Whatever Lola Wants (14 page)

Should he be studying too? Improve his German to continue the work he'd started in Freiburg? Didn't feel right. How about getting a job? But they were eking their way through on Theresa's handsome scholarship. Studying what? “Think it through, Milton. What do you care most about?”

“You.”

She nuzzled his cheek. “You can't study me.”

“I could. I will, all my life.”

How could he have known this, already then? Ha! Another thrust and she had the little clinker out to her zone one, footwork easier here, didn't have to watch her back. Now! Accelerate and hit! There, a fast riposte— Yeah, got him back to his zone one! His parry, not enough, and she knew the strategy was working. She felt her forehead being wiped. Sweating that much? Bad form to sweat with foil in hand. Was the clinker studying her? No, that was Milton.

“What else, Milton? What means the most to you?”

“Probably,” he said, “the Grange.”

“You can't study the Grange. What about the Grange?”

“You know, making sure it works okay. Better than okay. As perfectly as possible.”

“Works? Makes money?”

“Enough to support those who work it.”

“You need to firm up your plans to study agriculture. Simple as that.”

His brow furrowed. “All agriculture?”

“Some. What you do or what you could do at the Grange. To make enough out of it to make sure it lives on.” Yes! There on the clinker's face, the same furrow. His father's son.

“Something like agricultural economics?”

“Something like that.”

He researched agricultural schools across New England and chose the University of New Hampshire. Was accepted, a two-year diploma at the Ag School, microeconomic analysis his area of specialization. He borrowed money from his father and from the government.

They left Cambridge: Milton degree in hand, Theresa with a thesis yet to write, a lectureship till she defended her thesis, then an assistant professorship. They spent the summer at the Grange, Milton applying his lessons, Theresa writing morning to night, then revising morning to night, handing in the tome before leaving for Princeton. A degree in philosophy from Harvard in thirty-six months? Not possible. But she'd done it. Victory!

A lunge and she had the clinker on the run, into his own zone two. Triumph at hand! Again she felt the cloth on her forehead and from the distance …push, push …what the hell did they think she was doing? Course she was pushing, pushing till he was out, out back-end of his own zone three. Thrust! Cut! Push! Nurse! Nurse …

Like she'd tried to thrust at Princeton, against the reactionary faculty, the reactionary national government, the Johnson massacres, Nixon's crimes, the desecration they were bringing to southeast Asia, 1966 to 1969, bad years. And Milton, concerned for her, not loving southern New Jersey, the bad office jobs he found where he couldn't bring his degree to bear. What Milton needed were the fields and woods of the Grange.

“Why not,” said Theresa, and wrote to a colleague-friend who taught at the University of Vermont. “If we're going to live rural, might as well be in a place we both adore.”

Milton shook his head. “You'd give up Princeton University for a small state school?”

“Moral philosophy is needed everywhere,” said Theresa.

Even here in the birthing canal, here too. One moral push. One physical thrust. Again— Okay, clinker, nowhere else to hide. One last thrust, yes, she had him: touché, and out. Victory!

Karl Magnussen. Nine pounds, three ounces. The recalcitrant son.

•

“A big kid,” said Lola.

“Still is,” I said.

“And she's one tough dame. How'd she get to be so—so in control of herself?”

“I don't know more than what I've told you.”

“I wonder,” she said.

“What?”

She shook her head.

Three

1. (1976)

At Cochan Pharmaceuticals, Joe Cochan's
realm of medications and sedatives, it was a given that pain and sadness could be ameliorated with a prescription for capsules or syrups or tablets, creams or drips or suppositories. Joe was a chemist, son of Nicolas Cochan, the Montreal founder of CochPharm Inc., which had more than survived the Depression, expanded, and provided jobs in the worst of times. In 1939 when young Joe graduated from Harvard, he started CochPharm
US
down in a converted Cambridge warehouse. The times were right for quick growth, Canada in a grand war and the
US
sure to follow. Wars use up drugs like fires burn logs. The war came, profits soared; the war ended, profits rose higher.

Nicolas Cochan died in 1960, and by 1971 Joe Cochan loomed tall at the helm of his life's work, CochPharm now North America's fourth largest pharmaceutical company. On both sides of the border he commanded imaginative speculation, success-driven research, nimble testing, saturation publicity, brisk sales. Life had given him wealth, influence, and power; a stunning and shrewd new mistress; and Johnnie, the cleverest of sons, image of his father except for black ponytail hair and a curly-wire beard. The only fly in this aspic was Beth, alcoholic wife beyond despair. Unable to live with the booze. Or without it.

In 1976, on Johnnie's twenty-first birthday, two days after the young man's graduation from Harvard College, a Rhodes Scholarship in his pocket, acceptance at
MIT
on his return from England, Johnnie stared at the symbolic keys to the Alfa awaiting his arrival in London, breathed deeply, and handed the key-ring back to Joe. “No, thanks.”

“No?”

Johnnie shook his head.

“What do you mean, no?”

Johnnie chortled. “My vats.”

“Vats?” Joe, feigning ignorance, knew John's vats well. Elm Spender, his security chief, had discovered why for certain nights John was not to be found. In a small rented warehouse beyond the ring road, often from dusk to dawn, John blended, baked, dehydrated, encapsuled: John Cochan provided paths to an alternative world, elixirs and acids, winding roadways all, leading to pure hallucinogenic understanding.

“Come on, we both know Elm's not holding out on you. Vats.”

Joe began quietly. “Opiates, John.”

Johnnie repeated a pun he liked: “Solutions, Pop.”

“I will not allow it.”

“You could stop me. You won't.”

True. Because Johnnie would come back. Buy the boy off? But what didn't Johnnie already have? He'd hoped the scholarship and departure for England would close down the vats. Joe felt the rise of his bile and a new ache in his heart. “Why something this—this—this illegal? Not to mention wicked.” Johnnie must not continue down Beth's path.

Johnnie shook his head, weary of his father's corporate rigidity, furious with a father who had destroyed his mother—she'd been committed for the final time just weeks after he started college. “To open people's minds is why.” He sighed. “To scrape the rust and rancor from human imagination.”

“With poison! With—”

“With a communal acid-soaked wafer, Pop. With love, and trust. Without anxiety.”

“Dropping away—”

“Out. The expression is dropping out.”

For twenty months
Johnnie, with lovely Carmen from Wellesley at his side, provided his contemporaries with the means for confronting their fathers' world: aim high, shoot it down, watch it bleed gorgeous color. Over that time the son and his father spoke twice. The first time Johnnie cursed the man up and through, Mom's brain rotten with booze and the man not helping her, each year a new whore! Despite his occasional fear of Beth, his despair for her, Johnnie adored his mother but in the last years she didn't know what she was thinking, saying, doing; didn't know the good of her life, nor the bad. Johnnie Cochan believed he brewed hallucinogens in honor of his mother's grief. He needed to understand why she so hated his father, loved her son, why she'd taken herself into a realm hidden so deep in the dark. He would explore that place stoned, a geography peopled with perverse friends who played with him for hours, days, just as when he was a laughing boy. But in his land of narcotic relief he could locate his dear mother nowhere, nor rescue her.

•

Lola looked unhappy, or maybe just aggrieved. I stopped. “Something wrong?”

She shook her head a little, as if her concerns were of no importance.

“Come on. Tell me.” Nothing more from her. “Okay. Should I go on?”

She turned to face me, and narrowed her eyes. “She loved her son? His dear mother? What is this? I thought she tortured him, I thought he hated her.”

I considered this. “Yes, I think that's true.”

“Which?”

“Both.”

“Ted—”

“I'd guess— He hated her, yes, but she was his mother so he loved her. He hated her, and she began disappearing on him, fading out of his life, so maybe he had to love her. And he had to save her, so she'd know he loved her.”

Lola thought about that. “Are you making him think like that just for me?”

“For you?” I didn't understand. “What?”

“I said I didn't like him much. You're making him sound—well, weird.”

In a way I was flattered but also saddened that she thought I could modify John Cochan just for her. “No. What I'm telling you is history, as true as I can see it. Over those years Cochan began to develop a complex style, in fact an altogether more complicated way of thinking. Though then he could still switch it off and on. Like when he wrote his thesis.”

“So how you described him, that was really John Cochan.”

“As far as I can get it.” I glanced again at the down below, as if to underline my words.

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

Then and there I decided to abbreviate. Well, a little.

•

The second time
Johnnie and his father spoke it was in person, a year after their last meeting. Joe again begged Johnnie to leave the vats behind. Johnnie told the man to fuck off and continued to brew and sell the best of stuff, all the while filtering it through his own complex brain as well.

Carmen used it too, acid to acid, trip to trope. At every waking, down into the twirling colors; each evening, way out to the far-off fire. All the mornings through the silvery shades, at every dusk aching for warm, warm. Each dawn riding toward a grayless sun, all the night long frozen to silence. Until one March day, grim high noon, halfway across a bridge over the Charles, she let go, dropped down, and the river took her. Down there maybe—and Johnnie craved this for her from the huge tight center of his grief—she was sunned by glowing water and cooled by the sand.

A week later, early in the night, he stood on the same bridge, his eyes following ice chips on their seaward flow. They'd buried Carmen's body but he could nearly see her just under the surface. He straddled the stone banister. He could join her, real easy. He hadn't used his powders, not tonight, not for the last six nights. The night twinkled slowly, half a dozen smogged stars and a mild moon. He pulled his feet up on both sides and lay flat on the narrow ledge. He rolled toward the sidewalk. Toward the river water. Toward the dry side. He lay still. Then he dropped to the sidewalk, walked to the Business School shore, found his old Pontiac, drove home.

In the morning he called his father and invited him for lunch tomorrow. Joe, uncomprehending, refused. John said, “It's okay, Pop, you can pay for the meal.”

Joe, still uncertain, didn't recognize Johnnie. At a table by the window a young man stood up and signalled: clean-shaven, black hair parted in the middle, tweed jacket, no tie. Displays of emotion were foreign to Joe but that day the man came as close as ever to embracing the boy.

They talked. Joe slid between joy and doubt. Yes, it seemed Johnnie was serious: no more truck with drugs. “And what will you do, John?”

Go back to school, get the degree. Even better, at Joe's alma mater. Joe was ecstatic.

There along the Charles River John Cochan began a plan to bring his mother back to sanity: sell CochPharm because it, the board, his father, had forbidden her the life she'd yearned for. Jump ahead to the far side of the sale, and there she'd stand, tall and straight, fully human once again.

But it wasn't to be. She had long before drunk those three, five, sixty, two thousand last bottles. She might die with the company still unsold.

But in ridding the family of pharmaceutical contamination he would acquit himself to the sainted Beth Cochan. He built a strategy, one day to become the bedrock of Intraterra's multiple projects, and wrote out its theoretical foundations. It was possessed, unlike John's later style, of an easy elegance: ever more human beings alive in the world, four billion as the chapters poured onto paper, five a decade hence, by the new millennium well over six. Among the self-invented, caste-select wealthy, a great demand for elegant places to live, work, think, and play. Population increase is growth, growth generates wealth, wealth must play and be domiciled, playground and residential construction yields yet greater wealth. Those of negligible means, fiscal or intellectual, were of no concern to John.

Who to provide these environs but the men of development? And, what with John Cochan an incipient equal opportunity developer and feminist-to-be, the women of development too, of whatever race or color: clever ethnicity and astute gender, proudly at the forefront of progress. In three months of writing, a dissertation was wrought to excite the hearts of bankers and builders, the sons of Nobel and the daughters of Deere, stone masons, carpenters and welders, yuppies and dinks. It was a thesis honored with a Summa Cum Laude, a degree showered with offers of starting salaries near to six figures, a graduate whose future, however forged, would be gilded with success.

The great sadness of those years: during Johnnie's third semester his mother did die. A strong woman, difficult at times but, all in all, he'd loved her deeply. So ironic, had she just been allowed those experiments, expanded her research into marijuana the pain-reducer, she'd never have turned to her vodka bottle, gin bottle, whisky bottle; so indiscriminate, his mother.