Memoir From Antproof Case (29 page)

"In Manhattan?"

"Of course."

"Is he a shrink?"

"No. He's an internist."

"Who's your shrink?"

"I don't have one. Why would I have one?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"I think Freud overdid it," I said, "in that virtually everything he maintained was either patently obvious or patently ridiculous."

At this moment Constance swept into the room flanked by several extremely expensive lawyers. I knew that I was saved, but I didn't know from what. The detective stood almost at attention when he saw these people, figuring that I was either a billionaire, Truman's mad twin, or a space alien who had escaped from an Air Force interrogation center.

"How did you get like that?" Constance asked, embarrassed to see me, made up like a New Guinea headhunter, in the presence of the senior partner of Happy, Tricky, Devious, and Rich.

"Like what?"

"Look at yourself."

I looked at my hands, my feet, my legs: they seemed totally Brooks Brothers.

She pulled a compact from her purse and snapped it open the way you snap open the barrel of a revolver if you have to reload to save your life. She shoved the mirror toward my face. "Like that."

"Oh," I said when I saw my face. Then I looked at each person in the room, shifting my eyes in silence.

"What happened to you?" she screamed. An aristocrat, an activist by nature, she was never content to let anything pass without intervention or explanation.

"This is flour," I announced in a tone of surprised self-satisfaction.

"Flour?"

"Baking flour."

"How did it get on you?"

"I had a pizza."

"That must have been some pizza," the detective said.

"It was the best pizza," I answered, with fanatic intensity, "that I ever had, in all my life."

 

I have never been divorced from anyone other than Constance, so I do not know if all divorces feel the same, but, when someone you love wants to leave you, God gives you no quarter. It's like ending a chess game with just a king facing your opponent's two queens, two rooks, and rogue judo-esque knight.

Whenever I slept I dreamed that the whole world had come to resemble Gary, Indiana, at night, but instead of producing steel and rubber, the great mills and factories were roasting, grinding, and brewing. Flour-covered women dressed by the tailors of the Third Reich inhabited this nightmare, drinking five and six cups of coffee a day. It completely crowded out my dream of the surf. Worst of all, it had as its background the totally insane, wild, caffeinated pounding of the harpsichord, an instrument that would have driven the world out of its mind had it not been for the invention—with not a moment to spare—of the piano.

I would wake in terror, dripping with sweat, and turn to Constance, who, even in sleep, would turn away. It was finished. Then I would telephone Holmes to tell them to turn off the alarms, and I would go downstairs to the music room to play the piano.

The music room was sixty feet long by thirty feet wide, with a twenty-foot ceiling and special acoustical flooring of Mozambique Jerko wood. Eight sets of French doors opened onto a marble terrace that gave out to the lawn. Over the tops of trees blackened by night you could see skyscrapers shining through the moist summer air. I would open the doors and let the breeze make ballerinas and swans of the white curtains while I played Mozart and Beethoven until morning—perfectly balanced pieces that were as beautiful and hopeful as a mother singing to her child. They put everything in perspective, even if sadly, and it is because of them that I was able to go on.

I had eventually begged Constance not to leave me, but only after I had long held my emotions in check, hoping that an appearance of imperturbability would create in her enough desire and respect to raise a doubt. But she had no doubts, for the naturally shady and cool places of her temperament were kept always light and hot by her regular imbibition of coffee, which she took from a cart wheeled-in the first thing in the morning, in the middle of the morning, at lunch, at 'tea,' and after dinner. Five cups a day.... She was gone. There was no way I could reach her.

It made her hard, cruel, and ambitious. She thought ruthlessly; she shone like metal. She would go out dancing with other coffee drinkers and for hours they would move in a trance. "What's it like?" I asked later, like a mouse.

"It's like riding a bicycle on the beach road in East Hampton on a sun-filled day, without the appearance of a single car, picking up speed until you feel that your lungs, heart, and muscles are a perfect machine and you can breathe the air like a jet engine. The best thing is the sense that you can dance forever, that you don't weaken, that the more you exert yourself, the stronger you get. Why don't you come with us?" she asked with the cordiality of a stainless steel scalpel.

"I don't think I should," I said. "I'm only your husband."

"You won't be for long," she told me. "I don't understand you at all. You're a stronger and better dancer than any of the guys I go with."

"I couldn't drink the cup of coffee," I said.

"I know, but maybe it would work without coffee. Who knows. We could dance all night, and afterward...."

"Constance?"

"Yes?"

"Do you sleep with those coffee-drinking guys you go dancing with?"

"Do you think I drink decaf?"

This broke my heart.

When I was a child I went with my uncle to the exposition of power machinery in Baltimore, where I saw a steam engine that ran magically and rhythmically, never failing of enchantment. Its colorful rods and polished arms danced through the day in hypnotic ecstasy. Bright lights shone upon the perfectly timed steps, rotations, and exhalations. Kept in water and coal, the engine could go on forever with nothing but a shot of oil now and then. It ran all day, and it ran all night. Its power never slackened, and though it was bolted down and seemed not to go anywhere, I felt that it was churning a path through the stars.

Constance had metamorphosed into such a machine. I respected her power, but I shied from it, for she had traded her womanhood for a gambit that was sure to fail. After we separated, though I missed her at times with a great longing of the heart, I began to think of her as a kind of locomotive, and I no longer envied the coffee-drinking guys with whom she danced.

 

The divorce itself was not simple, involving as it did several hundred companies, shell corporations in the Alps, and scores of lawyers who dressed a lot better than I did. When we had married, Constance, in a gesture of faith, tied me to all her great wealth. Now, unable to resist the panic of her legal advisers, she girded her loins to get it back.

For the divorce she put aside Happy, Tricky and turned to a firm that had started as Wagstaff, Leper, and Balloon, and had evolved into Leper, Colony, and Fike, known in the trade as Leper, Colony. Even this was not as bad as Crooked, Bienstock, Midring, and Swine, referred to as Crooked, Swine: as in "My lawyers are Crooked, Swine." The human dental drills of Leper, Colony offered me five hundred million in settlement. They were so frightened that I would accept, thereby depriving them of untold billable hours of litigation, that they almost had heart attacks as I sat mulling it over.

"No," I said.

You could hear lawyerly hearts springing ahead like a pack of greyhounds. As I looked into their eyes I saw new clay tennis courts, summer houses in Nova Scotia, Maseratis.

They had prepared their fallback positions as carefully as the defenses of Iwo Jima, and they asked me for my bid. They certainly weren't about to counteroffer before they heard my demands.

"What I want," I said, "is for Constance to love me."

"Oh Christ!" they said, to a man. I knew it sounded rather weak. The senior partner took the lead.

"You're an investment banker?" he asked incredulously. "We're talking about two billion dollars here, man. Get serious. Don't think that you can smokescreen us with this hearts-and-flowers crap. We've been through a thousand of these, and we know exactly how people think."

"But it's true," I insisted. "All I want is for Constance to love me."

I suppose she had had a cup (or more) of coffee. She was unmoved. Her eyes were no more wet or glistening than a piece, of sandstone in the Sonoran Desert.

"What's your counter?"

"I don't have a counter. I don't want any money, or any thing."

"We'll offer you two hundred million, then, if we can close the matter right away."

"I don't want two hundred million."

"A hundred million?"

"I don't want money. I want my books and my clothes, the desk in my study, the Raphael that Constance gave me for my birthday, and a guarantee—in writing—that no one will ever kill Brownie."

"Who's Brownie?" Senior Partner asked.

"His pet pig," Constance told him, "in the country."

"Really?" said Senior Partner. "Is that all you want?"

I nodded.

"Why don't you take a hundred million just so I know that you can buy groceries?" Constance offered.

"I have a job, Constance."

"Jobs are nothing. You can lose them. Then what? You starve."

"I can get another job."

"As
what?
" she asked derisively. "You're an investment banker. That means you don't know how to do a goddamned thing but skim the top off money that real people make."

"Maybe I could get a job in a cheese factory," I said.

"Look," she declared, adjusting her new owllike hairdo. It was really sexy. It did something magnificent for her neck and shoulders, and it made her seem well considered, even-tempered, and wise. "I don't want to have to worry about running into you on the street begging for a nickel for a cup of coffee."

I raised my arms and smiled half-triumphantly.

"For vodka, then."

"I'd rather drink carbon tetrachloride."

"I worry. Do it for me."

"I can't".

"But I want you to. Everyone will know—
I'll
know—that you turned down half a billion dollars, that you could have fought for a full billion and more, and that I begged you to accept this pittance. No one will think that you're a kept man, or that you were. No one will ever think it, and no one ever did."

"I can't," I said, shaking my head. "The money's tainted."

"How so?" she asked pugnaciously, prepared to defend the legitimacy of her fortune against charges of slave-trading, bonded labor, monopolistic behavior, exploitation of unorganized workers, capital formation before the income tax, and half a hundred other accusations that attach to masses of money as naturally as moss to the dark side of a rain barrel.

"By coffee."

"You mean that, just because I drink coffee, my money's no good?"

"Correct," I said. "I don't want coffee dollars. I'd rather starve. One of the inalienable provisions of the Constitution of the United States is the right not to be forced to see other people drinking coffee. You can't buy that from me. No amount of money can draw from me the honor and freedom of my birthright. No bribe can deflect my resolution. No sinecure can lap at my purity."

This declaration did a great deal for the lawns of Westchester and Long Island, which would continue to soak up the sun undisturbed by bulldozers and fence builders, it helped keep the meadows of Nova Scotia In their windy and original isolation, and it humbled the luxury automobile industry in Italy.

The very last time I saw Constance, she was gliding over a marble floor on her way to a wood-paneled elevator. She didn't know I was watching, or perhaps she did. For about a minute she stared at the elevator indicator, a circle of white glass that glowed like the moon. I knew that if I had said, "I love you, Constance," all the lawyers around her in their expensive suits would have laughed. And, yet, it was true. It was the truest thing I knew. It should have had the power to reverse our late and sad history. I felt deeply that it could have, that it should have. But it didn't.

Sometimes love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing, and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road.

(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)

 

I
CANNOT TALK
to my wife, because she is only fifty years of age and still imagines that the body can be the fortress of happiness. She exercises, she rubs expensive concoctions on her face, and uses the mirror like a detective peering at a suspect in an interrogation room. Her misconstruction of English, once so charming, has become (as she might say), a 'mushroom,' a 'night mail.' "Who you think I am? I old now, like you. Okay, I not menistruate, you not menistruate either. I automon in bank, but what you?" In answering her own question, something that she likes to do, she tried to demean my efficacity, and she called it 'efacity.' I shook my head, and she said, 'F-assity?' I shook my head again, and she said 'F-icassy?' I shook my head once more, and she said, 'F-ississy?' I had begun to lose hope, but when she said, 'F-ick-acky,' I despaired, having forgotten how to say the word myself.

Did you know that the president of the United States sits at the
Oval Desk
f Perhaps there he watches the
Annapolis 500,
while he worries about the
Ras Tufarians
in
Ha-Mocha,
whether American
aircat
carriers have enough
lifety
rafts, or if the
Plebs
at
Vest Pint
are reading
Ponmoy's Complaint,
sympathize with the
Dentistas
in Nicaragua, would rather have gone to
Bedouin
College in Maine, or will vacation in
Yoseminite
park—every other goddamned word.

I'm old enough to remember vaudeville but I never imagined that I would marry it. When I was young I assumed I would be coupled with a woman who spoke like a poet, but I will end my days with Marlise, a woman for whom it would be a great leap forward to talk like one of Xavier Cougat's girlfriends. Besides, she's having an affair with a German salesman. The whole country is sex-crazed—even middle-aged women, especially middle-aged women.