Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  Baby Bart, who had joined a Christian brotherhood of some kind, came by to visit us once. He called himself a novitiate. He wore a sackcloth cassock, crude sandals, and was tonsured. He was living communally with his fellow brothers up in La Honda, but looked as if he’d stepped out of twelfth-century Europe.

  Beatrice made a pot roast, complete with oven-roasted potatoes, carrots, and onions. Baby Bart had grown up to be a very large man. He was well over six feet and probably weighed two hundred fifty pounds, and he had an appetite to match. He put away half the pot roast, six dinner rolls, and most of the potatoes.

  He guzzled wine like he did Kool-Aid when he was a kid. There was still plenty of food for Beatrice and me, but Baby Bart’s gluttony, along with his ascetic garb, irritated Beatrice.

  “God bless this table,” Baby Bart said, wiping his gravy-stained mouth on his napkin.

  Beatrice put her fork down hard on her plate. “You normally say grace before eating,” she said.

  “The brothers think afterwards makes more sense, don’t you agree?” Baby Bart said. “That’s when you’re truly grateful, when your belly’s full and your mind is unwanting and at peace.”

  Without a shred of self-consciousness, Baby Bart leaned to one side and released a thunderclap of gas. Beatrice threw her napkin down and went into the kitchen. The 6 p.m. commuter roared by, rattling the windows. It took a while for the train, which was headed north, towards South San Francisco, to pass. When it did, Baby Bart, his voice gravely with mucus generated by the rich food, said, “This table, this excellent fare, God put it here, expressly for us.”

  From the kitchen, Beatrice said, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes.”

  “You, too, Beatrice,” Baby Bart called out. “God put you here. He wanted you to be here, at this very moment. It seems trivial maybe, but it’s not. Nothing is trivial. We are all here, together, because God put us here.”

  Baby Bart annoyed me, too. “So what’s your point?” I said, hoping to jettison the subject so that we could enjoy our dessert—cherry pie à la mode.

  He turned his huge infantile face towards me, a pink topography of cherubic features. His eyes were large and sad and glazed with Christian love. “No point, Bernard. Just suggesting the obvious. What seems obvious to me, at least.”

  Beatrice came in carrying a tray loaded with a steaming carafe of coffee, a pint of ice cream, and a deep-dish cherry pie. She was looking forward to ending the evening as soon as possible. “And Hitler?” she said, pouring coffee for Baby Bart. “Is it obvious to you that God wanted Hitler among the Germans? How about Caligula? How about the Boston Strangler?”

  Bart sipped his coffee, spooned into his pie. “What is, is,” he said, almost too softly to be heard.

  “So God has this black sense of humor, is that it?” she said.

  “Everything hides God’s face. It’s all holy, Beatrice.”

  “Crud,” she said. Her skin was very pale, almost transparent. When her temper flared, you could see small veins and capillaries near the surface. The blue pulse in her temple was visible—a danger sign. We fought often and I knew the signals. This evening was going to end badly.

  I wanted to lighten things up. ‘“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh,”’ I said, quoting Voltaire. It made no impression.

  “Without horror there can be no bliss,” Baby Bart said. He set his coffee cup down and folded his hands in his lap, ready for the siege.

  “You don’t have to defend the existence of Hitler or anything else, Baby Bart,” I said.

  “Your religion, whatever the hell it is, is tailor-made for hypocrisy,” Beatrice said.

  Baby Bart belched lightly. He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “This meal,” he said, speaking to Beatrice as if in confidence, “was truly a blessing.”

  “Bullshit,” Beatrice said.

  “This house, this furniture, the pictures on the walls, all of it, including you and your husband. Perfectly exquisite. It’s what God wanted it to be, and here it is.”

  Beatrice picked up a dinner plate and Frisbeed it against a wall, shattering it and staining a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge, one that I liked in particular. The sun was under the bridge; the dimpled water dazzled the eye like a chest of gold coins that had been overturned; a three-masted sailing ship plowed west through glittering scallops of gold. “Did God want this, too?” she said, sending another plate flying at the wall.

  “Things, not ideas,” Baby Bart said. “Things, not events suborned by ideas. You don’t know what you want, Beatrice. But no one does, really. It’s better not to want at all. Only God rightly wants. God rightly wants these lovely things, but people don’t know what they want, even when the object of desire seems so necessary. Thus the general unhappiness.”

  “You’re deeper than whale shit, baby brother,” I said, hoping to defuse Beatrice’s growing rage. But Beatrice stalked out of the house, got into our car, and drove away into the night.

  Beatrice and I began to fight regularly. Our arguments became the chief gossip of the neighborhood. Baby Bart, and perhaps the clockwork commuter trains, only triggered what was bound to happen to us sooner or later. We didn’t see eye to eye on most things, and sex became a chore for her, mechanical release for me. Even so, we had a child, a little girl we named Polly Delight. Parenthood did nothing to renew our marriage. In fact, the added pressure of caring for a baby made us fight all the more and with more intensity.

  Beatrice had a loud voice that carried well down the pleasant tree-lined street we lived on. I threw a bottle of beer through the front window, and once took a hammer to the plaster walls. She threw dishes at me, screamed until the blue pulse in her temple seemed likely to burst. Once she picked up a bread knife and pointed it at my throat.

  Neighbors, alarmed at this chronic racket, called the police more than once, and we had to face that embarrassment, but even the threat of public humiliation was not enough to moderate our behavior. Once I drove out of the garage without opening the door. She ripped the drapes from the windows, burned them in the yard. We found ourselves in an escalating one-up contest of destructive tantrums.

  And then, in a moment of drunken candor, I admitted to having an affair with Heide Kreide, the daughter of a German rocket designer in Huntsville, Alabama. Heide hated the way Americans pronounced her name—Hi-dee Cry-dee, so she changed it to Heather Chalk, a literal translation. For some reason I thought this tidbit of information would somehow lessen the shockwave of my confession. Beatrice was not entertained. “You dirty, heartless son of a bitch,” she said, picking up little Polly Delight as if to shield her from the evil emanating from my person.

  “No argument,” I said, knowing that we were finished at last.

  “Things work out for the best,” Baby Bart said the next time I saw him.

  “Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t,” I said, feeling a bit philosophical myself.

  Baby Bart had given up his full-time commitment to the brotherhood, got his MBA, and had taken a job at the Bank of America as a loan officer. He still wore his sackcloth cassock on weekend retreats, and saw no conflict of interest between the spiritual and the financial. “It’s all of a piece,” he said.

  6. PRISONERS OF LOVE

  A year after Beatrice left me I fell in love with a girl who worked in the Lockheed blueprint library named Inez Pascal. Inez was almost ten years younger than me, but that didn’t seem to make much difference to her. We were soul mates. We told each other this often. For the first time in my life I understood what passion was. Inez was small and intense. She did nothing halfway. We would go out for lunch and wind up, hours later, playing the slots in Reno, work be damned. Inez had an apartment overlooking one of Lockheed’s parking lots. When I was laid off in 1968 after an argument with my lead engineer over my chronic absenteeism, I moved in with her. The narrow casement windows of her apartment made it seem like a cell. I spent my days there, watching soap operas or gazing out at the mammoth parkin
g lot as it emptied or filled during the shift changes. Then Inez quit her job in protest over the Vietnam War. “That is where the war comes from,” she said, pointing a righteous finger at the low gray buildings of Lockheed Missiles and Space.

  She joined the peace movement and became more intense than ever. She made trips into Berkeley with her new pacifist friends. She asked me to come along, but I refused.

  “You’re apathetic,” she said. In those days the crime of apathy was second only to the napaiming of villages.

  “No,” I said. “I just don’t think the nerve center of the military-industrial complex is located in Berkeley.” Under my glib words I was mourning her once, pyrotechnic passion, now diverted to the cause of sane international relations.

  We argued, and the argument escalated until it included United States foreign policy, the American Medical Association, and Billy Graham’s influence (or lack of influence) over Richard Nixon. I finally agreed to go with her to Berkeley, but I didn’t join the march on Sproul Hall where the war-mongers were planning the incineration of the world. I was, by this time, thirty pounds overweight, almost thirty years old, and balding. I couldn’t see myself tramping along with lean, long-haired kids loaded on pot, chanting inflammatory slogans as the lines of bored cops itched in their riot gear. That was no way to end a bad war, or start a good one.

  I had a hard time finding another job. Boeing made a tepid offer, but the job was in North Dakota and Inez refused to go there. There was no peace movement of any impact or glamour in North Dakota. I finally took a job in a large department store in a Santa Clara Valley mall as a plainclothes security guard. I had no experience, but I told the interviewer I’d been a brig guard in the marines. He didn’t ask to see evidence of my service. I had a boot-camp photo of Woodrow and I was prepared to tell the interviewer it was me, fifty pounds lighter, but he was so happy to have landed someone with real experience in handling security matters that he signed me on without further investigation. It was the Christmas season. If I did well, he said, my job might last until Easter.

  It was an easy job. I wore a blue blazer, gray slacks, and carried a can of mace, a walkie-talkie, and a set of handcuffs. I worked in men’s clothing and in sporting goods on alternate days. It was a minimum-wage job, but they gave me discount privileges.

  Inez spent Christmas Day in the Alameda County jail. I cooked the turkey anyway and ate hot sandwiches out on the steel porch of our apartment. The Lockheed parking lot was full, and the windows of the gray buildings thrived with feverish light. It reminded me of something one of Inez’s new friends once said: “The satanic mills will never stop unless we the people stop them, even if we have to use our own bodies to clog the gears and wheels.” It was a popular sentiment. I asked the boy who said this if he had ever seen someone who’d had his arm caught in a grain auger. “You fail to grasp the metaphor,” he said, dismissing me.

  I was becoming, I realized, an object of amused curiosity among Inez’s new friends. One of them asked me to give him my draft card. He was going to mail a box of them to the attorney general’s office in Washington. I told him no. We were sitting on the floor of a luxury apartment that overlooked the sailboat, speckled bay. The apartment belonged to a professor. Everyone looked at me with expressions ranging from contempt to pity. I said, “I’m Four-A. What’s the use? No one’s going to draft me anyway. Where’s the metaphorical value in that?”

  Because I was with Inez, I was treated like a dupe of the warlords rather than one of their toadies. “Poor old Bernie just doesn’t get it,” said the professor, a Trotskyite with tenure.

  I received a phone call at work one afternoon a few days after Christmas. The store was having a sale and every department was mobbed. My supervisor told me to make it quick, two minutes at most. The call was from one of Inez’s friends, a boy named Peter Ordway. We had to yell at each other because there was a lot of background noise at both ends of the line—acid rock on his, shopping mobs on mine.

  “You’re what?” I shouted, one hand clamped to my free ear.

  “Denver. In Denver. Didn’t have time to tell you. It all happened so fast. Here, talk to Inez.”

  “We’ll be in D.C. a few weeks, then New York,” Inez said, her voice quick with the happy excitement once triggered only by me.

  “I thought you were at home, in the apartment. How did you get to Denver?”

  “No time to explain. We’ve got to run to the United terminal.”

  “We? You and Peter?”

  “Yes. No. Not just me and Peter. Don’t be like that, Bernard. Jealousy’s so reactionary. Stay cool, darling. It’s not just Peter and me, it’s all of us. Everyone. We’re going to be doing some serious guerrilla theater. As much as the warlords would like to believe it, the revolution is not over.”

  “Why did you call?” I said.

  “Don’t sound so gloomy. The world hasn’t ended. I forgot it’s winter back east. Send me my wool sweaters, will you, Bernard?”

  “Sure,” I said. She gave me an address in Georgetown. I didn’t write it down.

  Just before closing time that day a deranged man entered sporting goods. He was wearing a 49ers jersey and cap. His pants were camouflaged combat fatigues. He didn’t have shoes. He was a big man with a dirty white beard. He stood in an aisle, laughing. He had a grand, Mephistophelean laugh that scared most of our customers out of the department.

  My mouth went a little dry, but there was enough bitterness in me at that moment to cut fear’s paralyzing chemicals. I walked up to him, mace in hand.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  He wagged a negative finger in my face, amused. He was tall enough to look down on me. His sharp blue eyes were dancing with the merriment insanity can sometimes produce. He was benignly attentive to everything before him, like a god well pleased with the material fabrications of his inventive dreams.

  I raised the mace so he could see it plainly. But he laughed again—a deep, booming, stagy laugh. He looked like Lee Marvin—rangy, lean, tough with stringy muscle. I sniffed the air between us for alcohol, but I’d been drinking earlier that day myself and couldn’t detect anything beyond the fecal stench of the man’s ruined liver.

  “Come on, sport,” I said. “Let’s go, okay? It’s almost closing time.”

  “Use it,” hissed my supervisor, yards away behind the safety of the canoes. “Use your mace!”

  I didn’t want to use it. I hated mace, on principle. The madman turned and walked away from me. He overturned a display of golf clubs. Then he sent a rack of executive dumbbells thumping across the tile floor. I tackled him from behind and we went down, hard.

  He was as strong as he looked. I tried to stay on top of him, but he lifted me off with a roar and I rolled into a low table stacked with Port-a-Potties. When I got up, I saw him moving with guerrilla stealth, doubled over as if avoiding gunfire.

  Then he was coming at me with a duckboat oar. I waved a skateboard at him. It was total war, suddenly. My war. A war I wasn’t prepared to wage.

  The slow oar stirred the air above my head. I threw the skateboard over his shoulder. He was a graceful, laughing warrior, I was mired in gloom. His war was happy and mine was not.

  Then one of his demons nagged at him, complicating his attack. He lowered the oar and scratched his head, bewildered, his laughter slowing to a creaky groan, the residue merriment false. I took the oar out of his hands and laid it down.

  His strength, which had been twice mine, was now miraculously atrophied. I handcuffed him easily. His flimsy wrists came together as though they were reeds. The look in his eye was apologetic and puzzled. He was ashamed of himself. The demon that had interrupted his oar-swinging zeal was sanity. It had returned like a dull oceanic depression, bringing with it overcast skies and a mild, enervating drizzle. It made him civil, circumspect, and ineffective. It made room in his heart for fear.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice surprisingly high-pitched now. “Something must have happened.”
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br />   I didn’t pursue what that might have been. A lot had happened to all of us. I thought of Woodrow, who had been wounded in Vietnam two years earlier and had returned home in love with morphine, then heroin. He lived first in the mountains northeast of Seattle, then in the streets of L.A. where Mexican brown was accessible and relatively cheap. After committing an exotic sexual crime, he spent a year in the hospital for the criminally insane at Atascadero. When he got out, he went to Holland. He figured Amsterdam was a good place to be a junkie and whatever else he was in the process of becoming.

  I thought of Baby Bart, who had moved into a vice-presidency at his bank. He got married, and his wife, in her first pregnancy, gave him twin boys. In her second pregnancy, she had twin girls. Baby Bart wanted to name the boys Yin and Yang, but his wife, a Mormon farm girl from Logan, Utah, put her foot down. She named the boys Brigham and Joseph. Baby Bart got his way with the girls, though: Blossom and Autumn. They bought a house in Larkspur, a three-story brick with a half-acre yard. “God’s half acre,” Baby Bart calls it.

  I thought of our father, who had gone to the last good war but had returned home from it an empty stranger, having suffered grievous ruptures to the soul’s delicate vessel. And I thought of our mother, making her bitter way as a sort of home-front camp follower, the question of dignity postponed for the duration, her calculating eyes fixed to a changeless goal—our survival. Frenchy Bigelow, who had built a cloudy fortress of lies against the daily invasions of conscience, never saw her long-range strategies, or the fierce tenacity that made them work. He believed he was simply and happily married to a worthy, hard-headed woman who allowed him, when the profits of Chez Frenchy merited it, small interludes of rest and affection.

  And my Inez. She had harnessed her explosive, all-out passion to the ready yoke of righteousness. After her sorties to Washington and New York, and later to Bonn and Brussels, she would have no use at all for doubtful heroes like me who would never fight for the cause of the moment—unless they were caught in its feverish arms and combat was the only way out of that terrible embrace.