shoulder of the jacket, before he put his chin over it, looking back at her from under half-closed eyelashes (white-blond as his father’s had been), his cheeks sucked in, his lips pursed. He tossed one end of the imaginary boa over the other shoulder. “Oh my,” he said, his voice high, “did we ever have ourselves a scene. And I was only eight years old. Oh what a wonderful day. More coffee?” he asked, descending from the stool.
“Please,” Judith said. She followed him out into the kitchen. It was good to get away from the bulls for a while. “Your mother says he was murdered,” she told him matter-of-factly.
“Very likely,” he said, after only a moment’s thought. “Though it couldn’t have been easy to accomplish with a houseful of jolly party-makers. I suppose you can ask her about it in Paris. Did she say who did it?”
“No.”
“Hmm. I do so hope she doesn’t have me in mind. It would be ever so troublesome to have to fight with her again. I’m rather fond of the old dear.”
For her second coffee, he offered her a choice of venue: either of the two rooms already explored or a third, upstairs, with a view of the river, the games room. She chose the first room: more games sounded distracting, and she found plain white more accommodating than Spanish modern. When she asked him about the contrast between the rooms he said that somehow contrasts suited his mood swings. “Decorating is a form of artistic expression,” he explained. “It’s what I do. Father had hoped I would take an interest in the arts. He didn’t have time himself, one of his few frustrated ambitions. Too busy making the next million. And the next one. I think I’ve already told you what a flop I was at violin lessons. Only pleasant part of that ordeal was getting away from him. For some reason he took it into his head that Mother and I would stay behind in Vienna so I could learn violin. Vienna is the only place for violin lessons. They also make marvelous, simply marvelous, tortes.”
“Yet he had an extraordinary collection of Impressionists,” Judith said, taking him back to Zimmerman. “His own selection?”
“That’s your first silly question, Mrs. Hayes. Why would he run around the world searching when he could have the best hired brains money could buy? Jeremy bought all his art. That’s how I met Jeremy: he introduced us. Lovely bit of irony that, don’t you think?”
“Who is Jeremy?” she asked, though she had already guessed.
“My lover, of course. I assumed you knew. He’s up in the bedroom. Resting.” Arthur stretched out on the white couch. His languid arm reached for another cigarette. “I think you’ll find him...interesting. He is a self-contained man. Doesn’t need anyone or anything—he allows us lesser mortals to inhabit his life from time to time; we’re decorative, rather than functional. It’s an attitude that renders him unbuyable, virtually incorruptible. I like that. Back where I come from, it’s a rare commodity.”
“If the relationship between you and your father was as unpleasant as you say, why did he decide to write a new will that featured you at all?”
“Why? He was buying me off, naturally. Unlike my lover, the illustrious Jeremy, I am totally corruptible.”
“What was he buying?”
“My silence. I had discovered a nasty little secret, and he was willing to pay me handsomely to keep it that way.”
“Then why did he change his mind?”
Arthur shrugged. “I guess he must have decided the secret wasn’t worth as much as he had originally estimated.”
“Will you tell me what it was?” Judith tried. “Obviously it’s not worth anything now.”
“No,” Arthur said firmly. “I’ve no intention of telling you, or anyone else, Mrs. Hayes. I never intended to in the first place. I merely threatened him with it. Perhaps that’s what he realized when he changed his mind. If he changed his mind.”
“Did anyone else know about...this?”
“I’m sure they did, but I doubt if you’ll get them to tell you either, my dear.” He stood to stretch his legs. “How about that tour now?”
The games room was full of arcade games of all kinds, even pinball machines. The walls were covered with masks made of wood and metal with leather straps dangling from their ears. They were decorated in garish colors. The floor was shiny black arborite. In the center there was a huge mechanical bull festooned with streamers.
“You want to try it?” Arthur asked.
“Perhaps some other time,” Judith demurred. “What about Brenda? He did love Brenda, didn’t he?”
“I suppose,” Arthur said, putting a quarter into the Pacman machine. “In his fashion. I would have tired of her ages ago, but then I do not share any of my father’s tastes or predilections. Nor he, mine.” The game had already kicked into action, but he continued talking while he worked the levers with both hands. He was clearly an expert.
“But he had an affair with Mrs. Griffiths,” Judith persisted.
“He had affairs all the time, didn’t mean anything. Liked pretty women, that’s all. He was quite discreet as a rule, but Martha decided to publicize this one herself. For som
e reason, she figured she’d harangue him into divorcing Brenda and marrying her. The fool.” Arthur had piled up 20,000 points and was getting an extra little yellow man.
“How did Chuck Griffiths take it?”
“Lousy. If Mother is right, I’d put him down for a suspect. He kept up the facade, but underneath he was seething. And my charming father, true to himself, kept his foot tight on Griffiths’s throat. One of his basic business tenets: once you’ve stepped on a snake, keep your foot firmly on his neck or he’ll turn on you.” At 50,000 points Arthur’s little yellow guy was gobbled up by the more colorful square fellows, and the machine declared him dead.
“How did he do that?” Judith asked.
“He owned the majority of Loyal Trust, paid Griffiths’s salary, guaranteed his bank loan, held the mortgages on Griffiths’s own properties—he had him totally in his pocket. If the poor bugger came up for air, he’d slap him back so fast he’d have skid marks on his ass.” Arthur led the way to the gallery. “Jeremy’s private collection,” he explained. “Hopper, de Kooning, Andrew Wyeth, Jackson Pollock, couple of Harold Towns, three good Matisses, a fair Renoir, a Vuillard landscape, a series of Van Dyck drawings, studies by Tiepolo. Except for a couple of odds and ends, he stayed away from Impressionists.”
It was a magnificent room, each piece of art individually lit, each wonderful in itself. The effect was overwhelming.
“Alas,” Arthur said, “some of them are only visitors. Jeremy still dabbles in the business, for the love of it.” As they walked past the open bedroom door, he called out to him: “Jeremy, my love, won’t you say hello to the nice lady?”
From the black-draped four-poster bed in the middle there came the low groaning sound of a wounded bear.
