Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  No biguglyBuick.

  In Hindsight . . .

  one

  No biguglyBuick. It’s like having to take a leak and engaging all your wits to keep from wetting your pants while you search for a place to go. There’s nothing else on your mind. And when you do go, the relief is immense but forgotten in an instant.

  The Buick Twins left my mind as I left Highway 101 and drove over what I called, growing up, the Black Point Cutoff without knowing what Black Point referred to. If it was a destination it was never the destination I had in mind. Hauling ass, I hit Interstate 80 at ten-thirty and merged with Hwy 50 at eleven-oh-five. In a sports car, you believe you’re going faster than you really are, the contact with the highway more intimate, things coming at you closer to eye level.

  Sacramento always seems more inviting at night, for reasons I never before pondered. In my assistant vice president days I had spent a fair amount of time in Sacramento, schmoozing legislative aides, sweating appearances before legislative committees, but what I remember most about Sacramento are lunches (why do I remember the Senator Hotel’s buffet before Frank Fat’s honey walnut prawns?) and finding a parking place. —Oh, and being introduced to Jesse Unruh once and being nervous about it.

  Eastward my back let me know that a TR3 set up for Mary Clare gave too little support to my thighs. I was sitting on the end of my spine and my middle back was saying ‘ouch.’ To counteract the ache I hummed along with the tires on roadway and with the spunky little four-banger: “Matilda,” à la Harry Belafonte and “Flamingo,” à la Herb Jeffries. I drove with one hand and buttoned down the side curtain with the other. The highway crossed a river bottom with Nebraska-tall corn that smelled sweet and vegetative, reminding me of something from my childhood that wouldn’t come into focus, just an old feeling.

  The air sucked into the roadster turned decidedly colder as the road began to climb into the foothills. I had to fight an urge to curl up and go to sleep. Sleeping in a sports car would be about as dumb as making love in a sports car. Would I ever try it with Mary Clare, if, say, we were driving non-stop to Omaha or Denver? Hmm.

  I said to myself, “Keep thinking ridiculous things, Gattling. At least it won’t put you to sleep.”

  As a diversion I rehashed how Mary Clare should have been royally pissed at Amanda but stayed calm and dignified. Maybe because Mary Clare was just recently over being the faux princess, so she understood Amanda and why her own mere presence would rankle the good doctor so.

  They both were, or had been, poseurs. I should know, I’d been one, too. In college I had girlfriend wild and striking as a Celtic sea goddess: Sissy O’Shea, half Irish, half Greek. My buddies were certain Sissy fucked me silly every night, which was a neat pose and a great stretch of the truth, that being before The Pill and me living in an all-male student cooperative (no girls above the first floor—except for mothers and sisters). But I let the guys think it. To them, though the expression hadn’t been coined yet, Bob Gattling, in bonding with Sissy, had scored a simple-pretty. I overheard one of them telling his friends, in man-oh-man terms, about following Sissy across campus from the women’s gym to Northside, wet, wavy auburn hair hanging half way down her back, wearing a pair of skintight red bicycle shorts, barefoot and with an ass that kept on turning eyes.

  Truth was, with Miss Sissy Bob Gattling usually felt sweaty-palmed, like a guy holding down the lever on a hand grenade.

  Ninety percent of those guys thought marriage would be a simple-pretty—it was the age of the split level ranch style house with a garbage grinder under the sink and a built-in oven. My simple-pretty was that if I waited until after thirty to marry I would escape disillusionment. My brother Bert pulled that off: a week after his thirtieth birthday he married Lulu, a woman I always wished I’d met first.

  Are you going to drive Mary Clare crazy? Repeat after me, son, she is not the be-all and end-all of your existence. She is pretty damned neat, though. Oh God, how I love her. I think I love her like George Patton loved war. Like a Kentucky Colonel loves his rye, like . . . like . . . oh can it, Gattling.

  Where were my college chums now? They were of a generation of Americans who thought the simple-pretty, even if they didn’t call it that, was a God-given right. They called it, the media of the previous generation having given it currency, The American Dream. Later came seven years of biblical lean, a lying, paranoid over-achiever in the White House, about to be re-elected, and they still call it The American Dream.

  You take Meany. (I hadn’t thought about Meany since the Black Point Cutoff.) To the rich and avaricious of La Morinda, Meany’s life must have looked like a succession of simple-pretties—until he was brought low by a pistol-packing dolly in a penthouse. Luck? Accident? Maybe you need two theories to explain the simple-pretty, like a wave theory and a quantum theory. If you explain luck or accident the way Clare does, you would expect Meany to balance out his life by going to the hoosegow for a long stretch, during which incarceration something really bad would happen, a heart attack brought on by artery-clogging prison food, or maybe the Bloods would beat him bloody. Come out a broken man. In other words, have the Great Accountant in the Sky journal entry all the negative transactions at once.

  But even if that happened, it was itself a simple-pretty. Maybe Meany was a brontosaurus, not a bear, maybe Mary Clare was the meteor that did him in. Or if you don’t like the meteor theory, he didn’t adapt. Though he probably thought he was adapting when he rescued Mary Clare, she turned out to be Meany’s last and purest simple-pretty. She was the good daughter, the Cordelia to whom he’d give his kingdom in return for her eternal gratitude, because he was wiser than Lear.

  Put it in waves, put it in quanta, it comes out the same.

  Highway 50 got steadily steeper. By Placerville, even though it was still a freeway, and straighter in both planes than the Highway 50 I used to drive visiting Lana in Carson City, you could tell you were in the foothills of big mountains. A flurry of traffic joined me on the road, local traffic—a dance breaking up or the movies letting out. I drove off the freeway where a sign offered food, lodging and fuel. In the service station I relieved my bladder and filled up—gas tank and stomach—and stretched my aching back.

  I asked the attendant, “Any place around here I could buy a jacket?”

  “Only place open around here, ‘sides this station, is the Safeway—oh, and a couple of bars.”

  “How do I get to the Safeway from here?”

  “Well, you can get back on the freeway, get off at the next exit. You’ll see the Safeway from the off ramp. Or, you’d rather, you take a right outta here, left at the light, and drive through town.”

  The implication was, I’d really rather not drive through town. (The chamber of commerce ought to give the boy a good talking-to.)

  The Safeway might conceivably have something like a sweatshirt—God knows, they sold everything but Mack trucks these days—but I didn’t want to take the time finding out. I knew the car had a heater, but I couldn’t find how to turn it on, and I also wasn’t going to take the time to read the operator’s manual and learn how. So I just got back on the freeway, driving hard, hoping that by the time I cleared Placerville the Smokey Bears would be few and far between. When I was going up to see Lana I was driving a hot BMW that people said looked like it was going faster than it was, and I never got a ticket, so I just let out the TR3, hoping for the same outcome.

  I kept telling myself I was going to see Mary Clare. I got up a head of steam and kept up a steady sixty-five, passing big rigs already gearing down. When I ran out of big rigs I tried not to be mesmerized by the patch of light from my headlamps bouncing on the pavement nor the whoosh whoosh whoosh lane markers clicking past. The freeway became the old, familiar Highway 50, mountains looming through the dark, pines close to the road, a cabin here and there, likewise a gas station or a log-faced restaurant or tavern with a neon Oly or Pabst sign, pickups and empty log trucks parked outside, a speed zone for a quarter mile eit
her side of them, where I went the required forty-five or thirty-five, down-shifting and preparing to accelerate, something long forgotten coming back as in a dream: the smell of trees and a wood fire somewhere off in the dark, the pickups all well-used, and finally so few cars I was driving with my high beams on, and once, in second gear on a switchback where a stream trickled down through a culvert, I spotted three sets of yellow reflectors that were the eyes of deer.

  I prayed to the patron saint of drivers that no deer leap in front of me and end my sprint to the finish, but one almost did. In a shallow cut with high banks of red dirt on both sides, it jumped down and ran along the road parallel to the car for an instant, but finally leapt behind me and crossed the road into the night. After that I felt an urgency like a gun at my back. I went through sleeping Meyers without slowing down and was at the junction of the road that hugs Lake Tahoe’s shoreline, carrying traffic from Reno and Northshore (of which there was plenty) at half past midnight.

  I thought the amount of traffic curious until I got into South Lake Tahoe, which wasn’t even a city when I came up here to visit Lana. My, had it grown.

  two

  I spotted Jake’s shiny Mercedes in the sixth motel on the main drag. It was not one of the newer, sleeker places, maybe the last of the mom and pop operations, run by people who’d fled big city hurly-burly. It was laid out with two units then a covered parking space for two vehicles, then two more units, around a U. When I pulled in Jake came out and motioned me to drive through the slot next to his car and into an alley behind the motel, where I could park out of sight.

  I opened the door and would have stood, but my legs were too cramped to do it until I stretched them out. “You lost them,” Jake said.

  “Most definitely, Ollie.”

  He reached in the door and squeezed my hand until it hurt, then helped me to my feet. “Isn’t this something? Not the bucolic little burg I remember from the Fifties.”

  The motel room had a gas heater in a faux fireplace and its sudden warmth caused me to shudder. Mary Clare bounced off the bed and grabbed me, felt my shivering. “Here, stand by the heater,” she said.

  “Just hold me.” I wouldn’t let her go until my brain disengaged from the motor journey, synapse by synapse.

  When Jake thought there’d been enough lovey-dovey stuff he said, “How’d it go?”

  “Fine, fine. You got any food?”

  Mary Clare went to the Formica table and held up a bottle of Balantine’s. “Energy food,” she said. “Two fingers?”

  “And ice.” I watched her pour into the plastic glass and pluck cubes from a plastic pail of melting ice. It was like seeing her again for the first time, the curve of her cheek, the arch of her eyebrow. I’d been concentrating on other things so hard the image of her I carried around day and night had hidden behind pine trees and deer and big rigs, and now it reemerged and I got tears in my eyes, wondering how I was so lucky.

  I paced around, sipping scotch. Jake and Mary Clare took chairs and Jake said, “Tell us about it.”

  “You tell me first: there’s two of you.”

  Jake said, “Nothing much to tell. We saw a motor home burn down on the side of the road. We had a nice chat, then we were here.”

  So I told them about stopping at the Claremont Hotel and the Goldfinger technology and how I got away. I told them I couldn’t find the Triumph’s heater switch. Mary Clare laughed and said it was a small stopcock under the hood. I told them about my Julio Fandango sprint through Tilden Park, Kensington and Richmond.

  Jake said, “You think they might have a back-up device?”

  “If they do,” I said, “they must have changed cars, cause thar weren’t no big ugly Buick behind me.”

  Clare asked, “What do you think they’ll do?”

  “Tell Meany they failed and fall on their swords,” I said.

  I added some scotch to my glass. I was warm by then, maybe a little too warm.

  Mary Clare got up and paced, a counter march to my pacing. She bounced the heel of her hand off her forehead and said, “God, am I stupid.”

  “What?” Jake and I said in unison.

  “I could take a plane from Reno, probably to Salt Lake City, connect to Boston from there.”

  “That’s not stupid,” Jake said, “That’s smart.”

  “But if I could think of it in South Lake Tahoe, I could have thought of it in Moraga and saved us all a bunch of sweat.”

  Jake said, “I would bet Meany’s operatives were checking flights out of Oakland and San Francisco.”

  “Given you made the plan before you knew about the Buick Twins, why’d you decide to drive in the first place?”

  She shrugged. “I came out here in a car: symmetry? My roadster as a security blanket? Or maybe I'm, like, a total Valley Girl.”

  I loved the sound of her voice, but I was thinking: was she giving herself the option not to come back? Was this a choice in the wake of her new autonomy?

  If so, whatever reasons, cogent or from the hip, no longer pertained. She hunted down the telephone book, rummaging through the yellow pages. “There’s a shuttle that leaves from several places downtown several times a day. Now I need to know when the airplanes leave. —Listen, guys, why don’t you go out and get us some real food while I figure out how to get to Boston.”

  “And back,” I said.

  “Do you have abandonment issues, baby? Of course, back.” She gave me the kind of smile Lady Ashley gave Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, insincere but heartfelt.

  Jake and I decided to walk, so I fished my Levi jacket out of my kit. Trudging to the highway, we saw neon signs to the east that bespoke food. In a strip mall about a quarter mile beyond, we had a choice of burgers, Chinese and Mexican. It was well past midnight but they were still open. We had no trouble deciding on Chinese, the experts in take-out.

  While the cook cooked we drank Tsingtaos and ruminated. “You know,” Jake said, “I am a meddler.”

  “I never thought so. What makes you say that?”

  “I meddled to get you together with Mary Clare, I meddled getting you out of the hospital, I meddled getting her hooked up with a defense lawyer. I could go on. I don’t do it out of a boundless fellow-feeling, it’s pride. I want to be the knight in shining armor. That’s in some part why we’re here.”

  “A bunch of bull crap, Jake. Knock it off.”

  The woman with the dangly jade earrings and the cheongsam that fit her perfectly a decade ago came with our food in two bags. I pulled out my wallet but Jake beat me to the punch.

  “Meddler.”

  “You wait,” he said. “That which goeth around cometh around.”

  The woman made change and said, with a laugh, “That saying come from Confucius.”

  “I heard it came from Al Capone,” I said to her, but she didn’t get it.

  Trudging back Jake said, “I would have been a better friend if, the first time we got wind of the Buick Twins, I urged Clare to confront Meany.”

  “She will. If she gets her failure at Brandeis expunged and enrolls at Cal, she’ll do it from a stronger position.”

  “He may be in prison by then,” Jake said.

  “You know,” I said, “I’ll be glad when we can just get together for lunch at Spenger’s on Fridays and Amanda isn’t mad at us anymore. We’ve had a hell of a sleigh ride.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder as we were walking through the motel parking lot, mouths watering from the Chinese food smells. “We seldom get to do things that mean something. This means something to me—a lot, in fact.”

  “Me, too, Jake, me too.” And I gave him a quick hug.

  three

  The night at the Ponderosa Village Inn resides in my memory alongside a fishing trip I took with my dad when I was ten. We lived in St. Louis. My father, a quiet, distant man, had worked too hard all his life to spend much time on male bonding activities with his sons. But he took me fishing on the Lake of the Ozarks the end of my eleventh summer. It ra
ined pretty much the whole time we were there. I tried fishing in the rain anyway, but caught nothing. My father brought along books to read and Jim Beam to sip, and we played checkers in the evening and listened to an old radio that sounded like an electric storm.

  We’d come to this rustic cabin on the lake’s shore via a dirt road that crossed a dry creek. On the way out—after a breakfast of balloon bread cooked into French toast—the creek had become a small river. The water was swift enough to have washed good-sized rocks into the roadway. I volunteered to wade the stream, barefoot and pants rolled up, and remove the biggest of them from our Nash’s path. In first gear and ever so slowly, dad got through. “Robert the Intrepid,” he dubbed me that day. The first place we could, we stopped for hot fudge sundaes, and I never felt closer to him.

  I never felt closer to Mary Clare than our night in Tahoe. She’d urged Jake get only one room, but he demurred, saying he was a light sleeper and our rustlings would keep him awake. So after the cashew pork and General Tao’s chicken, the fried wontons and extra servings of rice, he yawned and pled severe sleepiness and departed.

  Alone, Clare and I drank more scotch, fishing half-sized ice cubes from the pail of cold water. We sat in front of the fake gas fireplace and snuggled and drank.

  I grabbed a couple of fortune cookies from the scatter on the table. Mine read, “Where there is a track behind, there is a cart ahead.”

  I read it to Clare and she said, “You could write a novel based on that. It’s like the story of your life.”

  “What does yours say?” I asked.

  “Compassion comes with knowledge.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “we tapped into the philosopher’s book of wise fortune cookies.”

  “Give me yours. I’ll ponder these as I wing my way across the country. Expect an existential breakthrough over Nebraska or Iowa.” She put them on the table.

  We sipped scotch for a while and I freshened our glasses. Mary Clare said, “Let us drink to Jake Pritchett. He’s a brick, as they used to say.”