Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  A man like that would rather die than admit he was a fool. That was the piece Mac would miss, not a common case of flipping over a dame. The Meany sitting in the dark in the penthouse with his slap-dash Old Fashioned would never come back, because he had no place to come back to.

  When Sergeant Rutledge came to visit me in the hospital, he confided something which he did not tell either Robert or Mary Clare. He said that Meany had laid down on her bed with her mink coat pulled over him, and shot himself using two thicknesses of the coat as a silencer.

  “He turned the silk lining outwards,” Rutledge told me, “but the place still stunk of burnt hair.”

  *****

  Thank God Bolles didn’t let me go up to the penthouse with him. I saw my mother dead in her casket in church and ever after associated death with the smell of incense and candle wax. I saw the drifter, Ralph Delano Renwick, dead in that Washoe County arroyo and associate death with the smell of unwashed bodies and sagebrush. I don’t know how many times in life I might smell burnt mink, but it’s one less smell I have to associate with death.

  The Simple-Pretty

  one

  What ended my wallowing in self pity was the thought of telling Mary Clare her protector had opted out. She and I had entirely different attitudes towards Meany. I saw him as a man who’d let his past due compassion blind him to what was best for his ward. She saw him as a haven from the storms of life, evoking gratitude. After he attacked me and she had to shoot him, she erected a mole across the harbor entrance, and he became the sullen sea outside.

  She didn’t come back as planned and her delayed arrival gave me contrary feelings: fear that she wasn’t really coming back at all; relief because the longer she stayed away the longer I didn’t have to tell her about Meany. I had no way of contacting her; she knew to call the Pritchetts, but I wasn’t there and maybe they weren’t answering.

  Finally she called as I was awaiting a call-back from the airline concerning her flight delay. “You must not have listened to the news. There was a bomb scare at O’Hare and they didn’t land any airplanes for four hours. So I didn’t get out of Boston until nine last night. And of course I missed my connection. I tried to phone you but no one was answering at the Pritchetts’ and I didn’t know where else to call. —So how’s Jake?”

  I told her what I knew. I told her about my exit to Berkeley and the Pelican Motel.

  “Then I did correctly hear what the man said who answered the phone.” There was a long pause. She said, “Tell me what it is, Bobby. Something’s wrong; I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Tell you when you get here, darling.”

  “If you’re calling me darling it must be something between us.”

  I said, “Never. I’ll come get you.”

  Turns out I didn’t have to. The airline, to make up for the delay, popped for a ride across the Bay on the helicopter shuttle.

  When I heard the rap on the door I opened it to an understandably bedraggled Mary Clare. Tossing her bags behind me, I took her in my arms and kissed her and kissed her again. “You came back.”

  “This is where you are, Bobby. —Now tell me.”

  “I bought some scotch—Ballantine’s. How about a drink?”

  She grabbed me. I didn’t want to tell her but she wasn’t going to be put off. “Tell me. Is Meany going to sue me or something?”

  “Meany’s dead.”

  Her mouth fell open. She sucked in air. She said, barely audibly, “Did the police shoot him?”

  I shook my head. “He shot himself.”

  “When?” She sat on the end of the bed.

  “Last night. Let me get some ice and I’ll fix us drinks. Then I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  When I finished she looked at me, waiting for more. I shrugged and she wept. “God, his poor wife, his poor daughters.”

  She lay across my lap. I petted her. It felt good to have contact with her. I was more human, having another person touching me.

  She said, straightening up, “I still can’t get over it. Jake and now Vatche.”

  “Did you really call him Vatche?”

  “I called him ‘Sugar’ sometimes. He’d give me one of his rare smiles when I called him that.” She sipped her drink.

  I said, “Tell me about Brandeis.”

  “They were nice as hell. I cried when I told them why I had to go back so soon and the dean gave me a hug and said she’d talk to Berkeley and make everything right. —I need to sleep some, Bobby. Wake me up while there’s time to eat. I’m hungry but I’m sad and I can’t process any more. Sleep.”

  two

  At ten o’clock she hadn’t even moved, so I walked up the street to a hot dog joint and got two plain dogs and two Polish sausage dogs with everything on them. When I got back Mary Clare was wearing the blue Oxford cloth shirt I was supposed to wear to work the next day. She smiled at my choice of edibles. “You’re so sweet.”

  “That’s twice in one evening you’ve said that to me. You’ll spoil me.”

  She said, “Damned right I will,” and broke down again.

  I had said, the day she came down and commandeered my bathtub and drank my beer, “We have to have a serious conversation.” But she knew more about timing than I did. Gloriously naked in my tub, she had the upper hand and had no trouble putting me off. “Some other time,” she said.

  Meany dead, Jake shot up, now she was ready for the serious conversation. “We’ll talk,” I said, “but after the hotdogs and whisky.”

  She suddenly lunged at me, pinned me against the bed with beleaguering kisses, hand planted on my chest. “I love you,” she said, breath sleepy-sour on my nose, then jumped up, wearing my shirt over her skimpy underwear, the custom-fitted bra and panties her father had been buying her every six months since she had a figure.

  “Come back,” I said.

  “We have all night,” she said.

  “Talking might spoil it.”

  She said, “If it does, you’ll wonder why you ever wanted me in the first place,” rummaging through her carry-on for a pair of brown cords and a matching jersey and sandals—Boston clothes. She brushed her teeth, smiling at me in the mirror. The sleep, evidently, had revived her.

  She sat in the uncomfortable motel chair and bit into one of the Polish sausage dogs. Her hair was a rat’s nest and it looked perfect.

  “Where are we going to live?”

  “I’m glad you asked. —Are you going to want the other Polish dog?”

  “No. —Where, Bobby?”

  “So, a guy Howie knows who teaches biostatistics in the School of Public Health, his name is Abe Melnik, has this Maybeck cottage in his back yard, only he didn’t know it was a Maybeck—”

  “—And Maybeck is who?”

  I said, “You’re not from around here, I can tell.”

  “He’s a famous architect?”

  “Not on the scale of Louis Sullivan, but he’s well respected in Berkeley.”

  She said, “So he didn’t know it was a Maybeck—”

  “—And he was going to tear it down, because it looked like it was about to fall down, but he had a housewarming party and fifteen Berkeleyans said they’d shoot him if he tore it down, so he resurrected it.”

  “Is it cute?”

  “I haven’t seen it, but it’s a Maybeck. Howie has arranged for us to see it at our convenience.”

  “How did you get mixed up with all these Jews?”

  I said, “How did I get mixed up with a Jewish princess?”

  She had a mouth full of food and couldn’t remonstrate with me, so she poked me in the arm and glowered.

  “Jake called you that. He said that was why you and Amanda didn’t get along, she being a Southern belle.”

  “I will take this up with the ACLU. Although definitely cute, you are clearly anti-Semitic.”

  “Oh yeah, me and Abe Melnik and Howie Manheimer.”

  “Well then, you’re a bunch of male chauvinist pigs.”

 
“Howie says the place is plenty tiny. Sleeping is in a loft. No washer and dryer.”

  “Is there a Mrs. Melnik?”

  “Howie says she’s a slightly younger, slightly slimmer, Golda Meir.”

  “Oy veh.”

  She patted her mouth with the paper napkin from the take-out bag. She said, “I called Mrs. Meany while you were gone.”

  I gave her my bug-eyed look.

  “You know the fairy tale about the magic tinder box?”

  “The pertinence of which is?”

  She said, “Your eyes just got big as saucers.”

  “What did you and she talk about?” I asked.

  “I told her I was mailing her the pink slip to the Jag, she could have the jewelry and anything else of value from the penthouse.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She invited me to the funeral. She understands about tying up loose ends.”

  “Jesus! Did she say anything about me?”

  “She did not invite you to the funeral.”

  “Thank God. Are you going?”

  She said, “I declined the invitation. I am really through with that part of my life.”

  I saw that. She was wiped out when she came through the door, and now she was back in command of her life.

  She poured us both another scotch and told me about school, rehearsing what she was going to tell her parole officer the following Monday. Assuming the Brandeis dean was as good as her word, she would enroll as a special student at Berkeley for the fall semester, audit something in sociology, maybe Tilsit’s seminar on total societies. she would likewise sign up for a Mandarin laboratory.

  “So,” she said, finished with her itinerary, “tell me about your project.”

  “I figure my predecessor failed because he didn’t know the University. The University wanted to co-opt ABAG and legitimize its picture of the future as the only one worth considering.”

  She said, “Didn’t you help invent the University’s future—doctor-wise?”

  “How quick of you. That’s what they’ll say, too. Sure, I invented part of it, though everything I did has Stu Katz’s name on it. I just conjured up the numbers. But the game’s changing. Irvine graduated its first M.D. in June.”

  She was sitting cross-legged on the bed. She said, “Is there a shortage of doctors in the Bay Area?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Your guess.”

  I said, “My guess? My guess is there’s a glut of doctors, just like any place in the country that’s got a San Francisco Bay smack in the middle of it, maybe the two best medical schools in the country, and a climate that any Texan or Hoosier would die for. There are too many specialists of every kind and too few generalists. The problem is, the docs aren’t distributed the way the population is.”

  “Bobby,” she said, quite out of context, “I’ve got nothing to hide from you, you want to hear my life history it’s pretty shitty stuff, all the way back to about age two and a half, which is the earliest I can remember hearing my dad screwing my mother at night. You want to know my history, it’s the usual JAP bullshit with a heavy veneer of sex. You can take notes if you want, keep score, but I’ve got nothing to hide from you, and if that’s what you want . . .”

  I said, “Where did this come from?”

  “Because you’re hiding something from me. I really want to talk about the changes inside me, I want to tell you about the woman who’s leaving the damsel in distress behind, how there’s no dragon, no knight, no castle, that’s all bullshit. But that woman’s getting farther and farther away from you.”

  I said, palms beginning to sweat, “If we were to retire to Berkeley Square, I might, after a few serious drinks, tell you my life history, too.”

  “I love you, Bobby, what are you afraid of?”

  There were several urgent replies on the tip of my tongue, all of which my brain filtered out as trite, melodramatic, self-pitying: ‘Falling through space,’ ‘walking the edge of the abyss and having it crumble.’ I almost said, ‘If I could name it I wouldn’t be afraid of it.’

  Instead I said, ‘You never told me how you got involved with Meany.”

  “But Jake told you.”

  “It’s not the same,” I said.

  “My getting involved with Vatche is not the same as throwing over a career, ending a marriage, holing up in the WASP nest of the Bay Area, pushing a broom.”

  “Because it wasn’t a penthouse?”

  “Vatche was up from where I was—way, way up. Do you want to know where I was? Do you really? I was twenty-five, strung out on booze, speed, coke, and cannabis in all their forms, I was fat and out of shape, getting fucked every which way you can imagine by a couple of randy bi’s, the cold cut in a human sandwich. I had my Grape-Nuts in brandy every morning, a toke while I sat on the pot. I’d do anything to stay high till I passed out at night.

  “I felt worthless and ashamed enough to die—and most likely would have if Vatche hadn’t come along. That’s all past. I’m still ashamed but not worthless, and I will learn to forget the shame.

  “But I’m afraid I’m going to leave you in the dust, Bobby. I won’t mean to, but I will.”

  I said, “So is this the prelude to a kiss-off?”

  She said, “You dumb schmuck, I’m not setting you up, I’m talking truth. I love you.” While she was talking she took up my hand and shook it. “I don’t know what it is, there’s this kind of grace in you, if you ever got it together. Not a job, or money in the bank—fuck that—if you ever got happy and liked yourself. I know it sounds like a lot of Psych 1A bilge water, but I don’t know the right words. Where you’re at is worse than playing on the edge of incest, worse than cowering in a penthouse. I could live with the Bobby McGee side of you, nothing left to lose, except I can see the other side, too, the one that wants to redeem himself by doing great deeds.”

  “Got me all figured out, have you.”

  “No I haven’t, I haven’t got you half figured out. And I’ll wait a long time until you figure yourself out.”

  “So gimme a clue, my wise friend, how’d you change so fast?”

  She looked past me for half a minute and then turned narrowed eyes on me.“I shot a man,” she said

  I winced like a box turtle poked with a stick.

  three

  By the time Jake got out of intensive care, I was into the ABAG project in a big way. Mary Clare was visiting Jake almost daily, after the hospital’s big morning fuss was over, sitting with him and talking, I assume, about everything but his health status. I wasn’t jealous. Though Jake was more charming and articulate than I, I was comfortable that he wasn’t beating my time, he was explicating me better than I could myself.

  *****

  Here is what I gleaned from his tapes on the effect her shooting Meany had.

  That answer—“I shot a man”—may have been an intuitive thrust through the arras, trying to dispatch Robert’s inner Polonius, but it was also pat. It showed her lack of experience (to be sure, she was very experienced in many ways, but not in all ways). It was what a cocksure teenager would say. She was calling the head of the nail the answer and forgetting the point and the shaft.

  And the hammer.

  It wasn’t just shooting Meany, dear Mary Clare, it was having something worth taking a chance for, liberation not just due to a snap shot, but everything, starting with your trip down the back stairs with your bath towel and Camus.

  But face it, dear lady, this rescuing the beloved from mayhem or worse, while noble, can only be explained the way any heroic act is: I had no choice, there was nothing else I could do. (Which, by the way, is the oft-repeated explanation of heroes who run into burning buildings or leap into the frigid waters to rescue the flailing child.)

  But given Robert’s state of mind, saying “I shot a man” was the sweat lodge cure for what ailed him, the cure-or-kill approach.

  That’s our world, all of us bound by the glue of muzzle velocity and killing power. Bullets
bullets bullets. Charles Manson convicted. Lt. Calley convicted. Attica Prison stormed.

  Weep for the dead, bandage the wounded. Lift your head, square your shoulders, look your own assassinations in the eye. Go forward.

  “Maybe I don’t deserve your love. I might never change, you know.” Words of his she related: the hot dog conversation. Then he changed the subject: “You never said anything about Suzanne Arnold, how your interview went.”

  “Ah,” she said, “now there’s someone who’d never expect you to change. You want to live with someone who’d worship the ground you walk on, just the way you are, you should take up with Ms. Arnold.”

  *****

  That was the truly strange part of the hot dog conversation, as Jake refers to it. One minute she’s challenging me to change, the next she’s pointing out that I don’t have to. Is that true love, or is that the “old” Mary Clare, the Mary Clare of a few weeks ago, rising to the surface?

  When I gave her an incredulous stare she shrugged and rolled her eyes. “All I know is, the woman’s voice got husky when she talked about you.” Picking a stray piece of relish off her jersey. “And she’s not half bad, you know. But she knows I’d rip your cock off if you ever touched her, so forget it.”

  I started to get up to wash my hands. She grabbed my arm and held on until I sat down again. “I love you, Bobby, and I don’t want to wake up someday and find you’ve gone away.”

  I said, “I doubt we can do better than the best I’ve known, and everybody wakes up someday and it isn’t there anymore. I don’t want to be a Dante worshipping his deified Beatrice. I’d rather cope with real things.”

  That was that. She said, as if we’d never had this me-and-thee conversation, “Is there enough room in this Maybeck doll house for two desks?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “I could ask Abe if we can build desks under the window, ones that fold down when they’re not being used, with a gate leg, you know?”

  “When I study I spread out all over, you’ll never have a chance to fold it down.”

  “We’ll have to be very Japanese,” I said.

  Clare said, “I have a hard enough time being Jewish. —How will we get away from each other?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “That has to do with being Japanese, too, because, first, we have to agree where away is. Then we get one of those thingamajigs that fold three ways—hassock, chair, bed—know what I mean? It would live downstairs, with a comforter, somebody wants to get away can sleep down there.”