The Devil Tree

by Jerzy Kosiński

  So says Karl Marx.

  Have I reached a spiritual stalemate? Am I estranged from life? Do I, even with my income, need to work, just like the masses who commute daily on the subway or drive their cars for hours to and from grueling eight-hour jobs? Or am I to enter into competition with the captains of industry, who still work at increasing their power and wealth?

  Why should I? My capital, invested and reinvested by my brokers, increases on its own so fast that nothing I could do would possibly add appreciably to it.

  And finally, why should I feel ill at ease about enjoying the wealth that came to me legitimately, that originated in the hard work of hundreds of thousands of people and now benefits thousands of other people who, thanks to it, are employed and productive? Why should I lead a miser’s existence on a millionaire’s income?

  Had I had a talent, it would define me as writer, composer, painter, or sculptor and carve out a place for me in society. But talent is one commodity that even I cannot buy. My only recourse, then, is finding a spontaneous, natural activity that will allow me to know myself and others—and do harm to no one.

  Well, I’ve found one.

  The immediate, natural, necessary relation of human being to human being is the relationship of man to woman. . .. Therefore, this relationship reveals in a sensuous form, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature for man or nature has become the human essence.

  I could have written it, but I did not. Karl Marx did.

  • • •

  Karen speaks fondly of Amsterdam and loves her modeling assignments there. She says it is an ultimately civilized city, where she doesn’t have to make many adjustments, where almost everyone speaks English, and where nobody cares if she sleeps with a man, a woman, or both at the same time. True Protestants at heart, the Dutch relegated sex to the realm of either a marital duty or a tourist diversion, saw it as just one of life’s many surfaces, and by doing so effectively dismissed any power it might have as a threatening obsession.

  Karen’s response to Susan is much the same: Susan is familiar, undemanding, easy, and—with Karen—acts spontaneously. They respond to each other’s needs, even when those needs are inconvenient or come at inconvenient times. Yet, I suspect, even with Susan, Karen does not reveal everything, and if at times they’re lovers, Karen remains sexually ambiguous—and uncommitted.

  • • •

  In spite of the libidinous poses Karen strikes in her ads and fashion photographs, her obsessive sexuality does not find expression in her letters to me, even in the poems she occasionally writes. For all of her sexual experimentation with men, women, and couples, and her spontaneous—though often pot-induced—bed-hopping, I suspect that with me she is still sexually mute, unable to give voice to her many urges. I suggested to her that she might consider writing intimate letters to me in the third person, just as in her modeling she is often asked to portray someone else. This would give her the freedom to have her desires and thoughts, however outlandish and incriminating, attributed to her protagonist, a freedom enjoyed by storytellers and novelists down through the centuries. The idea had never occurred to her.

  • • •

  After having lunch with two of my former trustees, I went back to my hotel and began to telephone some friends whose names and numbers I found in my old address book, but I couldn’t reach any of them. Everyone must have moved while I was away. Just as well. Unlike Karen, who likes to hang on the phone for hours, I hate it. Talking on the phone is yet another substitute for real intimacy; a bit like looking at someone’s picture instead of being with the real person. When I called Karen I got no answer, so after a few drinks I called again. This time she answered. She sounded somewhat drunk, and I could hear Susan’s voice in the background. Karen giggled and chattered, and imagining her and Susan making love, I started to masturbate but couldn’t come. I took a Somaphren, dozed off, and awoke in the middle of the night, wanting to be with someone—anyone. I thought of inviting the hall porter for a drink, then of calling the 2001 for a girl, but, feeling groggy, I wasn’t certain whether I was in the mood for either one. Through it all, an inquisitive voice kept saying: What if this is insanity? What happens next? What if only I know of my condition while others continue to assume I am normal and healthy? If whatever I think is distorted by my illness, how can I, a mentally ill person, help myself?

  I took some more Somaphrens, fell asleep again, and dreamed of my mother. I saw her alone, having one of her attacks, scurrying from one corner of her bedroom to another, searching like a panicky thief for the drugs that she had hidden from her nurse. She was looking under the bedside tablecloth, in her bed, inside the drapes, among the books and magazines. Before the nurse appeared, my mother had swallowed several pills. Then, telling the nurse that she wanted to pick out a book, she ran downstairs to the bar next to the library and gulped from a half-empty Scotch bottle. She rushed back upstairs, turned on the TV, and went to bed. As the drugs and alcohol stifled her anguish, she drifted into sleep under the watchful eye of the nurse.

  There was no feeling of the presence of death at my father’s funeral. Instead, there were speeches, banks of flowers, long lines of cars with their headlights on, photographers, television cameras, crowds of people standing under black umbrellas in the rain, and a police helicopter hovering discreetly above the cemetery. That was all. I never saw my father’s corpse. I would like to make up for that now by imagining my mother’s death.

  • • •

  When I am depressed, doubt infects my emotions and despair corrodes my intellect. Unlike my natural drives for sex, sleep, and food, my depression arises from my failure to arm myself morally, spiritually, and philosophically against such doubt and despair. I could as easily have done something else yesterday afternoon, but in order to dull my mind I chose to be depressed, that is, to enact again a familiar ritual. Reenacting ritual in this way makes me feel as though I were in control of my depression rather than the other way around: the ritual makes the depression seem premeditated, and its mood, however painful, almost calculated and predictable.

  • • •

  Karen and I went to the Manhattan Transfer Theater on Broadway to see the recent theatrical adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier. During the intermission, many theatergoers recognized Karen. Men and women, old and young, in everything from evening clothes to work shirts and jeans, came up to her, complimenting her on “being herself,” on “looking great in that jeans commercial,” or telling her, “I saw your picture on TV, didn’t I?” “You are someone famous, aren’t you?” “You’re the best-looking American girl ever.” These well-meaning people treated Karen as if she were a stage or screen actress and as if her good looks were the result of a rare dramatic talent that she had developed through her own hard work.

  Predictably, men were Karen’s most eager fans. Seductively looking into her eyes, one after another they came to pay her tribute, murmuring, whining, or whispering such profundities as “You’re even more beautiful than your TV commercials”; “You are every man’s dream come true”; “After seeing you I’ll hate my girl friend”; “You’re too beautiful to be real”; “Can I kill somebody for you?” While Karen accepted their tributes with grace and charm and a made-to-order, sincerely offered “Thank you so much,” I found myself becoming irritated and jealous. Didn’t these hillbillies of American seduction, these delicatessen Lotharios realize that, if indeed Karen was as great as they thought, she would most certainly by now have picked out the man of her choice? Or several men? And what about me? Who did they think I was? What did they think I was doing sitting there beside her with her hand in my lap?

  I read in the program that Theodore Dreiser, in A Book about Myself admitted that he had settled in New York to become rich and famous. In New York, he said, “everything was in the making: fortunes, art, social and commercial life. The most impressive things were its rich men, their houses, factories, clubs, office buildings, an
d institutions of commerce and pleasure.” According to critics and scholars, the character of Frank Cowperwood, the protagonist of The Financier, was based on the life of Charles Yerkes, the American streetcar baron and Dreiser’s contemporary. Yerkes was suave, handsome, a scholar and sybarite who was an art collector as well as a lover of some of the most glamorous women of his day. Dreiser, who desired notoriety, comfort, and personal freedom, found Yerkes’s image appealing. Like Yerkes, Dreiser was a sexual adventurer; at one time in his middle age he maintained a liaison with a girl of seventeen. Moreover, Dreiser realized that he and Yerkes were both social inventors who designed large schemes for others to follow—Yerkes in finance and industry, Dreiser in his novels.

  In his Maxims of Happiness, Charles Yerkes had a few things to say about acquiring wealth, among them: “Wealth does not buy happiness; it buys luxuries” and “It is love of wealth that can never be gained that makes men unhappy and often drives them to wrongdoing. We cannot all be millionaires.” Even Charles Yerkes had no advice to give, however, to those of us who were born millionaires.

  As I read about Dreiser’s life and his fascination with money, power, and Charles Yerkes, whose life he used as a model for all three novels of his “trilogy of desire,” I wondered whether, had Theodore Dreiser ever married my widowed mother, he would have been able to present the true, convincing, and dramatic portrait of one Jonathan James Whalen, his millionaire stepson.

  • • •

  Later Karen and I had a meal at the Babbitt, the fancy new Arab supper club, where tuxedo-clad, foreign-mannered, money-scented smoothies tried their number on her, smiling and whispering compliments as we passed by them. Even after we sat down at our table, they still kept staring at her.

  One of them was particularly persistent. He was unnaturally obese; layers of fat swelled his cheeks and chin, rolled round his neck, fell like a mantle over his shoulders and arms. He was seated at the head of a table where four or five couples—I gathered by their toasts—were celebrating his birthday. Yet from the moment this glutton saw Karen, he became almost as transfixed by her as he was by his food. He dropped his gaze only when occupied with another large piece of meat, more potatoes, a helping of salad, a slice of cheese, and a large portion of the birthday cake—all of which he swallowed with unending greed.

  I summoned the maitre d’, and discreetly pointing out the glutton, I ordered the restaurant’s richest chocolate cake and asked the maitre d’ to send it to his table and put it on my bill. Within minutes the waiter delivered the cake, indicating that it was a gift from me. Accustomed to my little pranks, Karen was amused.

  The glutton was enchanted. As his table companions turned to look at me, the anonymous benefactor, the glutton waved his thanks. Delighted with a new opportunity to indulge, he began to devour great chunks of the cake while his friends and Karen watched.

  When he had finished the last bite, the glutton heaved himself from his chair and steered his huge trunk through the dining room to our table. “That was mighty gracious of you and your sweet lady,” he said to me, his eyes on Karen. “Mighty gracious.” Then, turning toward Karen, his great belly almost hiding her from my view, he said, “I sure could eat up your sweet little lady here, just like I ate that cake!”

  I patted him on his shoulder. “You still haven’t asked me why I sent you the cake,” I said, all charm.

  The glutton turned toward me. “Why did you?” he asked, puzzled.

  “A scourge of folly,” I said. “I knew you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too.” I smiled at him sweetly and added, “Then, too, there was the tempting chance that one more mouthful of food would kill you—right in front of me and my sweet little lady!”

  • • •

  When I was a boy, my father used to drive me through the countryside on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. While he worked the clutch of the car, I was allowed to sit next to him and work the gearshift. One afternoon we passed two men in hunting caps and leather jackets running along the highway with rifles in their hands. When we heard shots, my father stopped the car, and soon the hunters appeared, dragging a dead deer. Although I was fascinated by the thought of hunting down an animal so well equipped that it could outrun and outsmart a man, my father was horrified by what we saw. By giving in to the base pleasure of killing creatures so much weaker than themselves, he said, men turned into spiritual Nazis, who could eventually lose respect for even the lives of humans they considered inferior.

  • • •

  I told Karen that whenever I make love to a woman who is menstruating, the sight of her blood and the pungent, natural vaginal scent make me sexually more active, almost aggressive, which might be an atavistic throwback.

  I once went to bed with a girl who, even though she was suffering from a yeast infection, was unwilling to cure herself with drugs or medicated douches because she believed they would irrevocably alter her body’s natural functions. We were both naked, kissing and caressing, but her fetid odor made me unable to get excited. The girl began to worry about my failure to have an erection, and instead of pretending I had a headache or some such thing, I told her the truth and suggested that she douche or insert a scented suppository. The girl then accused me of being insensitive and of treating her like a whore. Further argument was pointless, so we parted enemies.

  “I love to have my period,” Karen announced. “The steady pull of blood makes me feel like nature’s donor. I hate birth control pills because they reduce my flow. I prefer to play Vatican roulette—the calendar rhythm method.

  “No healthy being should prefer the flavor and taste of synthetics—raspberry, jasmine, orange blossom, or champagne douches to the piquancy of the body’s own secretions.” Mustering her arguments, she paused, then continued. “They force us to take the pill, to insert IUDs, to douche, to depilate our bodies, to be manicured and pedicured and cured of smells they don’t like. They might succeed in penetrating our brains as well as our vaginas—but they will never understand our biology.” She did not say who “they” were, but she succeeded in reminding me that as a man I am forever prevented from comprehending what makes a woman a woman.

  • • •

  I showed Karen some men’s magazines and tabloids filled with sex-for-a-fee ads, most of which contained seminude or nude photographs of beautiful, shapely young women along with phone numbers. The ads read: “Sandra, an actress between engagements, will engage you in her act.” “Norma has a touch of class. Enjoy the class of her touch.” “Her father hates Georgina for what she’s doing. You’ll love her for it.” “Rona, her master’s toy; spank me, whip me, tie me up.” “I’m eighteen, tall, deep-throated, plenty of tits, ass, and legs for you to play with. Come to me and I’ll make you come. Yours, Bettina.” “Yolanda—angelic beauty, beastly lust. Purity you’ll like to soil.” “Paying for your girl friend when going out? Why not pay me, the dream girl you can go in with?” “I’m Tara. You saw me in fancy fashion ads—fancy loving me, any fashion.”

  “It’s so much easier for a man to ask for, and get, the sex he wants,” said Karen in response to this display of flesh for sale. “You can call any of these women up, treat her like a lady, pay her to enact your fantasy for you, and afterward feel no remorse. Fucking a whore has been a man’s right for centuries. But if I were to hire a gigolo for a night, I would feel like a defenseless junkie entertaining an escaped convict.”

  She began to reminisce. When she was a six-year-old playing with other kids, she said, she began to seek sexual pleasure by rubbing herself against the pole of a slide or by pressing her body against the rough canvas of the porch hammock. Her masturbation was instinctive from the start; she never had to be taught how to please herself, and as her sexual needs increased, she discovered that by prolonging self-stimulation she could conjure up sexually exciting images of herself with others and finally reach a climax that broke her tension and calmed her down.

  “As a young girl, making love with you, Jonathan,” Karen said, “I ha
d already discovered that if you were quick and violent and deep inside me, I would come only once, as fast as you, breathlessly and disheveled, but from the very depth of me. By myself, or with a man—or woman—bent on foreplay and kissing, I can climax on and off for hours, but I never lose control of myself.” She paused. “I’ve been conditioned to take my pleasure only from pleasing others. When a man asks me how he can make it good for me, what I want him to do to me, or how I see him in my fantasy, I get a mental cramp and can’t tell him. After all these years, I’m still not brave enough or abandoned enough to use a man for my pleasure, or even to satisfy myself as he watches—one of my biggest turn-ons in fantasy. To please a man, I usually fake my orgasm, and while I may be repulsed by my own cowardice, I despise him more for abetting my fakery.”

  • • •

  Recently Susan was out of town, and Karen went to a movie with a married couple she knew casually. Afterward she invited them to her apartment for a drink.

  Left alone with Karen for a moment, the wife, a shy, stolid woman with a willowy figure, innocently confided to Karen that her marriage was threatened: her husband had told her that he slept with other women during his business trips away from home and that on occasion he went alone or with a woman to swinging clubs.

  Over drinks the husband, a jovial, well-built man, jokingly made passes at both Karen and his wife. Then he asked Karen whether he and his wife could make love in one of the bedrooms, and Karen coolly offered them Susan’s room. When Karen was about to leave them there, the wife gently embraced her, saying, “Stay with us. We’re free-minded.” Karen hesitated. “Yes, please, join us,” said the husband, seconding the wife. “You don’t have to do anything; we don’t mind being watched.” Curious to know her own reaction to being in bed with people she hardly knew, Karen consented. They all undressed and a bit clumsily crawled into Susan’s double bed. The couple started to fondle each other, and then Karen became aroused by the sight of the wife being forcefully taken by her husband. When, from under her husband’s bulk, the wife reached out her hand, searching first for Karen’s breasts, then sliding down, Karen gave in to her own need and kissed the woman on the mouth, then on the nipples and belly, then forced herself between the man and the woman. Encouraged by his wife and Karen’s excitement, the husband started to stroke Karen’s thigh; then, with her quiet consent, gently impaled her, then alternated in his thrusting between Karen and his wife as the two women lay absorbed in him and each other. All through the night the initiative seemed to spring from the wife, and eventually Karen became aware that the woman had a marital plot: by bringing about Karen’s seduction, she sought to become a necessary partner to her husband’s need.