Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  She asked me, when I ran into her in Crushon’s (before it burned down) what I was doing in La Morinda, the implication of the question being, ‘What is there to do in La Morinda besides cleaning swimming pools and manicuring lawns?’

  “I get by,” I said.

  She said, “Have you seen any good plays lately?”

  “Haven’t been to a play since I moved over there.” Despite our different ages, she and I had, one year, bought season tickets to the American Conservatory Theater, and we would take each other to dinner at San Francisco restaurants before the plays, she one time and I another. This was just before I ran off to Mexico with Lana. I might have run off with Tilde Plum, the librarian, but somehow I wanted more of a challenge. Men full of testosterone foolishly do that. If I’d formed a relationship with Tilde Plum my life would have turned out to be entirely different.

  She said, “How about movies?”

  “I watched The African Queen on TV the other night.”

  “It’s not the same as watching it at the cinema,” she said, a hint of suspicion in her voice, as if I might be knocking back a few drinks while I watched—which was entirely true.

  After the faux pas of riding the outside elevator to discover the extent of my puerile fantasizing, I went over to Berkeley to try and run into Tilde, with the cockamamie idea that making love with her would somehow cleanse me of stupidity.

  She was out of town, attending the American Library Association’s annual convention, which probably saved me either a new humiliation or another blot on my stained conscience.

  I stayed away from Jake. I couldn’t stand it that he’d chastised me—justly, I was being a fourteen carat prick—but more so that he had justification. I went back to my pre-bicycle rate of alcohol consumption, read all of Elmore Leonard’s novels, a couple for the third time, and a lot of the Robert B. Parker’s novels, Spencer and that other guy, the Police Chief in Paradise.

  When I picked up my paycheck at the end of May, Meryl said, “Mr. Meany has decided you can move in here.”

  “Really?” I had reconciled myself to the bicycle commute from Walnut Creek, my daily aerobic exercise.

  “And there’s a studio apartment coming available tout de suite.”

  So I spent the first week of June moving. I moved my bed and kitchen stuff and started sleeping in the little place—smaller than mine in Walnut Creek, and more expensive, and I asked myself, ‘Why are you doing this?’

  It was still her, the Penthouse Lady. I’d been humiliated and chewed out, but I still would have cashed in my left nut to . . . to . . . not just screw her, but to know her as a person.

  When I realized it wasn’t just lust, I got scared. “What are you doing, Robert?” I asked myself as I wrestled my mattress into the place.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked myself as I moved in my cooking equipment.

  In a way she answered that question.

  *****

  Jake recorded thus:

  Mary Clare took things into her own hands, and I have her account of it, for Robert never exactly came clean with me.

  Whatever her faults, she saw one thing in Robert that he missed in himself. He was so hung up on Meany’s superior substance, he never saw himself as a serious competitor. Plagued with guilt, he was so modest about his own assets it never occurred to him he could compete with only what he had at hand: his cheery naïveté, intelligence, good looks.

  Mary Clare saw very clearly what he had that Meany didn’t. Rebounding from a couple of years of getting herself together, she discovered, as summer came on, she had a body and it had needs. It needed a Robert, and that need was enough to overcome her shame at suddenly having to tell an eligible male she was being kept.

  So one day she went down and borrowed his bathtub.

  *****

  Correctamundo, as The Fonz used to say. Bobwhite Court had a swimming pool tucked behind the building closest the Southern Pacific right of way, not large, no diving board, but a place I found pleasantly suited to my lay-about lifestyle of the moment. Mary Clare told me, after the maturation of our relationship, that she would watch me swimming and sunning with “that pear-shaped broad,” meaning Janice Lippert. (In fairness to Janice, she had a classic Madonna build, small from the waist up, with a generous pelvis, but she kept in shape, had luscious skin, a perfect tan, and, despite her bottom-heavy proclivity, a very feminine appeal.)

  One lazy-tense day, as Mary Clare described it, she spotted me, shirtless and shoeless, washing my truck before the sun got high. It was parked over the drain in the middle of the driveway. She came out on her deck and waved at me. She was wearing a man’s ribbed undershirt and looking like a Calvin Klein ad, hair wildly correct—or correctly wild—holding what looked like a Bloody Mary. She was too far away to be sure. She told me later about the drink (it was a Bloody Mary) and her waving. She was anticipating a visit from Meany, who said he was bringing over a basket of luncheon goodies and a bottle of champagne. He didn’t know it, but, she said, the bottle of champagne was a tip-off that he wanted sex.

  She didn’t want sex. Not with him, anyway.

  At one point, seeing me glance up, she yanked off her shirt and waved it like a jubilant footballer after the winning goal, waved and pointed to the elevator. If I had understood what she was pantomiming—the penthouse, besides being far away, was backlit by the ascending sun—I probably wouldn’t have taken her up on it.

  A good thing, too. Meany drove up in his Cadillac, waved at me as he got the picnic basket out of the trunk, and disappeared into the outside elevator.

  That visit set off in Mary Clare a chain of observations about her situation. She had hoped, early June and primaries imminent, that some politician would call, needing the king-maker to step in immediately and save his campaign, and Meany would hasten to Sacramento or even Washington, leaving Meryl to make his apologies. No, he came with Piper-Heidsieck and pâté, sourdough and hothouse grapes. She stayed in her undershirt and the khaki shorts that went with it, wore no makeup, swore like a sailor, despite knowing it jarred the old bear, and drank most of a bottle of champagne, more than her usual ration.

  And yet, she didn’t want him to think her ungrateful. She was just not up to faking any more passion in the afternoon. She was having libidinous fantasies about me, she reported to Jake, and she couldn’t simply close her eyes and pretend.

  Feeling wretched, she had more booze after dark, Glen Grant, a scotch Meany brought back from Washington when he flew out of National (back then, DC liquor stores made up three bottle carry-on packages all the airlines were familiar with). She put on her recording of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and turned it up until the whole neighborhood could hear it, including me, emptying trash and looking up at her balcony, wishing I were there with her.

  Probably it was good that I wasn’t. She was wrestling with her past, her tendency to be dominated by powerful men, ever since earliest recollections of her father, Zev, who strutted like a bull fighter and looked the part. Who insisted on owning his women. He would show off Mary Clare, ‘My little girl, mine,’ he would say to business associates. Bought all her clothes, vetted her dates, decided where she would go to school.

  She realized she couldn’t jump over Meany’s age, or his looks. Others might have ignored her kept status, were she shacked up with a young, GQ-type Montgomery Street arbitrager. And they might not have thought twice about Meany’s age and girth if she were in the condition of Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember, crippled and bravely helpless.

  Jake reports her saying, “If that’s the way people think about it, tough buns. I can give myself to whomever I want, and anyone who doesn’t like it can take a big flying fuck.”

  What she said to me was, in our frankest exchange about Meany, “If I can’t drive a man’s sports car and live under his roof and tell him ‘no’ whenever I want, I might as well join a convent.” I pointed out that she was paraphrasing Jesse Unruh, the Speaker of California’s Assembly, and sh
e said, winking, “I only steal from the best.”

  Strangely, the music sifting down from the penthouse haunted me until the end of my shift, and I had a similar chat with myself, leaving my patio door open and sitting in the dark sipping gin and listening now to Beethoven’s Ninth, begging for absolution from the recondite universe for reviling her without knowing the whole truth, holding back the tears she said flowed copiously during the choral finale, while I pictured but a single tear, like a drop of dew on a camellia petal, descending her cheek.

  three

  Well before the mercury climbed to its Saturday record, Mary Clare woke to a phone ringing through her hangover. Henry, the maintenance man and weekend manager, said, “Miz Morrison, you need to use the facility, you best now; I gotta shut off your water.”

  She swore softly to herself and demanded to know why.

  “Leak in your bathroom pipes; neighbors down below? Their ceiling’s about to cave in.”

  Her clock radio read ten-ten, the local FM station was predicting a hundred and five or six as the day’s high. Her cubic centimeter of opportunity, lying dormant for some months, had just doubled in size.

  “This is your neighbor in the penthouse,” she said into the phone when I answered, likewise slightly hung over and thus a bit fuzzy in the head. “I want to borrow your bathtub.”

  “Uhhh.”

  “I’ll bring my own towel and I’ll scrub off any bathtub ring afterwards. They’re shutting off my water.”

  “Give me a few minutes to get dressed,” I said, trying not to sound flustered.

  I didn’t have time to analyze this brazen ploy, though later, as the tub filled, I thanked my Fates that I didn’t have an overnight guest. You’d never know by my apartment I cleaned offices for a living: crumbs swept under the rug, an incongruous bottle of furniture polish parked in the bookshelf, ashtrays emptied but not washed.

  At the door she said, “My God, you really did dress,” as she walked past me, towel and book clutched to her bosom, trailing a whiff of Jean Naté.

  She took in the apartment in a glance. “Compact,” she said, with an unaffected smile.

  “Cheap,” I said. My smile was nervous. Hers signified she had her universe under control. It was so winsome, the faintest hint of dimples, I wanted to kiss the perspiration off her upper lip.

  She held out her free hand. “Besides the lady who mows down reckless cyclists, I’m Mary Clare Morrison.”

  I felt hastily put together, which was not far wrong. I was toweling off from a shower when the phone rang, and when I hung up I scrubbed the tub, wiped the bathroom mirror and just had time to don boxers and Levi’s, throw on a faded Madras shirt, and step into my huaraches. I imagined I looked like someone who did his shopping at Goodwill.

  She denounced the plumbers in her bathroom, depriving her of a basic civil right, and how she couldn’t use the tub even if they fixed the leak in record time, because Henry wasn’t about to call in someone to reset the tile on a Saturday. She wore a tube top, hair pinned up in festoons of curls, letting me know they were all hers and not a perm from the beauty shop. Up close she was shorter than I’d remembered her from the elevator, a little chunky, but definitely not pear-shaped.

  The book she carried was Camus’ Rebel.

  As I showed her the bathroom I mentioned that I’d read it during the first People’s Park uprising.

  “You were rebelling in Berkeley?”

  “No, but there were some rebels around who thought I was pretty revolting.”

  She turned in the entrance to the bathroom. “Revolting?”

  “I was on the other side.”

  “Oh?”

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  She said, “First year at Brandeis. The protests didn’t get to our campus till the next year. You’re not a cop, are you? I mean it’s all right if you are, as long as your status is ex. —God, let me shut up and bathe, okay?”

  I stayed on the other side of the door, hearing her open my medicine chest, I had no idea why, other than curiosity. I had an almost empty bottle of very expensive after shave and a nearly full bottle of cheap Bay Rum, tooth paste, a Schick injectable razor and a can of shaving lotion, some aspirin. “Where’s the bath oil?” she called, as if sure I was standing right outside the door.

  I put my mouth close to the wood. “Don’t have any.”

  The water continued to run, she said nothing.

  “I’ve got baby oil under the sink,” I called out.

  “Gotcha.” I heard the cabinet door open.

  I went away. I pictured her stepping into the bathtub, gingerly if it was as hot as my shower had been.

  In the living room I straightened some magazines and put away the furniture polish. I went into the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher. I looked in the fridge and spotted six Heinekens. I wondered if Ms. Morrison would like a beer.

  I knocked on the door. “Care for a beer?”

  “Yes,” she called out.

  I popped the caps on two beers and headed for the bathroom. I knocked and opened, extending my arm through a space a millimeter wider than my bicep. “Want a glass?”

  “No, but I can’t reach.”

  I opened the door wide enough to get some shoulder through.

  “I’m not a gorilla with six foot arms—and I don’t bite.”

  I sucked in a breath and entered the bathroom. I found her eyes with mine and tried to keep them there, but that was like looking into the sun and I had to look away—right at her breasts. It was all right, I decided later, for her breasts were small and so perfectly shaped it was as if she were wearing a fancy shirt.

  She said, “It’s too hot for Camus—want to talk?”

  I took a slug of beer, sat opposite the tub with my back against the wall, and scrunched myself low enough I could only see her from the shoulders up. “Someone saw me reaching around the door might think we were a generation apart.”

  She shrugged and rolled her eyes.

  I said, “Women of my generation don’t show their bodies to men they’ve only just been introduced to.”

  She said, “I’d rather be built like Jane Russell, but as long as I’m weensy, I might as well take advantage of what I haven’t got.”

  I said, “It probably wouldn’t occur to Jane Russell to read Camus in a strange man’s bathtub.”

  “I wasn’t conning you, they tore out a part of my wall. These two plumbers showed me the leaky pipe—do you know about joints in copper pipe? And I do have a second bathroom with a shower, but I hate showers. And as for Camus, it was the closest book on the shelf—I’m not that kind of egghead, believe me. But it’s apropos, when I read it I decided if I had to die with a motto on my lips it would be, ‘Enough!’”

  “Enough what?”

  She said, “I’m still deciding that.”

  “That book really scared the shit out of me. I had to put it down every few pages.”

  “And what do you read in the bathtub?” she asked.

  “I once read Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus in the bathtub.”

  “Well there you are, that’s braver than anything I ever did.”

  “How did you get to be called Mary Clare?” I asked.

  “If you get us another beer I’ll tell you.”

  I managed to get up and out of the bathroom without leering. When I came back she was sitting across the tub with her feet hanging out. Her legs were sturdy and not going to score high in a Miss America Pageant, but I observed a flat stomach—until my eyes were drawn up to her breasts again, which were now entirely out of the water. I told her she had beautiful breasts, and then blushed.

  “I know,” she said, with the tiniest of smiles, as if her modest proportions allowed immodest exposure.

  “So—Mary Clare.”

  “We lived in Mexico when I was born, although I was delivered in the United States, in San Diego, and my father is a naturalized American citizen. He came to the States from Russia via Mexico. Zev is a very interesti
ng man, though a terrible father. Anyway, I had a Mexican nanny, Lupe, who called me Mary Clare from the time I was starting to walk—Maria Clara, to be exact. It’s close, my real name is Maria Chava, but she had me baptized Mary Clare, by the priest in La Jolla. She almost got me to first communion, too. I studied the catechism. She made me a white dress and everything.”

  “She was really brave.”

  “Lupe was afraid of my father, but she was more afraid of God. Zev is an atheist, though culturally a Jew, while my mother is not religious but culturally as Jewish as they come. When she saw the white dress and the little veil with the cloth flowers sewn on it, she wanted to fire Lupe, but my father took the whole thing as an immense joke and told my mother, “I’ll scare her fat ass so bad she’ll never pull a stunt like that again.”

  “Was Lupe a good nurse?”

  Mary Clare smiled. “She was very wise. Even when we moved permanently to the states I used to go visit her at Christmas. She taught me, for example, never to be involved with two men at once, no matter how remotely. If I had a crush on my confessor, I must not have a husband; if I had a husband I must not have a lover. —Stuff like that. I thought I believed every word, but look at me now.”

  “Sometime,” I said, “we need to have a serious conversation.” V.M. Meany loomed in my mind like the Smithsonian’s stuffed grizzly.

  “But not today. Today we get acquainted and tell ghost stories. Next time I borrow your tub we can talk about heavier stuff.” Her voice teasing, knowing she had the advantage of me, perfectly comfortable while I was still ginger about a beautiful woman naked in my bathtub.

  We drank beer and talked weather. We drank beer and talked bicycling versus running. I told her I bicycled because my back didn’t like the impact of running, although when I was a boxer I ran every day. To convince her I really had been a boxer I knelt next to the tub and guided her finger over my nose, giving the topography of various bouts. I showed her how the basilar joint on my left hand was much larger than the right. “It took me a long time to learn how to throw a proper jab,” I said. “You have to turn your hand over as it impacts.”