“Annette will tell you.”
“I’m not telling him. He’ll kill me.”
“What’s this kill me? Have I ever even laid a hand on you?”
With that voice and that glare, I thought, who needs hands?
“I don’t know,” said Annette. “I mean, maybe I forgot.”
“Repressed,” corrected Gloria. “Josephine says that her doctor says that children tend to repress awful things like that.”
“Things like what?” Mr. Monti rose from the couch and hovered over a now cowering Gloria. “What doctor?”
“Her new shrink.” Gloria, feeling the heat, slipped out of her turquoise linen jacket and draped it over her rape-provoking knees. “Jo’s already had four sessions with her—the last one just this morning, before she called Mommy.”
Annette, the perspiration standing out on her creamy brow, decided to give her older sister some help. “Jo says Dr. X—she won’t tell her name because she’s worried you’ll track her down—has already opened her eyes about her whole life.”
“And when she opened Josephine’s eyes,” Mr. Monti asked, “what, I would like to know, did Josephine see?”
“That you didn’t want her to go with Wally . . .” Gloria began.
“Or with any other man,” Annette continued, “because—I cannot say this.”
“Say it!” bellowed Mr. Monti.
“Because,” Annette whispered, “you want her for herself.”
“Sexually, that is,” said Gloria, looking ready to faint. “Josephine told Mommy that the reason you’re against Wally is because you secretly want to go to bed with her.”
I have to confess that I was totally loving this Freudian seminar. Mr. Monti totally was not. Back in his Raging Bull mode, he swung out wildly and smashed a green-glass-globed lamp to the floor, then swung again and shattered a crystal ashtray. “I will not—” he reached out to swing once more, thought better of it, and jammed his hands into his pockets “—I will not have such filth spoken in my presence. Take your lies and get out of here, and you can tell your mother—” he took a deep breath “—you can tell your mother that if she can persuade tie Pope to believe such filth, she can have her annulment.”
In an instant, Annette and Gloria had vanished from the room, and I was alone with Mr. Monti’s wrath. What, I asked myself, could I possibly say or possibly do to turn it away? It was clear to me that Dr. X had tried to help Josephine understand her father by pointing to the underlying unconscious (and, of course, universal) incestuous yearnings that fueled his fierce refusal to let her go. (Give her a few more sessions and Dr. X, I was virtually positive, would see Mr. Monti’s motives as not merely Oedipal, would see that his narcissistic need for control and domination was just as profound an aspect of his pathology. Jake hates it when I talk like this, but too bad.)
In any case, poor Josephine—who possessed, I’d already observed, a quite literal mind—had failed to make the crucial distinction between unconscious wishes and concrete actions. Misinterpreting Freud, she had apparently decided that her dad was a clear and present sexual menace. Furthermore, having decided this, she was eager to share her new insights with her mother. Who, from what I was learning today, appeared to have an equally literal mind.
Let me say two things: I was more than willing to think the worst of Mr. Monti. But I also was ready to swear on my kids that, whatever else he might do, he didn’t do incest.
Perhaps I could earn his gratitude by essaying a constructive intervention.
“Listen to me, Mr. Monti,” I began, in my gentlest, most empathic voice, “your daughter Josephine is a bit confused. I’d like to help straighten this out, if you’ll only—”
“Listen to me, Mrs. Kovner,” said Mr. Monti in an extremely ungentle voice, “and listen carefully. You have torn my family apart. I promise you, I will do the same to yours.”
I had to admit to myself that Mr. Monti sounded chillingly sincere.
“I hear what you’re saying,” I soothingly said, though I truly loathe that phrase. “I hear that you are really, really upset,”
“Upset?” said Mr. Monti, laughing unpleasantly. “You think I’m upset?’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling, but I presume his destination was higher up. “May I never see my wife or my children or grandchildren again, may I end my days in poverty, may my—” here he faltered a moment “—my thing drop off, if I fail to exact full vengeance on your husband and your sons for what you have done to me.”
He paused, turned his burning eyes on me, and intoned: “Vengeance on your husband, Jake. Vengeance on your son Jeff. And permanent—permanent—vengeance on your son Wally.”
The temperature in the office suddenly fell about fifty degrees. A lump the size of a softball lodged in my throat My body turned rigid. My stomach turned over. My thoughts turned to Victor Mature in Kiss of Death. This was the moment I recognized that Joseph Monti was basically unmanageable, that in spite of my profound grasp of the human condition I wouldn’t be able to turn this man around. He had taken his vow—this corny, ridiculous, melodramatic vow—and I totally believed that he would keep it.
I believed him because he was seriously vindictive. Because he was mean. Because he needed to win. But mostly I believed him because he knocked wood, tossed salt over shoulders, never ever opened umbrellas indoors, refused to sing before breakfast (because, as he once explained, that meant he would cry before dinner), and would walk ten miles to avoid walking under a ladder.
The man was semi-psychotically superstitious. So I believed him.
I believed that he believed that he would lose his family and fortune and sexual organ unless he succeeded in tearing my family apart. They won’t be safe till he’s dead, I thought. I really want him dead, I thought. I really want to murder Mr. Monti.
• • •
In one of the many columns I have written on coping with stress, I strongly recommend the use of mind games, whose purpose, I tell my readers, is to give our tensions and torments a brief holiday by diverting us to trivial pursuits. Unlike board games, however, mind games require neither equipment nor a playmate. Mind games are played entirely inside the head. Which means, if we’re having an MRI—where we lie in a narrow tunnel for forty-five minutes, feeling both claustrophobic and unshakably convinced that we have a brain tumor—we could, for instance, try to name seven songs which contain the name of a drink in their title. (Hint: “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” They’ve Got an “Awful Lot of Coffee” in Brazil. “Tea for Two.” Take it from there!) Or nine songs that bear the name of a fruit M their title. (Hint: “Tangerine.” “Blueberry Hill.” “Strawberry Fields Forever.” And, counting for two, “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.”) Or, on a somewhat different theme, we might try to list all fifty states, alphabetically. (Hint: Eight of them begin with the letter M.)
The nice thing about these mind games is that they get you so obsessed that you simply cannot obsess about anything major. Which is why, when I left Mr. Monti and this voice inside my head started chanting murdermurdermurdermurdermurder, I drowned it out by trying to think of eleven movies starring Bette Davis. I had only thought of seven by the time the Metro had reached my Cleveland Park stop, adding All This and Heaven Too as I huffed up the Newark Street hill, and The Letter as I walked through my front door, I would have had my eleven, I’m sure, but the telephone was ringing. It was—I did not really need this—Philip Eastlake.
• • •
Philip had been pursuing me since our love in the afternoon back on March 18. He simply refused to believe that I would not be going to bed with him again. His surreptitious phone calls (“Are you alone?” “Is it safe to talk now?”) assaulted my orderly short-term adultery plan, which involved, you may recall, a commitment to minimal sneaking around—and no second helpings. Louis, in contrast to Philip, had refrained from sexual overtures after our naughty night together (also, I blush to remind you, on March 18), having accepted my statement that I intended to limit our lust to a one-
night stand as the prerogative of all free men and women (for which I must, reluctantly, credit Adrienne). I have to confess, however, that neither before nor after my afternoon with Philip did I ever mention the concept of one night stand, concerned that he would find such limits insulting, and convinced that I could surely come up with another (more tactful) gambit to fend off future sexual complications. And so, when Philip throatily asked, as we lounged in the John Hay suite of the Hay Adams, “How soon will we be able to meet again?” I offered him a rejection which I hoped he would interpret as First Prize.
“What happened between us this afternoon was the kind of thrillingly total soul/body experience that can—that often does—shatter a marriage. Which means, my dear”—could he hear that little tremor in my voice?—“that I do not dare make love with you again.”
Is that a winner or what? The man is turned away with his ego not only intact but inflated (“thrillingly total soul/body experience”—wow!). And since I assumed that Philip had no wish to play Vronsky to my Anna Karenina, I had, with my “shatter a marriage,” deftly warned him of the dangers of further pursuit.
Yes, thanks to my profound grasp of the human condition, I’d figured out exactly what to do. I had not yet figured out why it wasn’t working.
Why did Philip keep calling me up? Why did he keep imploring me to come to the John Hay suite and take off my clothes? Why did he keep insisting, “Don’t be afraid. You will always be safe with me, querida”? And, for that matter, why was a Jewish man with a William Buckley man-of-Yale accent using Spanish endearments like querida? (Perhaps it had something to do with that summer, many years ago, when he interviewed Ché and Fidel in a Cuban bordello. Or maybe he just thinks it’s cute. Well, never mind.)
My point is that I was stuck with my thrillingly total soul/body story, and it wasn’t making Philip leave me alone. Could it be that he was a selfish beast who would actually feel kind of flattered if, his name on my lips, I threw, myself under a train? Could it be (this was Carolyn’s view) that by letting him do the peculiar things that he wanted-to do with me, I had turned him forever into my sexual slave? Or could it be (this was Rosalie’s view) that Philip had seen through my story, and knew I had used him and callously tossed him away, and wanted to prove that he couldn’t be callously tossed?
In any case, what with Bette Davis movies on my mind, murdermurder just beneath the movies, I didn’t have the strength to fend off Philip when, that famous voice thick with emotion, he begged me to meet him immediately—or else he would come to my house and make a scene. I negotiated him down from the John Hay suite to the National Zoo, a manageable walking distance from home. Then, changing into my Reeboks, I trotted back down Newark Street to Connecticut Avenue, chanting my cheering mantra, “I can handle this.”
• • •
I hadn’t been to the zoo since Wally and Jeff were still young enough to be utterly awestruck at the sight of Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, our prized giant pandas (one—sigh—now dead), whose inky eyelinered eyes and black-and-white stuffed-animal bodies looked like creations of Disney rather than nature. I had planned to return to the zoo, if my back and energy held out, after my sons had provided me with some grandchildren, to whom—as we toured the premises—I would offer my quasi-poetic zooey spiel on the poignance of pandas, the tension of tigers, the bluster of bears, the goofy grace of giraffes, and other alliterations that my kids had long ago quit putting up with.
But there I was in the smelly humidity of the elephant house, surrounded by the most massive of the mammals. Philip, an ad for GQ in his well-pressed white pants and striped cotton shirt of many colors, was contemplating a rhino who’d lost its horn. I came up behind him. “I’m here,” I said, tapping him asexually on the shoulder. ‘But this is a terrible time for me. I’ve got a lot on my mind. And Philip, I need to say that I don’t think it’s right that you kind of blackmailed me into meeting you.”
Philip’s eyes, which usually glitter with the look of eagles, were glittering—to my amazement—with genuine tears. “Forgive the cliché,” he said, “but all is fair in love and war. And Brenda, I believe that I am in love with you.”
In spite of my profound grasp of the human condition, I have to admit I wasn’t expecting this.
“Shh, please lower your voice,” I urged, as a pair of tanned young mothers turned and looked with interest in our direction. Then, realizing that they had recognized Philip’s unmistakable baritone, I tugged at his arm and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”
The last of the summer tourists, sluggish and sticky under the hot late-afternoon sun, were dragging crabby children from ape to zebra, with time-outs to chase after vagrant balloons (“Did I tell you not to let go?”) and to issue threats (“Whine once more and it’s straight back to Tucson”) and to urgently ask, “Quick! Where can we find the rest rooms?”
Walking briskly down the sloping path, we passed the bison and didn’t stop until we reached the seals, where a woman read from a plaque to reassure an anxious boy that “If a gray seal is lying in the pool under the plastic pipe to your left, don’t worry. It’s asleep.” Her penetrating voice sent us on to the bears, where Philip repeated his declaration, adding “and I believe you love me too. And I want you to know I’m prepared to accept—” he paused a pregnant pause “—the consequences of shattering your marriage.”
And I want you to know that I was prepared to tell him, “Don’t to ridiculous,” but the proud and hopeful look on his face slowed me down. He reminded me of how Wally looked when, at the age of nine, he presented me with my Mother’s Day gift—a hostess apron covered with pink-sequined poodles. Faced with that please-be-pleased face, I switched from dismissive to gently instructive, edging into rejection with “It’s true we felt something quite special that day—”
“Not just quite special,” said Philip. “Thrillingly total.”
“—and it’s tempting to see that experience as the basis for a continuing affair—”
“Not just an affair. I might want to marry you.”
I almost choked on the “marry you,” but pressed on.
“—but that wasn’t really me you held in your arms that afternoon. It was an idealized, romanticized version of me.”
A plump man in unduly short shorts and a pith helmet, herding a large batch of boys, crowded beside us to gape at the fearsome black bears.
“It wasn’t an idealization,” Philip protested, seizing my hand and steering me to the relative calm of a water-lilied pond and a rocky waterfall. “I tell you, I love you.”
“Philip, trust me on this. The only reason you think you love me is that you saw me, that afternoon, through rose-colored glasses,”
(What can I say? I happened to be undressed to kill that day in my sultry red silk panties and my matching peekaboo bra and, to complete the picture, a red lace garter belt.)
“Not at all,” Philip protested. “I didn’t see you through rose-colored glasses at all. I saw where your bottom is starting to sag. I saw that fold of flesh above your waistline. I saw where the skin’s getting loose on your upper arms. When the light hit your face a certain way, I could see those little laugh lines around your mouth. And I saw that without your makeup the shade of your skin changed from pinkish brown to a sort of beige-green.”
A long, sustained screech from a ponytailed girl interrupted Philip, who seemed to be just warming up to this extensive documentation of his clear-sightedness. Before he could resume, I tersely said, “I do believe you’ve made your point.”
“Is that Philip Eastlake?” An ample middle-aged woman, her T-shirt displaying the Stars and Stripes above the vainglorious message THESE COLORS DON’T RUN, rushed over to us, an autograph book in hand. “I never leave home without it,” she said, her small black eyes aglow like two luminous jelly beans. “You just don’t know—please sign here; I found you a space next to Jackie Mason—where you’re going to bump into a celebrity.”
While Philip turned on the charm (the noble head
attentively cocked, the chiseled lips curved into a humane smile), I wandered ahead and promptly bumped into Leon Cooper and his daughter Daisy Leon, like a couple of other ex-presidential aides of my acquaintance, had discovered the joys of fatherhood late in life, having maintained—in his journey to the best antechambers of the Oval Office—the most minimal relationship with his first family. Toward the end of the 1980s, when Leon was looking at fifty-five, he noticed that his last kid had left the house and that, as he put it to me at the McCloskeys’ annual Fourth of July pool-and-picnic party, “I’d missed it all—the entire parenthood thing.” Which is why he divorced Bernice and married Brooke, who gave birth to Daisy and gave Leon his second chance at fatherhood.
In a column of mine called LIFE ISN’T FAIR—SO WHAT? I discussed the Leon Cooper phenomenon, concluding:
Perhaps the reason that women tend to be more mature than men is that life offers women fewer second chances. If we don’t get it right the first time, we must live with that failure and loss, work through that pain, use it to help us grow. When medical marvels succeed in giving the postmenopausal woman not only the complexion but the conception capabilities of a twenty-year-old, I wonder what the costs will be—for women, for men, and for the human race.
(“I’ll pay the costs! I’ll pay the costs!” my sister Rosalie said after she had finished reading this column. “You want to be mature—with all the failures and losses and pain and the rest of that shit—go right ahead.”)
Anyhow, there was Leon, a beaming, balding, slightly taller Danny DeVito, taking time off from his mega million-dollar consulting firm to show his darling Daisy the Panthera tiger. “And I’m the one she cries for when she wakes up with a nightmare, and I’m the one who’s there for her allergy shots, and . . .” On he went, as Philip, having escaped from his admirer, caught up with me and had the good sense to keep walking.
“What, by the way, are you doing here all by yourself?” Leon, as I’d expected, finally asked me.
“Research,” I immediately replied, having had lots of time, while Leon was busy with his Doting Daddy routine, to concoct an alibi. “Research for a column on personal freedom I’m thinking of calling MUST WE—LIKE THE ANIMALS—LIVE IN CAGES?”
Murdering Mr. Monti Page 10