Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  I wondered how I was going to survive. I was fired, but Meany hadn’t sent Meryl around with an eviction notice; Jake thought it wouldn’t come until he and his lawyers had finished their dance with the DA around assault or assault and battery, depending. If he was right, I had a roof over my head until my bank account went dry. Fino’s Market still delivered and Jake promised to look in every day.

  “Janice Lippert will come if I call in an emergency.”

  “Won’t that get complicated?” Jake asked.

  “No, we’re cool—or we were the last time I saw her.”

  Before I went home I was fitted for a corset reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara’s in Gone with the Wind. An occupational therapist came in and showed me how to do ordinary things in life, like putting on shoes, without bending from the waist. A discharge planner had also arranged for a physical therapist who would work on getting me in shape without screwing up my back any more than it already was.

  When the nurse was helping me into the car I stopped her long enough to take in the changes in the California hills. The sun was so bright I had to shield my eyes. The heat of summer had sucked the last of the green from the grasses. The mustard and London rockets and horseradish had shed their last blossoms and the hills had taken on that lion-rump tawny I always felt was their proper color. The only relief came from the dark, leathery green of the coyote bush and the silver of the rabbit bush, the green-black of the native oaks like hassocks scattered on the face of the hills.

  As we drove off I sniffed the air. “God, smell it, Jake: even exhaust fumes smell good.”

  On California Street I got my first look at Mount Diablo. It was turning noon and everything stood on its shadow, like bathers on a hot beach. The mountain looked like a three-D image of itself. Everything was new, the lines of buildings sharply in focus; I had no trouble identifying the different makes and models of cars and the different shades of blue and green and silver they came in.

  When I quit oohing and aahing Jake brought me back to practical things. “You got prescriptions to fill? You won’t have any fresh food in the house, maybe a refrigerator full of slimy lettuce and green bread.”

  I said I could manage, I didn’t want to be a burden.

  He harrumphed. “Someday you may have to do the same for me, so don’t be so noble. Remember, I’m eight years closer to senility and decrepitude.”

  “Oh well, if you put it that way,” I said. “Maybe I can keep you busy for an hour.”

  Jake told me not to worry about his time, he was in a pure marketing mode, so he had no deadlines to meet nor clients to brief. As we drove through what seemed like awfully busy traffic for a Saturday, I asked him how he marketed.

  “My market’s like a big vegetable garden. I go around with a wheelbarrow and spread lots of manure.” What he meant was going to meetings, like the APHA annual meeting he’d attended before I did in my back. At such gatherings he tried to sound both intelligent and approachable. “I spend a lot of time on the phone, too. I do lunches and drinks, not just with potential clients but with folks who have stuff in their heads I’d like to know.” He also scanned a Federal rag called the Commerce Business Daily, for requests for proposal that sounded juicy but seldom were.

  “Marketing,” he said, “is the bullshit of my business. I never think of the work as bullshit, even if somebody hands me a trivial problem. You can always find a handsome solution, even to the trivial, because health care—as you know better than most—is such a vast and ubiquitous pursuit. Think of how many babies get born every year, how many people are admitted to hospitals, how many dollars are spent.”

  “I know, I know,” I moaned.

  “Perspective is what I give people,” he said, veering away from painful reminders. “I think it’s worth a lot.”

  “So why aren’t the customers lined up to the parking lot?”

  “Because perspective isn’t your red-hot commodity these days. Your red-hot commodity du jour is the simple-pretty.”

  Leaving the freeway at South Main, he explained that the simple-pretty was not an original Jake Pritchett concept. He credited a colleague, Bob Berglund, with the idea. A simple-pretty, he explained, was a solution that looked nice, cost very little to realize and could not be attacked by your enemies. Simple-pretties do not exist in real life, they are the consultant’s unicorn, they exist in people’s minds because at the heart of the worst cutthroat is a child looking for a fairytale. As in most fields, the answers to management problems in medical care are complex and ugly. If you were completely honest in marketing to a client, he would never hire you.

  “So what do you do?” I asked.

  Jake said, “I hold up a mirror to the client and say, ‘See? A simple-pretty.’ Like the emperor’s new clothes, they’re afraid to call me on it.”

  There was no driving up to my door, but Jake parked in front of the apartments’ entrance, took my keys and unlocked that door. I exited the car, using the edge of its roof to grip and lift with my arms as well as legs. I shuffled slowly to my apartment, leaning on Jake’s arm. Inside I forgot the lovely summer day. The place smelled like it had been shut up for a month. I walked to the rear window and looked out, to see the Jag in its usual place.

  My bed looked as if Mary Clare had just leapt out of it. Jake made me sit in my one not-so-easy chair while he changed the sheets. Dishes in the sink were crusty.

  “Kind of a shock after the hospital,” he said as he opened a window to air out the old socks smell.

  I said, “She was here and gone so fast, she never really settled in. Besides, I don’t think cleaning up was one of her strong suits. A housekeeper came in once a week up in the penthouse.”

  “Well,” Jake said, “let’s get started.”

  He made me get in bed with pillows behind me, to read the mail while he inventoried the fridge and tackled the dishes. I had letters from my brother, Bert, and his wife, Lulu. I quoted from them to Jake while he was being domestic.

  “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  “Oh yeah; he’s a full head taller than me, and he doesn’t appreciate what a marriage he made. If I’d met Lulu first I’d have married her, no shit. She is like a mirror image of me; it’s uncanny.”

  He whipped out a pen and made a list of things to get at various stores.

  “Beer,” I said. “Be sure and buy beer.”

  “I will. Anything stronger?”

  “I’m not going to be operating any dangerous machinery, so I would stand to have a bottle of—I don’t know—gin. So get a lemon at the grocery, please.”

  While he was away I made three piles on the bedspread: bills and other things that needed tending to, junk, and first class mail. I’d hoped Mary Clare would send a note, but no. Then I ran into Meany’s eviction notice, sent by regular mail but with a certificate of mailing. The reason cited was changing the number of occupants without prior notice.

  I told Jake when he got back and he said, “That mother-fucker,” which was the only time I remember him using that epithet. “Let him try to enforce it. Where’s the corpus delicti?”

  “It isn’t such a hot place anyway, Jake, now that I’m not working next door.”

  “Look, Robert, just get well. All this other stuff will take care of itself.”

  two

  Jake brought me a beer as he put away the groceries. He gave me a road atlas to use as a lap board while he did dishes. I tried to answer Bert’s letter but nothing came to mind. You spend twenty-seven days doing nothing and all that exciting stuff you did just before is like the champagne that didn’t get poured last night. My correspondence with Bert was pretty humdrum anyway. He likes shooting elk and antelope. Each letter he writes is chatty: ‘I got this year’s elk with the thirty-ought-six,’ that kind of thing.

  I wasn’t going to answer Lulu’s letter while Jake was there. I always felt a little guilty about having a letch for Lulu, although I never ever did anything about it. But it was there. Like Jimmy Carter, I luste
d in my heart.

  I got out of bed the way the occupational therapist taught me, using gravity and every muscle except my back muscles. The meds I’d taken with the first beer were kicking in and I felt rather weightless as I shuffled to the fridge to score another. It felt good to be in boxers and a tee shirt instead of a breakaway hospital gown.

  As I staggered back to bed Jake suggested I move into his place: they had a spare bedroom. Just like that, standing at the sink with his back to me: move in with me.

  “Oh your wife would really like that,” I said.

  “Believe it or not, she suggested it.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. The nurses kept telling her how handsome you are.”

  “Thanks, Jake, but if I stay here I’ll get back on my feet faster.”

  To change the subject I told him about Bert and Lulu and their ranch in Montana (her ranch, really; her dowry, she liked to call it). Like something right out of Shane, mountains you’d swear you could reach out and touch. Soon as I told them about my little accident, she’d invite me up there to recuperate. “Only,” I said, “I wonder how cowboys in Montana would react to a guy in a corset.”

  Jake said, “Breaking horses might produce quite a few bad backs, maybe even a corset or two.”

  “See?” I said, “that’s your perspective at work. You can’t get away from it.”

  While Jake went out to the dumpster with all the debris from the refrigerator I scrounged a third beer and located the codeine bottle. Jake caught me at it and said, “Watch that.”

  “I promise, no driving or operating dangerous machinery. Besides, it’s a treat to drink ad libitum, as the nurses would say.”

  “Watch it anyway.”

  At that point I fell into a nod but not asleep. Jake came in from the kitchen drying his hands and told me about easy fixin’s in the freezer. He was shoving off. I thanked him, maybe over-thanked him, but at that point who was analyzing?

  *****

  Jake let a brief stab of sunlight into the apartment before shutting the door softly behind him. I lay in the cool semidarkness, eyes drooping, my mind a mishmash of slow motion reverie. As the air conditioner cycled on and off I would drift into limbo between sleep and waking, confronting beer and codeine fantasies.

  In one fantasy I'm up in Montana, I’m riding a horse. Pine branches frame the picture, mountains form the background. Lulu comes into the picture, likewise riding a horse. I will always remember Lulu from the stop they made in San Francisco on their way to Acapulco for their honeymoon, chic not sufficient to describe her, she took my breath away. So seeing her on a horse, wearing Levi’s and the kind of shirt barrel racers wear, is novel. She smiles at me; I swear, the horse smiles at me too. Twofer smiles.

  Another fantasy: Meany bursts in, hoisting me off the mattress by the shirt front, to throw me out. This time I get off a left hook and a straight right—all arm, though. Pull me upright, I pray. Then I’ll back him into a wall, head under his chin to take his balance, beat him about the ribs and kidneys until he begs for mercy. Instead, good old Jake intervenes. Oh well.

  I fell asleep, only to wake in a thoroughly peaceful fantasy, dancing in the moonlight (supernatural delight) with Mary Clare on her deck. A very refined flirtation, each knowing we will be lovers before the sun comes up.

  We don’t rush things, keep the suspense going, enjoying the palpable tension until finally I stop dancing and take her face between my hands and kiss her. I fell asleep and the fantasy became a dream. In the dream Clare wore a chemise gown with a short chain of diamonds about her throat. She wore mimosa perfume and she said, “Take this love I offer or let me be.”

  The dream flipped to a new chapter. I was back in bed and Jake pulled up a chair next to me, handing me a beer and offering me salted peanuts. He said, “You realize, this is the perfect opportunity.” His alert expression asked for a reaction.

  “You mean, I can drink all the beer I want, eat peanuts by the handful, gain back the weight I’ve lost?”

  “Better,” he said. “This is the perfect opportunity to start over.”

  “Why would I want to?” I asked.

  “You have to ask? Because, my friend, you’re the one man in the world who can create a gosh darn genuine simple-pretty.”

  “How do I do it, Jake? How do I make a simple-pretty?”

  In the dream I was atingle, sure I was about to hear a great truth.

  He said, “You just believe, really believe, it’s a new start, that anything you do will be the right thing—your luck’s come back.”

  “But how will I know when I have made a simple-pretty?”

  “That’s the easy part. Since no one’s ever seen a real simple-pretty, you get to decide what is looks like.”

  I said, “I can’t do that, Jake, I’m not wise enough.”

  “You’ve got to try, Robert. The whole world needs a simple-pretty and you’re the man who can show the way. Even if at first you fail, you have to keep trying.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but to start me off, can you help me out of bed, please?”

  Jake got up and backed towards the door, slipping away like virtue and freedom and other good things. “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to do that. But I’ll root for you.”

  I woke at that point, sweating, my throat dry. —Which was nothing to the ache in my heart, wanting to see Mary Clare. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and struggled to my feet.

  three

  I stepped into the midsummer evening, touching my pocket to make sure I had my keys. The air felt humid after air conditioning. Concrete and stucco gave up the day’s accumulated warmth; it was like walking into a laundromat on a chilly day. Close to my head, night fliers fluttered about the outside lights, gnats and moths and even a June beetle. I had washed my face and combed my hair. I found a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt to hide the outlines of my girdle. My face felt tight and hot, and my back throbbed, despite the beer and codeine.

  It’s telling you you’re alive, I reassured myself.

  Around the corner was a door marked EXIT which led to the back stairs to Mary Clare’s place. This was the route I’d taken so many nights ago, no greater peril than balancing a Pyrex baking dish holding marinating steaks, getting up the stairs without spilling the marinade on myself. Full of anticipation.

  This time I moved slowly enough to notice things, a smudge on the wall—newspaper ink fingerprint, my janitor’s eye told me. Paper boy? Bodies of tiny gnats littered the bottom of light globes. I saw everything, going up a step at a time. After the hospital the whole world seem uncommonly soiled. Dead insects and dirt depressed me. By the time I was at the landing of the third floor I was ready to turn back.

  You should have called first, Gattling. But what would I say? I’m sorry? Sorry my stupid back picked this time to go out on me? It didn’t cover what had gone on between Clare and me, and my back wasn’t really the problem, it was the excuse. It was also what made the prospect of walking back downstairs more forbidding than walking up. Perspiration emerged on my upper lip and brow and between my shoulder blades, soaking into my corset.

  I’ll just knock, beg her pardon for presuming, and ride the elevator down. When it closed behind me that would be the signal to start my life over without Mary Clare. That’s what that dream meant, Jake urging me to start over and concoct a simple-pretty. Life without the burden of love was going to be my simple-pretty.

  She opened the door and refrigerated air hit my face like icy, chug-a-lugged beer hitting my stomach. I thought I’d seen her in every garb imaginable, but here she was, bundled in a fur coat over a magenta cover-up, bare feet. She looked pettish and eccentric, a spoiled little rich girl indulging herself.

  No doubt she took me in with the same sort of jaundiced eye. Immobile for a-one and a-two and a-three, she turned and walked into the room, leaving the door open, letting me decide whether to come in. Climbing the stairs, observing the skeletons of dead bugs, I’d imagined something differe
nt: a look of relief and happiness escaping around the edges of a stern attempt to be mad at me. Love winning out.

  I walked in and closed the door.

  She said, nodding towards the bedroom, “He’s in there, you know.” No relief, no happiness.

  In his taped memoir, Jake pondered why I hadn’t just turned around and gone back down the stairs. Well, Jake, my legs were shaking badly from going up them, and by the time I got to the center of the living room I decided nothing was going to happen to me. The bedroom door was closed. I sensed, from Mary Clare’s tone of voice, Meany was asleep.

  “Care for a drink?” she asked. The way she asked it made me think of meeting Lana on the streets of Berkeley one day after we were divorced, words sticking in both our throats.

  “I’m fine. I’m full of beer and codeine.”

  She poured herself a drink. She said from the bar, “When did you get out?” a line from a noir film, the moll to the just-released jailbird.

  “Today, this morning. —Look, I’m sorry, Clare, I’m goddam sorry.”

  She said, “I’d forgive you, but I don’t know if I could ever stop asking ‘why?’ It wouldn’t be real forgiveness.”

  “I thought you couldn’t break away from him without a jump start. I feel stupid now.”

  “You didn’t trust me.”

  “You said yourself you needed all this to stay grounded.”

  She said, “I suppose I couldn’t change, could I? You wouldn’t give it time. That’s what I needed, needed to know someone out there didn’t have to own me, who didn’t have to run me, was the other alternative to a bottle of sleeping pills or the Golden Gate Bridge. You didn’t believe in me enough to give me a chance to change on my own, you just fucked it up. Now I’ve got this crazy old man on my hands I’ve got to take time out to deal with. And most of all, where I hang my chapeau doesn’t prove anything anyway. It doesn’t prove any more than the time I married Andy or left school for Berkeley.”

  “In the hospital I wasn’t any alternative at all. I was just helpless.”

  “Oh really?” was all she said. She slipped a cigarette from a pack on the bar and lit it with a Zippo I’d never seen before.