Which, I decided on the way home (Philip, to my relief, was nowhere in sight), was really not a bad idea for a column.
• • •
When I returned from the zoo I took a few deep, restorative breaths and decided to think about Philip Eastlake tomorrow. I also decided, however, that it was time to bring Jake and Marvin up to date on the Wally and Josephine situation. “You know, I have to bill you for this,” said Marvin apologetically, when he rang our doorbell after his evening run. I handed him a cooling drink and said we’d be thrilled to be billed if he would use the money to buy some new running shorts. I then informed them that Josephine was down in Rehoboth with Wally, confessing my own involvement in her flight, and summarized—albeit with several significant omissions—my last two conversations with Mr. Monti.
(Among the omissions were Mr. Monti’s instigation of Jake’s malpractice suits, Mr. Monti’s role in Jeff’s real estate woes, Mr. Monti’s malediction upon the Kovner family, and all of my innermost thoughts about first-degree murder. I had my reasons.)
When I’d finished my bowdlerized report, Marvin briskly summarized my summary: “Monti calls the cop? on Wally for stealing his dough and his daughter and winds up with no daughter and no wife. Look, it wasn’t the greatest idea for you to help Wally and Josephine run away together, but—”
Jake cut through Marvin’s sentence with a series of slashing incisions, “Not the greatest idea? How about the most high-handed idea? The most arrogant idea? The most presumptuous, irresponsible—”
“—but,” dear, imperturbable Marvin continued, “I think, at least for the moment, it turned out okay.”
I modestly murmured that I agreed with Marvin.
“And how’s Mr. Monti feeling about you breaking up his marriage?” asked Jake, most unfondly. “Is Mr. Monti saying* ‘It turned out okay’?”
“Well, he didn’t have much to say,” I lied. “He just sort of mentioned his marriage problems in passing when I dropped by his office today to—”
“—meddle some more?”
“To reach out a friendly hand. To end the hostilities.”
“Speaking of which,” said Marvin, inching discreetly toward our front door, “I think I’ll go now.”
Jake was unrelenting. “So tell me, was your mission accomplished? Will there, thanks to you, be peace in our time? Or”—this wasn’t my husband; this was the Grand Inquisitor speaking—“would you say the hostilities have been escalated?”
I think I could safely have said that the hostilities had definitely been escalated. I didn’t feel like saying that to Jake.
• • •
Over the weekend I received one of those whispered phone calls from Philip. He woefully announced that duty had summoned him out of the city for a few weeks. I also spoke to Wally and Jo, with whom I tried—several times, and without success—to discuss the Oedipus complex, the Monti marital situation, and other matters, “We’ll catch you later on all this stuff,” Wally told me after my third or fourth call. “Can’t do it now.”
Jeff, looking even more drawn than he had looked at our lunch last week, had dropped by the house to have a quick cup of coffee and (the true point of his visit, as I learned when Jake left the room) to ask for a stave off-Mr.-Monti loan. I wrote him a very large check from my personal, private, mine-to-do-as-I-please-with checking account. After he’d gone, I started my next column.
This column came straight from my soul, which had been burdened with recurring thoughts of murder, obsessive murderous wishes which, with every passing moment, my block-that-thought mind games were finding harder to block. How was I to deal with these insistent homicidal inclinations? My answer, which both relieved my soul and provided me with the subject for my next column, was to give up trying to fight them, indeed to thoroughly indulge them—via fantasy.
In FACING UP TO OUR FANTASIES I discussed the vital importance of fantasy life as a way to permit and contain unacceptable impulses. I took the view that all of us, deep down in our souls, harbor sexual wishes and violent urges that (for everybody’s sake) shouldn’t be acted upon out there in the world. But inside our heads, I maintained, we can find relief and even some psychic satisfaction by giving our wickedest, wildest desires free rein. So don’t be afraid, I said to my readers, to use your fantasy life for the most unspeakable, most outrageous purposes. To make mad love to Paul Newman on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, if you like. Or, if you like, to kill off all your enemies.
This column gave me permission to indulge myself fully and freely in fantasies of murdering Mr. Monti. I needed that permission. I planned to take it.
• • •
That Monday, when I awoke and started getting out of bed, the entire bedroom suddenly tilted sidewards. I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath. I opened my eyes again. The room still spun. I inched toward the bathroom holding on to the bedpost, my dresser, our chaise, but the walls refused to resume their upright position. Deciding to sit before I fell, I waited it out on the floor, my emotional state perplexed rather than panicked.
The good news was, I didn’t have a brain tumor. The bed news was, my dizzy spells had returned.
My first encounter with dizzy spells was slightly more than ten years ago. One alarming day in late July. My mother and I had just returned from a transatlantic cruise—fifteen days on The Empress of the Blue. My mother had always wanted to travel by ship across the ocean, but my dad got intractably seasick even on ferries. So when the doctors announced that there was nothing more they could do about her liver cancer, I booked us a cabin, left Jake home with the boys, and off we went with our flashiest dresses (for Fully Formal Evenings), our checkered shirts and bandanas (for Country Western Night), and our purses stuffed with cash (for the blackjack tables).
Her energy far surpassing mine, my mother embraced every goody the ship had to offer, partaking (just before lunch!) of Low-Impact Aerobics, Ladies Shuffleboard, the Complimentary Dance Class with Chris and Christine, a tour of the ship’s inner workings, a Better Your Bridge lesson, and a lecture on something like Secrete of the Deep.
“Come sit on the deck after lunch and we’ll watch the ocean and read our books.” My mother rejected my offer every day. She was making, in Cruise Crafts, an eyeglass case. She was playing a game of charades. She had to rehearse for the Passenger Talent Show. (“If only,” she sighed, “I could sing a song like your father.”) She spent half a day in our cabin preparing her costume for Masquerade Night, where, baring her midriff and wearing a whole lot of fruit, she won second prize for her chunky Carmen Miranda.
Every night, before and after the evening’s Star Studded Show, my mother, her golden curls bobbing and her baby-blue eyes aglow, shook her sequined tush in an unfettered cha-cha, having lured some willing (or maybe not-so-willing) widower onto the dance floor. And after the orchestra packed it in, we hit the gaming room, playing our slit-eyed, monosyllabic killer game of blackjack until we had exhausted our nightly gambling budget.
“How’re you feeling, Mom?” I would casually ask as we strolled the windy deck after midnight. “I honestly never felt better,” was her reply. Pointing up at the silvered sky, which was putting on its own star-studded performance, she said, “I haven’t seen stars like this since they invented air pollution. Who wouldn’t feel great with all this gorgeousness?”
She liked the ports we stopped at, and she liked my company—though she knew every person on board by the second day. But what she liked the best was the cruising itself—the movable feast of cruise activities. ‘To be doing all of this,” she said reverently, “while at sea,” as if the waves themselves were transsubstantiating blackjack and bridge and the cha-cha into something miraculous.
I too began to believe that the waves were possessed of some mystical qualities, for my mother returned to New Jersey smiley and pink, eager to introduce my dad to the forty new best friends she had made on The Empress and looking, he said happily as he gave her a fond squeeze, “the picture of health.” I had
pretty much convinced myself that a transatlantic cruise was the cure for liver cancer when, six days after we docked, my mother was taken back to Beth Israel. Two weeks after that my mother was dead.
And two days after that I began getting dizzy spells.
So after my neurologist had done all those tests where you have to close your eyes and try to touch your nose with your index finger, he recommended an MRI “just to eliminate certain possibilities.” I explained that I found it hard to understand technical terms like “certain possibilities.” I told him, “I can handle the truth. Don’t mince words.” And after he had unmincingly told me that “certain possibilities” could mean a brain tumor, I passed out cold.
During the next eleven days, while I waited to take die test and get the results, Jake gave me the grown-up version of the treatment he usually saves for his six year-old patients. Teasing me. Tickling me. Making me laugh. Bringing me dopey gifts. Holding me in his arms when I needed to cry. And one nutty night, having cut an incision in a strategic location, making mad love to me in his gorilla suit.
The next day I sewed up the slit in his suit and said, “You’ve got to promise me that you’ll never wear this with your second wife.”
“Even if I agree to many that pudgy cub scout leader you picked out for me?”
“Marianne Kimmel will not understand a gorilla suit,” J said, flashing a spunky smile that quickly collapsed into a noisy boo-hoo-hoo.
Jake lifted my chin until I was looking straight into his eyes, “Brenda,” he said solemnly, “who was the only one-armed baseball player in Major League history?”
“Why are you asking me this?” I snuffled. “You know I don’t know:”
“But I do. And I also know you’re not dying of a brain tumor.”
“Yeah,” I said, “you’re probably right,” but what I said to myself was, If he tells me that he loves me—which he does about once every six or seven years—it means Pm done for.
He told me he loved me.
Threatened with death by the same disease that had knocked off Bette Davis in Dark Victory, I tried, like her, to be gallant and uncomplaining. I failed. I also tried to inspire myself by reciting those stirring lines, “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.” I wasn’t inspired. Since I couldn’t sleep through the night, I spent a number of pre-dawn hours down in the kitchen where, seated at the refectory table we’d picked up for a fortune in St. Michael’s, I wrote my sons a series of letters sealed and marked “to be opened” on future birthdays well into the twenty-first century.
Full of warmth and wisdom, these letters provided motherly guidance as my boys passed through their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties: Don’t slouch. Don’t mumble. Help the needy. To thine own self be true. Marry for character rather than for breasts. Never give up on poetry. Floss now or be sorry later. And do not forget that your mother, though dead, still loves you.
(“This is the creepiest goddamn thing I ever heard of,” said Carolyn when I placed my tear-stained missives in her safekeeping. “I’ll tell you what’s worse for kids than having a mother who dies young—it’s having a dead mother who doesn’t stay dead.”)
I also, during those sleepless nights, reorganized and categorized all my recipes, less—I’ll admit—for Wife Number Two than for my future daughters-in-law, whom I imagined sighing as they prepared my infallible brisket or oyster-and-artichoke soup, “What a remarkable woman she must have been!”
For those of you who would like to know the name of the Major League’s only one-armed baseball player, the answer is Pete Gray, outfielder, St. Louis Browns. For those of you who would like to know the source of the “Cowards die many times . . .” quotation, the answer is William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. For those of you who would like to know how to make my brisket and my oyster-and-artichoke soup, the answers appear in my recent collection of recipes and columns called Brenda’s Best. And for those of you who would like to know the cause of my dizzy spells, since obviously I did not die of a brain tumor, the answer is that the doctors—that is, the neurologist-type doctors—had no answer.
Those dizzy spells lasted about a month and then they disappeared, returning two years later when Jake was deciding whether to leave me for Sunny Voight. This time, however, my dizziness was analyzed into submission by Dr. Cunningham, who also helped me recognize that my first set of dizzy spells had to do (you knew this already) with the death of my mother, and that they had served at least four different functions: (1) an identification with my mother—like her, I too would die; (2) a displacement of the mourning process—I couldn’t weep for her because I was much too busy weeping for myself; (3) an expression of my dependency needs—1 couldn’t stand on my two feet without her; and (4) a punishment for failing to save her life.
When we spoke of my next set of dizzy spells—the Jake and Sunny dizzy spells, I called them—I put in a lot of couch time on point (3). The prospect of losing Jake was not only making me terribly sad, Dr. Cunningham told me; it was also scaring the living hell out of me. For as I imagined life without my mother—oops, excuse me, my husband—to lean on, I felt helpless, I felt powerless, I got weak in the knees, I got light in the head, I got . . . dizzy.
But all of that was years ago. I was now IN CONTROL OF MY LIFE. I wasn’t supposed to get dizzy spells anymore. Which was why I was feeling perplexed as I quietly sat on my bedroom floor, waiting for the walls to stop their whirling.
• • •
Which, about ten minutes later, they finally did. After which, in order to reinforce my sense of control, I made myself a list entitled GOALS TO BE ACHIEVED BY THE END OF SEPTEMBER.
1. Find a philanthropist willing to help the homeless (and bail out Jeff) by purchasing Jeff’s buildings in Anacostia.
2. Talk to the Malones and the Tesslers about dropping their malpractice suits against Jake.
3. Put an end to Philip Eastlake’s passion for me.
4. Help Wally and Jo with their short-range and long-range planning.
5. Locate a displaced homemakers support group in northern Virginia for Birdie Monti.
6. Try to figure out—on a strictly fantasy level, of course—how, a person (I, for instance) could murder another person (Mr. Monti, for instance), and get away with it.
In addition to all the above, I had my newspaper columns to write, and I certainly planned to keep working on my marriage. (I’ve had the uneasy feeling that with every moment that passes, it’s needing an increasing amount of work.) Looking over my GOALS, I had to admit that I was feeling a little pressed. But as I turned my calendar from August to September, I took a deep breath and told myself, I can handle this.
6
•
SHE MATES AND SHE KILLS
If you think that it’s easy for people like me to come up with, a plan to kill somebody, all I can say to you is, “Think again.” Indeed, having spent the first two weeks of September exploring the subject, I was full of admiration for your ordinary citizen who has managed to commit the perfect crime. Most of my research was done at home in front of the VCR, with rentals from Potomac Video. Watching and taking notes on films like Black Widow, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Body Heat, I was sobered by the fact that only Kathleen Turner gets away with murder.
Perhaps Theresa Russell, the black widow of Black Widow (“she mates and she kills”), might have been just as successful as Kathleen if only she’d had the good sense to refrain from murder after husband number three. But smart as she was, she failed to grasp a fundamental concept—enough is enough—and Debra Winger nailed her in the end.
Yet in spite of Theresa’s errors, I felt she had used the best technique—a poison injected by hypodermic needle into an unopened bottle of brandy. I also felt, considering the risks involved in having a partner in crime, that she’d used the best judgment by doing her dire deeds solo.
I mean, even devoted lovers like Lana Turner and John Garfield came cl
ose to betraying one another in Postman, And in Body Heat, Kathleen Turner—having conspired with William Hurt to kill her husband—set him up to take the rap alone. As for Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, the death-dealing duo of Double Indemnity, they wound up treating each other quite abominably. The moral was clear: Either do it yourself, or else run the risk of exposing yourself to snitches, blackmailers, double-crossers, double agents, or unreliable bedmates.
(And you can’t even count on your woman friends—see Demi Moore and Glenne Headly in Mortal Thoughts, where, sharing some ugly secrets about the untimely death of Bruce Willis, they give each other up to the police.)
“When two people are involved,” Edward G. Robinson warned Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, “they’re stuck with each other and they have to ride all the way to the end of the line.” Unfortunately, the end of the line, said Edward, making Fred (and me) very nervous, may be the . . . cemetery.
Anyway, having given much time and attention to the matter, I wound up firmly rejecting the notion of letting others in on my murder plans. I also rejected guns and knives, explosives and ropes, and shovings off of cliffs—anything that involved hands-on violence or blood. My weapon of choice was the poison that Cary Grant was plotting to purchase in Suspicion, a poison not only untraceable and easily obtainable but also guaranteed to produce “a most pleasant death.”
I waited, pencil eagerly poised, for Cary to let me know the name of the poison. He didn’t.
Furthermore, in spite of several calls to the Poison Center, I could learn nothing about this promising potion. Indeed, as the days went on and my inquiries into the matter grew more insistent, and the people I spoke with began saying things like “Excuse me, what did you say your name was again?” I started to fear that I was about to become the star of a film called Suspicion 2. Putting my poison search on hold, I reviewed my movie notes and was struck by a line from The Postman Always Rings Twice, a line that referred to the fact that most serious accidents happen at home—in our own bathtubs.
Murdering Mr. Monti Page 11