A Changed Man

by Francine Prose

  “Three meals a day?” says Maslow.

  “Two,” Nolan says. “No lunch.”

  “Is your mother still religious?”

  “She’s a chanting Buddhist. She chants. For winning lottery numbers.”

  “Does she win?” says Maslow.

  “No, not really,” Nolan laughs. “Sometimes twenty bucks.”

  “Marvelous,” says Maslow.

  Nolan wonders if he knows what a chanting Buddhist is.

  “It’s why we can work together,” Maslow says. “I recognized that in you right away. The religious impulse.”

  “You mean I’m a fanatic,” Nolan says.

  “Not exactly. I don’t think you’re a fanatic. I don’t think you ever were. You’re too realistic for that. Too down-to-earth. Survival-oriented. Mostly, these days, people say fanatic when what they really mean is idealist. Though frankly, I’ll take a fanatic over your average person. You know where you stand with fanatics. They don’t say one thing and do another. Actually, very few people wind up working for us unless they are some kind of fanatic. Idealists, I should say.”

  “Including Bonnie?”

  “Definitely Bonnie. Bonnie’s on a mission. To be a good person and do the right thing. The foundation has been a godsend for her. I’ll tell you something I’ve noticed. Almost everyone who works with us was raised in some religion. Roberta used to be a serious Catholic before she married an Egyptian.”

  “Roberta’s married?”

  “Divorced. Anita Shu grew up in one of those Korean Christian churches. Faith is a habit, developed young. It’s not something you come to late. Once a person has a faith, he can change his religion, but you need to have that capacity—”

  “Like fat cells,” Vincent says.

  “Fat cells?”

  “I read that’s why fat kids grow up into fat adults. They develop the cells for it.”

  “Faith cells,” says Maslow. “Something like that. I like the concept. Fat cells. Faith cells. Listen, I’ll bet if you went back and polled your friends in ARM, you’d probably find that most of them had some kind of religious training.”

  Sure. Let Maslow take that poll. ARM members don’t think they’re fanatics. They consider themselves the reasonable products of a coolheaded, logical analysis of American history and government.

  “I’ll think about it,” Nolan says. “For the outreach program.” Unlike Bonnie and Roberta, who seem focused on Vincent’s speech at the dinner, Maslow has been talking in larger terms, about some kind of program aimed at guys like Nolan. I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me. Nolan likes Maslow’s thinking on that. It’s a reason for keeping Nolan around after the benefit dinner.

  “My thoughts exactly,” says Maslow. “The outreach program. Meanwhile let me tell you something. That Iranian guy we’re trying to save, he has a wife and kids. And they’ve started to torture him. Yesterday we heard that they might hang him as an example. And why?”

  “Why?” asks Nolan, obediently.

  “Because he refused to write a confession denouncing his wife, who had been arrested for not wearing a veil in the doorway of their own house. How wonderful it would be if God helps us free him in time to get here and also say a few words at the benefit dinner.”

  Nolan feels the stirrings of a sibling situation. Well, sure. Who’s going to get more applause? A former neo-Nazi? Or some purpledick hero who went to the Iranian slammer for defending his wife? Having the guy here would be wonderful. Over Nolan’s dead body.

  “If we save his life,” Maslow says, “it will represent just a small part of our mission. Small, compared to feeding and clothing refugee populations. But we’re always enlarging our scope. Which is why God sent you to us, to help us do something new. How great it would be if together we could find a way to reach young men like you, to redirect the energy that’s gone into anger and hate, to set them working for the cause of brotherhood and freedom.”

  One reason Nolan picked up on Maslow’s ideas so fast was that they were weirdly similar to the stuff you heard at the Homeland Encampment if you listened to the speakers ranting in the background while you were getting plastered and trying to get some white-supremacist nooky. That’s what they’re always saying: Bring our cause to the world. Reach out and show the way to one white man at a time.

  Maslow must be dreaming if he thinks that ARM is a religion. It’s a way that guys have found to explain to themselves why they’re unemployed and broke, or working crappy jobs they hate. And broke. Pay them like you’re paying Nolan for doing what Nolan’s doing, and that’s the end of ARM. Because, really, how good a gig is this? A salary, room, and board for talking to Bonnie and Meyer and the occasional reporter. Having fun with the computer. Writing some stuff about ARM. Surfing for porn sites. Putting in an appearance at the occasional dinner party. Drinking Scotch. Wearing cashmere. For the first time ever, Nolan feels that his luck might be improving.

  All right! The codeine’s checking back in. And the Scotch isn’t half bad. No wonder it’s the beverage of choice of your basic fat old bastard. Nolan feels terrific. A mysterious sense of well-being.

  Hang on. What’s Maslow talking about? Nolan’s missed a link.

  “—that is, if you do think we can change. That redemption and progress are possible. Or do you think it’s hopeless? That we’re born one way, and that’s that. What do they say? Hardwired.”

  “I hate that expression,” Nolan says. “Everyone changes. Look at me. Look at how I’ve changed.”

  “How you’re changing,” Maslow corrects him. “How far along you’ve come.”

  How would the old man know how far Nolan is? Far along on his way to what?

  Maslow’s smile smoothes over everything. “Peace through change. One heart at a time. That’s why we’re in business. I would have gone mad if I didn’t believe that there was a reason I was saved when millions of others weren’t. I would be a very unhappy man if I didn’t believe that there was a plan.”

  Funny, that’s what Nolan’s been thinking ever since he left Raymond’s. Everything has an order and a plan. Has Maslow been reading his mind again? Through the faint haze of drugs and alcohol, Nolan can see what Bonnie means when she talks about Maslow kicking things up to a higher level.

  Maslow says, “I think we understand one another. Good. Now let’s go enjoy a good dinner.”

  If Meyer stays in his study a minute longer, Irene will go in there and shoot him, unless his skinhead friend has already done it for her. Which would make Meyer a martyr, and Irene a martyr’s widow, her reward for all these years of being the wife of a saint.

  “Prince of Peace Whacked by Wife.” Let Roberta and Bonnie spin that! Lucky Meyer, surrounded by women who will take a bullet for him. Whereas here on the home front, the buck stops at Irene, the only person in the house who can make a decision. Babu may be a fabulous cook, but the poor guy’s Untouchable origins surface at inconvenient times, like this morning, when the gravlax arrived with a fluorescent green patina. It was Irene who phoned Zabar’s, Irene who complained to the florist about the arrangement that cost the earth and looked like a bouquet of toilet brushes.

  That’s partly why Meyer married her. Irene can manage a home with all the amenities of a five-star hotel, can see to details of physical survival so that her husband can concentrate on higher things—in Meyer’s case, saving the world. That’s partly what attracted him to Irene, the savvy Viennese who combines her grandparents’ peasant shrewdness with her mother’s knack for living as if she’d always had money, plus the foresight and common sense that enabled her father to get the family out of Vienna in time. What else did Meyer see in her? Sex. Beauty, which has mostly vanished, though Meyer claims not to think so. And the flattering appeal of Irene having left her millionaire husband for Meyer. Well, that’s ancient history now. No one but Irene remembers.

  So much work, this dinner for eight, for which she will get no credit. And how much should she get, really, for
telling Babu what to cook, what plates to put on the table? It’s not the same as saving an Iranian who’s about to be tortured to death. Irene believes in Meyer’s work. Her husband is a hero. She’s proud to give her time, glad to surrender whole evenings to those benefits at which she sits next to some old geezer who thinks he’s bought the great man’s wife for the evening, purchased the right to tell her, in excruciating detail, every step along his road to success and fortune.

  Social events have gotten harder since middle age stole the last consolation: the chance that the evening might at least provide the low-level hum of attraction. She understood when she married Meyer, twenty years ago, that a part of her life was ending. She would never have another lover. There was not a man in the world who could be trusted to keep quiet about having fucked the wife of an iconic world leader. Flirting, however, was harmless fun. It made the time go faster. Not that she fully appreciated it until one evening when she went out—who remembers exactly when, she was fifty, fifty-one—and it was gone. Vanished forever. Except in Europe, where men are less like teenage boys, and Irene is still in the running. Now an evening without that faint possibility seems endless. Unbearable.

  The official reason for this dinner party, which Meyer, Roberta, and Bonnie dreamed up, is to see if this feral adult they dragged in from the woods can sit down and eat with human beings. And what if he can’t? The lucky guy will probably get his own table at the gala. While, across the room, Irene will be pushing around her dried-out salmon and limp mesclun, shouting over the band and grinning at whatever deep-pockets Bonnie has sat her beside.

  Who’s here tonight? No one worth getting nervous about. Or excited, for that matter. Guinea pigs they can afford to offend if the Nazi runs amok. Sol and Minna, just out of the hospital. Roberta Dwyer, whose job is on the line, though she doesn’t know it, ever since the Times ran that insultingly tiny item. It was Roberta’s responsibility to make sure that the paper got the story. But no one’s replacing Roberta till the gala is over, and meanwhile she has to be here for Wolf Boy’s shakeout cruise.

  Irene’s heart goes out to Roberta, and Bonnie, and an office full of women and men who have Meyer instead of a life. In fact, Irene feels so badly that she has invited someone for Roberta: Elliot Green, divorced for a couple of years. In any case, Meyer owes Elliot, whose law firm does a lot of pro bono work for the foundation. If nothing clicks with Roberta, at least Elliot will have been invited to a payback dinner.

  Irene told everyone to come half an hour before Bonnie and the skinhead. Then she could get things settled before they have to deal with whatever craziness a Nazi dinner guest turns out to involve.

  That extra half hour was a mistake. Within seconds, everyone knew that Roberta’s lukewarm interest in Elliot was unreturned. Irene wondered how she, Irene, could have spent decades married to a man like Meyer without a bit of his goodness rubbing off on her. A decent person would never feel the competitive lift that Irene got from watching Roberta strike out. So what? It’s not Irene’s fault if the survival of the species depends on sexual competition. Not that Irene has done much—biologically—to help the species survive. By the time she married Meyer, she was almost forty. In those days a woman that age was considered way too old to have children. Now the streets are full of gray-heads pushing triplets in designer strollers. Irene’s done her part, in other ways. Who knows how many lives have been saved because of her smiling and lip-reading at those noisy dinners?

  No one’s life will be altered by what transpires this evening. Roberta won’t even wind up with a date. After they watched the high-speed drama of faint hope and rejection transpire between Roberta and Elliot, the others felt depleted, and the collective energy wilted, though Meyer tried to keep the group focused with news about the Iranian.

  Then Bonnie and the skinhead showed up, and he spilled red wine down his shirt, not a promising sign for a future of putting the squeeze on wealthy donors. Meyer took the guy off to change. Bonnie and Elliot said hello. They knew each other from work. Elliot showed even less interest in Bonnie than he’d shown in Roberta. Irene introduced Bonnie to Sol and Minna, whom she also already knew.

  Bonnie said to Minna, “I’m so glad you’re feeling better.”

  Minna, who Irene thinks has been behaving oddly since her illness, said, “Thanks. I’m surprised you knew I was ill. You must be very busy raising money for all Meyer’s causes.”

  Bonnie seemed confused, then recovered and said, “Meyer was terribly worried.”

  Sol and Minna seemed thrilled to hear it. And that was it for conversation. Now, as they wait for Meyer’s return, trying not to feel slighted by his absence, it’s Irene’s job to get the derailed chitchat back on track.

  It’s a relief when Bonnie says, “Irene, could I talk to you for a moment? Alone?”

  Irene looks guiltily at the other guests. Maybe they will find it easier to relax without her around.

  Whatever Bonnie has to say must be terribly private, or scandalous—Irene hopes—because Bonnie drags her across the room, all the way to the piano, on which Irene can’t help admiring her piano shawl, an heirloom artifact from a tribe of nomadic Ethiopian Jews. A souvenir of their travels, a grateful gift to Meyer.

  When the drinks tray comes by, Bonnie exchanges her empty glass for a full one with such a desperate lunge that the waiter is tipped off balance, and they nearly have the second casualty of the evening. Already Irene is prepared to agree to whatever Bonnie asks.

  Irene’s heart goes out to Bonnie, raising those two boys alone, though something in her reacts against a certain pride and vanity she senses beneath Bonnie’s self-effacing exterior—pride in the nun’s life she is leading, supposedly for her boys’ sake, as well as the vanity with which she wears the mantle of goodness that she imagines has dropped on her just from working with Meyer. Meyer, who at this moment is being so good that he’s wandered off with the Nazi and left Irene to deal with whatever Bonnie is apologizing for in advance. With her admirable but hopeless desire to be good, to do good, Bonnie reminds Irene of that ninny in Middlemarch, which they read in Irene’s book group.

  “This is all my fault,” Bonnie is saying. “Blame it completely on me.”

  “What could be so bad?” says Irene. Bonnie also reminds her of a woman she met once, a pale girl who had turned out to be a former lover of Meyer’s. When Irene asked Meyer how in the world he could have found the woman attractive, he’d said: Waifish. A certain waifish appeal. A quality Irene had never considered an ingredient in any recipe for attraction. Meanwhile, speaking of vanity…Irene could be wrong, but has Bonnie streaked her hair? When would Bonnie get the time? On her lunch break, maybe. And whom did she do it for? Not the skinhead. Or is it?

  “This could be terrible,” Bonnie says. “Vincent…For a former Nazi, Irene, the guy’s got a lot of problems—”

  “A problem getting a glass to his mouth.”

  Bonnie tries to laugh. “Irene,” she says, “this is serious.” Everything is, with Bonnie. Sex is probably serious, which is probably why her husband took off with the two-time-loser widow. Irene can never tell if, from behind her thick glasses, Bonnie is looking deeply into her eyes or trying, as Irene suspects, to figure out if Irene’s had surgery since Bonnie saw her last.

  What if Bonnie and her colleagues knew that it’s Meyer who wants Irene to get the procedures? Not that he would admit it. In fact he makes fun of women (women like Irene!) running to expensive, miracle-working dermatologists. But she can read it in his face, in his exquisitely controlled distaste for each new wrinkle and pouch. And considering what other men do—presidents getting blow jobs from interns, respected surgeons chopping up their mistresses and dumping them out of helicopters—who could fault a prince of peace and a Holocaust hero for wanting to sleep with his own wife? Only minus the eye bags. Meanwhile, Irene’s fate is to have everyone think she’s had surgery, even though she hasn’t—and won’t as long as she thinks Meyer wants it.

  “Irene!” A
note of childish petulance has crept into Bonnie’s voice. “Listen.”

  “I am listening, Bonnie.”

  “I forgot to tell you that Vincent is fatally allergic to nuts. All he has to do is eat something that’s been in the same bowl with a peanut, and he winds up in the emergency room. If he makes it to the emergency room. Irene, he could die.”

  “Americans,” says Irene. “Always allergic to something. In Europe there are no allergies.” Irene’s shock is disingenuous. And she knows how ungracious it sounds to have lived here for forty years and still be talking about Americans. Nowadays, Europeans have allergies, too. They also jog and don’t smoke. In fact Irene is so aware of how common such allergic problems are that she usually asks her assistant to call and ask the guests’ assistants what the guests can’t eat. But ex-skinheads don’t have assistants, and—incorrectly, as it turns out—Irene never imagined that one would have food allergies. A nightmare in the making. She and Meyer will have to personally escort the guy to the emergency room, and wait around on plastic chairs amid screaming gunshot victims.

  Irene sighs. “It’s in Europe now, too. Anyhow, I’m joking. The truth is, this happens so often that at this point I would sooner serve rat poison than a bowl of cocktail peanuts. Just to be safe, tell your friend to stay away from the hors d’oeuvres, and I will go and interrogate poor Babu about the main course.”

  “Oh, I feel so bad,” Bonnie says.

  “Don’t,” is all Irene can bear to reply.

  “And dessert,” prompts Bonnie.

  “Of course, dessert,” says Irene.

  “Thank you. I appreciate this so much, Irene, I—” Bonnie is visibly relieved now that she has dumped her crisis in Irene’s lap.

  What’s the Hindi word for allergy? Irene races into the kitchen and somehow locates a bag of walnuts and mimes eating a walnut and grabbing her throat and dying. Babu shakes his head no. No nuts in the dinner. But does he mean no walnuts? Or no nuts of any kind? Irene has done her best. If the guy has an attack, they’ll deal with it when it happens.