On Thursday night and on Friday night I lectured. I flew to San Francisco Thursday morning and talked about growth to Berkeley students, that night, urging them to set aside some time in their lives to do community service. (This could, I said, be simple volunteer work. It’s fine, I said, to be Indians, not chiefs, “Native Americans, please,” one of the students, another Adrienne, had corrected me, Where will this end?)
On Friday I spent all day attempting to get to my next lecture, in Indianapolis. (Or should I be saying Native Americanapolis?) The trip to and from Indiana was not a good time. Engine trouble, fog, high winds, and many screaming babies diverted me, during my travels, from plotting a murder.
Late on Saturday afternoon Jeff, having no place to live, returned to the room in which he had spent his childhood. It seems that Mr. Monti, in lieu of buying himself a condo in the District, had decided to take over Jeff’s plush Watergate pad (which, as you recall, Jeff had to forfeit). The only good news was that Jeff, by vacating Watergate immediately, had received an extension on the rest of his loan, with munificent Mr. Monti postponing the due date—what a prince!—till December 1.
Preoccupied with assuaging Jeff’s depression, I didn’t have a moment to think about murder.
On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday Jake and I had nonstop fights, both in person and by telephone. Far Jeff’s glum move back home had forced me to notify my husband not only about Jeff’s real estate problems but also about my efforts to resolve them. I had hoped to tell Jake the minimum, but under his stringent questioning (which came close to violating my human rights), I confessed about Vivian Feuerbach (“Billy? Elton Jr? You’ve got to be kidding!”) and Edmund Standish Voight (“And Sunny joined you for dessert? Uh, what did she say?”). I didn’t say what Sunny had said until the third day of our fighting, until Jake’s righteous scoldings had gone, too far, until he had moved from “Incattigible!” “Reprehensible!” and (he learned this from me) “Narcissistic!” to “Liar” and “Sneak.” After which I coldly observed, “Speaking of liar and sneak . . .” (significant pause), and then proceeded to tell him every word that Sunny had said to me at the Jockey Club.
My ensuing recriminations, extensive and colorful, left me no energy for murder plots.
On Wednesday I returned for part two of my gum surgery.
On Thursday, while I was occupied with signing a FedEx receipt, Hubert streaked out the front door and disappeared. I called his name, searched the neighborhood—both on foot and by car, rang doorbells, searched some more, shrieked, whistled, implored, impelled by the vision of Rosalie’s face if I had (God forbid!) to inform her that Hubert was lost. Two hours after my search began, I dragged myself over to Carolyn’s, hoping for some tea and sympathy. And there in the back was Rosalie, with Hubert at her side, supervising the digging of Carolyn’s lily pond.
“You let my dog ran away,” said Rose accusingly, her muddy hands planted on her blue-jeaned hips. “He could have been hit by a car. He could have been taken to the pound and put to sleep. He could even—a gorgeous creature like this—have been kidnapped.”
Hubert woofed a reproach and went bounding blissfully through the crunchy autumn leaves, returning to Rosalie’s side and woofing once more. “I just want to ask you this,” I said to my sister, blowing my bangs out of my eyes. “Did you hear me before—like an hour ago, and also an hour and a half ago—did you hear me out there screaming my heart out for Hubert?” Oblivious to the red-and-gold glories of Keats’s “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (the poem is “To Autumn”), I awaited my sister Rosalie’s reply.
“If you’d found Hubert right away,” Rose actually had the chutzpah to say, “you wouldn’t have appreciated how terrible it was to have let him escape. So you’d let it happen again, and then the next time he’d be hit by a car or kidnapped.”
“You’re telling me you heard me calling earlier,” I said, my voice robotic. “You heard me calling but you didn’t answer.”
Rosalie, shameless, admitted that this was true. “It’s one of the things people do—I read this in some book translated from the German—to get kids to be responsible for their animals.”
She paused to give the lily-pond diggers instructions and Hubert a scratch behind his ear. “And Brenda, you’ll have to agree,” she said, “that spending all morning looking for a dog will make a person think twice before that person lets that dog run away again.”
Just as I was about to say something stupendously unsisterly, Rosalie made an announcement that saved the day. “I’m almost finished with Carolyn’s yard. The rest of the planting can’t be done until spring. I’m planning on leaving early on Saturday. So tell me”—she paused, smiling slyly, looking for trouble, looking for love—“are you going to miss me?”
I didn’t skip a beat. “My house will not be the same”—I spoke from the heart—“without you.”
• • •
Friday the twenty-third was Wally’s birthday. My baby boy was twenty-four years old. The Kovner Four, plus impossible Rose and elusive Josephine, had tickets to the Washington Ballet, after which we were coming home to my Death by Chocolate birthday cake and champagne.
It’s difficult enough to bake a tricky cake like that without at the same time figuring out a murder.
Josephine met us at 7:15 on the top floor of the Kennedy Center. “Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!” all of us said. Indeed, we hardly knew her, with her radiant hair piled, artfully on her head and her tall, slim body’s perfection displayed in a well-cut black crepe suit instead of hiding out in one of her many where-have-all-the-flowers-gone numbers. Her fingernails were not only not chewed; they were polished. Her shoes were not only not scuffed; they were high-heeled. And color, deftly applied to the angles and planes of her heart shaped face, revealed the full dimensions of her beauty.
In response to our chorus of wows, Josephine giggled and explained her transformation. “I was starting to feel like my outer me wasn’t matching my inner me anymore. And so—and so—I decided to get a makeover.”
“Your outer you was fine with me,” Wally said to Jo, adding with some bemusement, “Besides, I didn’t even know you knew about makeovers.”
Josephine blushed prettily. “I didn’t,” she told him. “It was my doctor’s idea.”
We walked through the Terrace Theater’s tasteful but totally purpled lobby and filed into our center orchestra seats—first Jeff, then Rose, then Jake, then me, then Wally, and then Jo, an arrangement which allowed me, though the lovebirds were speaking softly, to hear their conversation without really eavesdropping.
“So tell me,” Wally asked Jo, “does your shrink do the makeover all by herself or does she subcontract?”
“If I’m not mistaken, that is a hostile remark.”
“I’m not being hostile. I’m being concerned that—”
“Shush!” warned a voice behind us, as the curtain went up on four ladies in classic tulle, who broke from their prettily posed tableau to embark upon a charming pas de quatre. During the applause and the little pause—not a full intermission—that followed this piece, Wally resumed his defense with “I’m only concerned that your shrink is too involved in your life, like she’s Pygmalion and you’re—you’re what’s-her-name.”
“Galatea,” I said, but not out loud.
“That just isn’t so!” Jo said hotly. “She’s isn’t creating me. She’s only helping me create myself.”
“Nicely put,” I said, but not out loud.
Dvořák’s stormy music squelched this dialogue and swept us into Nocturno, where we watched a muscular bare-chested dancer engage in—and I’ll defer to the program notes here—“a seduction promising the splendor of eternity.” The object of his affection, who was not exactly playing hard to get, molded, melded, melted into his body as he executed a series of moves so gymnastically erotic that Philip would have gnashed his teeth with envy.
“That’s how you used to be with me,” my wistful Wally whispered to his Jo.
&nbs
p; “Submissive,” said Jo.
“Receptive,” Wally countered.
“Engulfed!”
“United!”
“Consumed!”
“Content! Complete!”
“Wally,” Jo said, “It’s awful to have to tell you his on your birthday, but—”
Thunderous clapping obliterated the rest, of Josephine’s sentence, though I almost fell out of my seat trying to hear. But as we rose for the first intermission, Wally’s anguished response floated back loud and clear. “I can’t believe you mean that. I can’t believe it.”
Wrapping our coats around us, we stepped outside to the rooftop terrace to admire the city lights, the river, the sky. Wally, who had started to cry, grabbed Jo by the arm and left our happy group, which wasn’t all that happy what with Jeff morosely contemplating the Watergate (which, alas, was not only right next door, but you actually could see his former condo), and with Jake and me in what I would have to call an exceedingly tenuous rapprochement, and with Rose (still in her man-bashing mode) declaiming, “So after the splendor of eternity, you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to dump her.”
“That wasn’t a sexist tract. That was a goddam ballet,” I said, but not out loud.
Wally and Jo were not in their seats when the curtain went up on Lucy and the Count, the Count turning out to be the blood-sucking Count Dracula. Who, to Rose’s delight (“Once a victim, not necessarily always a victim,” she crowed), is offed by ex-victim Lucy in the end.
Back out on the terrace during the second intermission, I saw Jo and Wally wrapped in each other’s arms, an embrace that to my practiced eye looked far far more like “parting is such sweet sorrow” than it did like “and they lived happily ever after.” My suspicions were intensified when, just as the last ballet started, the starcrossed lovers announced that they were leaving.
Jo (with quivering lips): “Thank you so much for a lovely evening. I have to go now.”
Wally (with deadened voice): “I’m driving Jo home to McLean, I’ll meet you back at the house as soon as I can.”
They left. I gave my divided attention to Colorful Fantasies, which was very . . . colorful, and then we headed homeward to what threatened to be a real downer of a birthday party.
Wally surprised us by getting back from McLean by 11:30. He had obviously composed himself on the way. “I only have this to say,” he said, as he joined us in the dining room, “and I won’t be taking questions after my statement: Jo and I, though still engaged, have agreed to date other people for six months. After that, the plan is that we’ll either split up or set a wedding date.” His voice cracked a bit at the “split up” part but he valiantly pressed on. “So is this my birthday or what? Where’s my cake?”
I don’t want you thinking I’m vain, but I need to explain that my Death by Chocolate chocolate cake has been known to bring tears of joy to an eater’s eye. I’m only mentioning this in order to help you understand why, despite assorted tension and dissension, we were starting to relax, mellow out, have something resembling having a good time when—it was almost midnight—the doorbell rang.
The first response was from Rosalie: “Where’s Hubert? Did he get out? No, he’s here. He’s safe.”
The rest of us just kind of froze, hands poised in midair with flutes of champagne and forkfuls of cake.
The doorbell—shrill and spiteful—rang again and again and again. “I guess I’d better go answer it,” said lake.
Looking rather stern, he pushed back his chair.
All of us followed behind him as he walked down the hall to the door where, visible through the glass pane, stood a Harpo-haired clown in a striped and polka dotted clown suit. With a garish red smile gashed across his dead-white face and a bunch of black—black!—balloons clutched in one hand, this clown made me think of A Clockwork Orange (one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen) rather than your basic benevolent Bozo.
“Go away and leave us alone,” I shrieked at the top of my lungs. But not out loud.
“I was here earlier. You were out. I’m from The Clown Connection,” the clown, balloons waving, told us through the glass. “Birthday greetings for Mr. Wally Kovner.”
Just as I started to say to Jake that he shouldn’t let him in, Jake opened the door and let the clown inside. “So which one is the birthday boy?’ he inquired, looking around. Don’t answer, I wanted to say, but Jake replied. Shuffling over to Wally on pink-and-orange oversized shoes, the clown bowed ceremoniously and handed him the creepy black balloons. “Courtesy of an anonymous admirer,” he said. “And so is this song.”
Hubert, who had been sniffing the clown, wagged his tail approvingly and started chewing the pompom on one of his shoes. “He doesn’t do that with everyone,” Rosalie told the clown. “That certainly is a compliment to you.” The clown looked unconvinced, his eyes, beneath mobile Groucho brows, casting uneasy glances at his foot Then, with a hitch of his droopy pants (and with Hubert still chomping away), he started to sing.
Walked the walk.
Talked the talk.
Never questioned why.
Had some fun.
Now it’s done.
Time to doo da die.
Rode the bumps.
Took the lumps.
Learned to laugh and cry.
Ran the race.
Ran out of space.
Time to doo da die.
Time to doo
Time to da
Time to doo da die.
It won’t be long now.
Time to doo-oo da die.
Yeah!
In a combination final bow and fruitless attempt to pry Hubert off his pompom, the clown, his song completed, bent low to the ground. I leaned against the wall and managed—barely—to prop myself up as the room began to spin around and around. Knowing what I knew, I understood the brutal meaning of Mr. Monti’s mocking messenger. But while his cavortings choked me with nightmarish horror, the rest of my family seemed merely bemused by the spectacle.
Then Wally burst out laughing. “Too much! Everyone’s sent me these birthday cards about aches and pains and gray and needing a cane and wearing a truss and getting old. But one foot in the grave? Give me a break!”
“You’d be surprised,” said Rosalie, ever Miss Merry Sunshine, “how fast it all goes.”
The clown, after one last struggle, finally ceded Hubert his shoe and, holding his stockinged foot high, hopped out the door. While my sons, Rose, and lake returned to the cake, I—fighting off my dizzy spell—excused myself and hurried after the clown.
“Just a minute,” I yelled. I was going to say, “I know who sent you,” or maybe, “This is a citizen’s arrest.” But the clown, pausing only to reach in his pocket, said, “Here I almost forgot. The birthday boy’s card,” put on a sudden burst of speed, and vanished into the dark October night.
I opened the card before I went in and scanned its black-bordered message, although I already knew what it would say. I had not shared the previous warnings with Wally, nor would I show him this, for I planned on making the danger go away. But the witching hour was near. Halloween was next Saturday, just a week from today. And as this message, like the last message, threatened: ON HALLOWEEN THE CLOWN TURNS INTO A GHOST.
11
•
MY MOM IS A SLUT
In the very few hours I slept, I dreamed I was watching a pas de trois at the Kennedy Center. Mr. Monti, the clown, and Count Dracula, all wearing oversized shoes, were doing a stylized dance-of-death ballet. I screamed, “You can’t get away with this,” and the terrible trio vanished from the stage. And now I was watching Nocturno, whose unabashedly erotic pas de deux was being performed by . . . a naked Louis and me.
The shame woke me up—the shame, that is, of dreaming of sexual pleasure when I should have been figuring out how to save my son. On the other hand, since Jake and I were currently making war instead of love, this was the only kind of sex I was getting. So enjoy it a little longer, I indulg
ently told myself. You’ll decide how to kill Mr. Monti later today. I snuggled under the blankets and—half-sleeping and half-awake—entirely gave myself over to sexual reverie.
Having banished shame, I let my mind drift drowsily, dreamily back to Louis. To satin-skinned, loose-limbed Louis, with his long narrow face and tell-me-about-it eyes. To Louis, whose close-cropped head seemed always cocked in the yes-I’m-listening-to-you position. To Louis, with the shade and sweetness of a Milky Way, and the strength of ten because his heart is pure. To Louis and March 18, when I’d removed my no-nonsense Jockey For Her pants and undershirt (yes, okay, I was making a statement), lain down beside him on his sofa bed, and in less than thirty seconds fallen . . . sound asleep.
It had been a hard day.
As you recall, I’d been up at six, dressed in my long-skirted Waspy Western ensemble, rushed to the corner and into the limousine, where from 6:48 A.M. till roughly 11:10 A.M. I’d—under the tutelage of Joseph Monti—revised a number of my newspaper columns. After which I’d rushed home, leaped into the shower, dressed in red undies and a suit très Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (post, of course, not pre-Richard Gere), and cabbed to the Hay-Adams John Hay suite where, from noon till roughly 4:20 P.M., under the tutelage of Philip Eastlake, I’d deepened my knowledge of Oriental philosophy. After which I’d rushed home, leaped into the shower, put on my authentic equal-rights Jockeys (plus something authentically working class from the Gap), and promptly at 6 P.M. joined the board of Harmony House (and Chloe the social worker) for a very authentic brown-bag dinner meeting.
During the next three hours we heard reports on the various residents from Chloe—Ilona, for example, had just been hired by a bakery and would soon be ready to move to her own apartment; Alfred was back to beating up on Laverne. We heard from the head of our ever-harried maintenance committee that the furnace had been deemed beyond repair. We heard from our desperate treasurer: Would we give some serious thought to doubling our annual contribution? And we heard, at the end, from Louis, who—having written four grant proposals and lined up several more business groups to find jobs for the grownups and mentors for the kids and talked an orthodontist friend into doing Ilona’s daughter’s braces free and spent last Sunday helping repair the Harmony House front stairs and attending Sam’s sobriety celebration—wanted us all to know how terrific we were and what a wonderful job we were doing.
Murdering Mr. Monti Page 21