Murdering Mr. Monti

by Judith Viorst

  I searched through my purse, tracked down my little date book, and (in my first gesture of adulterous deception) entered my appointment with Philip in code: P.E.H.A.B.C.

  The P.E. was Philip Eastlake, formerly Epstein.

  The H.A. was our meeting place, the Hay-Adams.

  And because, as I tell my readers, the profoundly passionate need not preclude the practical, the B.C. was a reminder to Buy Condoms.

  • • •

  Months later, on a steamy August day, there I was at a far-from-my-neighborhood drugstore, purchasing a pack of condoms again. Except this time they were not for Philip and me, or for Mr. Monti and me, or for Louis and me. This time they were for Josephine and Wally.

  One of these days I ought to do a column on purchasing condoms. I mean, there is so little guidance in this area. Do we want ribbed? Do we want lubricated? Do we want the old standbys—Ramses or Trojans—or is it better to opt for the newer brands? Do we want to flatter our partner by buying the extra-large or—if he’s not extra-large—will the damn thing fall off? Even my best Mend, Carolyn, who has had a quite remarkable number of lovers (considering that she has also been married four times), is not that informed about condoms, though she strongly recommends that you look the salesman straight in the eye when purchasing them.

  Anyway, it had been six days since Wally had taken off for Rehoboth Beach, where he’d been holing up, planning and tanning. Today, however, was the big day he was coming back to the city. Today was the day he intended, with a little help from me, to rescue (or maybe kidnap) Josephine. He would then, having won her trust again, take her back to the soothing shores of Rehoboth, where he had already (what can I tell you? he’s a remarkable young man) lined up a vacationing shrink to give the poor girl some decent psychotherapy.

  Actually, Josephine had started seeing a therapist early in June. She should have started early in second grade, which was when, she once told me, she began to hyperventilate and sleepwalk and vomit every morning before school. But it seems that Mr. Monti treated any hint that his youngest child had emotional difficulties as a vicious personal attack on his fathering. “She’s a growing girl,” he’d say, whenever she started gasping, fox breath or throwing up. “She’ll grow out of it.”

  And so she did, replacing her childhood symptoms with several inconvenient obsessive rituals and an awesome collection of allergies. and phobias (including, along with the standard ones, a fear of contracting botulism from canned foods that had been improperly sealed). When Josephine’s allergist strongly recommended psychotherapy, Mr. Monti found her another allergist. When Josephine’s Aunt Minnie strongly recommended psychotherapy, Mr. Monti quit talking to Aunt Minnie. And when I, in a moment intimate enough to tempt me to try a constructive intervention, also recommended psychotherapy, Mr. Monti almost put on his trousers. “If my daughter’s got problems,” he finally said, in a very unloverly voice, “let her tell me about them. Why should I pay good money to some jerk who’s going to teach her to hate her father?”

  • • •

  But then, in April and May, as the conflict between her father and Wally intensified, so did Josephine’s rituals and rashes. In addition to which she lost—and she was a skinny girl to begin with—seventeen pounds. Just as the doctors were talking about putting Josephine in the hospital, Mr. Monti tuned in to a local talk show. And there was Dr. Phony (excuse me, Foley), a genuine certified psychotherapist, assailing the “disconnectedness of our perniciously individualistic society” and denouncing the current focus on independence and separation as “a psychoanalytic plot against family life.” His message—that all neuroses stemmed from a failure to respect parental authority—spoke directly to Mr. Monti’s condition. And when Mr. Monti learned that Dr. Foley had a private practice in Washington, his joy was complete. Herr, at last, was the therapist for Josephine. Here was the man who’d be able to restore his daughter’s psychological health, while also restoring her to her father’s arms.

  Three days a week, from 2 P.M. until 2:50 P.M., Josephine had therapy with Dr. Foley, driven into the District and back by one of Mr. Monti’s overpaid flunkies. The flunky would go for a snack at the diner on upper Connecticut Avenue, just a few blocks from where Josephine got shrunk, and my job—on that August day—was to intercept her before she started her session and somehow talk her into seeing Wally.

  “Mrs. Kovner, hi, what are you doing here?” Josephine nervously asked me, as I came hurrying over to her in the lobby.

  I had given my Josephine tactics a considerable amount of thought and had opted for the Grand Emotion approach. “Wally needs you,” I said to her, gripping her thin arm. “Please—he’s waiting around the corner. Please come with me.”

  Can I be frank with you? If I’d had my choice, I would not have been trying to coax Josephine into coming with me to see Wally. She was not the kind of girl I wanted for him. It’s true that she was good. She was kind. She was loving. She was probably even intelligent. And she was—in her wispy, wraithlike way—quite beautiful, But when I thought of what I’d consider the ideal woman for Wally, I thought “feisty.” I thought “zesty.” I thought “competent” and “savvy.” I thought “fun.” I didn’t think of someone who suffered from fear of botulism, had a tormented attachment to her father, and might, in my view (despite my deep commitment to growth and change), be a permanent basket case.

  Don’t imagine I didn’t wonder why Wally had chosen to fall for a permanent basket case. Don’t imagine I didn’t have a few theories. But also don’t imagine I would ever refuse, if Wally asked for my help, to help him to achieve his heart’s desire, who was—at the moment—chewing on a cuticle and shaking her curly head in a slo-mo “no.”

  “I can’t,” she wailed. “I can’t see Wally right now. Tell him I’m really sorry, but I can’t.”

  The elevator arrived and Josephine, showing more backbone than I would have predicted, got in and pressed the button for the third floor. I was right behind her. I waited a moment and then I asked, as we rode up to Dr. Foley, “Maybe you at least could tell me why.”

  The door opened at 3 and an ancient woman hobbled on just as Josephine was about to answer. Josephine clamped her lips together and rode, without saying a word, back down to the lobby. The door opened, the woman left, the door closed, Josephine pushed the third-floor button and said, as we headed upward, “Because I promised my father and Dr. Foley.”

  “Promised them you wouldn’t hear Wally’s side of it?” I asked, as the elevator once again stopped at 3.

  A man and a woman, quarreling in low hissing tones, entered and pushed the lobby button. The four of us, them still hissing, rode down together. When they were gone and the car was again ascending, Josephine sighed and looked at me with moist eyes. “Mrs. Kovner,” she said imploringly, “I promised.”

  This time, when the elevator arrived at the third floor, Josephine was instantly out the door. “It’s funny,” I said to her T-shirted back, my finger pressed on Door Open, “but one of the things I never dreamed you were capable of doing was deliberately inflicting emotional pain.”

  Bingo! Josephine gasped. stood rigidly still, and then backed back into the elevator.

  We rode down to the lobby together in silence. In silence we walked together around the block. And a moment later Wally was buckling Josephine into the front seat of his car, after which he gave me a kiss, said, “Thanks a million, Mom,” and was heading his Chevy up Connecticut Avenue.

  Just before my confrontation with Josephine, I had handed Wally a Care package consisting of my homemade curried squash and apple soup, my pasta primavera, a gorgeous olive bread from Marvelous Market, a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau, and the box of condoms, “Just in case,” I explained, as he set the carton of goodies in the trunk of his car, “you were too distracted to plan ahead.” I had also made him swear that he wouldn’t take Josephine to Rehoboth against her will. In turn I had promised that I’d be in charge of informing Mr. Monti that his daughter was—though I cou
ldn’t say where—in safe hands.

  • • •

  Remember the movie Raging Bull. It starred Robert De Niro, who gave a truly compelling performance as the brutish boxer Jake La Motta, a man whose violent . . . Well, you don’t have to remember the movie—the title itself quite. nicely describes how Mr. Monti took the news about Josephine. Which I bravely delivered in person, that day, at his office.

  When Mr. Monti stopped raging, he smoothed back his hair from his forehead and said, “So now your son is kidnapping my daughter.”

  “She went with him of her own free will and volition.”

  “Never!”

  “Yes she did.”

  “She went of her own volition with a person who stole money from her father?”

  “You know that’s not true about the money, Mr. Monti.”

  “You’re calling me a liar? Don’t you ever call me a liar. Don’t you ever ever ever call me a liar.”

  Mr. Monti was moving back into his Raging Bull mode, but I refused to be intimidated. “I’m not calling you a liar,” I told him. “I’m calling you a megalomaniacal sociopath with a severe narcissistic personality disorder and some heavy-duty unresolved Oedipal problems. You need help.”

  Mr. Monti flashed me a smile of the kind last seen on the nonhuman Star of Jaws, “And I’m going to get some help,” he said, as he reached for the telephone and dialed a number. He kept smiling his sharky smile as he waited impatiently until someone answered his call. “Hello,” he said. “This is Joseph Augustus Monti—and I want to report a kidnapping and a theft.”

  • • •

  Although my friend Carolyn’s taste in sexual partners is awesomely catholic, she still couldn’t understand why Joseph Monti had made my Definite Lovers list. Which, of course, he had done the moment I learned he was one of a pair of identical twins. Mr. Monti and I had seen each other a couple of times in the weeks shortly after our January dinner. Once, by accident, when we (with our spouses) ran into each other at the Kennedy Center. And again when Jake and I (at Wally’s urging) invited the senior Montis to brunch at our house. Each time I saw him I mentally deplored his intellect and his ethical system, while also mentally tearing off his clothes. He was Catholic, married, and a twin, which covered three of the eight traits I sought in my liaisons, in addition to which he was someone to whom I kept on wanting to moan, “Oh, take me! Now!” So why, I asked Carolyn—shortly before Mr. Monti accepted my offer—shouldn’t he be on my Definite Lovers list?

  “It’s just a gut feeling I have,” she replied. “I think he’s bad news.”

  “And since when has your gut feeling been reliable?” I asked her. “Cast your mind back to Gabriel, Kevin, Jimmy, Owen, George, that entire Argentinean string quartet . . .”

  “No fair bringing up the string quartet,” Carolyn grumbled, blowing strands of blond hair out of her eyes. “That was a scientific experiment. A sexual byway. A momentary lapse.”

  “And,” I reminded her, “a big mistake.”

  Both of us were breathing hard as we spoke—not because of the sexual subject matter but because our discussion was taking place as we briskly pedaled away on Carolyn’s side-by-side stationary bikes.

  According to Carolyn, her relationships with men have been greatly improved since her purchase of that second bike. “It’s a very bonding experience, pumping together for forty-five minutes,” she told me. “In fact, I’d say there are many times when the pumping is much more bonding than the humping.”

  “And definitely better,” I added, “for your calf muscles.”

  It was an unseasonably warm late February day, and a mild breeze blew through the open bedroom window as we pedaled round and round. Carolyn’s Cleveland Park house, just two blocks from mine, had been lavishly renovated, and her bedroom was three rooms combined into one vast suite with walk-in closets, a handsome tiled fireplace, and a bed that could hold all her past husbands at once. There was also plenty of space for the bikes, plus one of those giant-size television screens, plus a cabinet containing a fridge full of pricey champagne and boxes of Godiva chocolates. There was also Carolyn’s favorite toy—her tape recorder—which she used to record all sorts of indiscretions. But she never turned it on when we got together twice a week to improve our bodies and relieve our souls.

  “How much biking time left?” I panted.

  Carolyn checked. “Seventeen more minutes. Then I’ve got to shower and get out of here. I’m having my legs waxed, my nails wrapped, and my hair done. Then I pick up my new Calvin Klein. And this is my after noon to baby-sit Tiffany.”

  If you want to meet the living incarnation of the phrase “contradiction in terms,” meet my friend Carolyn, who spends more on her body than anyone I know, who (thanks to an eight-figure trust fund) indulges her every materialistic whim, but who also engages in all kinds of gritty volunteer work—like baby-sitting Tiffany, a poor black two-and-a-half-year-old with AIDS, so her mom can get out three afternoons a week. Imagine a Big Is Beautiful (size 14–16) version of Grace Kelly and you’ll have a pretty clear picture of Carolyn’s gilded, polished, aristocratic good looks. But from what I’ve learned in our twenty-year exchanges of deep dark secrets, you’d need to be familiar with some of the videos in the Adults Only, section to get a sense of Carolyn’s sexual style.

  I’ve been best friends with Carolyn since ten minutes after we met, which happened soon after I moved to Cleveland Park, when Jeff, beguiled by the host of golden daffodils on her front lawn, addressed himself to picking every last one of them. Carolyn had a warm smile on her face when, hand in hand with Jeff, she showed up at my house and told me the story. “You have an adorable son,” she said, “but he’s got this thing about daffodils. How can we stop him before he strikes again?”

  I loved her utter graciousness about the rape of her lawn. She loved my ardent apology and the homemade lemon pound cake I served with our tea. By the time she left my kitchen we had begun a conversation which we knew would never stop as long as we lived.

  • • •

  “So what makes you think Mr. Monti is seducible?” Carolyn asked me, as she climbed off her bike at the ding and removed her sweats. “For all you know he takes that ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife’s ass’ commandment seriously.”

  I quit biking too, and followed Carolyn into the bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet seat so we could continue talking while she showered. “I don’t think so,” I shouted over the din of her luxe eight-faucet stall shower. “Remember when the Montis came for brunch? Well, I had a few moments alone with him in the kitchen—enough time to melt a little ice—and he gave me this look and he said that people just don’t understand that a woman’s beauty is always found in her eyes.”

  “Sounds innocent enough.”

  “Yeah. Right. Except he was patting my ass while he was saying it.”

  Carolyn came out of the shower and started toweling off briskly. “God, look at these breasts. Why do they keep staring down at the ground instead of gazing up at the heavens?”

  “Only the left one is looking down. The right one is fine. Anyway,” I continued, “when, instead of slapping his hand, I gave it a kind of reassuring squeeze, he suggested that we meet in his office soon—very soon—to discuss the Wally-Josephine situation.”

  “I still think he’s bad news. Besides, don’t you feel guilty—just a little guilty—about her? Mrs. Monti?”

  “This from the woman who slept with her own sister’s husband?”

  Carolyn brushed some blusher across her alabaster skin and then went to work on her eyes with a blue-gray liner. “But I’m an Episcopalian. I can handle adultery.”

  “Well, so can I. And besides,” I added, in my stuffiest voice, “one needn’t conceptualize this as adultery.”

  Carolyn laughed. “Then how might one conceptualize it?”

  “As a scientific experiment. As a sexual byway. As a momentary”—I sprayed myself with her million-dollar perfume—“as a very very momentary
lapse.”

  • • •

  Although I use a word processor when I write the final draft of my newspaper column, I always like starting out with a pencil and pad. I like to write by hand curled up in our big brown living-room chair, or sprawled on the flowered chaise upstairs in our bedroom, or settled on a bench in the Bishop’s Garden of the National Cathedral.

  The cathedral is right in our neighborhood, an easy stroll away, but Carolyn drove me there on the way to her waxing. I found my bench in the garden, which is sort of a Secret Garden—small, cozy, lovingly tended, hidden from sight—and checked out the greenings and bloomings that would shortly ignite into a spring spectacular. Spring is different for sixteen-year-olds than it is for forty-six-year-olds, I told myself. And what if you’re seventy-six—what’s it like then? On such idle musings, I’ve found, are some of my finest columns built. I fished out my pad and pencil and started writing.

  What does the old lady think about in the springtime? What, in a time of rebirth and new beginnings, can possibly be her expectations, her dreams? In autumn’s flaming finale, the old lady can find reflections of herself that speak to her glories as well as to her diminishments. But she will not find her reflection in the spring of fresh starts and everything-is-possible. So what exactly is springtime to the old lady? What does the old lady think about?

  Every now and then I open one of my columns on this sort of poetic-melancholy note, but fear not—I instantly move on to affirmation. My column is, after all, intended to put people in control of their lives and to help them to develop a can-do attitude. Thus if spring means a new beginning, I go on to tell my readers, what all you old ladies in springtime must do is: Begin! Think about a new language you’d like to study, a new city you’d like to visit, a new book you’d like to read, a great new recipe you’d like to try. Is going back to school an impossible dream? No way. Alice Carney from Grand Rapids, Michigan, has done just that and she writes to me that she hopes to have her B.A. next year at the age of seventy-eight! Is learning to tap dance simply out of the question? Of course not! Marlene Walters writes to me from a nursing home in Tulsa that she can do a fantastic tap dance to “Puttin’ On the Ritz”! And she does it sitting down!! In a wheelchair yet!!! (I try never to exceed three exclamation points.)