by Daniel Klein
“But they can Tweet.”
Baskerton groans and refills their snifters.
“Let me get this straight. Are you saying that the reason I was hired was to run the magazine into the ground?” Digby asks.
“Yup. And from what I hear, you’re doing a pretty good job of it.”
“Thank you. But I don’t get it. That can’t be what Bonner wanted.”
“Absolutely not. He loved that magazine as only a sterile old man can love the seeds of his mind. It was the only immortality available to him.”
Clearly, Bob Baskerton is also the most talented metaphorist in a hundred mile radius.
“I’m still missing something here,” Digby says. “So why wouldn’t Bonner want the magazine to stay exactly the way it was? His little family was happy—Duke, his subscribers. Why mess with a good thing?”
“Why, indeed? Last I heard Bonner was even grooming Elliot Goldenfield to take over for him. Goldenfield was the man’s walking footnote. Elliot wouldn’t have changed the magazine a whit. You came as a surprise to everybody.”
“Really? That’s hard to believe considering Bonner’s deathbed request that Cogito go pop. Philosophy for the masses.”
“I heard about that,” Baskerton says. “Total fabrication.”
That does it: Digby’s mind boggles seismographically. For a master bullshitter, he turns out to be as naïve as a tulip when it comes to the complex cunning of these Louden professionals.
“Jesus! Felicia made up that whole bedside business?”
“Every word of it. With a little help from her friend.”
“Holy shit!” Digby’s brandy-illuminated brain connects the remaining dots. “But then I fucked up their plans.”
“Really? How so?”
Digby tells Baskerton about Binx Berger, Cogito’s New York buzz, Saatchi & Saatchi’s ad bid, and Felicia blowing off their offer.
Upon hearing this flakey twist of fate, Baskerton howls so hard he finally has to rest his forehead on his desk a few moments before speaking again. “So the worm turned and he turned out to be a marketing genius. How did you generate this so-called buzz, Mr. Maxwell?”
“I have my hand on the pulse of America.”
“And the other one up your ass.”
“Precisely.”
“Mine, too,” says Baskerton. “I’m not a suspicious man by nature, an unfortunate trait for a lawyer. So I didn’t even blink when I saw that as executive publisher of Cogito, Mrs. Hastings could reject any advertisement she deemed unworthy. Maybe this LeFevre fella never went to law school, but he thinks like F. Lee Bailey. He covered every exit.”
They sip in silence for a few seconds, then Baskerton says, “Nothing would make me happier than hoisting that LeFevre by his own petard. That’s French for fart, you know. Petard.”
There is a knock at the door. Baskerton calls, “Come on in,” and on in come a dour-faced young couple, the man in jeans and a khaki shirt, the woman in a waitress uniform. Digby’s guess is that they’ve come to divide up their joint property, such as it is, and he finds himself aching for them. A half hour with Baskerton and he is feeling strangely humane. He rises to leave.
“I’ll be thinking, petard-wise,” Digby says. “Any help would be appreciated.”
“Glad you stopped by, Maxwell,” says Baskerton. “I needed a little poke to get my mind working again. Sloth is bad for an old man’s health.”
CHAPTER 18
Digby is walking up Brigham Street with a surprising lightness of foot; once again, in a period of less than two months in Louden, Vermont, he is tasting a bittersweet morsel of existential freedom. He should be wholly enraged after hearing Baskerton’s tale of Mrs. Hastings’ connivery, especially its obvious implication that the time has come for Digby to pack his bags. Yet finally discerning the pattern of Felicia’s deviousness brings him a dulcet dose of peace. He can only take so much of viewing the world through a glass darkly—or through a front door window starkly, for that matter—before he starts to fall apart. Give me clarity or give me claret, as Chuck Jones used to say.
Wasn’t that how philosophy came into existence in the first place? Because some jittery Greek—Thales of Miletus, was it?—could not stand another minute of murky-mindedness? He probably was on his knees in his backyard, rocking his classical head in his hands, and yelling into the void: “Hey, I don’t mind if Truth stinks—I just need a big dose of it and I need it fast. Otherwise my head is going to explode.”
There is another reason why Digby is feeling happier than should be expected under his present circumstances. It is this vision of himself as a man with his bags packed. Bob Dylan must have been reading Schopenhauer when he wrote, “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.” Digby’s vision brings on that old, stranger-in-town feeling and that feeling draws him into the Here and Now, a place and time of unparalleled vividness.
“I nailed him!” a voice behind Digby bellows.
Digby turns to behold President Kim Herker in full jogger regalia—a Louden College-emblazened T-shirt and sweat pants, and drooping white sweat socks that reveal surprisingly fragile-looking ankles above his Air Jordans. He is jogging heavily toward Digby who instinctively braces himself, fearing a sweat-bearing bear hug or worse, one of those NBA chest bumps.
“I force myself to do this twice a day,” Herker says, pulling up alongside Digby. He laughs. “They say a run a day keeps the bogeyman away. Well, you don’t see any bogeymen here in Louden, do you, Maxwell?”
Chuck Jones once did a piece for Digby at New York Magazine about Michael Jackson’s racial ambiguity in which that word, ‘bogeyman,’ figured prominently. According to Chuck, the term comes to us by way of the German, Der schwarze Mann—the black man—so he deemed bogeyman a racist term regardless of whether the people who used it knew its origin. At the time, Digby had told Chuck that he had gone too far this time, crossing over the line into racial paranoia. But now, hearing the word issue from Herker’s mouth, Digby reconsiders Chuck’s position.
“Keeps the old blood flowing, eh?” Digby replies. It strikes him as the appropriately manly thing to say.
“Yup, I nailed the little bastard,” Herker repeats. He is beside Digby now, jogging in place. Without thinking, Digby finds his feet mimicking Herker’s, doing a little heel and toe action. “I told you I’d find him,” Herker goes on. “Or did you think I’d forget about it after your little showstopper?”
Digby has no idea what Herker is talking about, but he decides to wait for clarification rather than ask for it. Something about the big man’s pungent heavy breathing makes him feel this is a less toxic approach.
“Yup, I bet you thought I’d forgotten all about it, Maxwell,” Herker goes on. “But not me. Forgive, possibly, but forget, never. You throw a beer bottle in my direction and I’ll find you, one way or another.”
Aha! The jettisoned beer bottle that smashed the Administration Building window. Digby shrinks away from the college president. Language-challenged as Herker may well be, his switch to the second person gives Digby the willies.
“Who was it?” Digby asks in a tone of voice that he hopes comes off as mildly disinterested.
“This’ll surprise you, Maxwell,” Herker says. He appears to wink, although he may just be batting away some drips of sweat with his eyelids. “Yes, I’m sure it would surprise anybody of your way of thinking.”
In the moment, Digby is so curious to hear what Herker believes is his way of thinking—Digby often wonders what it is himself—that he lets the man’s menacing tone pass.
“And?” Digby asks.
“It turned out to be one of those chutney farmers.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Come on, Maxwell. You don’t have to play that game with me. You know who I am talking about. The homos. The faggots.”
It needs to be noted here that Digby is an inveterate critic of political correctness, especially when it censors colorful speech. In fact, he is of the opinion th
at PC-ness is one of the root causes of the decline of wit in our culture. That said, hearing Herker drop the words ‘chutney farmers’ and ‘faggots’ as if he believed they were just plain English makes Digby want to knee him in his jockstrap. Clearly, the president of the local liberal arts college is not only a racist but a homophobe. And equally as clearly, Digby needs to do something about that.
“How did you find him?” Digby asks, trying to keep his involuntary quivering to a minimum.
Herker laughs. “It wasn’t that hard,” he replies. “I have eyes and ears all over the campus. Loyal Louden men.”
Herker’s response and its shamelessly mirthful delivery remind Digby of nothing so much as the braggadocio of a Third World dictator. The man is dangerous.
“So what are you going to do—expel him?” Digby asks as neutrally as he can muster.
Herker shrugs. “I’m working on it. But you have to do these things discreetly, Maxwell. Under the radar so nobody can make a fuss about it. On the sly. It’s something you get to be pretty good at in my job.”
“I need to get back to work,” Digby says, gesturing with his head toward Hastings Towers.
Herker lets loose with a basso guffaw the meaning of which is singularly unambiguous to Digby. The guffaw says: ‘What work, Bozo? You’re going to be out of a job any day now.’
This, undoubtedly, is the source of Herker’s crude candor: the college president is so certain that Digby will be gone from Louden in no time at all—just as soon as the plug is pulled on that inane magazine—that he believes he risks nothing by speaking straight from his animus. In any event, Herker’s distaste for Digby Maxwell has been simmering ever since Digby’s showboat, beer-bottle interception, then rose to a boil after Muffy came home from that ridiculous club of hers and went on at length about how très raffiné—whatever the hell that means—the New Yorker was.
But what Herker cannot imagine is that the same thought is playing in Digby’s mind: his days here numbered, Digby sees nothing to lose by visiting some mischief on Miles “Kim” Herker.
Digby is suddenly a jogger himself, an exercise for his mental health. From over his shoulder he hears Herker calling after him. “Muffy says you were a big hit at her club,” Herker hollers. “A real cutup.”
Weeks before everything in his Louden life started to come unglued, on a late evening after a euphoric dinner with Mary, Digby had passed a couple of hours downstairs at his office desk reading An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume, the nineteenth-century British empiricist. Digby had picked the leather-bound book at random from Bonner’s bookcase after the latest issue of Vanity Fair had failed to hold his attention. What grabbed Digby’s attention in Hume’s tome was his dissection of the idea of cause and effect, particularly these lines:
“When I see, for instance, a billiard ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse, may I not conceive, that a hundred different events might as well follow from the cause?”
Hume’s point was that causality is all in our heads, that our minds make the connection between cause and effect based on our past experiences, say our past experiences with billiard balls. But Digby loved the idea that based on reason alone a hundred different outcomes could conceivably issue from the same cause; for example, Billiard Ball ‘B’ could just as likely suddenly break into a chorus of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” after being smacked by Billiard Ball ‘A.’ The entire concept had the loopiness of a Road Runner cartoon. And what was most appealing about it to Digby was that from a purely a priori point of view, making plans and designing strategies seemed pretty much a waste of time. This fit perfectly with Digby’s general belief that sometimes the best course of action is just to toss a wrench into the works and see what kind of havoc it wreaks.
Digby walks in through the front door of Hastings Towers and heads directly for June MacLane and Elliot Goldenfield’s office. Both are there and surprised to see him.
“I need some advice,” Digby says.
“Really?” Goldenfield intones, raising one sleek eyebrow.
“Yes. I’m afraid there’s going to be some trouble on campus. Serious trouble,” Digby says.
“What kind of trouble?” June asks.
Digby looks at June. There is no doubt about it, her pregnancy has radically transformed her. It must be an endocrinal thing, hormones squirting from her busy uterus to the far reaches of her body where they remove facial hair, gloss her cheeks, and smooth her formerly furrowed brow. These hormones must invade her brain too—when they arrive, do they fiddle with her philosophy? Digby somehow doubts that her ‘one gender–one world’ credo could hold its own against all that estrogen. All of which raises the pregnant question of just how significant can a philosophy be if a few chemical spritzes can so easily transform it?
No, that is not actually the first question that is bothering Digby’s mind. That question is: who the hell is the de facto owner of the baby bulging from June’s midriff?
Digby abruptly remembers what he is about and reaches for a wrench. “I believe your college president, Mr. Herker, is in the process of igniting a major firestorm on campus,” he says. “It could get dangerous and I’m wondering if there is anything we can do about that.”
Here, Digby is summoning his talent of yore, the one that once made him hot stuff in the New York magazine world: by predicting the very next thing, he is midwife to it. Nonetheless, Digby believes that at the very most all that he is doing is goosing along the inevitable.
He tells June and Elliot about Herker’s so-called discovery that the bottle-thrower is a member of the campus gay group. Digby suggests—without, of course, any genuine evidence of his own—that Herker’s evidence is flimsy, way flimsy, coming from informants in the Beer Party Republican mob. He quotes Herker’s words, “faggots” and “chutney farmers,” and grimaces with the pain of reiterating those words. He concludes by saying, “He has definitely crossed the line. I’m afraid a confrontation is inevitable. I hope it doesn’t get out of hand.”
Wrench lofted, the phone rings.
Cause and effect?
Digby sprints to his office and picks it up. “Maxwell here.”
“How soon can you get over here? I’ve got my grandson waiting.”
“Mr. Baskerton?”
“Himself.”
Definitely cause and effect!
“I’ll be right over.”
“Wait. Maxwell, you still there? Do you have a computer? A portable computer?”
“I do.”
“Bring it.”
Robert Baskerton, LLB’s door is wide open when Digby arrives. Baskerton is on the phone but waves him in, pointing to a seat and gesturing for him to set his MacBook on his desk.
“I’ve got my grandson on the phone,” Baskerton says to Digby. “He wants to scoop with us.” Baskerton’s grandson corrects him and Baskerton says, “Skype with us. Do you know how to do that?”
Digby does. Baskerton hands Digby the phone and Skype data is exchanged. In a matter of minutes, Baskerton’s grandson, an earnest-looking young man with stringy brown hair and rimless glasses appears on the screen. His name is also Robert, but he goes by Robbie. He is sitting on his bed in his dormitory room at M.I.T.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Maxwell,” he says.
“Good to meet you,” Digby replies.
“So, do you know your way around Sentry Link?”
“Nope.”
“It’s a personal background database. Totally legit, but pricey. Grandpa put it on his American Express card.”
Baskerton smiles proudly; Digby is not sure whether that is because he is footing the bill or because he feels terribly up-to-date by dint of owning an American Express card.
“Anyhow, there aren’t that many Ronald LeFevres,” Robbie continues. “In fact, only one in this guy’s age range. I’ll UL a pic.”
Digby watches Robbie
do some tricky finger work on his laptop and then a photograph of Felicia Hastings’ very own Ronald LeFevre pops up on Digby’s screen. In the photo, however, LeFevre’s hair is black and parted in the middle.
Baskerton snickers. “All that’s missing is a rose in his mouth,” he says.
“That your man?” Robbie asks.
“It is.”
“Okay. His real name is Fredrick Linkleter,” Robbie says. “Born 1952 in Wilmington, Delaware. Majored in finance and communications at Goldey-Beacom College. High honors, it says. Oh, he also goes by Nicolas Lombardi.”
Baskerton snorts. “He’s got a record, right?”
“Not really,” Robbie says. “Nothing criminal, not even a DWI. But he’s been on the losing end of a few pricey civil suits. Wait a second, okay, Gramps?”
Robbie does some more fleet computer multitasking and up on Digby’s screen pops the lawsuit of one Alice Pingree Thompson versus Nicolas Lombardi, aka Fredrick Linkleter, aka Ronald LeFevre, re: obtaining funds under false pretenses. These funds amounted to in excess of two million dollars; the alleged pretense had been that Lombardi, aka Linkleter, etc., was an estate planner. Another alleged pretense was that Lombardi, aka Linkleter, etc. intended to spend the rest of his life at Ms. Thompson’s side. In point of fact, he took off for Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France, as soon as said funds were deposited in his bank account. The court found in favor of the plaintiff, but the defendant ended up repaying only fifty cents on the dollar because, apparently, in merely six weeks’ time he had racked up one million dollars in purchases of gifts, mostly jewelry, and all for persons other than Ms. Thompson.
Robbie then pulls up three more civil suits involving LeFevre and women of a certain age with patrician names, including one in which LeFevre actually prevailed because, as the judge wrote, “The defendant’s promise of lifelong companionship and fidelity is, in the context of today’s common language usage, no more binding than, in an earlier era, a wink once promised marriage.” Baskerton reluctantly expresses admiration for the judge’s fine turn of phrase.