Book Read Free

Book Case

Page 28

by Stephen Greenleaf


  Tom usually arrives at Guido’s about nine. I’m usually already there, at my stool at the end of the bar. But this time there was a deviation—Tom didn’t have his book bag with him. I decided that at the very least the omission meant Tom was headed my way with something on his mind more immediate than the collective psychology of the Teutonics or the number of sorties that had been flown that day. A moment later, he was standing next to the stool beside mine, beer in hand, waiting for an invitation to join me.

  When I motioned for him to take the empty seat, Tom collapsed onto it as though he had rocks in his pockets and a pack on his back. He was dressed as usual—Levi’s and flannel shirt—and both above and below his thick black mustache his expression was dour and Lincolnesque, also as usual. Since empathy was epidemic in Tom Crandall, it wasn’t odd to see him burdened by someone’s plight, but for the first time I could remember, the object of the exercise was Tom himself.

  Before he said anything, he drank deeply from his glass, licked the ensuing foam off his lips, crossed his long, thin arms atop the bar, and looked at me with eyes as wild as weeds. “I’ve got a question,” he said gruffly.

  “Shoot.”

  Since Tom seldom relinquishes a subject till he’s worried it to a creative conclusion, I expected it to have to do with Bismarck or Hussein. But what he said was, “What the hell can you do about it if some son of a bitch sets out to steal your wife?”

  TWO

  Spurred by silent-movie images of black-hatted villains abducting wide-eyed ingenues when the rent on the farm fell due, I felt an urge to laugh. But when I looked to see if Tom was serious, what looked back were eyes afloat on inkblots of exhaustion and bracketed by fine white lines of worry. I tried to get as serious as Tom was, but I didn’t quite make it.

  “Once upon a time,” I began easily, hoping he was at least being hyperbolic, “they called it ‘criminal conversation’ or ‘alienation of affections,’ and you could sue the guy who tried it, even get an injunction ordering him to stop. If it was too late to keep her from running off, you could make him pay you a fair price.”

  “You said ‘Once upon a time.’ What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means the legislature abolished that particular cause of action back in 1939.”

  “Why?”

  “They didn’t want to clog the courts with any more domestic disputes than they already had. And because the concept smacked too much of indentured servitude: the analogy to rustling, the monetary measure of the wife’s worth, the husband’s proprietary interest in her affections—stuff like that.”

  Tom’s argumentative bent asserted itself. “They measure her worth if someone runs her down and kills her, don’t they?”

  “Sure, but that’s an event that seldom includes the wife’s cooperation and complicity.”

  Although a surrebuttal could be made, Tom’s usual thirst for debate had been slaked by the subject matter. “So there’s nothing I can do,” he concluded glumly.

  “Not as far as the law is concerned, I don’t think. Oh, you might dig up a lawyer who’d help you run a bluff—file a claim of unlawful interference with the marriage contract or intentional infliction of mental distress or something. It would be thrown out of court, eventually, but it might be enough to make this character back off.”

  Tom shook his head morosely. “Not this character.”

  He drank till his glass was empty. Guido replaced it before it hit the bar. I sipped some Ballantine’s and chewed some ice, then asked a question I seldom asked outside the confines of my office. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  Tom’s only answer was to stare, blindly and blinklessly, at the bottles on the back of the bar. The prospect of making his problems public, even to an audience of one, seemed to roast his anguish.

  But Tom was Tom, so he gradually retreated to reason and then to the rituals of our relationship. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  His smile was only semisuccessful. “We don’t do this, you know.”

  “Maybe that’s because it hasn’t been necessary before.”

  “Necessary.” He sighed and shook his head, then looked at his beer but didn’t touch it. “It’s amazing what can become encompassed within that definition. Here I sit, married fifteen years, happily married as far as I knew, and suddenly it’s become necessary for me to hurry to the local saloon so I can share the burden of my wife’s dalliance with another man.”

  “Only if you want to, Tom. Only if you think it will help.”

  He blinked in surprise, as though he’d never considered otherwise. “Oh, it will help. It always helps to toss off some agony onto someone else—it’s why behind half the doors in town lurks someone who calls himself a therapist.” He tried to smile, but the mechanics broke down halfway through the process. “I’m afraid the subject won’t be nearly as interesting as our conversation about the timber industry and the spotted owl. We’re cutting trees faster than Brazil is cutting the rain forest, you know. I just learned that this week.”

  I smiled. “Why don’t we talk about your wife?”

  Tom drained his glass and turned toward Guido, who had already started our way with another draught in his hand. “Bring me a brandy in a minute, will you, Guido?” Tom said after he had his beer. “A double.”

  Tom hadn’t ordered brandy for months, since the night before the morning paper had reported a particularly grisly rip-off retaliation in which rival crack dealers had gotten it on down by the Cow Palace and two of the losers had been decapitated. I hadn’t asked, and Tom hadn’t volunteered, but I knew he’d gotten the call to go out there that morning, and it had taken the brandy to get the carnage tucked into a place in his brain that wouldn’t haunt him, at least not till he was home.

  When the brandy was in front of him, he looked into its blood-red depths as though salvation might be beckoning. Like most people who look for messages in a bottle, Tom didn’t find one to his liking.

  “I’ve never talked to you about the war before,” he murmured finally, not looking at me, not really talking to me, either. In common with most people who confess their sins to others, Tom was primarily trying to explain things to himself.

  “And I don’t want to talk about it now, really,” he went on, “except to say that when I came back from Vietnam I was pretty messed up. Not only because of the war, I admit—there were things from my life before I went overseas that … well, let’s just say I was fucked up. Drugs. Booze. Nightmares. The whole megillah.”

  He peeked at me then, just for a moment, to be sure I understood that the situation he’d abbreviated was nonetheless extreme. “It’s weird, but at the worst moments in my life, women have always rescued me. Of course, maybe that’s not so weird, maybe it’s what women do best; hell, maybe it’s the answer Freud was looking for—maybe rescuing men is what women really want in life. I mean, it’s not the worst job in the world, right?”

  He paused to consider his insight. When it didn’t seem to please him, he returned to his story. “When I was confused and crazy in high school, a girl came along and gave me, well, whatever it was I needed. Esteem, I guess. Or understanding. She liked me for the right reasons, was what it came down to, when everyone else was reacting to things that didn’t matter. She was so sweet—God, I love it when they’re sweet. She used to—”

  Someone at the other end of the bar started laughing, and Tom broke off his reverie. He looked up the bar, then back at me. “But it didn’t work out,” he said simply. “I went in the army, things happened at home, and …” He shrugged. “Anyway, when I got back from Nam, I was even more screwed up than before, and along came Clarissa. It was enough to make me believe in God.” He peeked at me again. “Almost.”

  I smiled at the qualifier. We had discussed religion ad nauseam over the years. Tom clearly wanted to believe in a higher power, perhaps even needed to, but his preexisting faith in the gods of reason and reality wouldn’t let him make the leap, a
t least not yet. Me, I was still working on the problem, though since I read the newspapers more often than I read the Bible, the trend was generally the other way.

  I was still pondering theological imponderables when Tom banged his hand on the bar. “How could I have been so stupid?”

  The question was rhetorical, but I responded anyway. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re about as unstupid as anyone I know.”

  “That’s not quite right,” he growled bitterly. “What I am is informed. I know a lot of stuff, a ton of stuff—useless facts, misleading statistics, irrelevant information. My head’s so full it creaks at the seams.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is, I seem to know far more about the world than I know about my wife.”

  The words were slurred, less from the quantity of beer and brandy than from the pain of the revelation. The variables were catching up to him, and Tom was on the verge of getting drunk.

  “I imagine you’re not the first husband to feel that way,” I said.

  “No. And a lot of them end up wasting away their lives in places like this.” From the look on his face, we might have been patronizing a cockfight.

  Startled by his outburst, then chagrined at its implicit indictment of persons he regarded as friends, Tom looked around the bar as though he were wearing a new set of spectacles. What he saw seemed to alarm him.

  “It was a miracle she married me, of course,” he went on after a moment, the alarm become bemusement. “To this day, I don’t know why she accepted my proposal. We’re as different as two people can be. She’s an entertainer, for God’s sake. I have to get embalmed just to summon the courage to ask a gas jockey to check the tires.”

  The picture he’d painted of his marriage caused Tom to slip back into the funk that had brought him to Guido’s in the first place, which was something different in degree and kind from the normal depressions that lurked around the two of us like pigeons around a park. Although there were a thousand reasons not to—my desire to preserve my friendship with Tom and the fact that I heard enough of other people’s troubles during the day to cultivate them when my meter wasn’t running, among others—I resolved to keep probing until I discovered the source of his torment. I didn’t have anything to do the rest of the night, anyway. Or even the rest of the week.

  “How did you meet her?” I prompted.

  “We met in college. She was a senior at State and I was back from the war and earning a G.I. Bill living taking some courses in Asian history in the hope that what I’d seen and done over there would make sense if I put it in a context that didn’t originate with the Defense Department and the CIA. Clarissa was a music major—she’s known she wanted to be a singer since she was eight years old and her family trotted her out for every remotely appropriate occasion and made her sing ‘Alice Blue Gown’ and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’”

  Tom paused to enjoy what I imagined was an image of his wife as a budding Shirley Temple, but the vision didn’t last. “I was trying to decide what the war meant—whether it meant eternal damnation for all of us because man’s unquenchable inhumanity to man was the ineluctable stain of original sin, or whether it was just another exercise in barbarism so routine and unexceptional there might still be a place for me in the world, that I hadn’t forfeited my right to function in what passes for civilized society the day I failed to put a stop to the castration ritual that certain members of my unit were so enamored with.” He blinked. “I must say, by the way, that the recent events in the Gulf incline me toward the latter view.”

  Tom paused long enough to give me a chance to ponder what twenty years of physiological and psychological excess would do to the psyche, what Tom must have had to become in order to endure and even thrive in such a life, whether that was something better or worse than what I had become myself. Like most things I ponder, I gave up before I had an answer.

  “Clarissa,” he repeated softly. “We were in the same Global Studies class, only nodding acquaintances till we ran into each other at a concert in Stern Grove. I was a semi-roadie for one of the bands on the days I wasn’t too drugged up to function, and she was a part-time singer with a group called Ozymandias. She was trying to be another Janis Joplin in those days, though her talents were more like Lena Horne’s.”

  Tom sighed, more with pleasure than its opposite. “It was a Sunday. She was standing backstage waiting to go on, and I was fiddling with a balky amp and a drunken drummer, and we got to talking. I must have been less strung out than normal, because when I asked her to go out for a drink after the show, she said she would. It turned out we didn’t live that far from each other—patronized the same grocery and all that—and we started dating.”

  “Nice.”

  He met my look. “She saved my life, is what it came down to. Clarissa’s the one who realized the only way I could survive with all the Vietnam baggage I was carrying was to keep doing what had kept me sane in Nam—keeping people alive. Literally, she meant: being the first one on the scene, the one who stops the bleeding and reduces the fracture and treats the shock and stuffs the guts back where they came from so someone somewhere else can figure out a way to make it permanent. And she was right. Medicine—emergency medicine, street medicine—gave me the kind of focus I needed to keep the compromises I’d made in the war from eating away at everything I believed about the world and about myself. She was right on, was dear Clarissa; I’ll owe her for that forever.”

  Tom’s lips wrinkled into a wry grin. “Of course, in her view the EMT phase was temporary. After we got married, she decided I could do better—med school, hospital administration, osteopathic college, something. She still brings it up; her ambitions are not solely egocentric.” His smile turned charitable. “Clarissa thinks anything’s possible if you make up your mind to do it. I, on the other hand, think all of us are pretty much etched in stone. I mean, if est or TM really worked, no one would have ever heard of Joseph Campbell or this Bradshaw character, right? So while I stumble around uncertain about everything from the implications of the budget deficit to the safety of irradiated food, Clarissa has made up her mind about virtually everything. And right now she thinks her mind is telling her that she’s in love with another man.”

  Tom banged his snifter on the bar so hard I was afraid it would shatter in his palm. When it didn’t, I went back to worrying that his soul was about to do the same.

  When he’d wiped the spill and drained the dregs and signaled for another round, Tom looked at me and shrugged. “I love her, Marsh. I mean, we’ve never talked about this stuff before, but the main thing about me is, I love my wife. I want to be with her every minute. I don’t come to Guido’s to get away from her, like a lot of these guys; I come to get away from being home alone without her. It kills me that she sings her heart out for a bunch of drunken strangers six nights a week. I should be used to it by now, I know. But I’m not. I guess I never will be. Which I suppose is part of the problem.”

  Guido brought another brandy. Tom sniffed and sipped. For a moment, I was sure he was going to cry.

  “We’ve had a good marriage, you know? I mean, it’s weird—she works nights, I work days—so we’re not together that often, but when we are, it’s great. The sex, the talk, the fun—everything. We’ve had problems, sure—money’s tight, she wants a kid and I don’t, I want to move to the country but she still likes the city, I want her to cut back her schedule but she says she’s got to give it all she has while she still has her pipes. But we talk it through, and compromise, and it works out. Most of the time. How many great marriages do you know of, Marsh? Ever?”

  I thought about it. Harry and Ruthie Spring. The Kottles, maybe. And … “Three or four,” I said optimistically.

  “Well, we were one of them. Till he came along.”

  “So who is this monster?”

  Tom sighed. “Richard Sands.”

  I squinted to get him into better focus. “The Richard Sand
s?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “He’s the guy who’s after your wife?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  Tom shrugged. “Because he loves her, supposedly. Because he was smitten the first time he heard her sing.” His lip twisted sardonically. “‘Because he needs her to make sense of his life.’ And I quote.”

  I raised a brow. “You’ve talked to him about it?”

  Tom shook his head. “Clarissa reports in. It’s not like she’s sneaking around behind my back—she tells me everything they do. They’ve got it down to a routine—he calls for her at the hotel after the second show, then spirits her away to his private club, where he uses his wiles to seduce her away from me till she’s had her fill and asks him to take her home, where she climbs into the bed I’ve just vacated and gets her beauty sleep. Twelve hours later, the merry-go-round starts up again. And it’s driving me fucking crazy.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Six months. That I know of. You ever see him on TV?”

  I nodded.

  “What did you think?”

  “Lots of brass, lots of ego. Lots of money, lots of guts.”

  “A man who gets what he wants, in other words.”

  I nodded before I considered what it meant.

  “Well,” Tom said miserably, “what he wants is my wife, goddammit. So how am I going to stop him?”

  THREE

  Although I both hoped and suspected Tom was exaggerating his problems, it was easy to understand the panic underlying his concern: His rival for his wife’s affections was no ordinary swain. Richard Sands was a true tycoon, a corporate raider, a man who had used the relaxation of the rules and the buccaneer morality fostered by the Reagan administration, along with the brass and bravado that came to him naturally, to threaten, coerce, intimidate, and ultimately invade and occupy a series of corporate boardrooms up and down the West Coast. His real and threatened assaults on undervalued companies and overly complacent managements had yielded a fortune that placed him well up the Forbes listing of the world’s richest men and made Sands the stuff of envy or outrage, depending on whom you talked to.

 

‹ Prev