The Beggar's Pawn

by John L'Heureux

  * * *

  —

  REGINALD WAS DELIGHTED with Claire’s emails. They struck just the right balance between friendship and love. They were trusting, detailed, and confessional. They indicated that she was discovering what he had always known: that the life of the artist is one of unremitting pain and effort, that you can’t expect to be loved and admired in this world, that the constant temptation to kill yourself must be—in most cases—resisted. Better to kill someone else. And thus they both placed blame where it belonged, on her father.

  Reginald wrote her a quick email and sent it on at once. Be brave, he said, and remember that only art is eternal. He had decided to put off telling her details of the proposed changes in his novel.

  PART THREE

  12.

  That was the year—2010—when the East Coast toasted in an untimely winter heat and the West Coast had its coldest summer ever. It was the year of the greatest oil disaster . . . so far. But more remarkable still, that was the year when anger, professionalized and politicized, turned into hate. There were threats to burn the Koran, there were pickets and rallies against building a Muslim cultural center near ground zero, there was conviction in the radical American heart that anger could make all things right, for anger was mighty and it was good. And it begins at home.

  Reginald’s family home was in Hillsborough, but he did not go there anymore. Everybody in Hillsborough—servants and laborers excepted—had money somewhere in their past. Their great houses clung to the side of hills where views were most expansive and the more visible signs of wealth were concealed behind a faux rustic exterior. This was old wealth, modest about public exposure. It was also wealth that in many cases, and in Reginald’s particularly, had been greatly depleted over time. What was left to the Parkers was barely enough to cover taxes and upkeep, pay a cook and a daily cleaner, and stable the two family horses now enjoying old age. But not enough for what they regarded as luxuries.

  Reginald’s grandmother and his mother were now the sole occupants of the house and together they ran the cook half-crazy with their constant quarrels and their contradictory orders. Life would have been impossible if not for the Scottish cleaning woman who showed up each morning eager and ready to administer her bracing tonic.

  “I see you’re picking up after yourself these days,” she said to the grandmother. “It’s a good habit to get into. I won’t work for careless people.” And to the daughter she said, “Easy on the sherry, missy. You’ll lose your looks.”

  Her unrelenting belligerence kept her employers in their place and brought a welcome peace to the household. She slammed through her cleaning tasks at double time and later, over coffee, she cheered on the harried cook with tales of other dysfunctional families she had brought to heel. “You have to know how to handle the quality, and the Parkers are no exception. They just need reminding now and then.” The grandmother, cowed and at the mercy of the cleaning woman, paid her well.

  They lived in a state of armed neutrality, with Reginald as the territory they fought over. The grandmother still had some personal money left and frequently mailed Reginald small checks. Despite his repeated failures, she held out hope for his familial success.

  His mother, who continued to go by her Junior League name of Boo, wore out her days steeped in Spanish sherry and dreamed of another life. A life without Reginald. She blamed him for being born illegitimate, since his handsome father would never have decamped and married someone else if she hadn’t been pregnant. She blamed him for ruining her looks, since his birth caused her to put on weight, and still more weight. She blamed him for being carefree and careless. But what turned her against him for good was his young cruelty. At age five he set their cat on fire and a year later he tried to burn down the garage. The fire was extinguished before it did much damage but later that summer, already advanced in crime, he tried to drown his best friend. Boo had no proof of the attempted drowning except the testimony of appalled club members—you could never trust club members—but she was sure he was guilty and promised herself she was done with him. She kept her promise as each new year brought further conviction that she was right.

  Boo indeed! She found consolation in her sherry and in her occasional performance as docent at the local museum. For physical consolation she enjoyed brief sexual encounters with the pool cleaner, the groundsman, and, when she was weak and he was willing, with the odd delivery man of any age or color. Most of her time she spent watching soap operas and waiting for her mother to die . . . with the reasonable expectation that the family money and property would come to her. In this she was mistaken, however, since on turning eighty her mother revised her will so that the property was left to the Hillsborough Green Society and the bulk of the money went to the rescue of neglected animals. At the urging of her lawyer she left a token hundred thousand to keep Boo in sherry and a niggardly one thousand to the Scots cleaning woman. She had not yet decided about leaving anything to her grandson.

  The grandmother’s disappointment in Reginald began when as a freshman at St. Paul’s he was expelled for smoking pot. The first offense was easily forgiven and so were the third and fourth, but when in his junior year he began dealing drugs, his grandmother gave him an ultimatum: stop or be cut off financially. He pretended to stop and by his senior year the pretense had been so well practiced that it became a reality . . . and he was further helped by his discovery that he had a talent for writing. He sailed through senior year, graduated with honors, and went off to Duke to become a responsible member of the Parker family. Grandmother sent monthly checks to remind him of those responsibilities.

  At first everything went well. He had drinking buddies and smoking buddies, all from good families like his own, and, with his funny hair and tiny eyes, he was inexplicably popular with the girls. In his second semester he discovered Joyce’s Ulysses and resolved to spend the rest of his life becoming the new Joyce and writing Ulysses, Part Two. But Duke was not interested in ambitious new fiction. Instead they made him write boring essays on set topics that elicited annoying comments like “Clarity, lack of” and “Misused language” and “Your point here?” Reginald dropped out of Duke and went home. But you can’t go home again, he discovered. Both his mother and grandmother complained about the smell of pot all through the house, the cleaning woman refused to go near his room, and Reginald decided to clear out. He rented a studio apartment in the Haight district of San Francisco, where he could smoke in peace while he practiced his exacting art. Money was a problem of course but on the day he was born his errant father had set up a trust for him so that when Reginald turned twenty-five he could collect a hundred dollars a week. His father then disappeared into a succession of bad marriages and was lost finally to alimony and alcohol. But he had done his bit and Reginald would have been grateful if only the trust had been larger and available immediately. Still, it was something to look forward to. In the meanwhile he panhandled and he clerked from time to time at Walgreens and became an expert at shoplifting. Eventually he turned twenty-five and got his money.

  His trust fund made life a bit easier. And so did the drugs. In time, however, the drugs got to be too much for him—cocaine regularly and the odd touch of heroin—and he began to give way to violent rages. These culminated one night in a complete blackout that followed a bloody fight with his sixteen-year-old drug dealer. There was a knife involved—neither of them was willing to claim it—and Reginald found himself accused of assault with intent to do bodily harm. He spent a week in jail before his grandmother’s lawyer got the charges reduced to a misdemeanor and, chastened at last, Reginald dragged himself off to a Buddhist monastery where he dried out and thought about his life and his talent. For a dizzy moment he considered becoming a Buddhist monk, but when he returned to his senses he recognized that he was—by birth and disposition—a novelist in the great Western tradition and he just couldn’t hack all that Eastern mysticism. Instead he began freeloading at Glide Memor
ial Church, where he picked up the Christian notion of your brother’s keeper—very serviceable for panhandling—and he began to talk about the Lord’s way and walking with Jesus. It was nonsense, but it appealed to the do-gooders who had access to cash and who enjoyed helping the needy. Reginald enjoyed the Lord’s way. At times all this born-again business made good sense. He would have enjoyed sitting back and relaxing into belief if he didn’t have to worry about getting a job and if believing weren’t so lonely. What he needed was to love someone, he was convinced, or to have someone love him . . . the way a mother and father would love him. Or better still, the right girl. All the girls he met were hookers or druggies or losers of one kind or another, so what was he supposed to do? Write? He was desperate.

  He decided to get serious about his career. He took an evening course in fiction writing at San Francisco State and resolved to write at least one page a day. He stayed off drugs . . . with only a little marijuana on the weekend. He was ready for intense work. But when he returned to Joyce and Ulysses and his great unwritten novel, he discovered he had outgrown his earlier ambitions. They sounded dull and conventional now. Never mind.

  He was off drugs and feeling good. In fact he was feeling lucky.

  He would write a new kind of novel, something that had never been done before, a novel in which time and eternity mate, a kind of fifth-dimension novel—black holes included—where the great issues of philosophy could be explored. He was ready for a new life. He looked for an apartment close to Stanford so that those keen practitioners of physics and philosophy would be at hand when he needed them. His luck held and he found a guest cottage owned by Professor Loring and his wife. His grandmother, relieved that he was off drugs and still sane, agreed to pay the rent.

  Over the next years there was not a lot of mingling with great minds but Reginald did meet Helen, a barista at the nearby Starbucks, and so great was her love for him and so overwhelming her belief in his genius that eventually he capitulated and let her move into his guest cottage. Maybe this is what came of walking in the way of the Lord. He thought he might give it a try. Helen’s adoration persisted and he began to imagine new possibilities for his own life. It was almost like falling in love. “I love you. I adore you,” she said, and he pressed her closer to him and whispered, “I know, I know.” When she got pregnant he saw in this a kind of guarantee that she was right for him. “I love you,” he told her, and he was astonished to find that he meant it. The idea of marriage crossed his mind but he put it aside as he had his temptation to be a Buddhist monk. It was enough that they were together and she believed he could—he would—become a great writer. And he would be a father as well. He took some coke to celebrate . . . and this would be the last time.

  The illegitimate Iris proved the final straw for Reginald’s mother and she cut him off altogether. Again. Reginald shrugged. He had a family at last, a wife and daughter who loved him and depended on him. He didn’t need Boo. He still had his trust fund—a weekly hundred wasn’t nothing—and good old Grandma kept on paying the rent, chiefly to spite her outraged daughter. So he would be able to get on with his novel, which was the important thing.

  At the time he met Maggie and David he had still not finished the novel. And not long after that meeting he gave up on it altogether. He began a new one, more elegant, more streamlined, more human. It goes without saying that character was still not an issue—character studies had died in the nineteenth century—but this time he would use character to explore philosophy. He put in his time at the computer, he wrote a few lines each day, he rewrote them tenderly. And he thought. It was all clear in his mind—a psychological thriller and a neo-epistemological detective story—and yet it didn’t seem to impress Claire or the Hollisses. That breathtaking book, so luminous and alive in his mind, somehow lost its luster and genius once he talked about it, and it seemed dead even to him once the words were written down. The novel was not going well.

  In fact nothing was going well for Reginald by the year 2010. The whole country, it seemed, was angry about something or other—the economy, health care, immigration, mosques, you name it—and Reginald was angry right along with them. Reginald’s anger, however, was rooted in personal experience: he was short on money.

  He resolved at once to borrow more money from the Hollisses.

  13.

  Reginald was convinced that David, despite his height and weight and the authority in his voice, was in fact the weaker of the two Hollisses. From all those years in the classroom David had become deft at fending off irrelevant or annoying questions and he could be plain rude as well, but Reginald was pretty sure he could handle him. A direct request to Maggie might bring on a direct refusal, but David would be a pushover. He’d be worried what people would think of him and so he’d temporize and then give in.

  He found them at the dog park. They were sitting together, young lovers, on a bench.

  “What’s up?” David said, a formality only.

  “Meditating my book,” Reginald said. “And my problems.”

  David showed elaborate interest in a Yorkie that was trying to involve Dickens in play. Dickens just wanted to be left alone.

  “Oh, your book. The metaphysical mystery,” Maggie said. “Petit à petit.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Little by little. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes time to write a book.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “No, I think saying it was a mistake the first time around.”

  So that ended that.

  “Actually, I have a question for David. A request, actually.”

  David’s face flushed red for a moment and then it went white. He continued to study the Yorkie.

  “Yes, I wonder if you would loan me three hundred dollars?” He waited in silence, resisting the temptation to offer a reason for the request or a promise of repayment, letting the silence do its work. He watched David’s face closely and could see him processing questions and objections and reasons to say no.

  Reginald waited.

  Maggie, grateful that this was David’s problem, said nothing.

  David was thinking of all the checks he’d written for his three kids and their hopeless problems. He made up his mind quickly.

  “Yes,” David said. “If you come back to the house with us, I’ll write you a check.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY GAVE DICKENS his dog treats and settled into the breakfast nook with a cup of coffee. David had written the check and Reginald had left the house and now they were unwinding. Neither of them wanted to mention the loan.

  “Poor Iris,” Maggie said.

  “Poor us,” David said. “How did we get into this mess in the first place?”

  “It was my fault. He saved Dickens’s life and I loaned him two hundred dollars.”

  “Right. That first loan.”

  She couldn’t let this go unchallenged. “And you gave him a picnic basket of champagne and stuff. Piper Heidsieck.”

  “Charles Heidsieck.”

  “And then we went to dinner at his place. Dear God, that dinner!”

  They thought about the dinner for a while.

  “Why did you loan him another three hundred? I thought we agreed that this last one would be the last one?”

  “He caught me off guard. I never expected a frontal attack. Would you have refused him?”

  “I’d have just given it to him with no loan agreement at all, just for the sake of Iris.”

  “Well next time that’s what I’ll do. I’ll say, ‘Here’s the money. It’s not a loan. You can pay us back . . . if that’s possible . . . or you can just keep the money, all the money, as a gift. But this is the final . . . thing.”

  “‘Thing’?”

  “Payment. Handout. Payoff. Bribe. What should I call it?”

  “The final money.”

 
; “That’s what I’ll say. You can pay us back if you choose to or you can just regard it as a gift, but whatever you decide, this is the absolutely final money.”

  “The final money. And if he asks me, I’ll tell him he has to ask you. So that we’re both in agreement.”

  “Is that settled?”

  “It’s settled,” Maggie said and finished her coffee.

  “So we’ve solved that problem, Dickens.”

  Dickens thumped his tail on the floor in response.

  * * *

  —

  REGINALD WROTE CLAIRE a lengthy email about the changes in his novel. He began diplomatically by acknowledging the justice of everything she had written about her father: his inadequacy, his self-interest, his insecurity.

  “It’s all true,” Reginald wrote. “I saw them in the park this morning, sitting on a bench like two lovebirds, and they looked so annoying that I asked him for three hundred dollars to get high.” He pondered this for a moment and decided that borrowing money for a Thanksgiving dinner at Chantilly might amuse her, but borrowing three hundred for pot and just a little hit of coke might not. So he deleted the whole email and started again.

  Chiara mia: Changes in my novel. I have opted for simplicity and have dropped the novelist who is writing about a novelist, etc. etc. who may have been the father of Jack the Ripper’s final victim. I’ve decided to take out several layers—no fifth dimension, no Jack the Ripper—and write about a biographer instead, a man like your father who is very distinguished but in his old age has undertaken a biography of Stephen Crane.

  Actually, Reginald had written Gissing rather than Crane, but he realized suddenly that there was rich material he could borrow from David’s second biography and he had immediately changed Gissing to Crane. It occurred to him then that he was in a sense borrowing David’s career as the subject of his novel, and why not? David was seventy-something and had no further need of it anyhow. Indeed, why not borrow his whole life? And if you’re borrowing his life, why not borrow his family? The entire horror show. His mind reeled for a moment and his head fell forward as if he had been assaulted from behind. His sight went all fuzzy. Here at last was inspiration, an idea so powerful it made his head spin. He found himself erect and covered with sweat. So this was the real thing. He was a writer at last.