Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  Defying the odds is defying death.

  —Even though, in odd moments, we get used to crapping out. After the umpteenth well-wisher, saying goodbye without using the word, I even sent Beatrice away. For a sufficient time I clung to her like a baby, and then had to say, “Go, so I can finish my memoir.” Beatrice, who was to usher in my very own Vita Nuova, who understood and cherished plain old Jake, not the man who was supposed to be what every wife and child needs.

  It could have been worse. I could have sprung a bigger leak at home and bled out in front of the kids. I could have thrown a clot any time since the bullet became flesh of my flesh. Then there’d have been no Indian Summer for saying goodbye, no time to finish my Mylar opus.

  The hospital will be my spindle, keeping a distance between children’s tender sensibilities and the reality of death: it will be neat and institutional. And Amanda will know how to help them grieve. (Eighty percent of my current feelings are about them, though they aren’t the focus of this memoir.)

  I look at it this way: I got to give Robert a diversion, something to make him hate my guts, to make him wish I’d gone to the grave as speedily as his Nevada drifter.

  Because of that diversion I didn’t have to really clobber him, tell him to spare me the responsibility for ruining his life. I can accept responsibility for defying the God of Randomness, toting a gun when I shouldn’t, getting in the way of a bullet that decided not to go cleanly through soft tissue and out the other side. The ‘finish my novel’ ploy saved me the bother of yelling at him, ‘You didn’t do it, you melodramatic dickhead, I did it all by myself!’

  I didn’t have to do that. Robert bought the deathbed wish with a minimum of fuss, and it will be a diversion.

  At first I worried about what Mary Clare would think. I imagined her saying, ‘Dammit, Jake, this is the guy who can’t let go, and you give him a relic to cling to that’s phonier than the True Cross. He’s going to add Jake Pritchett to his string of victims, noodling around with that novel and never finish it.’

  She didn’t, though. She went along with it, having the healthier attitude, though in the long run I don’t think the Great Accountant in the Sky will do her any more good than the Divine Accident did Robert.

  Sad to say, he’s either going to leave her (before she leaves him, like his mother did) or else drive her away . . . unless he changes. And if he doesn’t change he’ll break her heart doing either.

  And that still leaves the God of Randomness, my personal contribution to the mythology of a Higher Power guiding our destiny—my answer to the Great Accountant in the Sky and the Divine Accident. He is the One who detonated the Big Bang and let the pieces fly off with a lot of English on them. And I don’t connect the God of Randomness with Jesus. Jesus didn’t solve anything in advance, he just said, ‘I can show you how one man did it, you have to do it yourself.’

  We all do. Getting shot in the name of love or in the line of duty doesn’t exempt you from wrestling with randomness. Random friendships coming to an end. Random bullets leaving behind messes.

  What Robert and Sergeant Rutledge didn’t quite get, hashing out how we humans survive knowing death in advance: we do it by living in the past or the future. We tie everything Now to something Past—from comparing lovers to recalling all the times we should have got it in the neck but didn’t. We survive not one day but thousands—the freeway wrecks, the airplane crashes, the wars that always happen over there, the nervous blind date.

  We forget that the past is no more than electronic pathways in the brain—okay, a length of celluloid maybe, a book in the library—the mundane things not even that. Auto wrecks and airplane crashes cease to exist as such, they become scrap for future autos and planes. Poof.

  Never mind, one small triumph breeds a lifetime of hope. Even a Mary Clare lugs a lot of Past with her, even when she declares “Enough!” or brags about turning over a new leaf.

  She’s come a long way, Penthouse Lady becoming a scholar again, but she shouldn’t forget the vehicular accident Mrs. Clarke witnessed, or the gun Meany just happened to arm her with, else she might still be up in her aerie, mourning a Bobby she never got to love properly. What you’ve got to give her credit for, though, is seizing the opportunity that wandered by, for having next to her heart not a fragment of lead but a fragment of self-love.

  Damn, don’t we get what we deserve.

  Although I don’t know if she deserves a lover who’s got self-loathing encoded in his chromosomes, who has electronic pathways in his brain that make him take it on the chin every time. He’s even had to take on the world’s burdens in his women: Lana, wanting to “do something” but crapping out when first the going got tough; Marta, trying to figure out why the guys have so much fun and she just feels used. Janice, the cokehead’s oppressed wife. Even Mary Clare, the damsel in the castle keep.

  Could the university a better guy to send out to trade shouts with the hippie agitators?

  Meryl read him like a book, she just couldn’t believe it, going no holds barred in the parking lot after Meany’s party, she knew which string to jerk, she learned quickly. Funny, how the shrewd of the world have it all over the intelligent and sensitive.

  For a while I thought Robert was the strong one, had figured out he couldn’t hide from life forever, at least couldn’t hide and act at the same time. I thought, This time it’s not so easy, he has to use every skill he possesses to win her. I forgot to put a value on my part, how I was the one who wouldn’t let him quit.

  Even so, he learned enough to recognize he’d been at a crossroads back in Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement: to curse the darkness or strive ever for the light, to admit one’s destiny is not in one’s hands alone, to accept not just new fates but the reality that there is no perfection of this life, there is only the rock we push up the hill again and again and again.

  Mary Clare was at that crossroads, too, but appears to have chosen a path with heart, so maybe she’s got the point. —As much as anyone does who’s got a luxurious amount of time left.

  —I, unfortunately, have no such fund of time. I’ve learned a lot on Bobwhite Court, come a long way, who hid out behind his three piece suit and six bit words. I hid out many more years than either Robert or Clare, and I tried to keep on hiding out while I had a vicarious success through them.

  Just think, I might have waited until Jimmy grew up and used him as my proxy. So maybe a random bullet saved my son from a father with a mouth like Polonius. Quote, Don’t look at the world the way your mother does, don’t be a charming rascal like your Uncle Robert. For God’s sake, don’t wait for a bullet exploding in your chest to make you let go of the petty and mundane and find a worthwhile path in life.

  Don’t be a janitor. Jimmy, don’t spend your life cleaning up others’ messes. Don’t look for simple-pretties. And for sure don’t get yourself trapped in a corner, trying to keep someone else there.

  Lucky for you, Jimmy, Robert came along, a pseudo-Jake with his slate wiped clean.

  Only it ain’t wiped clean, which I’ve spent hours saying. Telling Robert his having a second chance can jinx him. He no more has a clean slate than Jake Pritchett or anyone else who’s reached majority.

  Maybe, saddling him with a deathbed wish, I’ve merely given him a chance to walk around the fork in the road, instead of choosing a path. But if he does actually write the fucking thing, and publish it, it may be the atonement he’s looking for, for the dead in his path. And he might actually do it, put in the time and the self-discipline. He has, after all, a hyperactive imagination, as he demonstrated time and again, parsing the Penthouse Lady. He might end up a better writer than I ever could have been, having skipped many a year of turning out bureaucratic bullshit.

  Maybe he won’t see a modern-day witch as so preposterous. To me she meant that it was still possible, by conjuring up demons from the past, to make magic that overcomes the odds. Which makes her the antithesis of letting go.

  Which might just app
eal to a guy who clings like a Gila monster to everything he’s supposed to let go of: the easy out, self-pity, jealousy and anger and ghosts. In the dream about the witch I was a rat in a maze of conflicting desires and I chose the path of duty. Maybe in trying to get out of that maze, Robert will choose a path with heart.

  three

  Goodbyes said, we walked a slow march among the graves on the way back to the truck. Halfway there, Mary Clare said, “Wait a minute,” and ran, ever so gracefully in her high heels, towards a figure I had caught in the corner of my eye during the ceremony. She ran towards a woman in a dark blue coat and a beret that covered her hair except for a brunette braid. You could see legs from the below the knees and hands and an oval face. The terrain hid her shoes, but I guessed they would be sensible. She stood in the shade of a tree that looked like Van Gogh’s mulberry. The two conferred a moment, earnest talk, I could tell from Clare’s body language. The conference over, Clare took the woman by the hand and took a tangential path to the truck, on which I converged just as they got there.

  “Robert, this is Beatrice Hennessey; Beatrice, this is Robert Gattling, my sweetheart.” Beatrice held out her hand for me to shake, giving me a twenty watt smile, fortunately wearing no eye make-up, as she had puffy eyes from crying.

  Berkeleyward, three abreast in my funky truck, we are silent until, in the yellow-tiled echo chamber of the Caldecott Tunnel, Mary Clare says, “I asked Beatrice for coffee.”

  And Beatrice says, as we leave the tunnel, “Actually, you know, I’d rather have a drink.”

  To which I add a fervent “Amen.”

  I dive off the freeway at the Ashby Avenue exit, heading for the Claremont. Berkeley Square is not the place to take Mary Clare and Beatrice. I am in no mood to explain the two women to Mac.

  “Ah,” says Beatrice, as she sees the old Victorian edifice loom up, “This is where you two went with Jake the day you picked up your little sports car.”

  “Jake told you about that?”

  “He told me everything; we had no secrets. But we had a rule: no telling others people’s secrets.”

  I exchange a look with Mary Clare, which Beatrice catches. As if she suspects we think that nuns have no secrets worth sharing, Beatrice says, “The secret that predates meeting Jake is, I had a lover in the convent. That’s why I’m no longer there.”

  “I was kept in a penthouse by a sugar daddy—until this guy came along.” Mary Clare isn’t trying to top Beatrice’s convent lover, she’s exchanging a hostage. “Now tell us what you’ve been doing since you got out—besides loving Jake.”

  “I write poetry and clean houses to support my poetry habit.”

  “And how did you meet Jake?” I ask her.

  “In a bar,” she says, eyes on the floorboards, reddening a little.

  I’m dumfounded by this quick exchange of intimate details but Mary Clare laughs a friendly laugh.

  To which Beatrice responds, “I’m such a wanton hussy, aren’t I.”

  Now we all laugh.

  “Was it terrible of me to have an affair with him, do you think?”

  Mary Clare says without a second’s hesitation, “You saved his soul.”

  In the corner of my eye I see Beatrice put her hand on Mary Clare’s arm and I want to cry. I say to myself, No wonder, Jake, no wonder.

  And Clare’s right, it’s possible that the Jake I knew and loved didn’t exist before Beatrice. A man married for twenty years to a professional virgin meets a woman who, no matter how many lovers she may have, will forever remain a virgin in her soul. I tuck that away to ponder when I’m tempted to drink that fourth martini.

  And as if she’s reading my mind, Beatrice says, “Jake worried terribly about your soul, Robert.”

  “But not the way a former nun would,” I say, solemnly, for my heart seems to know where this thought is going.

  “More so,” she replies. “His greatest fear of dying was what it would do to you. He loved you very much.”

  The appearance of the valet at the Claremont entrance keeps the tears out of my eyes. I say as I alight, “And vice versa.”

  She says, “I should hope so. He was more alive than ever, just before he died. And it was because of you two. Does that sound strange?”

  Neither Clare nor I answer—what would we say? Beatrice starts to cry, softly, and Mary Clare puts an arm across her shoulders. It’s as if Jake is doing this, he’s writing a scenario for us to exchange words of comfort.

  Only it’s Clare doing it, too.

  In the midday quiet lounge a waiter appears and takes our order, expertly matching his mood to ours, speaking softly, not smiling.

  “While he’s fetching those, I’m going to powder my nose,” Clare says, and stands, as do I. Evidently convent etiquette is silent on the subject of women visiting the powder room together and Beatrice remains seated.

  We’re silent for a minute and then Beatrice says, “I’m not sure how intact my faith is, but I believe in heaven, I believe in the continuation of a state of grace, I believe you can only participate in the Godhead if you have the capacity to. Can you appreciate that?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “Jake began to have that capacity again after he met you. He said he’d been a fool most of his life. I told him he was a fool for love, like Francis was a fool for God.”

  I glance into her eyes and try to smile, but at least I don’t cry.

  Mary Clare returns just as the waiter appears at my shoulder. She motions for me not to stand.

  I’m the only one with a sensible drink, bourbon over ice, while Mary Clare has a Side Car and Beatrice a Whiskey Sour.

  “Mmm,” says Mary Clare.

  “Mmm,” says Beatrice.

  “Yuk,” I say.

  Mary Clare says, “Something wrong with your whiskey, sweetie?”

  “No, it’s for all your fruit garnishes. Lady drinks.”

  “That’s because we’re ladies, you see.”

  “Both of you copped to being hussies a few minutes ago.”

  Beatrice replies, trying to be solemn but with a smile playing in the corners of her mouth, “We were merely practicing humility.”

  Clare says, “Robert is frequently short on humility.” She smiles broadly and winks at me.

  The funereal mood is broken. But before we more than taste our drinks I raise my glass and say, “To Jacob Pritchett, a true friend.”

  “To Jake,” the women respond in unison.

  After that we talk about what it’s like to live in Berkeley. When the drinks are drunk I invite them to have another. Beatrice shakes her and Clare follows suit. On the descent to Berkeley’s flatlands I tell Beatrice about the letters I retrieved at Jake’s request. She is grateful and embarrassed at once and wants to keep them, so I swing by the Maybeck cottage.

  “I would show you around, but we left in a big hurry this morning.”

  “Another time,” Beatrice says.

  Mary Clare wants to change, so I drive into the heart of Berkeley’s flatlands, where real hippies and ex-nuns and poor folk live. The letters stay in her lap as she gives me directions. As I pull up in front of a Twenties vintage stucco bungalow she retrieves her keys from a coat pocket. I turn off the engine. Neither of us speak for what seems like a long time.

  “It’s very kind of you,” I say at last.

  “What?” puzzlement in her voice.

  “For putting some reverse spin on Jake’s death, how he’d changed for the better, how I was in some way a vehicle of divine grace.”

  She says, speaking carefully, “If I understood anything Jake said, you and he were kindred souls. ‘If I were king for a day’ I remember him saying, ‘I would send everyone over twenty on a quest—over the Himalayas or across the Sahara—take the chance of losing everything in order to win anything at all.’ And I said amen to that, because you’re as likely to lose your soul in a convent as in a brothel.”

  “Now I see why Jake liked you so much; you escaped, you broke out.�
��

  “Jake liked it that I wrote poetry and cleaned houses. He got to teach me a lot and he liked to teach.” She opens the door and steps out.

  “Would you come to dinner sometime soon?” I ask her through the open door.

  “To be honest, no. I hate to say so, Robert, but I haven’t learned to lie yet. You’re too much like Jake, only you have a spiritual arrogance he didn’t, and I’d want to change you, and it would drag me down.”

  “I understand.”

  And I did. Her words stung, but I did.

  Driving home I reflected how it could have been worse. Jake could have been shot in the head, dead on the spot or a brain dead until Amanda pulled the plug. He might have been paralyzed. He could have shot himself, like Meany. Still, it’s bad enough this way: Jake’s not here anymore. If I had the substantial faith of a failed nun I might think there was a whimsical but providential God heaping it on my old sore back. She would say God was giving me the opportunity to climb higher in heaven.

  Oh to be a Georgia share cropper or a péon chopping cotton somewhere around Los Mochis.

  Before I leave the truck I sit for a few minutes, dredging up deep thoughts, how death is life’s one solo flight. You are born only once, but it’s never a solo flight, there’s always a triad, a nice solid form at the apex of the great pyramid of life that stretches back into the unknown. To live means to learn this unity, this immersion in a stream that flows without end.

  To die is to leave the stream, beached forever. Alone. The essence of death is solitude.

  Beatrice would argue otherwise, I know. She would have me believe that that event, the source of loneliness in the night train’s whistle or the sadness of the wolf’s wilderness cry, is but the bottom of an inverted pyramid, formed by the souls of the elect, blossoming out for all eternity.

  Mary Clare sticks her head out the cottage door and beckons to me, and it interrupts the thoughts—no doubt a good idea—for they have moved on to the executioner’s hood, how his identity must be hidden, because it is alone the state’s right to execute, not any individual’s.

  Only, Beatrice, that ain’t so. Some of us executioners don’t even bother with the hood.

  four

  It takes some time before I venture to cross the campus again, the last time being the day Johnny brought me the bad news. A Saturday morning that is still autumn on the calendar but winter on the flesh, I have an urge. I put on my waffle stompers and grubby Levi’s, Pendleton overshirt and an auto cap I haven’t worn since I left Berkeley for Walnut Creek. I tiptoe about, not waking Mary Clare, who obliges by hugging her pillow and breathing sleepily.