The Devil Tree

by Jerzy Kosiński

  Susan had indeed gotten to know Karen well. She had picked up Karen’s mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of speech until it seemed that she was deliberately imitating her. At first she had also dressed as Karen dressed, copied Karen’s hairstyle, taken up things that interested Karen, even went after men she knew Karen had been with. This continued until they became very close; then Susan grew self-confident enough to develop her own persona.

  Karen once suggested that Susan and she and I live together, a possibility that involved no risks for Karen and Susan. I knew that Karen was not implying any three-part sexual relationship; still, I asked who would be the most expendable if our triad failed? Such an idea did not seem to have crossed Karen’s mind. She will not admit to her dependence on Susan, and she would resent my describing their relationship in terms of dependence; but what is it the two of them share that I could not share with Karen alone? Is Susan merely a receptacle for Karen’s experiences, or does she mold them? I’m not convinced by Karen’s explanation that Susan is a good companion, completely forgiving and patient. Such companions normally come and go. They meet other people, get married, have families of their own. But Susan is not seeing anyone else now; Karen is her life. I could give Karen financial security, but that’s not what she wants from me, and I no more want to be Karen’s servant than she wants me to become her benefactor. Sometimes I feel protective toward her, and of course I want her to be comfortable, but if our relationship is to develop, she must ultimately choose between Susan and me, between the very different attachments we represent.

  I have no idea where I stand on Karen’s list of emotional priorities, where I rank in relation to her work, to her pleasure trips, to her social life, or to Susan. Last week, to preserve her glamorous image in the society pages, Karen flew to Buenos Aires to be photographed with a bunch of local horse-breeding millionaires. Would she fly as far to preserve my image of her?

  • • •

  As the election nears, one of the local incumbent senators and his wife must have been reminded by their friends, the Howmets, that I am back in the country. My parents were always among the most generous of Republicans; with a little prompting I too might join and support the party.

  I accepted the senator’s invitation to attend a Fourth of July garden party at his Oyster Bay estate. The afternoon was to be enhanced by the presence of the vice-president, the governor, and other state and federal luminaries.

  Because the senator’s invitation was addressed to me alone, Karen, upset that she had not been invited by name, refused to accompany me. I had to go alone.

  The garden party was an elaborate affair, mixing food, drink, and dance with ad hoc tributes by film, stage, and TV stars. We were offered a political cocktail of well-prepared speeches by members of the senator’s reelection committee, and there were a few inept utterances by some of his financial backers.

  Delighted that I had arrived alone, Helen Howmet, who had taken her role as my godmother as seriously as if God Himself had appointed her, promptly introduced me to every rich and eligible debutante there. No doubt every one of them would have proved an unexceptionable wife for a clean-cut lieutenant of capitalist enterprise. But none of these girls matched Karen in looks or bearing; none of them interested me at all.

  Exhausted by her matchmaking efforts, Helen Howmet finally left me alone, and as I mingled with the crowd I came across a familiar face: Keith Cushman, whose family owns The Cushman, a department store, and who, like me, was a failure at Yale and a draft dodger—another miserable exile from the American Dream. We first met in an Istanbul youth hostel. He was then immersed in making a career for himself in marine biology, and I remember still his childlike excitement over what he had learned about the jellyfish. That creature, after being fertilized sexually, begets a polyp. The polyp propagates asexually by budding, but it begets a sexually reproducing jellyfish; then the cycle begins again, the jellyfish always taking after its grandparents.

  The sea squid was the other creature that fascinated Keith. During copulation the male squid blocks the female’s breathing by inserting a sexual tentacle, one of its eight arms, into the female’s cavity. Choked and fighting to break away, the female tears off the tentacle. While the severed tentacle remains inside of the female, the mutilated male swims away, to grow, in time, another tentacle in place of the missing one. The female later releases the tentacle, which starts a life of its own by becoming a sea serpent, a totally independent species.

  I had also come across Keith in Amsterdam. He was then searching for another purpose, another label for his existence. He wanted to start a Marxist revolution in semantics, for he claimed that contemporary language had lost its ability to convey the spontaneous and could thus no longer serve as a meaningful revolutionary weapon.

  Owing to a bad case of hepatitis, Keith had returned to America ahead of me. Now his health was restored, and he seemed glad to see me again. Drink in hand, talking in his usual dispirited, listless voice, he told me that while I was still bumming around abroad, he had married a young woman named Deborah, a City College graduate. However, he added, after two years of marriage, they were now divorced.

  I asked how he had met her. He told me that she had been a contestant on Blind Date, a popular TV game show. In front of a live audience, she had had to select a date from among three bachelors who were hidden from her view behind a curtain.

  From the moment she appeared on the screen, Keith knew that Deborah was the woman for him. In his travels, Keith said, he had been to a number of cathouses, and by the time he returned home he knew what it was in a woman that haunted his fantasies. He had also dated a lot, he said, and could recognize a woman perceptive enough to allow him to freely express himself sexually. On the show Deborah looked stunning; the questions she addressed to each bachelor were intelligent and witty, and her responses to their answers were effectively alluring. Even her final choice of Hugh—a rugged construction engineer from North Dakota—impressed Keith, despite his jealousy of that complete stranger who would now spend a week with as perfect a creature as Deborah.

  At the end of the show the moderator announced the prize for Deborah and her date: an all-expense-paid idyllic week in Altos de Chavon, a newly built mountaintop retreat almost a thousand feet up, looking out over the green Chavon River on one side and the blue Caribbean on the other. As photographs of Altos de Chavon flashed on the TV screen, Keith speculated that he himself was no more a stranger to Deborah than was Hugh, whose only advantage was a brief conversational parrying with her during the program. Prompted by such thoughts, Keith decided to go after Deborah, the figure of his tele-fatuation.

  On the day Deborah and her date moved into their suite in Altos de Chavon, Keith checked into the suite next door. When he spotted the couple having cocktails on a terrace above the Chavon River, he casually walked over and introduced himself as a fellow American. The Blind Date couple did not mind his intrusion; Deborah was almost grateful for it, for Hugh had little to offer in the way of conversation. Keith, an old hand in matters of politesse, was not about to make the life of the North Dakotan any easier. Keith quickly invited several other American guests—all accomplished writers, filmmakers, and artists who were visiting Altos de Chavon at the local government’s invitation—to join them, first in conversation over drinks, then for dinner, and finally in a night canoe trip along the river to a picnic site on a moonlit Caribbean beach. Nor did Keith stop there: for the rest of the week, in a show of generosity toward Deborah, Hugh, and other “fellow Americans,” he arranged fishing trips to nearby islands, parties at the oceanfront hotels of the Costasur, and trips to the museums and historical sights of Santo Domingo.

  The week passed quickly. The dating game was soon over for Deborah and Hugh, who were about to depart. Saddened, Deborah admitted to Keith that she was sorry to leave behind such a stimulating companion and that she looked forward to continuing their friendship in New York. Her obvious interest was not lost on Keith, and when the airport
taxi pulled up and Hugh began to load their luggage into it, Keith told Deborah that he did not want to lose her, that he wanted her to stay—not just in Altos de Chavon, but in his life.

  Soon after that, Keith and Deborah were married. The wedding was widely covered in the society pages, and the couple moved into a Fifth Avenue penthouse purchased by Keith’s parents as a wedding gift. There Keith gave his bride a blank check, which she was to use to buy anything she wanted for herself and the apartment.

  Because most of his friends, including me, were still living abroad, Keith said, during the marriage he tended to rely on Deborah’s friends. The newly weds entertained often, and before long Keith had met many people he considered far more interesting than anyone his parents or their friends had ever introduced him to.

  “Why the divorce?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” said Keith with a touch of vehemence. “It happened without warning.” And sensing my curiosity, he continued. “Even though Deborah and I smoked only pot, many of our friends liked uppers and downers, coke, LSD—you name it—and as good hosts we kept on hand a large supply of all that stuff. One night I had a headache and asked Deborah for a painkiller and a sleeping pill, which knocked me out. I was awakened by the voices of two uniformed police officers, who were taking notes as they listened to Deborah, standing before them in her nightgown. On the table lay my .45 caliber revolver and next to it several small packets of our hospitality stuff. ‘What happened?’ I asked, suspecting robbery.

  ’“While you got yourself high on that,’ said one of the officers, pointing at the stash, ‘you tried to kill your lady.’ He directed his gaze at four bullet holes that hadn’t been in the bedroom walls when I fell asleep. That’s some fire power to use against a defenseless young lady,’ said the other officer. ‘You went quite out of control, Keith,’ Deborah said, her voice soft, her expression full of innocent concern, ‘and thank God you missed me before you conked out again. But I’ve decided to take no more chances with my life—or yours, Keith.’ She looked at me with playful reproach. ‘So I called the police.’

  “Suddenly it dawned on me what had happened. Deborah wanted a child, and when she found out that, because of my faulty genes, any child of ours could be born with a birth defect, she decided to divorce me. She knew I loved her and would oppose a divorce, so she decided to set me up. Taking full advantage of the damaging evidence—I had no permit for the gun, not to mention the coke, hash, and other illegal mindblowers the police had found in my desk—Deborah filed for divorce. She won easily; the settlement—in which she got everything she asked for—was her private March of Dimes.” He reflected. “Nietzsche claimed that everything about a woman is a riddle with one solution: pregnancy. But enough about Deborah,” he said peevishly. “What about you, Jonathan? Are you still in love with that bionic beauty, Karen?”

  • • •

  For Karen, her brief, perishable relationships—the end of one already linked to the beginning of another—are proof of her freedom and of her victory over an ordinary existence; she refuses to do what her parents expect of her: to become, one day, a wife and a mother.

  Because Karen is what I want, she holds the secret of who I am. Thus my relationship with her is, for me, a victory of self-knowledge over detached experience. But Karen, a living work of art, lives in time spans as short as those in which eye contact is made. Ceaselessly admired, a well-paid product of the industry of advertising, she cherishes her newly discovered independence. And so the two of us—she the Duchess of Independence, I the Duke of the Free—keep swearing to each other our love of freedom and independence. Even from and of each other.

  • • •

  Anthony was once my father’s valet. I recently asked him to lunch. During the meal Anthony revealed to me why my father had fired him. One of Anthony’s duties was to prepare my father’s shaving cream every morning and, once a week, to insert a new blade in his razor. To prove his faith in the quality of products made of American steel, my father always insisted on shaving for seven straight days with the same American-made steel blade. Then one day Anthony overheard my mother complaining to my father that for the last three days he had not seemed smoothly shaved. From then on, without telling my father, Anthony put a new blade in the razor every other day.

  One morning my father turned to him and said, “Yesterday I shaved with a blade that had a slight defect at one end. Still, it was a perfectly good blade, and it should serve me until the end of the week. What happened to it?”

  “I changed the blade, Mr. Whalen,” replied Anthony.

  “What for?” asked my father.

  “I thought you might need a fresh one,” said Anthony.

  “I do not,” my father replied. “Bring back the old blade.”

  Under the scrutinizing gaze of my father, Anthony admitted that he had thrown the blade away and that he had been changing the blades every other day for some time. When he finished speaking, my father turned to him and said calmly, “If that’s what you think of our steel, Anthony, you needn’t work for me anymore. My secretary will prepare your paycheck, and after you’ve packed, the car will take you to the station.” Then, without another word to the man who for years had served him like a faithful dog, my father returned to his shaving.

  Anthony also told me valuable truths he had learned from my father, who in the good old times would chat with him while shaving. On the day my father learned that General Motors had begun to manufacture its Corvette Sting Ray—a limited-appeal, very expensive fiberglass sports car—he promptly summoned a meeting of the board of directors of his company. He told them that every twenty-four hours, ten thousand new drivers and just as many new cars are added to our roads; that the American consumer spends one out of every four dollars on the automobile; that car production consumes twenty percent of our steel. What would become of the steel industry, the backbone of our economy, he asked, if all American cars were to be made of fiberglass? Regardless of the small market envisaged by Detroit for the two-seat Sting Ray, his company would no longer sell steel on preferential terms to General Motors. Soon after, having spotted the wife of a top-ranking Chrysler executive driving a Japanese-made compact, ’my father telephoned her husband to inquire why he let her do it. Annoyed, the executive replied that his wife was a free citizen—free to drive any damn car she chose; and promptly my father ceased doing business with Chrysler. That meant he was preferentially supplying steel only to Ford and Studebaker. Some years later, however, when Studebaker announced production of the Avanti, its five-seat mass-market fiberglass sedan, my father blew up, called the move blackmail, withdrew his product, and swore that Studebaker would pay dearly for their desertion of the steel industry. Indeed, Studebaker soon faced serious financial difficulties and, on the verge of bankruptcy, ceased its car production in the United States.

  “Have you decided what you’re going to do with yourself, Jonathan?” Anthony asked me. “Are you going into business? You’re still young, and it would be a real pity to waste yourself doing nothing—or doing the wrong thing.”

  Anthony seemed to think that my present life, like my years of draft dodging and drugs, was nothing but evasion of responsibility. I changed the subject, chatted about my travels, said how much I had learned from my exile. Anthony remarked that I was lucky to have so much freedom—meaning money. When I tried to tell him that money could not buy the inner freedom I have always desired, he wasn’t interested. When he said how much I resembled my father, I became angry. I wanted to tell him that was a lie, as he of all people—a black man, the archetypical American servant—should know. But I checked myself. I started instead to talk about some of the women I had had, asking him pointed questions about his own sex life and telling him increasingly realistic stories. He laughed at first, but as the episodes became more lewd and violent, he began to grow uncomfortable, and exhausted by the thought of even the possibility of such adventures, he slumped in his chair. I don’t know why, but perversely I contin
ued until I was sure he realized that my life was beyond his experience.

  • • •

  A penthouse tenant of my hotel called the police about something she saw from her balcony: a man attempting to cross the East River Drive on foot in the midst of the evening rush hour was struck by a car that did not stop after it hit him. It took the police thirty minutes to arrive at the spot, and by then the dead body was flattened. Car after car had run over it; not a single one had attempted to slow down or stop.

  I wonder if it ever occurred to my father that, whether the automobile was made of fiberglass or steel, more Americans have died in automobile accidents than in all the wars our country has fought in the last two centuries. Or that in fifty-three American cities highways occupy a third of all the land; that half of the land of Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis is given over to traffic and parking lots. My father, a clear-thinking businessman and industrialist, must have been aware that the societal cost in loss of life and property caused by car accidents was ten times higher than that caused by all other crime and violence combined. And if he was aware and did not speak up against such destruction, then was he guided—or corrupted—by his lust for profit?

  • • •

  The less you are, the less you give expression to your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the more you store up of your estranged life. Everything which the political economist takes from you in terms of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth, and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you: it can eat, drink, go dancing, go to the theater, it can appropriate art, learning, historical curiosities, political power, it can travel, it is capable of doing all those things for you; it can buy everything; it is genuine wealth, genuine ability. But for all that, it only likes to create itself, to buy itself, for after all everything else is its servant. And when I have the master I have the servant, and I have no need of his servant. So all passions and all activity are lost in greed.