Then as the years passed and he became rich and powerful, he came to believe that he had the right to capture women for his pleasure. If they resisted, he continued the pursuit. If they hesitated, he did not give up. If they tried to brush him off, he turned on all his charm. If they told him that they did not want to see him again, he showered them with expensive gifts. The game of chasing a woman commanded at least as much of his attention as National Entertainment. He luxuriated in a long pursuit rather than a short one. Indeed, he avoided quests that threatened to be too easy.
A woman did not have to be young or beautiful to interest him. She had to be intelligent, mature, selfpossessed, and, if at all possible, forbidden in one way or another, the sort of woman who would flirt with him discreetly, serene in her confidence that he would not be able to break through her resistance. To be “interesting” a woman had to be a challenge, confident that in any sexual encounter she would be the winner.
In recent years he had chosen for his prey women who were sophisticated and, if possible, successful in the entertainment world. His last conquest, and he licked his lips whenever he thought of her, had been a brilliant woman film producer. He was currently hunting the president of a regional cable firm, hoping to conquer both her and her company, a mouthwatering prospect—to own the woman both in bed and in the business world. She could hardly claim sexual harassment after he owned both of them. He particularly relished relationships where the woman of her own volition became a temporary slave.
The hunt had gone on for many months. He thought that now he was close to victory.
“Victory” for him was to turn her into the loser and make her enjoy it.
“You’re a predator,” Michael said. “You hunt women like other men hunt elk or wild boars.”
“I’m not going to deny that. I don’t kill them though. In fact, I don’t even hurt them. What’s wrong with that?”
“That’s the problem. You don’t know what’s wrong with that. You’re going to have to find out.”
“How the hell can I do that?”
“Ask them.”
“No way. I won’t do it.”
Michael slowly withdrew the folded “contract” from his pocket and tapped Neenan’s shoulder with it.
“Yes, you will.”
“I’ve been a celibate for long periods of time. Donna wouldn’t sleep with me and my adventures often went on for months before I won.”
“That should tell you something interesting about yourself.”
3
The pilot announced yet another delay. Lightning exploded just beyond the plane’s wingtips.
“I don’t even have a reputation as a predator,” Neenan argued in his own defense. “They don’t think of themselves as victims.”
“Even though they are?”
“I don’t think they are,” he said hotly.
“You think they’ve become temporary slave women. Doesn’t that make them victims?”
How does he know what I think? “It’s what they want to be”
“Do they?”
“Don’t they?”
“You’ve covered your tracks very cleverly,” Michael changed the subject, having created more feelings of guilt.
Neenan finished his vodka. He’d drunk too much. He would not have his wits about him for the meeting at O’Hare.
“You don’t want to get a reputation like that,” he explained to the pseudoseraph. “It makes you a sitting duck for sexual harassment charges.”
“You were so good at covering up that your wife never raised the issue of infidelity in her divorce suit.”
“About the only thing she didn’t charge.”
“You put a private detective on her and found that she had taken a lover, didn’t you?”
“My divorce lawyer suggested it. I told him it was impossible. But her demands were enormous. I offered her a big cash settlement. She wanted more and a share of everything I’d built up. So I told him to do whatever it took. He found out she was sleeping with this doctor from DeKalb she’d gone to high school with.”
“So you cut your offer of a cash settlement in half and she took it?”
“You bet.”
“Because she was cheating on you?”
“Because she was trying to cheat me … . Anyway, she got one of those Catholic divorce things and married the guy and lost a lot of weight and earned her college degree. She is financially comfortable and, I’m told, happier than she’s ever been.”
“She even produced another daughter, didn’t she?”
“That’s true,” Neenan admitted grudgingly.
“So he must have something you didn’t have?”
“We’ve been given an approach time of thirty-five after the hour,” the captain announced tonelessly. “That’s forty minutes from now.”
Neenan grabbed for the phone in the armrest next to him and impatiently punched in a number. He fumed as he waited for an answer.
“Joe? Neenan here. What the hell took you so long to answer? …
“You mean you’re not out at the airport? I don’t give a damn what time they say the plane is going to land. I told you I wanted you guys there at noon. That meant I wanted you at noon, regardless of the weather. Sometimes these things clear up in a hurry … .
“That’s no excuse … . What’s the status of the Gulfstream? … It damn well better be ready by Friday … . Look, I won’t have time to meet you people at the Admiral’s Club. You can ride over to Lake Forest in my car. Get in touch with my driver and set it up. Got it?”
Neenan hung up and frowned angrily. “Assholes.”
“Nice way to talk to your executive vice president. You have to treat him like an errand boy?”
“Treat him any better and he’ll think he has a right to my job.”
“I had observed that your wife’s second husband must have had something you didn’t have.”
Neenan gritted his teeth. “It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”
Donna O’Connell had been a terrible mistake. When he was a senior, she was a freshman at Northern Illinois, the daughter of a prominent and affluent DeKalb medical family. He had just taken over the farm network and was intoxicated with success and prospects for greater success. The town of De Kalb, if not the university, was still part of the 1950s suburban culture—home, family, two cars, high school football games on the weekend. The Donna Reed Show. Donna was intelligent and pretty and quite prepared to participate in every imaginable form of foreplay so long as it did not cross the line into intercourse. Her parents liked him, and astonishingly, his father and mother seemed to like her. She’ll make a man of you, they said. So Neenan had bought into the American dream. It was time, he told himself, that he give up his sexual escapades and settle down with a wife and family, a family that, he told himself, would be as joyous as his own had been devoid of joy.
There had been signs even before the marriage that ought to have warned him. His mother and her mother became friends all too easily. Yet it was unthinkable that Donna could ever become the chronic complainer and nag that his mother had always been. During their honeymoon trip to Ireland, however, she had complained about the food, the weather, the hotels, the service, the poverty, the slovenliness of the people, and the ugliness of the countryside.
Despite her prudery, he had taken her marvelous young body, on which he gorged himself. He had made her undress for him (which she thought was disgusting), insisted that the lights be on when they made love, and forced her to accept his foreplay, which did not seem to arouse her in the slightest. When she protested, he lectured her about a wife’s obligation to her husband, exploiting her Catholic education.
He told himself that she would grow in her sexual self-confidence and that all would be well between them.
But it never was. Once their first child, Vincent, named in honor of his maternal grandfather, arrived eighteen months after their wedding, the baby became the focus of her life. Two subsequent children, Jennifer and Leonard
, born at two-year intervals, filled her life completely. She was never without help, but the children exhausted her, she had claimed, and she was too tired for sex and too tired to take any interest in his expanding business enterprises.
“I’m sick of hearing how important you are,” she had informed him.
She also began to ridicule him in bed when he tried to arouse her, understanding at last his vulnerability to ridicule.
“I hope you’re enjoying what you’re doing,” she had told him one night, “because I’m not getting anything out of it.”
She took care of the house and the family, and he took care of the job. They rarely fought because he gave in to almost all of her demands. The children became sullen strangers who looked on him with distaste whenever he came home from a trip to Los Angeles or New York. The boys seemed to him to be effete sissies, and Jennifer hated him, turning away in disgust when he tried to kiss her.
They were all furious at him when he moved the family to Chicago. They dismissed the big house in Evanston across the street from the Lake as “ugly and cold” and promptly hated all their neighbors.
Later when he had purchased a condo on Captiva and an apartment in London, they refused to visit either home because all they wanted was to move back to DeKalb.
Donna also refused to share his interest in opera. “Why should I sit still for four hours and listen to all that shouting? I hate opera and I hate the phonies that don’t hate it.”
That was pretty definite. Neenan always felt odd when the other major patrons of the Lyric asked him, gently of course, whether his wife was interested in opera. Routinely he would reply that she was still busy with their three children.
Donna had put on at least fifty pounds and seemed to rejoice that she had made herself sexually unappealing. After the birth of Jennifer, Neenan gave up on the suburban domestic dream and carefully began again his sexual adventures.
However, he did not seriously consider divorce. He had long since given up any Catholic faith—though he went to church to give a good example to his children. However, he loved his kids, though they seemed to despise him, and believed that divorce was not good for the children. It did not occur to him that Donna, loyal and faithful Catholic that she was, could ever file a divorce suit against him.
They had been married eighteen years and had three teenage children when she broke the news to him.
“I’m sick and tired of being R. A. Neenan’s wife,” she said. “I want to be my own person. You’ve ruined twenty years of my life. I won’t let you ruin the next twenty. I want you out of this house tonight. You make me sick, every time I see you.”
He felt someone had hit him over the head with a hammer. At first he feared that she had found out about his adventures. But he was never charged with infidelity. Her rationale for the divorce was that she was tired of being an ornament to his career and of being ignored by him as an unimportant nuisance.
A second blow to the head was his discovery that she had taken a lover five years before the divorce, a chubby, bald, little M.D. from DeKalb who had been her high school prom date.
“I don’t blame her at all,” Jennifer had snarled at him. “A husband like you would drive any woman to adultery.”
Neither Jennifer nor Leonard would speak to him. Now, ten years after the divorce, they would not answer his phone calls or respond to his Christmas cards. Leonard, the youngest, was living in San Francisco with a gay roommate. Neenan had learned that Leonard had come out of the closet in a rare phone call from Donna.
“I hope you’re happy, you dirty bastard, your younger son is a faggot.”
Busy with a major merger, Neenan had had little time to wonder where it had all gone wrong.
Jennifer had declared herself to be an actress, worked as a stagehand and bit player in an off-Loop company on Lincoln Avenue, and had two years ago moved to Los Angeles to make her way in the world of Hollywood, where pretty young women like her seem to disappear. Anna Maria had insisted that they see her in a play where she had a minor but not totally unimportant role. Jennifer had seen them come in and stormed out from behind the set.
“You and your whore get out of here,” she had thundered. “Do you want to ruin my big chance? I won’t go onstage as long as you are in the house.”
He had tried to reason with her, but Anna Maria dragged him out.
“You were not a very good father to her, were you, Ray?”
“I don’t know what I did wrong.”
Vincent, who had always seemed timid in his father’s presence, had quickly learned to detest his stepfather. When he had graduated from Drake, he came to his father about a job. He had worked for National Entertainment for seven years and, in his father’s judgment, was an incompetent weakling, utterly without the killer instinct that the industry required.
Neenan had feared that he too was gay, but he was now apparently happily married to a sensible young assistant state’s attorney, named Megan McGrath (pronounced McGraw), and had produced a child whom they had called Ramona.
They apparently wanted to be friends with him, especially since Donna so hated Megan as to refuse to come to the wedding. Somehow they hadn’t managed to connect in a relaxed fashion. They both seemed frightened of Neenan and diffident in the presence of Anna Maria. They tried hard to please him, and somehow it never worked out.
“What a lovely young couple,” Anna Maria had commented. “They adore you.”
“I can’t figure out why.”
“Neither can I.”
Neenan rubbed his hand across his face. Why did he feel guilty about his life? He was not ashamed of himself. Why had he let this damn fool black man upset him?
“You’ve pretty much made a mess out of your life, haven’t you?” Michael observed with apparent satisfaction.
“I don’t see it that way,” Neenan answered hotly. “I don’t believe that there’s any reason for me to feel guilty.”
Still he felt guilty. And again he had the sensation of being torn apart, like a public-housing high-rise imploding in a demolition explosion.
“What if all the things Sister John Mark told you in grammar school were true?”
“Then I’ll go to hell and probably deserve it. But you’ve told me there isn’t any hell.”
“I said that we didn’t like to use that metaphor much anymore.”
“What the hell kind of people are you anyway? You’re some kind of angels or something?”
“Let’s say that we’re responsible for most of the phenomena which your kind attributes to angels.”
“You really look like you do now?”
He reached over and touched the black man’s arm—firm and solid.
Neenan noticed that the choir was singing softly in the background. Maybe they had been singing all along. He tried to link the music with the conversation. There was some kind of connection all right, but its meaning escaped him, though Michael’s words seemed to get the stronger tunes.
“Not ectoplasm?” the alleged seraph said with a vast smile. “Actually, if I should show myself the way I am, it would blind you and scare everyone in three or four states. What you see and what you just touched is a surrogate which interprets us to you in a manner you can understand. It’s not me, but it’s not not-me either.”
“You’re pure spirits of some kind?”
“Sister John Mark was wrong on that. We have bodies as you do, though a very different kind of body. We’re far more advanced in our evolutionary process than you are in yours. Our bodies have developed in the direction of supporting more profound thought and more intense love and hence are invisible to your eyes, for which you should be grateful.”
“You’re immortal?”
“Typical human question. If we have bodies, we deteriorate just as you do. It takes a lot longer, but we still die. We believe that we survive death and our evidence is much stronger, but still we do not know for certain.”
“How much longer?”
Michael shrugg
ed. “Thousands of years. But it’s never enough time.”
“You have women?”
“We call them life-bearers. How could a species with bodies survive without procreation? Perhaps you will meet my companion on some occasion.”
“I’d like that.”
“I doubt it. She’s not nearly as patient with human nonsense as I am.”
“You, ah, screw?”
“Naturally … and to respond to your prurient questions before you ask them, it takes days … . Now, to get back to your failures as a human being. Does it not strike you that you are a poor excuse for a husband, a parent, a child, and a friend? Your first wife dumped you, your parents and two of your three children hate you and the third fears you, your employees fear you, your colleagues despise you, and you have almost no friends.”
“I’m rich and powerful and I have the women I want.”
“That would be true of the silverback in a highland gorilla band or the alpha male in community of chimps or Yellowstone timber wolves.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel bad?”
“The point is that, whenever you think about your life, you do feel bad.”
“I do not!”
“And now, when I break through your carefully constructed denial mechanisms, as strong as those business protections against Murdoch or Disney or Turner or Walter Murtaugh, you feel yourself cracking up like an airplane exploding in the sky.”
“I don’t like that metaphor.”
“The question is whether it is accurate. Regardless of Sister John Mark and the Other and your own glorious religious tradition, you have fouled up your life even by the most elementary human standards. I’m not saying that there were not excusing factors, because palpably there were. I am saying that our agreement” —Michael slipped it out of his pocket again—“requires that you admit your failures as a first step.”
Contract with an Angel Page 3
