•
After returning the Buick and grabbing a cab back to Georgetown Park to retrieve my car, I made a quick stop at the market to pick up some swordfish, which—topped with fresh salsa and teamed with pasta dressed with garlic and olive oil—would serve to show my husband that no matter how insensitively he behaved, I’d always meet my culinary commitments.
When I got home, however, two brief notes were waiting on the kitchen table—a “Mom, I’m with Jo. I’ll see you Sunday” from Wally, and a “Brenda, I need a time-out. I won’t be back until tomorrow night” from Jake. Wally’s note had a “love” in front of the signature. Jake’s did not.
In all of our married life, Jake had never before gone off for the night without advance warning. He had never gone off for a night without providing a telephone number where he could be reached. Nor had he ever gone off because he needed—what was that nasty phrase?—“a time out.”
My Thelma and Louise euphoria vanished.
Big bad bleak black thoughts clouded my mind.
I shoved the food into fee fridge and removed a chilled, unopened bottle of Chardonnay, deftly yanked out the cork, and filled up a glass. No, in case you are wondering, I am not a secret drinker, but sometimes a woman has to have a drink, A Saturday that includes attempting murder and being abandoned by your husband is—in my view—certainly one of those times.
My big bad bleak black thoughts grew bleaker and blacker.
Had I, in trying to kill Mr. Monti, lost my moral moorings? Had I maybe lost my husband too? Had I, in addition, lost my looks? A glimpse of my haggard self, as I carried my drink past the front-hall mirror into the living room, suggested that this might indeed be the case. I seemed to be a dead ringer for that woman in Lost Horizon who aged a hundred years when she left Shangri-La. No one would mistake me for Goldie Hawn’s first cousin.
For a few shaken moments I almost—along with my moorings and husband and looks—lost my self confidence. I felt myself surrendering to despair. But then my can do attitude—enhanced with several swigs of the Chardonnay—came, as it so often has done, to my rescue, allowing me to review and reconceptualize the current situation.
So I said to myself, If Anne Archer, in defense of herself and her family, is entitled to kill Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, surely you are entitled to kill Mr. Monti.
Ergo I have not lost my moral moorings.
And I said to myself, If Angelica Huston, in spite of many obstacles, can get Jack Nicholson back in Prizzi’s Honor, surely you will be able to get back Jake.
Ergo I have not lost the man I love.
And I said to myself, Tomorrow morning, after a good night’s sleep, your skin will be brighter, your eyes will be wider, those brackets between your nostrils and mouth will vanish, and you’ll stop resembling that lady in Lost Horizon and start resembling Goldie Hawn’s first cousin. Furthermore, I reminded myself (although I still didn’t want him) that, just a few days earlier, in my kitchen, Philip Eastlake had found me wildly attractive.
Ergo I have also not—not in such a short time!—lost my looks.
By the time I had finished ergo-ing, I had finished my third glass of wine, which—since I’d skipped eating lunch—winged straight to my head, from which all thoughts had fled except for the oddly comforting thought that Philip Eastlake found me wildly attractive. A naked woman quoting James Joyce while on her elbows and knees in the moistly receptive Jumping White Tiger position is Philip Eastlake’s notion of wildly attractive. My mind traveled back to March 18, half a year ago, when I’d been that woman.
• • •
Arriving at noon that March day at the John Hay suite of the irreproachable Hay-Adams, I had found Philip eagerly poised at the open door, elegantly but improbably clad in a flowing silken black-and-gold kimono. He helped me off with my coat, continentally kissed me on each cheek, and told me he was delighted that I had come. Then he gestured grandly to a table set for two, next to a window that offered one of the most theatrical views to be found in the city: the White House, with its amicable majesty. And behind it, solemn and pure, the Washington Monument. (And in front of it, in Lafayette Square, a homeless fellow napping on a park bench, though Philip, when I pointed this out, insisted that some of the homeless in Lafayette Square are really the Secret Service working incognito.)
I was on an adrenaline high, having spent from 6:48 until 11:10 in Joseph Monti’s vigorous embrace, after which I had scooted home to shower and dress and perfume myself for my second bout of adulterous activity. Which, in sharp contrast to my morning encounter, Philip eased us into with great tact.
Indeed, as we chatted over a meal of lobster bisque, grilled lamb chops, and champagne, you never would have believed we had sex on our minds, for we seemed to be getting together for the sole and exclusive purpose of discussing Yeltsin, the Middle East, the greenhouse effect, education, and the fluctuating state of the economy. I can’t quite remember how we got from the deficit to Oriental erotica, but that’s where we’d got to shortly before P.M., when Philip opened his robe to display what he called—as he gently urged my hand upon it—his Weapon of Love, his Precious Scepter, his Jade Stalk, his Crimson Bird, the Lingam with which he yearned to fill my Yoni.
“Excuse me,” I told him, “I grasp the idea, but I don’t grasp the context.”
Philip was happy to help me with the context.
It seems that while he was doing research for his TV program on Oriental art, he learned that this art included the art of erotica—exquisitely painted and highly graphic and (to him) profoundly arousing portrayals of often esoteric acts of love. By the time he had finished pursuing his intriguing line of research, he had had—well, let him tell it—“an epiphany. I understood that the interpenetration of the esthetic, and the erotic was my path to a thrillingly total soul/body experience.” (Which, of course, is how I picked up that damn phrase.) Philip had also acquired, in the course of his thorough review, of the material, a vivid and varied vocabulary of arcane sexual postures and bodily parts, legitimized by references to the Taoist and Tantric teachings of Eastern philosophy.
He spoke knowingly of these matters in his aristocratic voice. He spoke with his hands.
“The union of woman and man,” he explained, unbuttoning my blouse, “precisely mirrors the mating of Earth and Heaven. In making love”—he adroitly unhooked my new red peekaboo bra—“we recapitulate, microcosmically speaking, the macrocosmic harmonies of the spheres.” He paused to taste what he characterized as the Immortality Peach Juice of my breasts, causing my breathing to quicken and his Crimson Bird to flutter under my fingers. And then he went on to say—as he unzippered my skirt and dropped it to the floor, along with my stockings, lace garter belt, and panties—that what we were embarking upon wasn’t mere carnal contact but the merging of Positive Peak and Pleasure Grotto, of Yang Pagoda and Purple Peony.
“This just isn’t me,” I started to say as Philip removed his robe and stretched me out on the rug with my legs in the air. But then I reminded myself that I was here precisely because I didn’t want to be the old sexual me.
As Philip straddled my hips and draped my ankles around his neck, preparing my Honey Pot to receive his Ambassador, I huskily whispered, “Philip, wait. The Trojans.”
“We’ll try that one later,” he promised, resuming his efforts with an ardor that almost made me forget about safe sex. Fortunately, my purse was on the floor, within reach of my hand, and despite great distractions I finally extracted a condom. Which, after a few more moves that took me up to, but not over, the brink of bliss, he paused to put on. But instead of returning to what he proudly informed me was an inspired variation of the ever popular Pawing Horse position, he sat me upon his lap, easing my Precious Conch Shell onto his Jade Flute, and swayed us backward and forward, not to mention from side to side and round and round, in the even more in spired Shouting Monkey Embracing a Mountain Goat variation.
Once again Philip brought me to the very portal of paradise and stopped an instant before the bell was rung, a tantalizing tactic that he repeated again and again with impeccable timing. My nerve ends revved and ready, I eventually attempted to accelerate, but Philip—twisting our bodies into increasingly improbable positions—said we must move to the music of the spheres. And so he bent and folded me into the Mysteries of the Clouds and Rain position. And then he stood me on my head in the Donkeys in the Third Moon of the Spring position. And then he arched me over into the—
“You’re asking a lot of my lower back,” I was about to complain, when the music of the spheres picked up its beat, and Philip’s Faithful Servant addressed itself without restraint to the final requirements of my Valley of Joy.
And yes I said yes I will yes (I am, of course, quoting Molly Bloom in Joyce’s dense but deeply rewarding Ulysses) as inner and outer . . . and heaven and earth and micro- and macrocosm interpenetrated.
• • •
While the floor, two pink chairs, a floral print couch, and a Chippendale conference table had served as the sites of our acrobatic amours, we never got anywhere near fee bed until after. But after our passions were spent, we summoned the strength to crawl between the pristine sheets, where Philip napped and I evaluated.
Had I liked it? Hey, I’d loved it. All my molecules were humming. The sheets could ignite from the heat coming off of my skin. Every inch of my body—including my earlobes, my eyebrows, my belly button, my toenails—quivered with voluptuous satisfaction. My big Oriental O bad been, without any question, a once in-a-lifetime experience.
But once was enough.
Yes, even if I had been into long-term adultery, once with the Pair of Tongs position and the Bee Buzzing Over Man position, not to mention die Fixing a Nail and Soaring Seagulls and Spinning Top positions, was quite enough.
Why? Because it’s a miracle that I didn’t wind up in traction ate all of those tricky gymnastic gyrations.
But also, and mainly, because Philip never smiled.
What I mean is, he brought to his efforts to wed the esthetic to the erotic a dedicated, unrelenting solemnity. What I mean is, the man was remorselessly sincere. There were times when I wanted to laugh—when I thought I’d explode if I didn’t laugh—when the only response was to laugh—but I didn’t dare. Now believe me, I am willing—just as willing as anyone else—to be reverent abort acts of sexual love, but how can a person feel reverent when doing a back bend? And while I was truly grateful for the attention that Philip’s Warrior had lavished so warmly on my Pleasure House, how could he speak those names with such a straight face?
Lying beside him in bed, I began to giggle—softly at first, and then dementedly. Yes, I thought, clamping both hands on my mouth so I wouldn’t disturb his rest, once was enough.
I drifted off to sleep, and when I awoke I found Philip gazing upon me adoringly. Adoringly, but as I was later to learn when we met the zoo, with full awareness of each and every physical imperfection from laugh lines to . . .
Anyway, there was Philip, gazing and quoting—I guess—from some Eastern book of love; “How delicious an instrument is woman. How capable is she of producing the most exquisite harmonies, of executing the most complicated variations, and of giving the most divine of erotic pleasures.” His Precious Scepter was showing some definite signs of perking up as he continued. “With minds freed from doubt and shame, we have not cooled the natural urges of our passionate—”
“Philip,” I interrupted, not wanting to deal with any uncooled natural urges. “It’s getting late. I’ve really got to go.” Which is when he insistently asked how soon we two could meet again. After which, complications set in.
• • •
My Philip Eastlake reveries and my end-of-the-bottle-of-Chardonnay golden glow were banished in a flash by the sound of his-and-her voices quarreling on my front porch. The voices belonged to Wally and Jo, who weren’t supposed to be at the house this evening. Their words, despite the closed windows, came through step and clear. I don’t think you call it eavesdropping when people are speaking so loudly that you’d actually have, to leave the room not to hear. I did not leave the room.
“I said I’d drive you home, but I didn’t say I was coming in with you,” said Josephine.
“You’re not staying here. I can’t stay with you at your sister’s house. What,” Wally angrily asked, “is going on?”
“Separation-individuation,” Josephine Said, “is what’s going on.”
‘That’s fine. You go and separate-individuate from your father. That’s probably an excellent thing to do. But, damn it, Jo, we love each other. I’m the guy you’re marrying. Don’t separate-individuate from me.”
Wally’s voice broke as his hurt and bewilderment overrode his anger. He (and his loving mother) were close to tears.
“I won’t feel guilty,” Josephine snapped. “I won’t let you make me feel guilty because I want some psychological space.” She let out a heavy sigh. “Oh, Wally, don’t you understand that I can’t just go from my dad’s domination to yours?”
Wally shouted “Christ!” and pounded his fist against the front door. “That’s nuts!” he said, and pounded the door again. “I am not your father. I do not want to dominate you. And if that’s what your shrink is telling you, then tell her for me that she’s totally full of—”
Josephine, sounding more like her father than I could have ever imagined, snapped, “Don’t tell me what to tell her. Don’t you dare! And don’t you start putting her down just because she’s got me—” she paused, cleared her throat, and continued unsteadily, “to ask myself some questions about our relationship.”
A long silence followed her outburst, and then Wally grimly said, “So what are you asking?”
Josephine’s voice dropped so low that I had to—I still don’t think you could technically call this eavesdropping—move from the couch to a nearer-the-window chair. “I’m asking,” she told him nervously, “if our feelings for each other are based on—uh, you know—love or just on need.”
“I need you,” Wally exploded, like I need a hump on my back. You and that family of yours—that’s what I need? There are plenty of nice Jewish girls around who don’t have crazy fathers and fear of botulism. God knows I don’t need you, Jo, but”—Wally’s voice turned sweet as syrup—“honey, I love you.”
A rustling on the porch suggested that Wally was conveying his love nonverbally. “Don’t kiss me. It mixes me up,” I heard Josephine groan. “Okay, so you say you don’t need me but maybe you need me to need you. And maybe that’s what I’m doing instead of loving you.”
Now Jo was crying, and Wally was crying, and I started crying too, for Jake and me as well as for Wally and Jo. I cried for young lovers everywhere and for middle-aged lovers too, for the way we were—and the way we screw it up, for that please-believe-me-I’ll-die-if you-leave-me, that are-you-pretending-it-can’t-be-the ending, that high-as-the-mountain-and-deep-as-the-ocean devotion which ends with our lonely heart calling, in the chill still Of the night, lover come back to me.
“Oh God, oh God, it’s so sad,” I wailed. My body shook with sobs—two-thirds sorrow, one-third Chardonnay. As tears streamed down my cheeks and my sobbing reached a loud, crescendo, all of a sudden I heard somebody say» “Mom? Is that you?”
I had, in my grieving for love’s labours lost, forgotten that Wally and Josephine were, right there. Now they knew that I was right there too. “It’s me,” I said, thinking fast. “I was taking a nap, and I just woke up from a terrible nightmare. Come on inside and I’ll make us all some coffee.”
I opened the door to let them both in, but Josephine told me No, thanks, explaining that she had studying to do.
Wally grabbed her hand and said, “It’s really important to me for you to come in.”
Josephine slipped her hand away. “It’s really really important,” she said, “for me not to.”
“It actually isn’t that cold tonight,” I said to Wally and Jo, trying for a constructive intervention. “Compromise! Have coffee out here on the porch.”
“Forget it,” said Wally, and stormed into the house.
“Good night, Mrs. Kovner,” said Jo, and walked to her car.
Saturday night, I said to myself, is the loneliest night of the week.
I made myself a lonely cup of coffee.
And since Wally said no—a rather sharp no—when I asked if he wanted to talk, and since Jake was God knows-where with God-knows-whom, I decided the best thing to do was to go to sleep. Tomorrow—when I was thinking more clearly and looking a whole lot better—I’d figure out how to make up with Jake and how (once again!) to murder Mr. Monti.
• • •
Sunday started out badly and got worse.
The phone rang at 7A.M. with my sister Rosalie saying, “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
There are three answers to this question. The direct approach: “Damn right you did. Who calls at seven A.M.?” The smart-ass reproach: “Certainly not. I had to get up to answer the telephone anyway.” The comforting lie: “Oh, no, I’ve been up for hours.”
In the interests of sisterhood, I chose option three.
“So why,” Rose persisted, “are you sounding so groggy?”
“Maybe I’m getting a cold,” I said. “Rose, I’m up.”
“Because if I did wake you up, you could tell me. I can deal with that I’d rather have you say it right out than secretly thinking I’m selfish and irresponsible.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” I fibbed. “I’m thinking that if my sister is calling at seven A.M., it must be important.”
“In other words,” Rose said triumphantly, “I did. I did wake you up. And you hate me for it.”.
As I think I’ve already mentioned, ours has never been an easy relationship.
It took about ten minutes to get beyond this opening gambit to the purpose of Rosalie’s early-morning call, which was to let me know that she and Hubert would be coming down on Wednesday. They would need to stay, she reminded me, two or maybe three weeks, till the work on Carolyn’s yard was well under way. “Unless—and you can be honest with me, Brenda—” she tensely said, “you’d rather that Hubert and I went somewhere else.”
“You’re more than welcome,” I assured her.
“Is that ‘you’ as in me or ‘you’ as in Hubert and me?”
“You’re both welcome here,” I said. This was not the truth.
“I know you don’t really like dogs, Bren, but I couldn’t come without Hubert.”
“I wouldn’t want you to.”
“I mean, a Great Dane is a sensitive breed, and Hubert happens to be especially sensitive. And intelligent. And intuitive. And dignified and proud. And deeply devoted.”
“I don’t, know Hubert that well,” I said, trying to stanch the flow, “but I’m looking forward to getting to know him better. And now, if you’ll excuse me”—I employed my old trick for getting off the phone—“my doorbell is ringing.”
“Who would be ringing your bell,” asked Rose, “so early in the morning? Don’t they care about waking people up?”
“Wednesday, Rose,” I said, and hung up the phone.
When I went outside to bring in the Sunday papers, I saw something on the windshield of Wally’s car. Stuck under the wipers, a raggedy note announced in big block letters, ON HALLOWEEN THE CLOWN TURNS A GHOST.
I had no problem deconstructing this terrifying message. It obviously was naming the date on which Mr. Joseph Monti intended to do in my baby boy.
The sidewalk lurched under my feet. The sky started falling. A full-scale dizzy spell was about to begin. No, I said to myself, I won’t let this happen. I won’t let them hurt him. I won’t be helpless. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t let that bastard win.
I reminded myself, as I tore up the note and tossed it into the trash can, that Halloween was more than a month from today. Which meant that Wally was safe for a while, that I didn’t need to feel pressed to swing into action and rescue him right away. There was time, and I had to have time, to prepare another foolproof plan to kill Mr. Monti.
How much time, did I have to win back Jake?
I was brooding over this question during a meager breakfast of coffee and dry toast when I got a telephone call from Vivian Feuerbach.
“I wanted to check on your health, my dear,” she said to me in her Katharine Hepburn voice. “You sounded so dreadful on Friday when you canceled.”
What in God’s name was she talking about? For a moment my mind was blank. And then I remembered. “Oh, right. But I’m fine today.”
And I also wanted to tell you that I’m going out to the shack for a couple of weeks”—this, shack was. her two-hundred-acre estate in Middleburg—“so whatever you wished to see me about will have to wait until I have returned.”
My mind, no longer a blank, flashed, That’s too late.
I guess I must have moaned, because imperious Vivian quickly, graciously added, “Unless—well, if it’s important, I could make the time to see you this afternoon.”
I told her it was important. I told her I’d get back to her immediately. I called up Louis and asked could he meet us today. “We’ll take her to Anacostia, and then we’ll take her to Harmony House, and then you’ll make your pitch about converting Jeff’s properties into group homes for the homeless, and then she’ll agree it’s a great idea, and then she’ll agree to buy them, and then Jeff will be all right, and then maybe Jake . . . maybe Jake . . . maybe Jake . . .”
“Brenda! Brenda! Slow down! You need me to meet you and Ms. Feuerbach, I’ll do it.” Louis’s voice was soothing arid concerned. “But—no offense intended—you are strange, I mean sincerely strange, today.”
I took a deep breath and told Louis that I was suffering from a case of sensory overload—“I need to unjam a few circuits and I’ll be okay.” I decided I wouldn’t say that I needed this real estate coup not merely to bail out Jeff but to score some urgently needed points with my husband, whom—I also didn’t say—I seemed to have significantly alienated.
“I don’t want your praise or apologies,” I imagined cooing to Jake, when—having been told (dramatically) about Jeff’s ruinous real estate deal and (modestly) about my brilliant solution—he looked at me with new respect in his eyes. “I don’t want your praise or apologies—just your love.”
• • •
In the early afternoon Vivian Feuerbach and I—and Jeff, who of course we needed to come with us—were crammed into Louis’s Honda on our not-so-merry way to Anacostia. To one of the meaner sections of Anacostia. To, in fact, one of the meaner streets of one of the meaner sections of Anacostia.
The day was pay but mild, and a silent cluster of teenage boys, in the hanging-out mode, looked us over when we stopped at a light. As I, in turn, looked them over—looked at their unsmiling faces and what-you-doing-here eyes—my hand, without my permission, reached out to push down the locks and roll up all the windows. Red light, red light, turn green, I nervously said to myself, this chant of impatience dredged from the mists of my childhood. But when the light turned green, our way was blocked by a wiry lad in high hair and a headband, who darted into the street and, rhythmically pecking his head and jabbing out his elbows, started dancing to an improvised rap song.
So they come across the river
From the other side.
Now they got no place to run—uh uh!—
And no place to hide.
Gonna make tomorrow’s headlines—
This is where they died.
Get ’em. Go get ’em. Go get ’em. Go get . . .
When some of High Hair’s pals danced into the street and joined him in the “get ’em, go get ’ems,” Louis backed up, swung around them, and pulled away. None of us expressed any wish to stay for the rest of the boyz-n-the-hood performance. Especially me.
I mean, I was scared. I also was ashamed of being scared. I also was much more scared than I was ashamed. I was scared to be in this blighted place with its overflowing trash cans and dismembered cars, not to mention its alienated inhabitants. Would I be feeling more welcome if I were wearing my sixties WE SHALL, OVERCOME T-shirt? I doubted it.
I was looking across a gulf that was missing a bridge, that I wished could be bridged, that required a lot of encouragement to be bridged. Which is why, when we parked in front of a battered, brick building—one of Jeff’s sorry set of eight—with its door swinging off its hinges and its first-floor, windows methodically smashed in, the sign saying KOVNER PROPERTIES—EFFICIENCIES FOR RENT displayed a desperate addendum: WEST MONTH FREE
In’ spite of which, as Jeff had already informed me, the occupancy rate was no more than 30 percent.
I had warned Vivian in advance that I was taking her on “a magical mystery tour” of a part of the city that she had never seen. I also had warned her in advance that I might, for the very first time in our relationship, be asking her to make what I termed “a substantial contribution to a good cause.” (I chose to avoid specifics until later.) I also had warned her in advance to wear her casual clothes, which for Vivian meant low heels with her Chanel. Leaning on Louis’s arm, with Jeff leading the way and me warily covering the rear, Vivian made a regal entrance into the front hall—and bumped into Jeff, who was frozen in his tracks. He was staring—we all were staring—at a man in a Rolex watch and designer running suit, who seemed to be holding a gun to another man’s head.
Forget about “seemed.” This man was positively holding a gun to another man’s head.
“We’re doing some business. Please move on,” said the man who was holding the gun, though he phrased his request in far more colorful terms.
Jeff began backing out. “Yeah, right. We don’t want to interrupt.” Vivian, however, stood her ground. “Are you going to whack him?” she asked “Is this a drug deal that’s gone sour? Or one of your pushers skimming off the top? It’s important to show some muscle, but everyone knows you can’t collect money from a dead man.”
Billy (the name was embroidered on the pocket of his running suit) tilted his head and squinted, his eyes at Vivian. “You been seeing too many TV shows, Mama.”
“I happen to be of the reading generation,” said Vivian proudly, “and quite a connoisseur of detective fiction.”
“Mama, get your ass out of here or you gonna be quite a corpse of detective fiction.” Billy was clearly not charmed by Vivian’s style. He was even more annoyed when, moving up close and shaking a finger in his face, she told him, “No one, not even my son, calls me Mama.’ And furthermore I consider threats a repugnant and unacceptable form of discourse.”
While Billy, cursing vividly, was pushing Vivian’s chastising finger away, his erstwhile victim chose to exploit the distraction. Moving with serpentine grace, Elton Jr. (his name was embroidered on his running suit too) swiveled around and wrestled the gun from Billy. After which he grabbed Vivian, held her up in front of him like a shield, and announced, “This is a hostage situation.”
Somebody down the hall, his interest aroused by the commotion, poked out his head, said, “Oh, shit!” and quickly withdrew.
Somebody from the second floor, a baby on her hip, looked down from the top of the stairs, said, “Oh, shit!” and withdrew.
While Jeff (aloud) and I (silently) concurred in this estimate of the situation, Louis asked Elton Jr., “What are your terms?” But Vivian—eyes ablaze and all of her ninety-six pounds aquiver with indignation—said, “No terms, Louis. Never. I am have been, and will continue to be, opposed to any negotiations with hostage-takers.”
“You with the big fat purse,” said Eton Jr., looking at me and ignoring all talk of terms and negotiations. “Open it up and put it here by my foot.”
I did what he said.
“Your jewelry. All of it. Off and into the purse.”
I did what he said.
“Now you two dudes. I want wallets and watches and, hey, that’s a fine-looking belt you wearing there, white boy. Lizard?”
“Lizard,” said Jeff.
“In the purse.”
Jeff and Louis did what he said. Vivian, after protesting, did so too. “And now it’s your turn,” Elton Jr. told Billy.
“Hell, kill the hostage,” Billy replied. “Ain’t gonna bother me.”
“Ain’t gonna be the hostage who gets it,” Elton Jr. told Billy.
Billy, like the rest of us, anted up.
Pointing his gun at the four of us now, Elton Jr. released his grip on Vivian and used his free hand to scoop up the loot at his feet. “Catch you all later,” he said as he backed down the hall and out the front door. “Catch you all later,” said Billy, who followed soon after. Before disappearing, however, he turned to Vivian and said, “Hey, Mama, he was skimming off the top.”
• • •
We tried to phone the police from one of the first-floor Kovner apartments, but there were no apartments, exactly, on the first floor. There were two what once were called crash pads but what I guess you’d now have to call crack pads, and they lacked not only telephones hot furniture, intact windows, and other niceties. What they didn’t lack was people, a Dante’s Inferno collection of people, semireclining on the filthy floors—so drugged, so wrecked, so out of it that they barely could lift up their heads when we four E.T.’s pushed open their unlocked doors. As for the other units, four were vacant and triple-bolted, and two belonged to tenants who demanded a warrant before they would let us in, and one appeared to belong to a foreign student who informed us—through the keyhole—that he was too busy studying for an engineering exam to be disturbed.
“We’ll go to my house,” Vivian said, showing her leadership qualities. “We’ll call the police from there and then we’ll have tea. Unless”—she turned to Jeff—“your other buildings are more . . . ah . . . together than this one is.”
We went to Vivian’s house.
It was clear that the trip to Harmony House, though on our side of the Anacostia River, had been scrubbed for the day, and—in Vivian’s case—forever. Pouring tea in her paneled and chintzed and English-antiqued library, she characterized our adventure in Anacostia as “an enlightening experience which shall, I believe, suffice me for a lifetime.” (Kind of the way I felt about sex with Philip.) When we pointed out that Jeff’s buildings could be turned into eight more Harmony Houses if someone like her would make—I repeated the phrase I had used with her earlier—a “substantial contribution to a good cause,” Vivian briskly noted that in surrendering her jewelry to Elton Jr. she already had made a substantial contribution.
“We all feel real bad about that,” Louis said.
“It’s my fault,” moaned a deeply demoralized Jeff.
“Vivian,” I began, winding up for one of my no-holds-barred abject apologies, “I can’t begin to tell you how unspeakably, inconsolably sorry I am, how an guished, appalled, incredibly sick at heart. Anguished that you were robbed. Appalled that you were put in physical danger. Incredibly sick at heart that you were exposed to—”
Vivian stopped my words with an impatient wave of her hand. “You don’t have to apologize, my dear. And I”—she cocked her head to one side and gave me a shrewd smile—“don’t have to buy any buildings in Anacostia. Yes?”
I swallowed a miniature blueberry tart and wiped the crumbs from my lips. “Of course yes,” I said with false heartiness. “Of course yes.”
Vivian turned to Louis and Jeff. “My passion, you know, is music. It has always been one of my chief philanthropies. If you get your new homeless houses set up, I’d be happy to give each one a nice CD player.”
Driving away from Vivian’s house, Louis tried to cheer up the kvetching Kovners, who had banked a whole hell of a lot on a positive outcome. When he failed to dispel our gloom he began to beat out a rhythm on the steering wheel, pecking his head and chanting, “Get ’em. Go get ’em. Go get ’em. Go get ’em,” and then swinging into a vigorous “So we come across the river from the other side . . .” He gave Jeff a nudge.
“Now we got no place to run,” said Jeff, “and no place to hide. Mom?”
“Gonna make tomorrow’s paper. This is where—uh huh!—we died.”
And all of us, laughing hysterically, screamed out, “Get ’em, go get ’em,” all the way home.
• • •
The swordfish was marinating and the salsa was freshly made when Jake returned around eight on Sunday night I had set the dining-room table with candles and flowers. I had also—in the interest of privacy—managed to ease glum Wally into going out for a meal and a movie with Jeff. Dressed in a dark-green hostess gown with a gilt-edged plunging neckline, I looked like what I was: a woman whose game plan for the evening was seduction.
My mood was positive.
Jake strode into the house as if he’d only been gone for ten minutes. “I assume you got my note,” he said, dropping his overnight bag onto a chair. Then Mr. Never Explain-Never Apologize-Never Justify took off his jacket and grabbed himself a beer, waiting for me to do what he was confident I would do—zap him with bitter where-were-you’s and how-could-you’s. I had a surprise for him.
“Go sit down with your beer,” I said. “I just need a moment to toss the angel-hair pasta. Oh, and sweetie”—I knew for sure he wasn’t expecting any “sweetie” from me—“would you please take these matches and light the candles.”
Before I tossed the pasta, I put on the music of Nat “King” Cole, whose songs could soften the heart of a Saddam Hussein. “Oh, how the ghost of you clings,” I sang along as I popped the cheese bread into the oven. “These foolish things”—I took off my apron, smoothed my hair, and got ready for action—“remind me of you.”
Having a cozy and vivacious conversation that omitted, among many otter burning subjects, all of what Jake had teen doing since Saturday morning, much of what I had been doing since Saturday morning, and can this marriage be saved?, was something of a challenge. I rose to it. I told Jake, in a moving but not-at-all-maudlin manner, that Wally and Josephine seemed to be going through a difficult time, obliquely making it clear that I in no way was advising—or interfering with—them. (The reason for this, of course, was that they wouldn’t let me advise—or interfere with—them, but why trouble Jake with all the boring details?) Next I told Jake, in a really quite charming and entertaining manner, about my sister’s early-morning phone call, making many wry observations on sister-sister and sister-dog relationships. Halfway into the swordfish, I actually got him to laugh. And then I moved on to how wonderful he was.
“You’re being so nice about Rose coming down to stay with us,” I said warmly. “A lot of brothers-in-law would not be that tolerant.” In the background, Nat “King” Cole complemented my words with, “Unforgettable, that’s what you are. Unforgettable, though near or far . . .” Jake kicked off his shoes. The man was relaxing.
“Rose isn’t all that bad,” he said. “It’s actually kind of exciting to see who she is going to be this week.”
“You mean like her Melanie Griffith wild-thing phase?”
“I was thinking more of her Mother Teresa phase.”
This led to some funny recollections of Rose in her assorted incarnations, which led—by associative leaps—to Great Danes, to great Danish, to a new production of Hamlet, to “O death, where is thy sting?” (which I insisted, incorrectly, came from Hamlet), to a recent D.C. police department sting operation, to the hernia operation Jake had performed on two-month-old Claire on Friday morning.
“Tell me all about it,” I urged, as I served the apple crisp with the frozen yogurt. “The shore was kissed, by sea and mist, tenderly,” crooned the legendary Nat “King” Cole. Jake, while I listened closely, told all about it.
“I like how you look in that thing you’ve got on,” Jake interrupted his story to observe. “Especially the part that isn’t on.” He traced a path from the base of my throat to halfway down to my wrist, which was where the plunging neckline finally stopped plunging.
“ . . . lipstick’s traces . . . romantic places.” The tapes were on their second time around. Leading Jake to an open space in our long front hall, I put my arms around him and said, “Shall we dance?”
• • •
I once wrote a newspaper column which, opposing conventional wisdom, was called IT’S SOMETIMES BETTER TO SHUT UP. It starts by noting that though married couples are deluged with advice to say what’s in their hearts and on their minds—to ventilate, to communicate, to share—this may not always be a great idea. It goes on to observe:
A full and frank disclosure of every stupid (or worse) thing we’ve done could lead to alienation instead of to intimacy. An utterly truthful description of exactly how we feel about each other’s mother could leave us feeling bruised instead of informed. And must we really tell our mate that last night’s performance in bed was down three points from Friday’s 8.9? And couldn’t we—instead of rehashing every painful detail of our last argument—sometimes use our mouths just to kiss and make up?
Though I don’t necessarily follow, my own advice, I was, in this instance, enthusiastically doing, so. And though Jake hadn’t read my column, he was enthusiastically doing so too. At least that’s what I thought as, without any full and frank disclosures, we danced our way upstairs and into bed. It wasn’t until . . . after . . . that Jake was moved to move into the confessional mode.
“Nothing major happened,” he said, “but I have to be honest with you.” (Who told him he had to?) “I spent . . . I spent last night with Sunny Voight.”
“Ain’t misbehavin’, I’m savin’ my love for you,” sang Nat “King” Cole, the words floating into our bedroom as honest Jake delivered himself of that wonderful news.
I didn’t—not for a moment—believe either of them.