GETTING A DATE for my dinner with Cromwell, an idea that had sprung to my mind at the sight of Elke Höhlenrauch’s breasts, became a full-time job as the day of Cromwell’s arrival drew near.
I was determined to have it out with him in public, to tell him to his face and in front of witnesses what I thought of him and that I never wanted to see him again.
My moral man monologue was coming along fine. “Listen to me, Cromwell, and listen well,” it began, and went from there to denounce in detail the evil in him.
But to show up alone for my dinner with him when he, I knew, would be accompanied by some beautiful young woman would be to undermine my position in an instant. Implicit in anything I said would be the damning fact that I was alone. That despite weeks of advance warning I had been unable to come up with a suitable dinner companion.
My moral man monologue, my whole harangue under those circumstances, no matter how withering and devastating it was, could be easily dismissed by Cromwell as the ravings of a lonely, envious loser with a fat gut and a limp dick. The episode, after my departure, would be turned into broad comedy. I would be a story Cromwell told others, instead of a story I told others.
Getting a date, therefore, was not merely a social convention this time, but something attached to a high-minded moral purpose. A crusade against evil.
But the women I called didn’t seem to care what my purpose was. Most of them didn’t even listen long enough to learn that I was inviting them out to dinner. Some hung up as soon as I identified myself. Others laughed and said, “No, thank you.” A few seemed to be on a crusade of their own against me and men like me. They told me to go fuck myself instead of fucking with them. What did I take them for, they wanted to know. Did I think they had forgotten the kind of man I was?
What astounded me about these women was not that they had unpleasant, or hostile, or even sickening memories of me. That I could understand. Their attitude was, in almost every instance, perfectly justified. What astonished me was how vivid their memories of me were in comparison to my own dim memories of them and the even dimmer memories of myself.
Even that squinty-eyed Peggy turned me down when I called her.
“Why should I go out with you,” she wanted to know, “when I already went out with you once?”
She had me there. I could think of no convincing rebuttal.
Further complicating my life, and distracting me from the focus I was trying to maintain on getting a date for my dinner with Cromwell, was the unexpected behavior of my accountant, Jerry Fry. For some reason, Jerry took it very personally that I had walked out on my physical exam and, along with it, on the prospect of being insured by GenMed. Somebody from Dr. Kolodny’s office must have called to tell him. It certainly wasn’t me. I was too busy calling women.
“You left? You just left? Just like that?” Jerry was beside himself.
I was in my office. He was in his office. His office was located less than three blocks away from my office, but our local telephone line, as tended to happen more and more since the breakup of AT&T, was breaking up itself. It was full of static and whine and all those nostalgic sound effects of long-distance calls of yesteryear. This sense of distance, although I knew for a fact he was only a couple of blocks away, prevailed and added a sense of urgency to every word he uttered.
“How could you do that, Saul? How could you leave just like that, when it was all arranged? It was all set. Why? Why did you do it?”
Hoping to placate Jerry, I told him that I had left “because I simply wasn’t interested in being insured at this time.”
This had the effect of squirting lighter fluid on an already overheated charcoal grill.
“You what? What did you say? Not interested, is that what you said? You’re simply not interested in being insured at this time! Is that what you said?”
He was incensed, seething, screaming, and the combination of his voice and the crackling static on our line made it seem that he was calling me from a burning hotel in some tropical island paradise on the other side of the world.
“That’s your explanation! That’s it? You weren’t interested! Can I quote you on that, Saul? Do you realize that a transcript of this conversation could land you in Bellevue or some other less reputable mental institution? What the hell is that supposed to mean? You’re not interested. Nobody is asking you if you’re interested or not. This is insurance, Saul. Health insurance. This isn’t somebody asking you if you want your carpets cleaned, to which you could then reply that, no, you’re not interested in having them cleaned at this time. This is insurance! Health insurance! You don’t ask yourself if you’re interested or not interested in having health insurance. You just do it. You just get it. Are you listening to me?”
I was. I really was. But I couldn’t understand why he was so upset that I was left uninsured as a result of a choice I made when, if my memory served me right, he wasn’t nearly as upset when Fidelity dropped me from its rolls and I was left just as uninsured as I was now, but without any choice in the matter.
Victims deprived of the blessings of health insurance he could understand. Blessings of any kind lost their significance if everybody was blessed. But to decide, to actually choose, for whatever reason, not to be blessed was a sign of a mad or subversive personality.
He called me once a day, sometimes twice a day, with fresh arguments and assaults on the position I had taken. And since the period in question coincided with my desperate attempts to get a date, I not only had to put up with the insults and sarcastic remarks of the women I called, I also had to put up with the insults and sarcastic remarks of Jerry, who kept calling me.
“You think you’re a rich guy, don’t you? Don’t you, Saul? You think you don’t have to bother with health insurance because you’re so damn rich. Right? Let me tell you something, Saul, rich guys are my bread and butter. I know rich guys. All I do is handle rich guys and you want to know something? You’re not so rich, Saul. Not rich enough to make do without insurance, that’s for sure. That’s for damn sure. There’s diseases out there, diseases you and I don’t even know about, which could, any one of which could, slurp up your liquid assets in a blink of an eye.”
He was so worked up, he actually made a slurping sound of some disease sucking up my liquid assets.
He went on to talk about diseases at length (polio was making a comeback) and made it seem that diseases had a way of knowing when somebody was stupid enough to be uninsured and went after him first. Jerry seemed to hint that diseases actually worked for insurance companies, like Mafia goons, and were sent out in pairs to wreak havoc on the lives and liquid assets of men like myself who “weren’t interested in being insured at this time.”
Nor should I hope to seek comfort, he warned me, in the prospect of a quick death when it came to these diseases. No, no. No, sir. Months, years, probably decades of agony and suffering lay in store for me.
There were blood clots of various kinds, leading to countless combinations of physical and mental incapacity. There were rare tropical and subtropical viruses brought over by the influx of immigrants from those parts of the world, which caused blindness, disfigurement, loss of facial, genital, and body parts, and, in some cases, total shedding of the skin. All these diseases would require prolonged hospitalization and private nursing care.
“And who’s going to pay for all of that? You, that’s who. You, Mr. Rich Guy. While these diseases are chewing up your life, the bills will be chewing up your assets. Chewing them up, Saul. Are you listening to me?”
I was. I really was. It was just that as his assault on my position changed, so did the motive for my position. Our conversations never became totally pleasant, but I started enjoying them. They acquired an element of a theoretical discussion, a hypothetical case of someone rejecting health insurance, and as we argued, I saw motives I had not seen before. Being open to life, instead of protected and “covered” by insurance of any kind. Being “covered,” I told Jerry, was not the way to live.
“You want open!” Jerry shrieked, “I’ll give you open. Open heart surgery. Open brain surgery. Open-ended agony and pain. Open bank accounts and stock portfolios. Open hospital windows with assets flying out, while you lie in bed paralyzed and drooling. You want more open? I’ll give you more.”
And he did.
“I know what your problem is,” he called one day and ripped into me without even a hello. “You think you’re better than I am. You do, don’t you?”
I didn’t, but I didn’t get a chance to say that I didn’t. His voice was choked with rage.
“You think you’re better. More sensitive. That’s what you think. You think you’re too sensitive, too artistic to put up with such mundane things like health insurance. You’re an artist who can’t be bothered with crap like premiums and policies. You ever hear of hubris? This is hubris, Saul. This is fucking hubris up the ass. This is you thumbing your nose at Zeus!”
I laughed, and it’s true, I might have laughed the wrong way and said something to the effect that I had no idea that accountants worried about hubris. Whatever it was, my laughter or my words, Jerry took it wrong. He took it as a snide comment on his education and his MBA degree. His education and his MBA degree were the furthest things from my mind, but that didn’t matter to Jerry.
“Listen to me, Mr. PhD in comparative literature, you’re not the only guy around here with a quality education. Just because I’ve got an MBA degree doesn’t mean I’m not familiar with the classics, Greek and otherwise. I went to Yale. So when I say hubris, I know what I’m talking about, and when I say Zeus, I know who Zeus is.”
And, as if I were doubting him, he went on to tell me exactly who Zeus was. Zeus was (I discovered, thanks to Jerry) the son of Cronus and Rhea, the husband of Hera and father of Athene and Hermes, etc., etc. Jerry not only went through Zeus’s whole family, he rattled off almost all the gods of ancient Greece and the names of their Roman counterparts as well. And somehow he made it sound as if all these deities were arrayed against me because I was a hubris-infested chump who needed to be taught a lesson.
The next day, he attacked me on purely sociopolitical grounds. Fine, it was fine for me, an affluent asshole, if I didn’t want to be insured. But what about all those people working at part-time jobs in the service industry with no medical benefits? What about them? What about all those millions of destitute poor who couldn’t afford health insurance? Men of goodwill (his phrase) were busting their chops trying to get a national health insurance bill passed in Congress, and here I was, making a mockery of the whole thing. What kind of a message did that send to all those underprivileged millions in our nation? Or did I give a shit?
I told him, or I tried to tell him, that I was a private citizen and not a political candidate and that therefore I wasn’t sending any messages to anybody.
“What?” Jerry jumped all over me, as if he had been hoping I’d use that line of defense. “What? What was that? A private citizen! Is that what you said? Is that what you are now, a private citizen? There is no such thing! We’re either a society and a nation or we’re not, and the last time I checked, we were. The United States of America. Ever hear of it, Saul? Private citizen! Private citizen is an oxymoron, you asshole. You can’t be both. You can’t be both ‘private’ and a ‘citizen’ at the same time. Citizen of what? Do you have some private country, some private world, of which you’re a citizen, where the things you do don’t affect others? The only private citizens I know live in private padded cells and wear wraparound sleeves that tie in the back. Private citizen! Do you know what that is, thinking you can be a private citizen, having the goddamn nerve to think of yourself as a private citizen? It’s hubris, that’s what it is. It’s hubris!”
And so, once again, but this time by another route, I was back among the vengeful gods of ancient Greece.
In the end, Jerry gave up on me. I received a fruit basket from him, whether as a peace offering or a symbol, I wasn’t quite sure. It was delivered by a messenger to my office, and shortly after its arrival came the last phone call from Jerry on this subject. It was his view, he informed me, that I was a self-destructive maniac and it was his job, as my accountant, to make sure to invest and care for my money in such a way that when I did destroy myself, I would at least have something to fall back on. This he would do. But I should keep one thing in mind. It wasn’t just the accountants of this world who were held accountable for their actions. He hoped I liked my fruit.
The end result of my telephone calls to all the women I had ever known was that no woman who had ever known me wanted to know me anymore. My only hope of getting a date for my dinner with Cromwell was with a woman who had never heard of me.
I was left with three choices.
Cancel the dinner altogether, maybe even leave town on some pretext and not come back until Cromwell was gone.
Get a date through an escort service.
Or resort to the unthinkable and ask my own wife.
I rejected the first option as being cowardly.
All the elite escort services I called only dealt with corporate accounts. This made me afraid of the kind of date I might get from an escort service that was willing to have me for a client.
In the end, the only option I had left was to do the unthinkable. But the more I thought about it, the better it seemed. Seeing as how, despite all my efforts, I was still married to Dianah, I should at least get something out of my marriage before it ended. Dianah, although not young anymore, was considered beautiful by one and all. There was a certain panache, I decided, about showing up with one’s estranged wife that might even make up for her age.
I lit a cigarette and called her.
“Hello,” she answered breathlessly, as she sometimes did, for no reason at all. This used to drive me crazy when I lived with her. We’d be sitting there in the living room, bored out of our minds, rereading old New Yorker magazines, but when the phone rang she answered it in that breathless way of hers, as if she hadn’t had a moment of rest all day.
To make sure I didn’t blow this, my very last hope for a date, and to get on her good side right from the start, I steered the conversation toward the topic of our divorce.
Yes, she agreed, we really had to get going on this divorce business. We had let it slide.
So we talked divorce.
Talking divorce always had a strange way of making us feel closer to each other than we had ever been in our marriage, except for that brief period when Billy came into our lives. Talking divorce brought out the best in us. We tried to outdo each other in caring, generosity, and consideration. We shared our visions about the kind of divorce both of us wanted. Amicable, yes, but more than amicable. Much more. Tender, deeply felt, full of love, that’s the kind of divorce we had in mind. Fifteen minutes and three cigarettes later, we were still talking about it. The more we talked about divorce, the more married we seemed. Not just married, but happily married.
When I lit my fourth cigarette, I decided it was time to get around to the purpose of my call.
She found the abrupt change of topic offensive and inconsiderate and told me so. Not only that, she told me that she was going to a spa with Jessica Dohrn and wouldn’t be in town the whole of next week anyway.
This was Saturday. She was leaving tomorrow, Sunday. My dinner with Cromwell was on Thursday.
“Can’t you put it off for a week?” I pleaded.
“For you? No. Poor Jessica has been looking forward to this for weeks and I’m not going to disappoint her.”
“What about disappointing me?”
She laughed.
“Oh, darling, if I could be assured of disappointing you, I would stay in town and do it, but I don’t think you’re capable of being disappointed, or even of knowing what the word means. When was the last time you talked to Billy?”
“Billy. What do you mean? I talk to him almost every other day,” I lied.
“Oh, Saul,” she sighed, “why do you lie?”
“I don’t know.”
“I talked to Billy yesterday and he told me he hasn’t heard from you since the McNabs’ party.”
“How is he?” I asked.
She found my question egregious and told me so. If I really wanted to know how he was, I wouldn’t have to ask her. What kind of man was I? What kind of father was I? What kind of creature was I? Her questions built up rhythmically and stylistically, like a piece of music culminating in:
“Oh, Saul,” she moaned, she made a moan out of my very name, “what is the matter with you?”
“What isn’t?” I replied, and then tried once again to get her to change her plans and come with me to Cafe Luxembourg on Thursday, to have dinner with Cromwell.
“You’re pathetic, sweetheart. You really are. Didn’t you tell me a couple of years ago that you don’t like Cromwell and that you would never, ever, work for him again?”
“Who said anything about working for him again? Are you kidding? And I didn’t say I didn’t like him. I told you I hated him and I do. I hate the bastard.”
“If you hate him so much, why are you having dinner with him?”
“He called me. He’s coming to town.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? He’s coming to town. What does that mean, Saul? If Hitler were alive and called you and was coming to town, would you have dinner with him?”
“I just want an opportunity to tell him to his face what I really think of him.”
“I’m sure you do, darling. And I’m sure you’re bound to be magnificent, as always. How unfortunate that I won’t be there to share in your triumph. You must remember to tell me all about it when I come back. Bye.”