“Do you know what I’m talking about?”
There was the roadside stop. I decelerated more and turned the wheel. “I don’t know. Tell me what you mean.”
“What do I mean, Harry? I mean the night you and I went to Lowry’s for dinner. Where did you go afterward? Remember you said you had work to do and I believed it? Stupid, trusting me. I needed you that night! And what about the wonderful leather bag you bought me? You went back and bought her one too? You drove all the way back to that store to buy her the same bag? You didn’t even get a different color. That’s what I loved most about it. That marvelous sexy blue! Did you ever go back to a place you’d been with her to get something for me?”
The answer to that was yes, but I wasn’t about to say it then. Her list went on. Lies, gifts, meetings, things said and not said. Fanny had decided to “come clean” with Claire Stansfield because now that she’d told me to go to hell, she wanted the other woman in my life to know exactly what had gone on between us so that Claire could decide whether she wanted to be involved with such a black-hearted, megalomaniacal, deceiving villain. She was as complete with her report as a tax auditor. Claire listed at least twenty rotten things I’d done behind her back, between the lines, in broad daylight, et cetera.
“Are they true, Harry? Did you really do them?”
“Generally, yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘generally’? Don’t play word games.”
“I mean yes, I did them with some little differences. I assume you know Fanny told you about them with just the slightest slant in her favor.”
“I assumed that. I’m not so dumb. And I’ll tell you right now that when she was finished I said, ‘Thank you, Fanny. Now I understand why Harry chose me and not you.’ And I hung up. She can drop dead. But that has nothing to do with us. These things are all betrayals, Harry. They’re shitty and wrong and selfish, and people who love each other just don’t do them. That’s all. It’s as basic as that. So I want to know why you did. And why you did them so often to me. I don’t care about you and her.”
A truck zoomed by on the autobahn. A car with Polish license plates pulled into the rest stop. Two small people jumped out and ran for the toilet. When they emerged a long time later both of them wore the smiles of the just. I still hadn’t spoken. My mind’s computer had placed all its programs into RAM disc and skimmed each for possible answers. But in the same nanoseconds, I discarded each response because they were either too clever or evasive or simply not true.
“I wish I could give you the answer you’d like to hear. I’m sure there’s one that’d soothe you or make you feel better. But you know the only word that’s in my mind, Claire? Struggle. I’m not getting political on you and I’m not trying to avoid the issue. I’m talking about the truly difficult, everyday struggle to do the right thing. You’re a genuinely good person and because of that … gift, I don’t think you know what it is to have to work hard to simply do the right thing, especially with the people that matter to you. You have it innately, and sometimes I’m very jealous. It’d also be easy to say ‘lightning only strikes the highest peaks,’ meaning, if you’re going to love me, you’ve got to take the whole package and accept the way I am. But you have every right to reject that too. Maybe I do have greatness in me, and I can honestly tell you that in the last months I’ve been working like never before to do right, not only for the moment, but for all concerned. Did I do those shitty things before? Yes. Would I do them again? I hope not. I hope not. I hope not. Right now I want you. I want to treat you the way you deserve. I want to treat you as well as you’ve treated me all along. And I am trying. Please know that I’m trying. But I am not a character in a novel or a television series. Things always make sense there and we get used to thinking life should really be like TV or a Dickens novel. The bad guy has a terrible experience, gets brought up short by life and boom—he changes everything and becomes a good soul. I’d love to be a good soul. I’d love to be a good soul for you and I’m trying. That’s the only thing I can say with any certainty: I am trying.”
“That sounds good, Harry, but you did betray me.”
“I betrayed you. A hundred percent.”
“Which means you’re not to be trusted.”
“I doubt if anyone has ever trusted me.”
She jammed me in the arm with her elbow. “Oh goddamn you, Harry, I trusted you! I knew your shortcomings and how deeply involved you were with Fanny, but I still trusted you. That’s what’s so hurtful about this—I gave you so much rope because I knew you needed it, but you took that rope and twisted it around my neck, not your own! I’m the one who’s choking here, not you!”
I put my forehead on the steering wheel. “I will try. I will struggle, I—will—try. I can make no other guarantees.”
“You’re in no position to make guarantees.”
Cars passed. Thin gray clouds looking like racing greyhounds came in and moved out again.
“Even if I believe that you’re trying, I hate the fact I can’t trust you. It’s like having sex but always stopping just before the orgasm.”
“Huh?”
“Because when the orgasm comes, a good orgasm, you click everything else off and just fall into it. Because you know your love will catch you. When it’s over, you’re on safe ground again. How do I get back to that with you?”
The few days we had together in Zell am See before the Sultan arrived were fragile and sad. Like a person with a new scar, we’d just begin to function normally when something was said or done that stretched our “skin” too much, and instantly the new weaker tissue would scream. We were formal. I talked too much and tried too hard to keep her entertained. One afternoon we were feeding ducks by the lake and she started to cry. I asked if there was anything I could do. She held out her mechanical hand, palm up, and without saying a word, opened and closed it again and again. Coming when it did, the gesture was so odd that it made me too uneasy to ask what she meant.
Another time, apropos of nothing, she told me her parents’ favorite Claire-as-child story. When she was four, her mother asked her what were her favorite things. “Love, zebras, and my husband.”
We screwed too much, and frequently it was the same variety: crazy-aggressive, hot but without any closeness; look up at the wrong moment and you were likely to catch a cold eye watching you. I was very glad Morton was around because he quickly sensed the tension between us and did what he could to lessen it. We ate meals together where he entertained us with wild stories about his days soldiering for the United Nations. He and Claire went cross-country skiing one day and into Salzburg one afternoon. When he asked what was wrong I told him, trying carefully to give as fair and balanced an account as I could. He seemed sympathetic, but distant. For the first time, I asked him if this was the sort of thing that had caused him and his wife to break up. “No, Harry, I was true to her. I did other things wrong, but I always believed one person was enough for a lifetime.”
The day before the Saru contingent was due to descend, Claire left without telling me. I returned to the room after a morning meeting and there was a note on the desk propped against a vase holding a single red rose.
“I owe you more of these for ruining yours the other day. I’m sorry to chicken out, but I can’t be here now with you, my dear. I’m going to Vienna and will stay there until after Fanny leaves. Then we can see how we feel and talk about what to do. I keep saying to myself, ‘Forgive him,’ but then I realize I don’t want to forgive you, I want to love you. Since I can’t do either now, I’ll go and be alone in a pretty city and hopefully clean out my cluttered head. I’ll call when I get there and tell you where I’m staying.”
Although it surprised and hurt me, on the one hand I was glad she’d made the decision. She deserved my full attention, but I couldn’t give it to her until the formidable Neville had come and I’d had it out with that bitch. Actually, now that I knew what had happened between her and Claire, I didn’t think of Fanny as a bitch so much as a
… . No, I thought she was a bitch. A fang-addered, holier-than-thou, backstabbing bitch who hadn’t gotten the world’s best deal from me, granted, but did not have the right to repay me by trying to pump venom into the arteries of my life. She was a bitch all right and would get hers. Naturally I had a plan.
I wasn’t at the small airport in nearby Schuttdorf to greet the royal duo when their helicopter came in. I was back in the hotel room asleep, having an entertaining dream about buying Mormon literature. Palm said my absence was an embarrassment for people who didn’t deserve to be embarrassed.
At the reception that night, held at the Sultan’s Schloss, half of the western part of Austria seemed to be in attendance, so it was not until I’d milled around for an hour that I saw or talked to either of them.
Both wore black. Way on the other side of the room talking to a bunch of attentive politicos, Hassan stood in a silky double-breasted suit that made him look taller and older. Nearer to me, Fanny had on a billowing silk blouse and slacks, and a pomegranate red belt. Were women in Saru allowed to wear such slinky garb? What happened if mere mortals lusted after the Sultan’s wife? Furious as I was, it pleased me to undress her in my mind and remember what she was like in the sack. I’d seen her asleep. Heard her pee. Watched as she stood in front of a mirror and patrolled her face for blemishes. She was mean but vulnerable. I knew what she’d done came of caring deeply for me but not getting what she wanted in return. Now I’d give her exactly what she had wanted, but too late. It was no longer hers to touch. When we made eye contact I was the one who went up first.
“Hello there.”
“Hello, Harry.” Her eyes were a complete meteorological station of dials, meters, and wind socks programmed to read the weather in me, and between us. I gave her enough time to take a first measurement: (1) He came up; (2) he looks friendly; (3) he hasn’t tried to kill me.
I knew what she was expecting—a hundred-megaton Radcliffe blast, or at the very least, gale force winds that would blow her back to Saru. What she got instead was Harry Radcliffe at his indisputable best. Gentlemanly, witty as only I could be witty, but most important—kind. I “kinded” her right out of the room. I could go into detail and quote what I said/she said/I said to show what I mean, but suffice it to say Fanny Neville never knew me to be so gosh darned wonderful. From the first minute, I could see it was driving her crazy. When she asked if Claire had arrived, I said yes and how important a talk we’d had in light of their recent conversation. When she pumped me on who said what, I lied like a car dealer and brilliantly made it sound like Claire and I and our love had all had epiphanies/insights/ breakthroughs galore because of that momentous chat between the two women. But I did it so smartly, and underplayed things so well, that even the hyperperceptive Fanny didn’t see the wool being pulled over her eyes. The trick was not to smooth it over. Sure, Fanny’s exposing my badness had caused a crisis, shouting and tears. Sure, we’d come close to breaking up. Sure this, sure that, but in the end we realized there was a great sturdy bond between us that, though shaken violently, had revealed itself to be so much stronger than either of us had thought. How fundamentally we cared!
What Fanny saw was the Radcliffe she’d always wanted—as a direct result of her trying to ruin him. He was much the same man, only better now because of her shameful, unnecessary act. By being a small, tattling rat, she had helped Claire and me to find the mother lode in our relationship.
I had a part two of my revenge plan but put it on hold after seeing the result of part one that night. After fifteen minutes of intense conversation, surrounded the whole time by peeking, sneering, snooping people from the reception, I could see the damage seeping through to Fanny. When finally she asked why Claire wasn’t there that night, I looked her in the eye and said, “She went to Vienna. She left because she needs time away to think whether she wants to stay with me or not. It’s very possible she won’t, Fanny.”
“Even after all you worked through? I thought everything was all right.”
“Everything is understood. It’s not all right.” I took a breath to say more, but found I couldn’t. Because I was telling the pure truth and was terribly afraid I would now lose Claire because of the old me—a me I could no longer stand. He had done these things to her. The same Radcliffe bullshitting Fanny right now into believing her contemptible behavior had been such a help to us. You might never see her again! In her note she’d said let’s talk after Fanny leaves, not let’s see each other! I wanted to rush off and call Claire, beg her not to leave. To give me even half a chance to try to do it right. I was glad I’d used my Saru wish to get her a hand, but if I had that wish again, I’d ask for another chance with Claire, because nothing was more important than another chance with her. Any kind of chance.
I looked at Fanny and felt dizzy. I touched my head to still it. I was hyperventilating badly and couldn’t stop. Be calm. Excusing myself, I walked quickly away to find a bathroom where I filled the sink with cold water and stuck my whole head down into it as deep as it would go. I might lose Claire! I probably had. Call her immediately. No, leave her alone and let her work it out for herself. Beg her. Don’t bother her. Crawl. Don’t call.
I pulled my head up from the water, gasping, dropped it in again. Call Vienna. Don’t you dare.
My head up again, I looked in the mirror over the sink. My face dripped and shone. I was panting. “You win, Fanny. You win.”
ONE LAST STORY BEFORE I finish. Philip Strayhorn and I were having dinner at Venasque’s house one night. The subject had turned naturally and comfortably to the many different ways there were to die. I was not so far away from my days of madness, and normally talk of death made me jittery. But these two men, particularly together, made even the land of no return an intriguing place to hear about. Strayhorn, who knew something about everything, told us how in the Middle Ages executions were quite formal, absorbing events. Often the condemned would get up on the platform, his final podium, and give a stirring speech to the crowd. He told them how worried he was for their souls and how he’d arrived at this pitiful place himself. Beware, folks, don’t follow my path or you’ll end up here. The crowd loved hearing these last-minute autobiographies while the doomed had his last earthly moment of camaraderie with those who’d come to see him die: We’re all in this together and the only trick I’ve learned, brothers and sisters, is do not do it my way.
Venasque spoke while finishing the last bit of spicy potato salad on his plate. “Harry did that once.”
Shoveling in pastrami on rye, I almost missed my cue. “Say what?”
“That was you. You got up once and gave a terrific speech and then they cut your head off. One of the only times in your whole history you ever admitted to being wrong.”
I looked at Strayhorn. “When was this, Venasque?”
“Oh, in France, before the revolution. They got you for stealing a priest’s pig.”
“A priest’s pig?”
“That’s right. Who wants another pickle?”
“How much ‘before’ the revolution?”
“Don’t worry about that, Harry. Listen to what I said between the lines that you didn’t happen to read. I said it was one of the few times in your history that you admitted to being wrong. Hint hint, darling.”
I LOATHE OOMPAH BANDS. Fat guys marching pompously around in Tyrolean hats with pheasant feathers leaping goofily off the side. Quasi-fascist, paramilitary loden costumes that look like uniforms, and the music they play! What sadist ever thought up that music? What circle of hell has he been committed to?
There must have been five oompah bands on hand that day. And when they stopped for a breather, Austrian folk groups would come leaping up from some other part of hell to yodel, do ass- and foot-slap routines, howl and prance through dance after traditional Austrian folk dance. In between, a famous television personality served as master of ceremonies and kept up a patter of jokes and comments and a parade of pretty girls in dirndls cut so low you could see their belly
buttons. Welcome to the Dog Museum Dachgleiche. Actually, it was terrible but not that bad. Once you got used to the fact that the purpose of the whole thing was to get drunk and congratulate anyone nearby, it was nice in a sort of George Grosz way. My only real problem, aside from having to listen to “The Radetzky March” six times, was too often I’d be looking at these people having fun and remember many of the older ones were doing this same cavorting back in the 1930s and ’40s, and then when the festivities were peaking, a guy in a brown uniform would get up and give a ringing speech about Herr Hitler. That realization put a damper on my becoming too involved in the party. But it was fun. The Saruvians drank apple cider and orange juice. Lamb had been brought in for them. Barbecuing lamb and sausage smells filled the air, along with the oiliness of fried potatoes and tartness of new wine and mugs of beer. I have no capacity for alcohol at all, and knew if I had two beers I’d be dead drunk fast, so I took a glass here, had a sip. Put it down and, wandering on to the next group, took a glass there, sipped … . That way I would be able to make it through the ceremony and what followed in reasonable shape. I also knew if I got drunk I might very well call Vienna and end up saying the wrongest things to Claire. My newest plan was to leave her alone for another day, if I could bear it, then call and tell her how bad off I was and ask if she would please see me, even if she’d already made up her mind to go. That was fair, wasn’t it? I held onto the scheme like a bird with a broken wing: Maybe I could keep it alive with care and concern. Maybe it would heal and fly again if I did things right.
I was staggering through a pidgin conversation in German with the Bundeshauptmann from Salzburg when Hassan came up, followed by a small army of minions.
Outside the Dog Museum Page 24