•
I suspect, it says something bad about me that—although I have dined at her home, entertained her at mine, and slept with her husband—I haven’t once mentioned Mrs. Monti’s first name. But in my defense, let me note that this is a woman who, whenever she introduces herself, will say, “Hello, I’m Mrs. Joseph Monti.” As I stood in her husband’s office, however, recoiling from his curses-upon-you glare, it flashed in giant letters on my brain: Renata, shortened to “Ren,” then homonymed into “Wren,” then omithologically generalized into “Birdie.”
Who, from what I’d just heard, had flown the coop.
Mr. Monti’s ashen face was precisely the shade of his gray Armani suit, and his suddenly deflated lips had turned the steely blue of his Hermès tie. Even in a state of shock, the man remained exquisitely color-coordinated. And unrelenting.
“Somehow—how, I don’t know yet—this whole thing is on your head,” he repeated menacingly. But I had come to make peace and would not be provoked.
“Mr. Monti, Joseph,” I said, taking him by the arm and thinking fast, “this is no time for blaming and reproaching. Come sit with me on the couch and tell me about it.”
Sounding slightly dazed, Mr. Monti murmured, half to himself, “She calls me up and she says, ‘I’ve put up with plenty over the years, but this time, Joseph, you have gone too far.’ ” He settled, with a heavy sigh, into the brown leather couch. I was right there beside him.
“Did she say what you had gone too far about?” I asked solicitously, removing my fetching cloche and fluffing my hair.
“Something to do with Josephine. Something—it didn’t make sense to me—about Josephine. But then she started crying. And then she hung up.”
Though I not only think of myself as, but am, a deeply compassionate person, I confess to faking compassion for Mr. Monti. For the truth is that Mrs. Monti’s flight left me with only one (uncompassionate) question: Was this good news or was this bad news for the Kovners?
I was just about to explore this when there were cries of “Daddy! Daddy!” and Annette and Gloria burst into the office.
“I’ve never seen Mommy like this before,” said Annette.
“She’s up in my guest room,” said Gloria, “sobbing her heart out.”
“She says as of now,” said Annette, “she’s a single parent.”
The Monti daughters, though no longer pregnant, still looked larger than life, their Dolly Parton breasts and their showers and towers of raven curls occupying far more space than your average breasts and hairstyles tend to do. Standing tall to their strappy shoes, and encased in designer duds, Annette and Gloria would surely have seemed, a dynamic duo anywhere but in the presence of their formidable father.
“Watch that tone of voice, missy,” Mr. Monti snapped at Annette, the color flooding back into his face. “And Gloria, if you’re walking around the city with skirts that short, I don’t want to hear you’ve been raped. It will not be rape.”
I silently waggled my fingers in a hello to Annette and Gloria, hoping I wouldn’t be asked to leave what promised to be an informative family powwow. Lucky for me, the three throbbing Montis were far too overwrought to contemplate the propriety of my presence.
“You’d be on the rapist’s side? Against your own daughter?” Gloria asked, uncharacteristically unsubdued. “Another good reason for Mommy to want an annulment.”
“Annulment? What annulment?” roared Mr. Monti.
“And she’s prepared to take it all the way to the Pope,” Annette chimed in. “She says you’ve gone too far.”
“I heard that already. And I say your mother’s gone crazy. It must be—what’s this new ailment all of the women are getting now?—that PMF.”
“It’s PMS, Daddy,” said Gloria, “and it stands for—”
“In mixed company I don’t want to hear what it stands for.” With one reprimanding finger, Mr. Monti silenced his daughters and let the silence gather in the room. “And now,” he said, “the two of you sit and tell me why your mother has left our home and is suddenly talking annulment.”
Annette, alternating with Gloria, explained that their mother had packed a suitcase and left after Josephine telephoned her that morning.
“From where?” Mr. Monti interrupted.
“She isn’t saying,” Gloria said, trying to tug her skirt down over her kneecaps. “She told Mommy she’s hiding out from you because—” She stopped abruptly and sank her top teeth into her lower lip.
“Because what? Mr. Monti demanded.
“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?”
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.