Karoo Page 2

  Dr. Jerome Bickerstaff, my family physician from the days when I was still a family man and had a family, came up to me while I fed and he just stood there, looking on in disapproval as I devoured desserts and canapés in no particular order. Some of the things I ate had toothpicks stuck in them and I tossed these away, like bones, on the floor.

  “Are you all right, Saul?” Dr. Bickerstaff finally asked me.

  “No,” I gave my standard reply. “Why? Do I look all right?”

  I laughed, encouraging Bickerstaff to laugh along with me.

  He wouldn’t.

  “You don’t look well, Saul. I haven’t seen you in a while, and you look a lot worse since the last time I saw you.”

  “I do?”

  “You do, indeed. You should see yourself.”

  Because we were at a party, because Beethoven’s Sixth was blasting away through Bose speakers, each the size of an imported subcompact car, and because the people around us were shouting almost at the top of their lungs so they could be heard above the din of music and conversation, Dr. Bickerstaff and I were not merely chatting about my unhealthy appearance, we were shouting for all we were worth.

  “Your hair,” Bickerstaff said.

  “What about my hair?”

  “A doctor can tell a lot about a person from the look of his hair. Your hair looks dead, Saul. I’ve seen medium-priced dolls at F.A.O. Schwartz with healthier-looking hair. Your hair looks sick. Dead.”

  “What were you doing at F.A.O. Schwartz, Doc?”

  He disregarded my comment as if he didn’t hear it. To be fair to the man, perhaps he didn’t hear it. It almost required risking a distended testicle to be heard in that atmosphere.

  “And you’re putting on weight,” he continued, alluding with his chin to my stomach.

  “Am I?” I looked down at it.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t think I was,” I said.

  “Think again,” he said.

  Being perceived as overweight hurt. It hurt more than actually being overweight, which I knew I was.

  “But I’m not fat, am I?” I pleaded. “I’m not what you’d call a fat man! There is no history of fat people in my family.”

  “There was no history of money in the Kennedy family either, till Joe came along,” he said, a little sorry to be wasting such a gem of a reply on somebody like me. I could tell, because such things are easy to tell, that he was filing it away for future use.

  “I saw Dianah a couple of weeks ago,” he told me, giving me a grave stare meant to imply that he had more to tell.

  “Oh, really.” I ignored the import of his stare. “I just saw her myself about half an hour ago.”

  “Professionally,” Bickerstaff explained. “I saw her professionally.”

  “How is she professionally?” I asked and laughed, encouraging him again to laugh along with me. He wouldn’t.

  “Is it true what she says?”

  “I don’t know, Doc. What did she say?”

  “She told me, I can’t really believe it’s true, that you no longer have any health insurance.”

  “What’s to insure,” I screamed hysterically. “I no longer have any health.”

  It was a waste of time trying to be funny around Bickerstaff, but it was a waste of time talking to him at all, so I thought I might as well waste my time in a lively endeavor.

  “So it is true,” he said and looked away from me as if needing a moment to compose his next remark.

  “Listen to me, Saul,” he then said and put his hand on my shoulder. Unlike most New Yorkers, Dr. Bickerstaff never touched anyone in public. It was an indication of the gravity of the situation that he did so now. “Please listen to me and listen well. I know you’re drunk but …”

  “I’m not,” I interrupted him. “I’m not drunk at all. I’m sober. Cold stone sober.” I almost burst into tears at the memory of using these very words not that long ago and actually being drunk when I said them. My overemotional delivery confirmed to Bickerstaff that I was drunk.

  “When you sober up in the morning,” he went on, “take a good look at yourself in the mirror. What you’ll see is an overweight man past fifty who’s an alcoholic with a history of cancer and madness in his family. You’ll see a sallow man with dead-looking hair. You’ll see a man, Saul, who not only needs health insurance, but who needs the most extensive coverage available. If you can, I would advise you to join plans from several carriers.”

  I took all this in and replied: “But other than that, how do I look to you?”

  My flippancy no longer amused anyone. It had never amused Bickerstaff. He shook his head once, like a pitcher shaking off a sign from the catcher and, squinting at me, turned to go. I grabbed his arm.

  “Listen to this, Doc. I quit smoking!” The trumpet of the Annunciation could not have been more jubilant than my voice. A point arrives in every man’s life when he desperately wants to please his doctor, even if the doctor isn’t his anymore.

  I couldn’t actually hear the groan for all the din around us, but Bickerstaff’s face assumed a groanlike expression. It was clear that he didn’t believe me.

  “I did, Doc, I swear. I quit. Yesterday. Not a puff since then. Not one.”

  I was telling the truth, but for some reason Bickerstaff’s conviction that I was lying seemed far more substantial and authoritative than my truth.

  He pulled his arm loose from my hand and his parting look informed me that I had become officially boring. Then he left. The mouth of a medium-sized congregation of people parted and swallowed him whole.

  5

  The McNabs’ apartment had more vegetation per square foot than any other I had ever seen. There were plants around my ankles, waist-high plants, there were veritable groves of trees scattered around the premises. Sections of it could have served as a set for the old Ramar of the Jungle TV series. It was one of the most photographed apartments in North America. It had been featured in Architectural Digest, New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Ms., and at least a dozen other publications. From what I’d read of the devastation caused by acid rain, I was sure that this apartment had more greenery than did whole communities in the Ruhr Valley.

  To the accompaniment of the “Pastorale” I stumbled around from grove to grove until I found one to my liking. There I sat down underneath a canopy of leaves and resumed drinking.

  People came and went as they tend to do at parties. Singles, couples, trios. They lingered in my grove a while and then moved on. We talked about the chow-SHESS-koos, Bucharest, Broadway, and the Berlin Wall. People I barely knew and who barely knew me seemed to know all about me and I all about them. In the Information Revolution the world really had become a global village and, as in the villages of old, gossip was once again the dominant form of communication.

  George Bush had a mistress.

  Dan Quayle was gay.

  One of the most dispiriting side effects of my inability to get drunk was not just that I was sober while this global village gossip went on but that I would remember it the next day.

  Loss of memory was one of the true pleasures of getting drunk and when I was my old healthy self and drunk every night, I would wake the next morning feeling refreshed and completely oblivious of the night before. Every day was a brand-new-day with no strings attached. Every morning was a new beginning. I was in synch with nature. Death at night, birth and renewal in the morning.

  It all changed when I contracted my drunk disease. Ever since then whatever I did or said or heard the night before greeted me the morning after. A new, merciless continuity entered my life which I was not equipped to handle.

  In the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times I had read an article on physics that described the theoretical possibility of the existence of antimatter in outer space, antiworlds, entire antigalaxies composed of subatomic antiparticles.

  It made me wonder while I sat in my grove and gossiped along with the rest if, in this yin-and-yang scheme of thi
ngs, an anti–Betty Ford clinic existed where diseased ex-alcoholics like myself could get help. Where my immunity to alcohol would be reversed and my system, after a two-week stay, would be completely retoxified by trained professionals.

  My grove began to fill up with people. Some stood. Some sat. All of them talked and when they talked they had to shout if they wanted to be heard and all of them wanted to be heard. I was neither inculded nor excluded from various conversations. It was up to me. They babbled. I babbled back every now and then. It was therapeutic. The booze was having absolutely no effect on me, but the meaningless babble was almost intoxicating.

  A horrific possibility suddenly presented itself to me. I wondered, what if my immunity to alcohol extended to other chemicals and drugs? Pain. Horrible pain. Unbearable pain. What if I came down with unbearable pain that no chemical substance could alleviate?

  I saw my wife coming toward me. Serene, smiling, with a glass of champagne held away from her body, she looked like somebody crossing the grand ballroom of the QE2 to invite me to dance.

  She stopped and just stood there, looking down at me.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I offered and motioned to get up.

  She shook her head and said, “No, thank you.”

  I slumped back in my chair and took in the dress she was wearing. The endangered beast du jour was an owl. There were little endangered owls all over her dress. A flock of little owls with those big, round eyes stared at me from her bosom and her belly. If I didn’t mend my ways, their eyes seemed to be warning me, I too would end up on an endangered-species list someday. Maybe even on a dress like this.

  “Nice dress you’re wearing. What kind of an owl is that?”

  “Anjouan scops owl,” she answered, sighing, as if she was wasting her breath even talking to me.

  “I thought so.” I nodded. “Delightful-looking birds. They look like a jury of insomniacs.”

  I laughed, inviting her to laugh along with me, knowing ahead of time she wouldn’t. She didn’t. She didn’t even acknowledge the invitation. She just looked at me.

  My wife. She was still my wife. My married life was over, but my marriage went on.

  Dianah’s face had all the features of this year’s beautiful women. Everything about it was prominent. Eyes. Cheekbones. Lips. Teeth. Her platinum-blond hair extended at least six inches away from her ears, like some flung-open raincoat. The effect of that coiffure seemed to be that she was flashing me with her face.

  “I don’t suppose you noticed that your son was here,” she said as her gaze wandered past me to the people in my grove whom she was summoning as witnesses to our conversation.

  “Billy? Sure I noticed. He’s hard not to notice. There he is.” I pointed across the room where, in the distance, his head dominated the horizon.

  “He needs to talk to you, Saul. He really does. What’s that on your shirt?”

  I looked down at my crumpled blue shirt. Some stuffing from one of those canapes I had devoured had fallen and landed there. Some reddish stuff. I tried to brush it off, but it smeared. The resulting stain made it seem that I had been gored.

  She sighed, rolled her eyes, and looked away.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “No,” I shook my head. “Not even close. I’m completely lucid and, sad to say, all my faculties are intact.”

  Some moral perversity made it pleasant for me to speak the truth in the complete assurance that it would be rejected by Dianah. The more sober I claimed to be, the drunker I appeared. Her conviction that I was drunk was so strong that for a moment at least I felt myself getting high on her conviction.

  “Please, Saul. Enough. I’m tired of these games. Everyone here—” again she swept the grove with her gaze, summoning witnesses “—can tell you’re drunk. You’re not fooling anyone.” She stopped, heaved a huge sigh, and resumed. “We were talking about Billy, if you don’t remember.”

  “I remember. He wants to talk to me.”

  “Not wants. Needs. He needs to talk to you.”

  “Fine, have it your way. He needs to talk to me. What does he need to talk to me about?”

  I had to look away from her dress. All those large, unblinking owl eyes were making me nervous.

  “He’s your son, Saul.”

  “I know that.”

  “What does any son want from his father?” she addressed the gallery in my grove.

  “Beats me,” I replied.

  “He wants to be with you. He needs to be with you. I can’t remember the last time you spent any time alone with him.”

  “I can’t either, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  She raised her eyebrows, disgusted by my flippancy, and then proceeded again, slowly, patiently.

  “He wants to go home with you tonight. He needs to spend a couple of days with you before he goes back to school. This is very important to him, Saul. Very, very important, and if you have any feelings for him …” She went on.

  She had managed, in the short time she was there, to silence all the other conversations in the grove and now, as she went on, she had the full attention of all those people sitting or standing on either side of us. I was grateful for the presence of this audience. If marriages, like parades and parties, were strictly public affairs, Dianah and I would still be living together and I would probably consider myself happily married. It was the privacy, our time alone, that ruined my marriage. Not public privacy as we were having now, but private privacy. Just the two of us. In this regard, at least, I was totally blameless. I had done all I could to avoid all private moments between us.

  “Fine, fine,” I gave in. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I’ll take him home with me tonight.”

  “You will?” She regarded me with suspicion of rare vintage. “You won’t try to get out of it as you always do, will you?”

  Of course I would. I knew I would. But I lied.

  “I promise I won’t,” I said.

  “You promise!” She laughed. The owls on her belly and breasts fluttered as if in preparation for takeoff. “You could pave all the potholes in Manhattan with your broken promises, darling. You know that. You do know that, don’t you?”

  I did indeed and so did probably all those people in the grove who were listening to us.

  “Do you think I’m putting on weight?” I asked her, patting the stain on my shirt and the stomach underneath the stain.

  She winced and sighed.

  “Surely, darling, a fat monster like you has more important shortcomings to consider than the weight you’ve gained.”

  To be called a monster was one thing. To be called a fat monster hurt.

  “Really? Do you think I’m getting fat?”

  “You’re falling apart, sweetheart. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically.”

  “So then, you think that at least intellectually I’m still …”

  “You,” she cut me off. “You’re like the last days of the Ottoman Empire. You’re the sick old man of Manhattan.”

  An attentive audience always brought out the best in her.

  “Don’t you think, then, that it would be a bad idea to have somebody like me spending time alone with Billy?”

  “I certainly do. He deserves a better father, but unfortunately for him you’re the only father he has. You’re spilling your drink, darling.”

  I was. I tried foolishly to brush the spilled bourbon off my thigh.

  The “Pastorale” concluded. In the short hiatus without music, Dianah just stood there looking down at me and then gazing to her right and then to her left at the people in the grove. I was, she soulfully conveyed to them all, a cross she had to bear. And then Beethoven’s Seventh began.

  She asked me, in that bearing-the-cross voice she now assumed, if I had done anything about my health insurance.

  “Yes,” I lied. “I did.”

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  “No, I’m not,” I lied. “I’m covered. Comple
tely covered.”

  Lying was nothing new for me. What was new was the ease with which I lied now.

  “You haven’t even noticed.” I switched from lies to truth the way liars like to do. “I’ve quit smoking. Not a puff since yesterday. Not one puff. Cold turkey. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “I think I’ve done it this time. I really do.”

  “Oh, Saul,” she sighed.

  I heard myself circumscribed by her sigh. She knew me, and everybody who knew me seemed to know me, better than I knew myself. Our audience in the grove had no doubts that either A, I was lying, or B, I would start smoking again very soon.

  “The only thing you’ve quit cold turkey, my darling, is telling the truth and taking responsibility for your actions. You have become a menace to us all.”

  She turned to go and then stopped.

  “By the way,” she said. “This is the last time I’m going to ask you to come and take your father’s clothes out of my apartment, or I’m going to give them away.”

  My father died three years ago. Cancer of the spine. The cancer worked its way up his spinal column to his brain. It took a while for him to die and for the last months of his life he was completely mad.

  In his madness, he came to believe that he had two sons. The good son, Paul, whom he loved madly. And the worthless son, Saul, whom he hated, just as madly. I had no idea, whenever I visited him, which son he would see in me. It varied from visit to visit, from day to day, from hour to hour. Sometimes in mid-moment, in a blink of an eye, he switched from one to the other. All I could do was play along.

  As his good son, I conspired with him and castigated the behavior of my worthless brother. As the worthless son, I sat in silence and contrition while he raved and condemned me to various forms of capital punishment. “I sentence you to death,” he told me over and over again. He was, before his premature retirement, a judge in the criminal court system in Chicago and when he sentenced me to death it was in his capacity as a judge, not father. Before he died, he left an insane will behind. In that will he commuted my sentence of death to life imprisonment without parole. To his good son Paul he left all his clothes. My mother, for reasons of her own, could not bring herself to throw his clothes away. She prevailed upon me to take them and, as the good son, I took them back to New York. When I left Dianah, I couldn’t bring myself to throw away his clothes either, but I certainly didn’t want to take them to my new apartment.