“She picked a life with you before.”
“But that was before she had a chance like this one. Look. I know it’s not just his money she’s after—she’s not interested in Cadillacs or castles on the Rhine—it’s what his money can do for her.”
“Like what?”
Tom closed his eyes. “When we were young, we both had these ideals. I was going to start a free clinic. Clarissa was going to be a star and give lots of benefit concerts for the poor. All very liberal and altruistic. Except it didn’t happen that way, for either of us; we’ve had to struggle just to keep our heads above water. But we’ve been working it out, at least I thought we were. Lowering our sights, coming to grips with what and who we are. It’s been bumpy—Clarissa is afraid her voice will go before she gets her best work on record, and then there’s the age-old problem of what to do with me. But we were okay, or so I thought, because our marriage was the most important thing in our lives. But now it’s not. Not for her, at least. How could it be, for her to hurt me this way?”
“What does Clarissa say about it?”
“She says she doesn’t know what she wants anymore, she only knows she needs to find out who she is.”
“A lot of women her age feel like that these days.”
“But that’s the point. Sands won’t let her find herself; he’ll gobble her up before she has time to look. Or worse, convince her that what she’s looking for is him.” Tom swallowed and almost choked. “I thought she already knew who she was, you know? I thought she was my wife.”
Tom fought for self-control as I searched for some consolation to send his way. “She’s not asking for a divorce, is she? She’s just saying she’s not sure.”
Tom shrugged. “And in the meantime, Sands is hitting her with everything he’s got. He’s says he’s tired of the rat race, wants to establish a foundation that will fund a medical center for homeless people and—here’s a nice touch—that I can be the chief of emergency services, or some sort of consultant if regulations say the chief has to be an M.D.”
I couldn’t help smiling at the man’s gall, and Tom couldn’t help being incensed by it.
“The guy is telling Clarissa she’s more important to him than anything he has, which the last I read came to almost fifty million.” He rubbed his face so hard I thought he was going to draw blood. “You’ve got to help me put a stop to it, Marsh.”
I sighed and shook my head. “You ever see the movie Roger and Me?”
Tom shook his head.
“It’s a documentary by a guy named Moore. He—”
Tom scowled, angry at me for the first time ever. “I’m not in the mood to talk movies, for God’s sake.”
I persevered. “This guy Moore set out to talk to Roger Smith, the president of General Motors, about why GM was shutting down the auto-assembly plants in Flint, Michigan, and destroying the town. The movie was about all the tricks Moore came up with to get to talk to Smith.”
“So how did he manage it?”
“He didn’t. And I’d have about as much luck getting to see Richard Sands as Moore did getting to see the head of GM. Besides, I don’t think Sands is your problem; I think Clarissa’s your problem.”
He shook his head. “She can’t help what she’s doing. He’s hypnotized her.”
“But if he’s really in love with her, there’s no way you or I or anyone can stop him. I mean, it’s not like you can buy him off. I don’t know what I could do to help, even if I wanted to.”
Tom looked at me bleakly. “Scare him, maybe? Threaten to sue?”
“I already told you, criminal conversation isn’t a civil offense anymore, and he’s got lawyers who would see through any other ploy in a minute. Plus, if you filed suit, the whole thing would come out in public, and the press would make it seem like the slimiest thing since Liz and Dick or Madonna and whatever the guy’s name was she married for a minute. It’s hard enough when these things are worked out in private; I don’t think you or your marriage would have a chance if it was being played out in the papers every day.”
Tom looked around the room, as though an idea might float by on a cloud of smoke. “Maybe you could, like, threaten him? Physically. Not really, of course. Just enough to—”
“Come on, Tom—guys like that have bodyguards three deep. I’d end up in the hospital or in jail, and Sands would step up his campaign even more.”
“So what can I do?”
“Maybe you can challenge him to a duel,” I said, but when Tom seemed to be considering the idea, I tried to find an answer. “The only thing I can think of is for you to talk to Clarissa and get her to see that this guy’s no good for her. Even I know that the wife of a man like that gets swallowed up in his wake. After a month with him, she really won’t know who she is.”
“I’ve already tried to get her to see it that way. All she says is that she’s been through so much pain trying and failing to make me happy, she’s not sure of anything except she doesn’t want to keep doing that.”
“It sounds to me like she’s got problems that don’t have anything to do with you or Sands.”
“Of course she does. She’s getting old, Marsh—she’s almost forty. A middle-aged torch singer is pretty much an oxymoron, you know.”
“Maybe she should get into something else.”
“She’s been talking about it—teaching, songwriting, maybe even social work. The problem is, she’s not considering them because she wants to, but because she’s afraid she’ll have to. If she marries Sands, she won’t have to consider them at all.”
There wasn’t anything for me to add, so I let Tom work with it by himself for a while.
“I actually feel sorry for her,” he said after a moment, “in spite of everything she’s done. Show business is an awful life. She’s out there all alone, seldom has a job that lasts longer than six weeks, has to compete with the new talent that comes along every year. She doesn’t have much to show for her years in the business—no retirement plan, no record contract, no long-term bookings—and I’m certainly no security blanket. She’s run to Sands because she thinks money will eliminate her problems, but she’s wrong. Clarissa isn’t the type of woman who can be happy as someone’s consort, but by the time she realizes it, it’ll be too late. For us, at least. I mean, I love her, but there are things I can’t accept, you know? Some things a man has to hang on to or he can’t call himself a man.”
Tom convulsed silently, the brandy still his only lifesaver. “There’s one thing I better mention,” I said after he had control of himself. “I don’t do domestic work. Haven’t for years. I’ve turned down a lot of friends who wanted me to help them through a marital crisis, so I can’t very well—”
“This isn’t a domestic case, this is a murder case.”
Oddly enough, I believed Tom saw it just that way. He had so little sustenance from the sources most men look to—money, power, fame—he was dependent on his marriage for the nutrients to keep him going. Tom had married above himself, he had always told me, an assessment that carried with it the fear that someday Clarissa would realize the fact and rectify the situation.
I was resisting the urge to back away from my refusal to get involved when Tom spoke up, all of a sudden endlessly calm and eminently reasonable. “I understand your position, Marsh. And I know there’s really nothing you can do. I just needed someone to talk to about it.” He shoved the snifter down the bar and looked around, a beatific smile elongating his lips. “I’ve enjoyed it here. You … Guido … the others.”
As he tossed some money on the bar, I gave him as much solace as I could find. “If you think of something concrete I could do to help,” I said, “or if you need to talk some more, you know I’d be happy to. Any time.”
Tom responded with an eerie tranquillity. “Thanks, Marsh. For everything.”
“Let me know how it works out.”
“Sure.”
“If I don’t hear from you in a couple of weeks, I’m going to come see how you
’re getting along.”
“Fine.”
“Well, good luck.”
He managed a brief grin. “I think I used up my allotment back in Vietnam.”
FOUR
I spent the next several days mired in a depression triggered by my conversation with Tom Crandall. Part of my mood was generated by sympathy—Tom was as miserable as anyone I’d ever seen outside the walls of an institution, even though I’m in a business that traffics in misery, and I couldn’t conceive of a scenario in which he would deserve what was apparently being done to him. Another part was frustration—Tom had come to me for help, had literally begged me for it although begging was as foreign to his nature as sadism, and for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything I could do to alter the fact that his wife was evidently being poached from under his nose. But most of my problem was self-centered. Tom’s troubles laid claim to my thoughts less because of what they said about Tom than because of what they said about me.
My failure to come up with a battle plan for Tom to employ in his war with Richard Sands reignited a malaise that’s been with me off and on for several years. Charley Sleet calls it my midlife crisis, and because Charley is Charley and is therefore immune to the frailties of mortal men, he laughs whenever I say something that implies I’m undergoing some sort of inner reassessment. Charley may be right—the condition may be laughable and I may be just another slice of a syndrome—but that doesn’t mean the malady isn’t real.
For a long time, I tended to believe my state was purely psychological and thus susceptible to self-help. Analyze the problem, concoct a solution, put theory into practice: If results aren’t immediate, the bookshelves are full of how-to’s. But self-help hasn’t worked, and neither has self-pity, and lately I’ve begun to think I’m wrong—clinical depression has been in the news a lot of late, along with drugs like Prozac that are supposed to render affective disorders obsolete by altering the neurotransmitters in kind and number or some such biochemical intrusion. Accounts like William Styron’s, of battles with the storms of desolation, are increasingly bruited about, not always with the eloquence of Styron to be sure, but moving nonetheless. If pressed, I could come up with a pedestrian account of my own, featuring waves of worthlessness that make every episode in my past seem ignoble and inept, days of lethargy when nothing or no one seems worth the slightest effort, tremors of self-loathing that make suicide seem not only attractive but obligatory.
On the worst days, it occurs to me that I should seek psychiatric help. The problem is, to a self-sufficient soul like me, such a step is an admission of failure, further proof of an inadequacy with which I’m already overburdened. So I’ve held off, in the hope that my mood would improve on its own, that my depressions will vanish like the sniffles, that I won’t have to change the recipe that makes me what I am. But like the track of a bad cold, my mood has spread to my chest, and now both my head and my heart are ailing.
Of course, Charley’s right—what I’ve been feeling isn’t unique. Many people my age, maybe most, undertake a midpoint readjustment. I know half a dozen marriages that are foundering after more than twenty years because one or both of the partners has become terrified, in the wake of an empty nest or a stalled career or the unsightly droop of age, that the arrangement that got them where they are is no longer sufficient to carry them across the final third of their lives. And I know several single people who have resorted to drugs or debauchery for much the same reason.
At such a point, people usually decide to do something before it’s too late, and the first thing they do, the women at least, is talk to someone about it. Mostly they talk to other women, but because I’ve never married I’m occasionally regarded as lacking a vested interest in the institution, so some women decide to talk to me. My job has taught me how to listen, and I try my best to be of aid, but the dynamic of marriage is so different from my own unilateral existence, and the remedy for a faulty one so drastic, that I usually advise them to stick with it, talk it out and see it through; whatever you do don’t jump ship, because the waters in Singles Land are not smooth sailing. In other words, I’m about as much help to these women as I was to Tom Crandall.
They’re not much help to me, either, although they often want to be. It’s not their fault—except for occasional grumblings to Charley Sleet or Tom, I seldom go public with my troubles. Like most men, I avoid confession whenever possible, for fear my weaknesses will be used against me and because I sense that, since I’m my own boss and am beset by no obvious horrors and lead a periodically dramatic life, some people feel I’ve got an enviable existence already and am being excessively grasping or inexcusably self-indulgent to suggest things could be better for me than they are.
But as anyone in middle age knows, it’s not that simple: Any life can seem trivial to the person who lives it, and for months my thoughts have swirled with elemental inquiries—would I be more productive if I swallowed my pride and went back to being a lawyer; more complete if I asked my friend Betty to marry me even though we both profess to be happy with things the way they are; more significant if I wrote a book, built a boat, learned to speak Spanish; more useful if I joined the Peace Corps or volunteered at St. Anthony’s or went to work for Legal Aid.
The answer to such questions depends on as many variables as does staying satisfactorily sober, however, so mostly I make a choice at random, work with it awhile, then decide I wouldn’t live that life any better than I was living this one. In any event, the principles of inertia make such changes either unlikely or a long way off. For the moment, my best hope for a boost in morale seemed to be to abjure my rules about avoiding domestic disputes and make like the cavalry and ride over the hill and try to rescue one Tom Crandall.
Although Tom and I hadn’t seen each other since our night at Guido’s, he had kept me apprised of his state of mind, which seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. In a series of phone calls to my home and office—none lasting over twenty seconds, few involving any remark by me other than the opening salutation—Tom peppered me with observations.
The first call, in its entirety, went something like this:
“Hello?”
“He’s been sending her love letters. How do I know? She reads me excerpts. She says she has a right to a private life, to have friends of her own, both women and men, to keep what she says and does with them a personal matter. Can she possibly be right? Can a marriage survive such secrets?”
“I imagine it can if both people want it to.”
“How would you know?”
And he was right. How would I know? As I said, Tom Crandall was smart. Smart enough to wound a friend; smart enough to wound a wife.
There were other calls as well, hundreds it seemed, though there were probably fewer than a dozen. I came to regard them the way I regarded the briefings of generals Kelly and Neal—as reports from a war in which I was thankfully not a combatant.
Sometimes Tom spoke to me directly, but more often he left terse essays on my answering machine that invariably deposited a bit of Tom’s pain for me to sprinkle atop the less-focused version of my own. For example:
“She lectures me on my attitudes. She says I worship women but don’t respect them. She calls me a Victorian—she says I think women are weak and overemotional and incapable of true accomplishment. This from someone who demonstrates her own respect for her sex by playing footsie with another woman’s husband.”
And,
“Do you think it’s some kind of test? If so, what am I supposed to study? Where is the examination held? And who the hell is grading it?”
And,
“I asked her to tell me what’s gone wrong with our marriage. She said we should spend more time communicating. Fine so far. But it’s clear the exclusive subject of discussion is to be what’s wrong with Tom.”
And,
“I’m thinking of tapping my own phone. Is it legal? How much would it cost for a gizmo that would make a record of everything she says to him? Can you g
et a rate on that kind of equipment for me? What can she do if she finds out?”
And,
“She has total recall of our years together. Of course what she recalls is less a marriage than a feudal system.”
And,
“I’m sorry I’ve made her do this, I really am.”
And,
“Did you ever study Chaucer? Do you recall the term ‘cuckold’? Do you remember what a loathsome creature it evoked? Did you ever think you’d become one?”
And,
“How much longer do you suppose I can continue to believe her when she tells me they’re just friends? Of course, their sexual shenanigans aren’t pertinent, really. I’d much rather she was sharing her body than her mind with him.”
And,
“Are men as awful as women say? Are we, Marsh? Are we?”
And, most recently and most distressingly.
“I was in the army, you know. I spent nine months attached to Special Forces: nine months in the highlands with the most efficient killers this country could produce. I know a man who would waste Richard Sands for fifty bucks, no questions asked, just to show it could be done. In fact, he’d probably do it gratis.”
At this point, I decided steps had to be taken. Tom’s attitude seemed to be lurching from suicidal to homicidal, and though I didn’t think he was capable of either step, I couldn’t sit by and let it work itself out. After listening to Tom’s most recent message, I considered my options for the rest of the evening, and in the morning I called a shrink.
Max Rosenfall is a forensic psychiatrist, on call to the top criminal-defense attorneys in town, a reliable reinforcement for the mentally ill in everything from insanity pleas to commitment proceedings. Although there were a lot of his ilk around, Max was one of the few I respected: Max wasn’t a hired gun who parroted the pose of whoever was paying the bills; Max said what he believed, which was probably why juries invariably went along with his diagnoses and prognoses, outlandish though they often were—once Max convinced a jury that a young man had strangled his mother because he’d been driven temporarily insane by a video game. Even more surprisingly, Max had been known to say no to a fat fee if he thought the defendant was faking his symptoms or the family’s reasons for putting Aunt Mabel in the nuthouse were more avaricious than compassionate. Unfortunately, after I’d reminded him of the instance when we’d worked for the same lawyer on the same case, then outlined Tom’s situation for him, no is exactly what he said to me.
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