Murdering Mr. Monti

by Judith Viorst

  At nine, when the meeting broke up—it had been held at our treasurer’s house in Bethesda—Louis and I, in separate cars, drove down to his apartment in Adams-Morgan.

  I mean, please, where else would you expect Louis to live?

  It’s true that Adams-Morgan is just a five or six minute ride from Cleveland Park. And it’s true that some of the houses on some of the side streets harbor, behind their modest facades, dazzling no-expense-spared renovations. Nevertheless, Adams-Morgan—with its colorful ethnic and economic mix, its store-front abogados, its Ethiopian and other exotic cuisines, its dance clubs and bars, its antique shops and frame shops and wig shops—is a far, far funkier neighborhood than mine. (That is, if they’re still using words like “funky.”) There was plenty of action on Eighteenth Street as I cruised behind Louis that night—action and an edge, just an edge, of risk. Finally—it took quite a while—we managed to find two places to park and walked the three long blocks and the four long long long long flights of stairs to his top-floor apartment.

  Where things did not, initially, go too well.

  I suppose-in a way I started it when, having huffed and puffed up those endless stairs, I plopped down into the nearest chair and proceeded to use my pocketbook to fan myself, complaining as I fanned, “My God, I’m positively dripping with perspiration.”

  “Yes, and your face is really red,” Louis said sympathetically. “How long do these episodes usually-last?”

  “Excuse me?” I answered, mopping my brow with a Kleenex.

  “It’s a normal, natural process, and I’m glad it’s come out of the closet,” Louis said “I’m glad that people like you and me can discuss it without embarrassment—frankly and openly.”

  “Discuss what, Louis?” I didn’t quite catch his drift.

  Louis sat down in the chair next to mine, took out a hankie, and finished. mopping my brow. “The night sweats. The irritability. The mood swings, insomnia, migraines. The—”

  “You’ve lost me,” I said to Louis, but he marched on.

  “—urinary incontinence. The short-term memory loss. The vaginal dryness. And, of course, the hot flashes, which I can see that you are experiencing right now.”

  “Did you say hot flashes?” I asked, my face burning up all over again—with indignation. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Change. The Big M. The Silent Passage,” Louis answered cheerfully. “Menopause.”

  I was, as rarely happens to me, rendered speechless. Louis, now tenderly holding my hand, pressed on. “I’ve been reading up on the subject lately—it’s something we men need to know about—and I think I’m getting a sense of what it’s like.”

  I still found myself with nothing to say, but Louis, it seemed, had plenty more to tell me. About hormone-replacement therapy. Osteoporosis. Menopause support groups. Vaginal lubricants, “And I just want to add, and then I’ll shut up—I get that you’re feeling uncomfortable with this, Brenda—that to me a woman in menopause is as vital and as sexy as one who is . . .”

  While he cast about for a tasteful phrase (“ovulating”? “menstruating”?), I finally regained the capacity to speak.

  “You promised to shut up,” I told him, “so shut up and listen to me. These aren’t hot flashes. I’ll say that again. These aren’t hot flashes, Louis. I’m not menopausal.”

  “They aren’t—? You’re not—?” Louis fell silent, hanging his head and staring down at the rug, and then he started to laugh—a low rich sound—a low rich sound that grew louder and richer and wilder and so contagious that I quit being miffed and started laughing too.

  “I was trying to be—” he began, but a new wave of laughter intervened.

  “You were trying to be,” I helped out, “a sensitive male. I appreciate that, Louis, and I promise you that the minute the Big M strikes, I’m racing to the phone and letting you know.”

  Louis tossed me a rueful glance and eased out of his chair. “What I’d really like to know,” he said, heading into the kitchen, “is whether you like your omelet well done or runny.”

  He moved around the small kitchen with efficiency and grace while I watched from his book-lined minimally furnished living room, trying to act like I wasn’t pretending I wasn’t menopausal, which I wasn’t. I didn’t fully recover until Louis served up gorgeous platters of herb-flecked eggs, put something with mandolins on the CD, and began to probe my life as a girl, daughter, wife, mother, writer, and woman with such gently insightful questions and such rapt attention to my every reply that I practically forgot that I had come for sex, not eggs and understanding.

  I didn’t doubt for a minute, as I talked nonstop about me me me me me, that Louis would totally understand what I’d done that day with Philip and Mr. Monti.

  I didn’t doubt it. But I didn’t tell him.

  “I really respect and admire you as a person,” said Louis, finally making his move—a slow, sweet kiss on each of my eyes, followed by a soft kiss at the edge of my mouth, followed shortly thereafter by a kiss upon my lips of such scorching intensity that I urgently needed to fan myself again. My whimpers of pleasure encouraged Louis to open the sofa bed, divest himself of his clothes, and climb under the sheets, from whence he warmly invited me—“though please don’t feel that there’s any pressure whatever”—to join him. Passion warred with exhaustion as I swiftly stripped and threw myself into his arms. Exhaustion won.

  • • •

  I woke to the ring ring ring of the phone. Louis reached out, picked it up, listened long, and frowned. “Okay, yes. I’ll hold. It’s Darryl” (the resident manager of Harmony House), he whispered. “There’s sort of an emergency. He first tried calling Chloe. She’s not around. So . . .”

  I looked at my watch. It was almost one. “My God, it’s late,” I said,.“Jake is out of town tonight, but still . . .”

  “You don’t want to go before we—” Louis caught himself and shuddered with embarrassment “Whoa, sorry. Don’t mean to lay expectations on you. Hey, just because you took off your clothes and got naked with me in bed doesn’t mean I’m entitled”—he tactfully covered himself with the sheet—“to make any kind of sexual assumptions.”

  “Feel perfectly free,” I said to Louis, reaching under the sheet, “to make assumptions.”

  Which, for the next several moments, he deftly did.

  He kissed the hollow of my throat while one gentle hand took a leisurely trip down my body, stroking my breasts, my belly, my inner thighs. He had just established beyond any doubt that I wasn’t yet in need of commercial lubricants when Darryl was urgently back on the telephone.

  Louis listened intently while caressing me firmly but gently. I returned the favor fervently. We were heading with all deliberate speed from separate but equal to total integration when Louis was called upon to respond to Darryl.

  “Okay, let her stay in the bathroom,” he said, “while you try to get Paulie down to your apartment. Tell him I’m waiting to talk to him on the phone. Then while I’m talking to Paulie, go on back up”—he slipped on the royal-blue condom I handed him—“and say to Joan that she’s got to come out of the bathroom.”

  Although I am ordinarily a woman of more than average curiosity—some have even called it nosiness—I was remarkably unconcerned about the current domestic problems of Paulie and Joan. I had other matters to contemplate when Darryl put down the phone and went to get Paulie, leaving Louis free to Inquire—as I lay panting beside him—whether penetration was permissible.

  “You still could get up and walk away and there wouldn’t be any hard feelings,” he quickly added.

  “Thank you,” I told him, “for reassuring me.”

  “No matter how far things have gone, a woman always retains the right to change her mind.”

  “Or not to change her mind, as the case may be.”

  “Nor do I agree,” Louis said, “with those who hold that silence means assent.”

  With every cell in my body warbling “I’m in the mood for love,
” this dialogue was becoming just a tad tedious. Not to mention the fact that at my back time’s winged chariot was hurrying near.

  For I could visualize Darryl running up the stairs at Harmony House and quickly getting Paulie away from Joan. And now he and Paulie were coming down the stairs to Darryl’s apartment, where Paulie—any minute, any second, any instant now—would be talking to Louis at length on the telephone. “Listen to me, Louis. You’ve got my assent. Believe me, you’ve got my assent,” I moaned. “I’ll put it in writing, Louis. I’ll get it, notarized.”

  Too late. Alas, too late. For, just as I feared, there was Louis on the phone with Paulie. “You’re right. Yeah, that’s a bummer, man,” he said. So was this a bummer, I thought, and—seizing time by the forelock—I pushed Louis down on his back on the sofa bed. And I . . . impaled myself.

  “Paulie, excuse me,” I heard Louis say as I began to undulate enticingly. “I’ll have to put you on hold for a little while.” Then, laying down the phone, he commenced to attend to the subject now under consideration with zest, imagination, and great style. He was on his way to the moon—I had already been there—when I stopped the proceedings and said with a sweet little smile, “You still could get up and walk away and there wouldn’t be any hard feelings. A man retains the right to change his mind. Hey, just because you took off your clothes and got naked with me in bed . . .”

  Here’s what’s so great about Louis. A little bit later—not right at the moment, but later—he laughed.

  • • •

  On Saturday morning, before Rose left, we took a walk to Carolyn’s house so Rose could show me the finished work on the yard. “Can’t stay. I’m late for my facial,” said Carolyn, large and lush in her blue-and-white cash mere warm-up suit, blowing kisses as she rushed to her car. “But go see how divine.”

  On Thursday I’d been too angry at Rose to notice what she had done. It indeed was divine.

  “You never believed—now admit it, Bren,” Rosalie challenged me, as I lavishly admired the latticed tree house, the three-tiered lily pond, the delicate Japanese garden, the pebbled walkways, “that I was capable of doing this job. You thought I’d screw up.”

  “If that’s what I thought,” I said, amazed and impressed by the beauty before me, “I take it all back.” I knelt to examine a bronze baby walrus that Rose had artfully set on a rock by the pond. “You’re a born landscape architect.”

  Rosalie’s usually tense, alert face surrendered to a six-year-old’s blissful grin, a testament to the transforming power of praise. “You really think so?” she asked, reluctant to let the moment go. “You really think so?”

  I unstintingly assured her that I did.

  Rosalie twinkled with pleasure. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you for letting me stay at your house. I know I’m not the easiest to live with.”

  I was on a magnanimity roll. I shrugged my shoulders and quietly said, “So who is?”

  Sisterhood sang in the treetops as we walked home.

  Later, when Rose had packed the car and settled Hubert onto his velvety mattress, she buckled her seat belt and looked me straight in the eye. “I have to count on you, Brenda, being all alone in the world, and I want you to promise me that if I die—”

  “You do,” I reminded her, “have a daughter.”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “I want you to solemnly promise me, Bren, that if I die, I’ll be able to count on you to take care of Hubert.”

  • • •

  When Rose had roared happily off (I am now the designated guardian of a Great Dane), I sat on the porch in my wicker rocking chair. Rocking back and forth in the bracing late October air, I turned my thoughts to murdering Mr. Monti. I rocked and racked my brain. I rocked and I racked. I racked and I rocked. I came up with zilch.

  Jake strolled out to the porch and sat across from me on the hammock. “You’re thinking,” he said. “I get nervous when you think.” Wearing a tight black turtleneck, a pair of soft khaki pants, and an amiable expression on his face, he crisply reviewed the sexual and the real estate revelations we’d been fighting and brooding about for almost a week. When he finished his review, he made a proposal.

  “Suppose I forget what you did,” he said, “and you forget what I did, and both of us swear we’ll never do it again.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Suppose I concede, in addition, that what I did was a lot worse than what you did.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Suppose I add to the previous package a statement of deep remorse, accompanied by a genuine plea for forgiveness.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Suppose I fall on my knees to the ground and kiss your fucking feet.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Jake had to leave for the hospital. He didn’t kiss my feet. But he did take my hand and plant a long kiss on the palm. “I’m sorry I slept with Sunny,” he said. “But now you know all my secrets.” He gazed deep into my eyes. “I hope I know yours.”

  • • •

  In the months that have passed since March 18 it has never once entered my mind to confess to Jake about my three adulteries. And whenever my readers ask, “If he tells about his, should I tell about mine?” I always say no. Presumably, what’s sauce for the gander ought to be sauce for the goose, but in sexual matters this simply isn’t so. “So of course,” I said to Carolyn on Saturday afternoon when she stopped off at my house to borrow a book, “when Jake made that crack about did he know all my secrets, I didn’t say a word.”

  “Damn right you didn’t,” said Carolyn. “He’d never have forgiven you. There’s no such thing as equal-opportunity adultery.”

  “I guess, But, God, that seems so unfair,” I complained. “It’s so unfair that Jake could feel entitled to not forgive me, and yet he’s just assuming that I’ll forgive him.”

  Carolyn shook out her shining blond hair and said sure it was unfair but that’s how it was. “Because, when our husbands cheat on us, they only break our hearts,” was her explanation. “When we cheat on our husbands, we break their balls.”

  Hearts, we both agreed, were far more resilient.

  Carolyn left with her borrowed book, a novel by Rosellen Brown called Before and After, a novel that spoke to concerns that consumed my soul. How far—to what lengths—should a parent go on behalf of his or her child? the book inquired. I’d already answered that question for myself.

  And so I sat down again and gave my full attention to implementing that answer. I needed to figure this out for once and for all. I needed to find a way, a safe and simple and foolproof way—a final way to murder Mr. Monti.

  • • •

  On Sunday I thought about gas—perhaps I could turn on the jets in Mr. Monti’s kitchen and somehow persuade him to stick his head in the oven. Or perhaps I could get him to park in a shut-tight garage with the motor running in his car. On Monday I thought about plastic bags—I might, as he lay sleeping, ever so gently slip one over his face. On Monday I also recognized that—tidy and simple though they well might be—these were not the murder plans of a rational person.

  You will note that it the head-in-the-oven plan as well as the plastic-bag-over-the-face plan, I presupposed access to Mr. Monti’s condo. I presupposed access because, when Jeff had handed over the keys, he forgot about mine. And of course I had a key—what Jewish mother would not have a key to her child’s condominium? In case of emergency. In case he’s too sick with the flu to open the door. In case she wants to murder the next tenant.

  With no murder plan in sight by the end of a sleepless Monday night, and with time-running out, I made the desperate decision to let myself into the Watergate condo and look around. Somewhere on the premises there must be, had to be, would surely be found, some obvious opportunity for homicide. I was going to find it.

  • • •

  I needed to go unrecognized to the Watergate condominium. Once again I needed a disguise. Who should I be? I asked myself (
I must admit I was getting into disguises). And after I had rejected dressing up as a police woman or a nun (though I loved both outfits), I had my answer. Three stops—at a hardware store, a uniform store, a costume shop near Dupont Circle—and I was (not too expensively) equipped. I had just tried everything on in a gas station ladies’ room to check out the effect when a woman walked in, gave a shriek, and fled out the door. My disguise was a triumph!

  On Wednesday morning I put in a call to Mr. Monti’s office and established that he was already there and that he was expected to be there all day. I then called the Watergate desk—this time I spoke as Mr. Monti’s private secretary—and explained that Mr. Monti would be sending someone to work in his apartment. I then drove my car past the Watergate and parked it right next door, in the underground parking of the Kennedy Center. Finally I dialed Mr. Monti’s Watergate telephone number to make absolutely certain that no one was home.

  No one was home.

  Just a bit before noon a man with a small black Chaplinesque mustache walked over to the Watergate desk. Dressed in heavy work boots, a white peaked cap, and blue-and-white-striped industrial coveralls, he explained in broken English that he was Mr. Garcia Fuentes, here to do a job in apartment 10 C. He carried a bucket of paint, a paintbrush, a ladder. He said Mr. Monti had given him the key.

  “We’re expecting you,” said the man at the desk, pointing him—I mean me—to the service elevator.

  • • •

  And here I was, in Mr. Monti’s—previously my poor son Jeff’s—condominium.

  And a very nice place it was—two bedrooms, two baths, eat-in kitchen, huge living room, handy dining area, and a wraparound terrace reached through sliding glass doors. Though Mr. Monti’s furniture (which, I presume, he had rented) lacked the high-tech flash of Jeff’s former decor, I observed, as I put down my ladder and other equipment and wandered slowly through the rooms, that he had already settled himself in. Indeed there were paintings hung on his walls and photographs set on his tables, photographs of him and his family. A studio portrait of Birdie. Snapshots of his daughters and his grandchildren. A photo with his parents and his twin brother. A photo of—