“She seems quite wonderful” I agreed, smiling and sipping my wine and sinking deeper into the plush upholstery.
“Quite wonderful is right,” he said, as he poured more Burgundy. “A woman of great understanding. And acceptance.”
I nodded solemnly, trying to look impressed. “Understanding and acceptance are wonderful qualities.”
“Wonderful,” he repeated, bringing our total number of “wonderfuls” up to six. “She understands my appetites. And she accepts . . . she accepts that I must . . .” He shrugged an excessive Italian shrug and tossed me an unconvincingly sheepish smile and reduced the space between us to practically nil. The limo was moving slowly through the afternoon rush-hour traffic, but Mr. Monti and I were starting to speed.
“Accepts that you must what?”
“Satisfy them.”
“You tell her when you satisfy your appetites?”
“Sometime I tell her. Sometime she finds out.”
“But when she doesn’t find out, you always tell her?”
As the limo swung onto the Fourteenth Street Bridge, Mr. Monti finished his wine, then helped himself to mine, then got rid of the glasses, after which he swiveled toward me, one hand pressing my shoulder back into the seat, the other—palm flat—Insistently rotating round and round and round against my shamelessly receptive left nipple.
“You mean,” he said, “would tell my wife about us?”
The hand that was pressing my shoulder had moved significantly southward and rapidly disappeared into the interior, setting certain sensitive sections to singing oh-my, oh-yes, oh-more, oh . . .
“Ouch!” My turned-to-mush body suddenly congealed. “Excuse me for saying this, Joseph, but I really don’t think that’s any place for a pinky ring.”
Mr. Monti was deeply apologetic.
“Please forgive me, Brenda,” he said, withdrawing his hand and removing the ring from his pinky. “The last thing I would want is to cause you pain.” As he made his move to return to where he had been before being rudely, interrupted, I pulled away and said, “Wrong time. Wrong place. But if, just for argument’s sake, there should happen to be a right time and right place, I think you need to know that you would cause me serious pain if you told your wife about it.”
“Just for argument’s sake,” said Mr. Monti, “what do you think would be the right time and right place?”
I knew half the answer immediately, though I certainly also knew that my response was more than a little bit kinky. Which didn’t stop me from answering, “For argument’s sake then, let’s say March eighteenth. I’ve got some time available in the morning.”
• • •
My trip to Manhattan included a sushi dinner with my older sister, Rosalie, and an early-morning taping of a cable television show on food guilt. The TV people had offered to put me up at the Berkshire Place, but with all I had to tell Rosalie I decided I’d spend the night on her living-room couch.
There are twelve years, ten months, and three weeks between the date of my sister Rosalie’s birth and mine. For twelve years, ten months, and three weeks, as she is often wont to point out, she reveled in being our parents’ only child. At the age of fifty-eight she has finally recovered from the shock of arrival. But she still resents the fact that I am always going to be twelve years, ten months, and three weeks younger than she.
Tall and leggy and slender, with her jawline fairly intact, my sister looks good for her age the way Lauren Bacall does. Which doesn’t quite do it for Rosalie, who would rather look good for Jodie Foster’s age and who is heading toward sixty kicking and screaming, “Why me?” In her job as a conference coordinator, Rosalie shows the organizational skills that both of us inherited from our late mom, known in northern New Jersey as perhaps the finest president ever to preside over Fair Lawn Hadassah. In her chronic dissatisfaction, however, Rosalie seems to be taking after our dad, a life insurance salesman who believed that he sang better than Ezio Pinza and who felt that if he had only aimed for Broadway instead of Prudential, he would have been the man Mary Martin tried to wash out of her hair in South Pacific.
Our father, who died two years ago, sang decades of popular songs—from “Jeepers Creepers” to “Bésame Mucho,” from “Goody Goody” to “White Cliffs of Dover,” from “Some Enchanted Evening” to (keeping up with the times) “What I Did for Love.” He sang at Bar Mitzvahs and weddings and on trips down to the shore (during which Mom and Rose snoozed and I sang along), and although he was surely no Pinza he could put a lump in your throat with his “Once you have found her, never let her go.”
Dad at least had a vision of what perfect happiness was: making beautiful music up on a stage. Rosalie, on the other hand, is forever revising her life and she still hasn’t got a clue as to what she is going for. She has been an airline stewardess, sold real estate, ran a gallery down in SoHo, worked as the pastry chef at La Folie. She has ranged, since her divorce, between defiantly single (“Who needs them?”) and desperately single (“I’m nothing without a man”). Currently a blonde, she was briefly brunette with a stick-straight Lulu-in Hollywood bob and has also tried her luck as a frizzy haired redhead. She has also tried being a mother, which has worked out just fine with her dog, but not with her only human child, Miranda, an independent producer who is living out in Los Angeles and keeping in cautious touch with her mother by fax.
Remember that woman who dealt with bad times by saying “Could be worse”? Rosalie lives by the motto “Could be better.” Which means that, wherever she is, it—by definition—is never the place where she wants to be. “How’s the convention business?” I ask, and she gives me forty-five minutes on why she finds it deeply unfulfilling. “You know who’s being fulfilled?” she asks me. “Landscape architects. I’m giving serious thought to a career change.”
This career-change talk used to be the cue for me to do forty-five minutes on wasn’t it time she resolved her identity crisis, and didn’t she need to channel and focus her energies, and shouldn’t she come to terms with her limitations, and why in God’s name didn’t she grow up already!
We irritated the hell out of each other.
I once confessed to Jake that I loved my sister but didn’t like her. I believe Rose would have said the same about me. But when our father died and was laid to rest beside our mother in the Kedron section of the King Solomon Cemetery, we both resolved to make greater efforts at sisterhood.
I would make efforts to stop with the critiques.
And Rose—though she viewed whatever I did, including being born, as a critique—would make efforts to be less defensive and less touchy.
Which is why Rose tries not to tell me to shut the fuck up when I give her advice on how to live. Which is why—although my column advises everyone else how to live—I’m trying really hard to not advise her. Which is therefore why, instead of making my why don’t-you-grow-up-already speech; I said, as I finished the last piece of yellowtail at Hatsuhana, “Landscape architect—that’s really interesting.”
And then I told her some interesting stuff about me.
“I’m appalled,” Rose said when I’d filled her in on my short-term adultery plans. “I’m fainting with shock and horror. Tell me more.” We were at her apartment now (she has a nice place on East Seventy-fourth Street) and Hubert (Rose’s Great Dane) was sprawled at our feet, the beauty of his countenance, his charm and wit and intellect and grace having already been commented on ad absolute nauseam by his doting mistress. Rose stared at me contemplatively as I brought her up to date with my back-of-the-limo encounter with Mr. Monti, and then she said, “I disapprove. I really disapprove. God, this feels good. This feels great. I mean, this feels fabulous.”
“What does?”
“Feeling morally superior to you.”
“Well, okay, fair enough. You’re entitled.”
“And feeling more mature than you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because what you’re planning is very immature.
You’re not going to give me an argument on that, are you?”
I cleared my throat and fiddled with the zipper on my cozy flannel bathrobe. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Rose, but if you were doing it, I’d think it was immature. My doing it is . . . is a, well, it’s an exhaustively thought through, fully responsible choice. Not admirable. I’m not saying admirable. But when you look at the total picture—not immature.”
You can tell how improved our relationship is by the fact that Rose just shook her head, and laughed at me, after which she excused herself, hustled into the kitchen, and came right back with a bag of frozen Clark Bars. “Speaking of immature . . .” she said, and then the room fell silent, except for the snuffle of Hubert’s stuffed nose and the sound of our busy teeth chomping through chocolate.
Rosalie yawned, “So tell me, on this TV show you’re taping tomorrow morning—what are you going to say about food and guilt?”
I stood up and brushed the crumbs off my lips and licked the last of the chocolate off my fingers.
“I’m going to say that there’s nothing that a woman could do in bed that could possibly, in a million years, make her feel as guilty as eating four Clark Bars.”
• • •
I’m getting concerned that I’m coming across as devil may-care about guilt. Not true—I am a deeply guilty person. I’ll go even further and say that I believe I am gifted in guilt the way some folks are gifted in athletics. A sense of guilt is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of healthy adulthood. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. But having asserted that principle, I must add that although guilt is good, we must not overdo it—a point I have underscored in several columns, like IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT THAT IT’S RAINING and FORGETTING HER BIRTHDAY DID NOT GIVE YOUR MOTHER A STROKE and (one of my profounder explorations of the subject) NOBODY’S GOD—MAYBE NOT EVEN GOD.
I believe I have learned to distinguish the things that I shouldn’t feel guilty about from those things about which I most assuredly should. Like (despite what they taught me in parenting class) preferring Wally to Jake. Like (despite an excess seven pounds and a two-eight five cholesterol) eating candy. Like (despite the fact that Mrs. Monti won’t ever find out about it) sleeping with the husband of a wonderful wife and mother and future grandmother.
I knew at the time that Mrs. Monti would never find out about it because Mr. Monti had sworn a fearsome oath. I didn’t know at the time that (even though our secret would go with us to the grave, and even though I posed no threat to their marriage, and even though I wasn’t the first—or even the fifteenth—woman he had slept with) I would nonetheless feel I had injured Mrs. Monti, I didn’t know I would feel so small, so mean, so wrong, so unbelievably guilty.
I told you I’m good at guilt but, as I often explain to my readers, guilt must then be followed by forgiveness. We need to forgive other sinners—and ourselves. And so I’m in the process of forgiving myself for injuring Mrs. Monti, a process I am hoping to complete by the time I’ve managed to murder her husband.
• • •
It was while I stood in his office back on August 24, hearing him bellowing to the police that my younger son was a kidnapper and a thief, that I let myself think it: I want to kill Mr. Monti. Look what he’s doing destroying my Wally’s life. But not so fast! It seems the police could not call Josephine “kidnapped” unless she was being held against her will. (“Find my child,” Mr. Monti roared, “and when I’m finished talking to her, I guarantee she’ll say it’s against her will.”) As for the theft of the money, “Yeah, okay, I got it back,” he conceded grudgingly. “But that doesn’t cancel out that I was robbed.” He explained his deal with Marvin—“I retained the right to accuse this punk of the theft”—but that didn’t seem to galvanize the officer, who clearly was not responding with a blazing-guns, call-out-the SWAT-team sense of urgency to Mr. Monti’s increasingly wild accusations. A few more rounds and Raging Bull was raging, “Family problems? I’m not talking family problems—I’m talking crime.” And then he slammed down the phone with a red-faced, furious “Enough! I don’t speak to sergeants. You’ve got my number—have the police chief call me.”
He slumped back into his black leather chair, tap-tap-tapping the telephone with his pinky ring.
“I think I’ll go now,” I said with a smile as I took out my peach-glow blusher and brightened my cheeks. I looked fine. Mr. Monti was looking bruised. But not for long. “Don’t think, Mrs. Kovner”—his venomous voice stopped me dead at the office door—“don’t think that you are going to beat me out. If I don’t get Wally on this, I’ll get him on something, dealing drugs or even spying—I’ve got a couple of friends in the CIA.” He laughed. “Yeah, I’ve got friends and they could fix him pretty good. Fix him for a while. Fix him forever.”
I stared at him. He was trying to scare me, right?
“And it won’t be, you know,” he went on, “just little Wally who’s going to get it. There’s Jeff—you heard what’s doing with him?” I nodded. “And then there’s your husband. Your husband the fancy pediatric surgeon. Your husband and those two malpractice suits.”
Mr. Monti was pushing hard, but I didn’t intend to let him see I was shaken. “Those stupid lawsuits!” I snapped, “I can’t believe those people are suing. They’re being just incredibly ungrateful.”
“Ungrateful?” said Mr. Monti. “These are heartsick, heartbroken people, their children’s lives shattered by a surgeon’s knife.” He puffed out his cheeks and slowly blew the air from his pursed-up lips before he continued. “But lucky for them, a friend of mine—I’ve got my friends at the hospital—looked up their records and helped me track them down.”
“Tracked them down to do what exactly?” I whispered, though I already knew the answer.
“To tell them it wasn’t too late to sue the pediatric surgeon who messed up their children. And”—his (once so melting, now so menacing) big brown eyes locked onto mine—“to offer them my help with their legal expenses.”
• • •
While I never refrain from criticizing the medical profession for being (this is a partial list) insensitive, greedy, arrogant, conservative, and patronizing to women, I also (where it’s appropriate) am always willing to give the doctors their due. I have nothing but praise, for instance, for my artful cosmetic surgeon, who rescued me from upper-eyelid droop. I adore my nimble internist, who is the Jascha Heifetz of the sigmoidoscope. I am even willing to grant that the sadist who deep-cleans my gums four miserable times a year is, though made of stone, the finest periodontist in the Washington area. And I’m totally convinced that my husband, Jake, whatever his personal inadequacies, is a brilliant, gifted, dedicated surgeon. (You don’t have to take my word for it; there are major—major!—hospitals in New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles where they’re begging on bended knee for Jake to please be their chief of pediatric surgery.) So when, a few months back, I heard that the Tesslers and the Malones were suing Jake for malpractice in the treatment of Tara Tessler and Kenny Malone, I knew (and this was before I knew that Joseph Augustus Monti had put them up to it) that Jake was being persecuted unjustly.
At the time the suits were brought, it was almost impossible to get my husband to talk about them. He was evasive, dismissive, cryptic, and abrupt. He was also (although, of course, he would never admit this to me—but I knew) terribly hurt that the Tesslers and the Malones, whose daughter and son he had done so much for, would take him to court on such baseless and nasty charges.
I extracted the details one night in July when Jake had come home from Children’s with a bad headache, and I offered to give him an almond cream massage. He flopped on his belly while I, on my knees, gently straddled his thighs, kneading his bunched-up muscles with the silky, slithery, almond-scented lotion.
“Ooooh, ahhh,” he sighed. “I love that a lot.”
“More?” I asked him.
“More.”
“Happy to do it,” I said. “But you’ve got t
o talk to me.
Which is how I finally got the straight scoop on the Case of the Shattered Spleen and the Case of Malrotation Volvulus.
Kenny Malone was the kid with the shattered spleen, which got badly smashed up (along with his leg) when he ran in front of a car at the age of six. Jake—in a race-against-the-clock emergency operation—saved Kenny’s life by taking out his spleen. Jake also, in the post-op care, gave Kenny his all-out, you’re-my-main man attention, the kind he rarely gives unless you are scared and sick and under the age of eighteen. The Malones had sent Jake a lavish “Thanks, Doc, we’ll never forget you” Christmas card every single year for the last five years. This summer—on the grounds that “due to the removal of his spleen Kenny Malone has suffered from, and-will continue to suffer from, a lifelong susceptibility to painful and potentially lethal infections”—the Malones filed a two-million-dollar suit against Jake.
The Tesslers’ suit was for few and a half million dollars.
Another family that should have been singing Jake’s praises instead of suing him, the Tesslers, had brought Tara in with a twisted intestine, which, as I understand it, is the English translation of malrotation volvulus. As Jake explained it to me, when a person’s intestine gets twisted, the twisting cuts off its blood supply, and without a supply of blood the intestine will die, and if a surgeon doesn’t untwist the intestine and remove the part that is dead, pretty soon the person will be dead too. The reason Tara Tessler, now three, is just in the fifth percentile for height and weight and has chronic diarrhea and will spend her life on a highly restricted diet is that Jake took out part of her intestine. And the reason Tara Tessler did not die at five weeks old is that Jake took out part of her intestine.
Okay, so what we’re dealing with here are very ungrateful parents, who got ungrateful after they met Mr. Monti. A man I thought, until yesterday, I’d know how to outmaneuver and control. A man I thought, until yesterday, was vengeful and mean but not that vengeful and mean. A man I thought I’d like to kill, which of course is totally different from deciding to kill, which—since yesterday afternoon, on Sunday, September 20, is what I decided to do to Mr. Monti.
Murdering Mr. Monti Page 8