by Walter Kirn
I SPENT THE NIGHT at the Greenwich Village apartment of my best friend from college, Douglas Rushkoff, a writer who called himself a “media theorist” and believed that computers and the Internet were changing us in ways we weren’t aware of but that might prove transformative and magical. Or disastrous—he was still deciding. Doug, the son of a suburban accountant, was by far the smartest person I knew. In college we’d dabbled in mind-expanding chemicals and staged experimental, absurdist plays, our goal being to liberate ourselves from middle-class “consensus reality.” We’d been at this project for fifteen years by then and were faring better than other classmates who’d aimed high artistically, panicked when they faltered, and settled, as we saw it, for dull careers in business. I depended on our conversations to form my opinions about technology, which was the great public subject at the moment. That night I could have used such a discussion to divert me from thinking about Clark and the extravagant favor I’d just done for him but had yet to be compensated for. Doug wasn’t there, though. He was traveling, giving one of his speeches about the future.
Maggie was there. She’d flown in ahead of me; the delivery of Shelby represented a success for the animal shelter she headed up, which hoped that Clark would reward it with a generous donation. I told her about tomorrow’s dinner plan and answered questions about my trip, downplaying its insults and its horrors, but I wasn’t in a mood for intimacy.
In bed, as she slept, I allowed myself some optimism about the life awaiting me back home, which the trip had excused me from having to think about. I’d turn the job of remodeling the house over to a professional carpenter. I’d take a fresh look at a novel I’d abandoned and see if I couldn’t finish it by fall, ship it off to my agent, and start another, possibly one that life might hand me if Clark and the muses cooperated. I’d refinance the ranch through a bank or mortgage company, retire my terrifying “contract for deed,” replenish my savings through budgetary discipline, and climb back aboard the Dow Industrial Average—or the surging NASDAQ, even better. I’d also throw away the Ritalin, beginning with the bottle I had with me. By Christmas, God willing (Remember God, Walt? I’d grown up a Mormon and still tried to cut Him in on things, even though I’d left the church), the blur on the sonogram would be my daughter. It was time to prepare to hold her. To be a man.
WE MET CLARK AND Sandy for dinner at the Sky Club on the fifty-sixth floor of the MetLife building, the hulking art brut midtown office tower that arrogantly bisects Park Avenue. The club, with walls of windows on three sides and tables situated along its cliffs, was one of those overwhelming interior spaces that seem impossible until you’re in them. Looking out from where we sat, buildings that seemed colossal from the street were revealed as marginal and secondary, their masts and spires petering out below us. I wasn’t sure I liked the view. Not panoramic or comprehensive enough to stimulate meditative appreciation, it tickled the suicidal imagination, the part of the mind that pictures falls and leaps, with a beguiling specificity that forced me to withdraw my gaze lest my attention spin down into its depths.
“Is everything satisfactory?” Clark asked. His tone was jolly and proprietary. Indeed, he’d already pointed out to us that the dominant building in the vista—a limestone tower brushed by shafts of light shining upward from its base—belonged to “the family’s place,” Rockefeller Center. When he said this, I cut my eyes to Sandy, whose face masked a layer of spousal story fatigue that told me his stunt had been pulled before, and bored her.
Clark raised his glass: “To Shelby.” We followed suit. She was down there somewhere with her wheelchair and her incontinence, submerged in the roaring grandeur of it all and possibly not equal to its pressures. Why had Clark wanted her so badly, courting the Pipers long distance through his computer practically every day, they’d said, for weeks? Her rarity, maybe. The rich prized rarities, not content with being rare themselves.
The food was forgettable but the conversation, once I gave myself to it and Clark got rolling, was like none I’d ever been a part of. Sandy, who’d heard much of it, presumably, busied herself with her silverware and napkin, while Maggie sat back as though attending a play, settling into her pregnant, hormonal fullness. First, came the peculiar personal tidbits. Clark, who’d ordered chicken for his meal, had never eaten a hamburger, he said, dined in a public restaurant, or tasted Coca-Cola. He asked me to describe its flavor, which flummoxed me. “Very sweet,” I said. “And brown.” Soon, he was relating his biography. As a child, he said, he’d suffered from aphasia, an inability to speak, but a chance encounter with a dog changed this when he was ten or so. He spoke the nonsense word “woofness” and recovered. A few years later, at just fourteen, he began attending Yale, his intelligence having unfolded at record speed once the magical animal untied his tongue.
The club workers came and went during this monologue, filling glasses and clearing plates, careful not to trespass on Clark’s perimeter and hanging back whenever he grew animated. They called him “Sir” and “Mr. Rockefeller” and he directed their movements with amiable nods and glances.
The conversation shifted to public matters. Clark warned of a coming market crash, disclosing that the elites of the financial world had already set a date for the event and were positioning themselves accordingly. I asked what the date was. He said he didn’t know, he only knew it had been agreed on recently. In anticipation of the debacle, he’d positioned himself in Treasuries, he said, and he cautioned me to do the same. Then he repeated his warnings about China and its expansive, imperial ambitions, using the term Lebensraum again, a word that seemed to please his vocal cords. Somehow he jumped from this to Frasier. He said he would be appearing on the show soon in the guise of a caller to the radio program hosted by the lead character, Dr. Crane, who advises people on the air about their psychiatric problems. Clark said he’d scripted his cameo himself. He’d play a caller with a compulsion to sing familiar songs from Broadway musicals in such a way that dog references and dog sounds were mixed in with the lyrics:
“The hills are alive with the bark of doggies, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof . . .”
Before I could absorb all this, Clark ever so discreetly slipped me what could only be my stipend, sealed in a long white business envelope. It happened without fanfare, at a moment when Sandra was engaged in cutting her food and Maggie was just returning from the bathroom. I declined to open the check in front of him, reluctant to commit a breach of protocol.
“What do you say we have some fun?” he said. He could tell I was having fun already. Gesturing toward the limestone monoliths looming in the window over his shoulder, he proposed an after-hours tour of Rockefeller Center, including certain subterranean sections inaccessible to the general public. He reached inside his jacket and patted something. “I happen to have it right here,” he said. “The key.”
“You have it?” I said. “You have the master key?” This assumed that there could be such an item, which seemed only reasonable, since there was such a thing as Clark. Maggie appeared to disagree. I glanced at her and caught a smirk on her freckled Irish face.
We ordered dessert, a slimy crème caramel with a brittle burnt-sugar cap, and the tour idea was shelved—maybe some other time, it was getting late. Clark buttoned his jacket and sat up in his chair and ate bites of custard lifted lightly on a fork. The windows in the buildings arrayed below us were lit up in broken diagonals and lines that spoke of a city in slowed-down weekend mode. A waiter approached and I ritually touched my wallet, but Clark waved me off. I never saw a check. Maybe private clubs delivered such bills at the end of the month, in the mail, all added up.
On the elevator ride back down, Clark invited me to his apartment the next day to see “the art.” Could I come at noon? I could. “Fabulous. Fabulous,” he said. My impression was that he did not consider the women essential to our emerging relationship.
At bedtime, I asked Maggie what she thought of him. She’d been notably silent on the subject.
“
He puts on quite a show,” she said. “I also think he might be gay.”
“That’s just the manner of those people.”
“He doesn’t listen, either. He just talks.”
“What did you think of Sandy?”
“I’m not sure. She’s quiet. He isn’t very nice to her.”
I didn’t press her to say more. We had different investments in the matter and drawing attention to them seemed unwise, and probably unnecessary. We’d be home in a couple of days, with much in front of us. My odd new pal, if he continued to be a pal, would end up on my side of the ledger, along with the duties of housing, feeding, and clothing us. A thirteen-year age gap between a husband and wife, particularly when the wife works mostly at home and is only twenty-two, tends to promote certain very clear divisions. These existed in Clark’s marriage, too, from what I’d seen of it—I just had no idea what they were.
WHEN I ARRIVED AT Clark’s building the next day, prepared for a brush with Tony Bennett, the envelope with the check was still in my trouser pocket. Guessing at the sum was proving more stimulating than knowing it. An attendant showed me to an elevator, which let me out in a dim hallway behind whose doors I sensed no special wonders of decor or ornament. That rich people lived here didn’t surprise me—I knew their preference for dull respectability—but it shocked me that a great singer would choose the place.
Clark’s apartment was spare and unadorned—scuffed wood floors, a small dark sofa, a utilitarian kitchen with empty counters—but the art on the walls was bold and grand. It included a Mondrian in a Lucite box, a Motherwell, a Pollock, and a Rothko. I admired them, sipping a glass of water as we awaited the visit of a restorer from the Museum of Modern Art, which Clark said hoped to secure them for its collection. I couldn’t help trying to estimate their value. Ten million? Twenty? It might be much, much more. A gentleman didn’t ask such questions.
The apartment smelled stale and sour, not surprisingly, like a kennel. Yates and Shelby were lying on the floor, giving each other jealous looks that seemed to portend a fight. Clark walked me over closer to the Pollock, which was leaning unframed against a wall, and picked something from its surface: a curly black dog hair.
“I believe that animals and art ought to coexist comfortably,” he said. Then he showed me a smudge on the same painting. “Yates’s saliva. He likes to lick,” he said. “MoMA, of course, is utterly appalled. That’s why they insist on weekly cleanings.” He found another dog hair on the Mondrian, inside the Lucite box, and smiled. It seemed that his neglect of his collection made him prouder than the pieces themselves.
I complimented him on them anyhow. He told me they’d come to him partly by inheritance and partly through the efforts of a buyer—“a man I have in Spain”—who’d picked them up for a fraction of their value from certain cash-strapped European aristocrats and even a couple of renowned museums. He said I’d be shocked if he named these institutions. “It’s rather scandalous,” he said. The museums’ directors were shady figures who’d needed to replace embezzled funds and Clark felt no guilt about exploiting them.
“One must never pass up a bargain,” he concluded. “The irony is that I prefer Old Masters. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded and said I did. It was baloney. I’d never considered the question. I’d definitely never considered it from the perspective of ownership.
I was starting to get hungry. I’d assumed on my way over that Clark would serve me lunch—after all, he had a chef—but there was no sign that a meal was in the offing, or even that meals were ever prepared here. An explanation arrived presently, possibly in response to some remark from me about the kitchen’s extraordinary tidiness. Or maybe I said nothing. Maybe, as would happen often over the next few years, Clark read my mind.
“I have the identical apartment under this. It’s where the help stays,” he said. “They’re off today.” He looked at the floor as though he could see through it to the quarters below. I wondered where the entrance was, where the staircase came up—or weren’t the places attached? Maybe you had to go out into the hall and take the elevator down.
The restorer rang the bell and Clark let him in while I knelt and calmed the dogs. The man unzipped a case of tools and brushes and went to work on the Pollock, ignoring us. Shelby seemed to have perked up since the trip and arched her neck against my hand as I stroked and scratched her. Clark, in an infantile, doggy voice, reassured a rivalrous-looking Yates that his place in the household wouldn’t change because of his “new widdle sister.” The dog voice saddened me. It seemed to convey Clark’s lonely inner self more fully than his normal speaking voice, which wasn’t all that normal. Given what he’d told us over dinner about his isolated, foreshortened childhood (Yale at fourteen couldn’t have been easy), I realized that he was a largely self-nurtured being, a kind of waif or wolf boy, but with money. No wonder he loved animals.
The restorer packed his kit and left with a curt, no-eye-contact goodbye. I needed to eat. I felt a little dizzy. It was the summer of 1998 and unreality was in the air: a stock market buoyed by “irrational exuberance,” a president in peril for lying about oral sex acts, and a heady profusion of new technologies with powers to reconfigure time and space. My new cell phone, temporarily quiet, was soon to mount an invasion of my consciousness that I had no way of imagining just then.
“How much do you know about Rothko’s death?” Clark asked me. He invited me to look closely at the canvas, which he’d taken down from the wall. He turned it around and said something like, “He killed himself. He slit his wrists. On the back of this here, do you see these spots, these dribbles?”
I couldn’t, but to please him I said I could. I’d traveled a ridiculously long way on an exhausting, humiliating errand, and I hoped we would be friends.
“It’s blood,” Clark said. “The artist’s blood.”
Down on the street, after I left his place, I opened the envelope. The check was drawn on his wife’s account. Five hundred dollars. It didn’t cover half of what I’d spent—and I still had to make the return trip. A mistake? Shouldn’t the figure have another zero? Naturally, I never said a word.
FOUR
THE TRIAL OF Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German immigrant of many aliases, for the 1985 murder of John Sohus in San Marino, California, began in early March 2013. It was held in downtown Los Angeles, in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, a hulking, rectilinear, gray hive of offices and courtrooms that stands across a plaza from City Hall. It’s a part of the city that’s rarely seen on film—a district of dismal bureaucratic towers presiding over an outdoor homeless shelter. Attorneys, jurors, and city workers mix on the sidewalks with shopping-cart vagabonds and lean, shirtless drifters squatting in ragged camps. (One morning I saw a man hunched beside his bundle tending a pet brown rabbit on a leash.) The lawyers walk briskly past the squalid scene, jabbering into blinking Bluetooth headsets and sip-sucking Starbucks mochas through plastic cup lids. The jurors appear vaguely stranded and at loose ends, uprooted from their routines and livelihoods. Certain blocks are lined with parked police cars and media vans equipped with satellite masts. Most everyone who can leave by rush hour does.
On the first day of jury selection, I rode an elevator to the Foltz Center’s metal detector–equipped ninth floor, the home of the city’s highest-profile trials—O. J. Simpson, Phil Spector, Michael Jackson’s doctor—and took a seat on a hard bench only a few feet away from the defendant. I had known him for almost fifteen years by then and considered him a friend for ten of them, visiting him at his clubs and in his homes, talking with him often on the phone, and casually tracking his passage toward middle age while keeping him informed of mine. Except at the very end of our relationship, after his divorce from Sandy, when he came to me bewildered by an experience that I’d endured myself a few years earlier, we were never close friends, never intimates, but he was a singular figure in my life and a subject of frequent contemplation. I’d never written about him as I’d pl
anned—my literary killer instinct had yielded to a desire for his favor—but I nevertheless imagined I’d understood him. Events had proved me wrong. They’d proved a lot of people wrong.
He was dressed the way he had been when I’d known him, as Clark Rockefeller (the name he also used with his attorneys and fruitlessly asked the court to recognize), in a preppy blue blazer, gray slacks, and a white shirt, every item a size too big. He still wore shoes without socks, exposing pale gaps of ankle, but he’d traded the thick black glasses I used to see him in for a professorial rimless pair. His hair had darkened to a mousy brown and his face was leaner than in the past, which emphasized the sharpness of his long nose and the elfin points of his big ears. According to the German passport found by investigators in a hiding place where he’d stashed various personal belongings, including several paintings rolled up in tubes and a book of signed blank checks from Sandy, whose salary had helped bankroll his charade, he had just turned fifty-two years old.
He’d been in prison for four years by then, the result of a prior conviction in Massachusetts for abducting his daughter, whom he called “Snooks,” in 2008, during a supervised visit in Boston. I’d met her in 2002, when she was one, during a visit to his rambling country house in Cornish, New Hampshire. He’d lured me there with a promise to introduce me to J. D. Salinger, who lived nearby and was, Clark said, a friend. Later on in the trial that mad weekend would come back to me, reemerging in hindsight as the moment when all the clues were spread out for me to read and I should have caught him at his game, but for now my clearest memory was the child. She was learning to walk, I remembered. She stuck her arms out, toddling unsteadily toward a sofa where he sat coaching her, saying, “Snooks can do it.” Sandy, who’d just returned from a long business trip, stood by looking haggard and angry. The child made the crossing. People clapped.