Karoo Page 3

  “Fine, fine,” I now told her. “I’ll come and get them in a few days.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  “I promise,” I lied.

  “This is the last time I’m going to ask you, Saul.”

  “This is the last time I’m going to promise, Dianah.”

  She turned to go again and stopped. Arrested for a moment in mid-flight, she bestowed upon me one of her famous forgiving looks. Forgiveness not just for the many, many wrongs I’d done up to now but, being the kind of man I was, forgiveness for the many, many wrongs I was bound to commit in the future. It was a look of daunting forgiveness. Were I to live two hundred years, I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly commit enough wrongs to warrant a forgiveness of that size.

  And then she left, turning this way and that as she worked her way through the crowd, leading with her champagne glass. Her platinum hair brightened and dimmed as she walked past various lamps. In the distance, at the far end of the room, towering above the throng, I saw my son. His head was bowed as it always was when he conversed with normal-sized people.

  He brought to mind a sunflower.

  6

  A short time later, I left the grove myself. I moved around the rooms, mingled, drank, and babbled about the realignment of the nations of the world. I could babble about anything. The less I knew about the subject, the more convincing I sounded to others. To myself as well.

  I loved parties at other people’s apartments. I had developed a home disease of some kind and felt at home only at other people’s homes. Almost always I was the first to arrive and the last to leave. The ambiance where music thundered and men and women screamed banalities at each other appealed to me.

  It appealed to me as well (in an on-again, off-again kind of way) to think of myself as The Uninsured Man. I was positive that I was the only uninsured man there. This knowledge filled me with a reckless bravado. How bold of me! How independent. I not only took my uninsured status in stride, I made it a part of my stride as I journeyed from plant to plant and lamp to lamp and group to group. The Uninsured Man.

  A European gentleman at the party did the European thing and offered me a cigarette before lighting one himself. No, I told him, no thank you. I quit. Not a puff since yesterday. Those around me who knew me laughed as if I were either telling a joke or lying. Strangely enough I really was beginning to feel that I was lying. That I hadn’t quit at all. Telling the truth was one thing, but feeling in touch with the truth after telling it was something that no longer seemed to depend on me. It was granted me or denied me by the response of others. It was a disease, a truth disease, and one of its symptoms was that I felt much more at home in other people’s truths than I did in mine. Even when their truths were the exact opposite of mine.

  Wherever I went, I could see Billy in the crowd, keeping his eye on me lest I slip away and leave without him. Fleeing from my son’s eyes as if from an assassin, I moved on.

  I had to pee and, doing my best imitation of a drunk who had to vomit, I stumbled into the McNabs’ men’s room and locked the door behind me.

  One of the many decorative touches of the McNabs’ apartment was that they had a clearly marked men’s room and ladies’ room. The signs on the door were antiques that their fabled interior decorator Franklin had found for them.

  The men’s room, in addition to a toilet, had a large antique public urinal. Another Franklin touch. The urinal rose from the floor half up to my chest. Its old porcelain was marbled with cracks and its overall color was the color of unhealthy old teeth of smokers like myself.

  I unzipped my fly and fished out my prick and leaned toward the urinal.

  There were plants in the men’s room as well. So many plants that I felt I was taking a piss outdoors, in the park.

  Used to be, whenever I peed all I had to do was point and shoot and wherever I pointed that’s where I shot. It was one of those activities I could do, and enjoyed doing, with my eyes closed.

  No more.

  My prostate was putting the squeeze on me. Like a pistol firing bullets out of the side of the barrel, my piss went wide left or wide right, or suddenly dried up to a dribble. Looking down, I observed a whole new development. Instead of a single stream, there were two streams shooting out of my prick like a V-sign. And all the time there was the burning sensation as if I were pissing ReaLemon.

  There. I was done. I shook my prick and flushed. I sucked in my gut and zipped up my fly. The song of the ages sang in my ear: You can shake and you can dance, but the last drop always goes down your pants.

  On top of the marble sink was an ashtray from the Plaza Athénée Hotel in Paris. Inside the ashtray was an extinguished cigarette, two-thirds unsmoked. I glanced at it and looked away. I washed my hands.

  My latest attempt to stop smoking had been motivated primarily by my inability to get drunk. Lung cancer seemed like a terrible way to go, but what really terrified me was the thought of not even being able to get drunk on the day I got the news.

  Years ago, I was completely cured of smoking and didn’t have a cigarette for almost three months. I was cured by a procedure I had been positive was a hoax. Hypnosis. The hypnotist was a Hungarian named Dr. Manny Horvath.

  I took the treatment just to prove to a friend who had recommended it that the whole thing was a hoax. I went to Dr. Manny Horvath’s office positive that I couldn’t be hypnotized in the first place, not to mention be cured of smoking.

  How wrong I was. Dr. Manny Horvath hypnotized me in record time. When I came out of the trance, the mere thought of a cigarette filled me with nausea. For several weeks, I chastised other smokers and proselytized the virtues of hypnosis.

  But the cure, good for my cigarette habit, proved disastrous to the rest of my life.

  I discovered that I loved being hypnotized and that the hypnotic trance into which Dr. Manny Horvath had put me never really left my mind. It was like plutonium or strontium 90. Once inside of you, it was inside of you for good. I learned, much to my surprise, that I could put myself in a hypnotic trance without any help from Manny Horvath. And so whenever I encountered some crisis in my life that I found too difficult or painful to handle, I simply drifted off into my self-induced trance and cured myself, so to speak, of the need to deal with it. The mere thought of dealing with crisis filled me with nausea.

  This caused chaos in my life. Personal. Interpersonal. Professional. Everything.

  In the end, in order to cure myself of this nausea for dealing with life’s problems, I had to cure myself of my newfound belief in hypnotism. I had to unhypnotize myself. And in order to do that, I had to prove to myself that Horvath was a charlatan who had never really cured me of smoking. And to do that, I had to start smoking again. It was very unpleasant at first, but eventually I was back to two packs a day and bad-mouthing Horvath all over town.

  In the mirror above the sink, I saw my face. Instead of waiting until tomorrow morning, as Dr. Bickerstaff had suggested, I decided to take a real good look at myself now.

  Everything he told me seemed true. My complexion was sallow. My hair did look dead.

  Was I fat? Or was I a burly six-footer, as I had come to think of myself?

  The face of The Uninsured Man in the mirror did not seem sure of anything, nor was there even a hint now of that bravado of being uninsured.

  I took a couple of steps back in order to see more of myself. I pulled the shirt out of my trousers and lifted it up to look at my gut in the mirror. It was not a pleasant sight. I was still a six-footer, but burly was too kind a description for the six feet of flesh I saw.

  No doubt about it. I was at the age when things break down. The probability of somebody my age developing prostate cancer was high. Other cancers as well. Spleen. Pancreas. Lungs, of course. Lungs, by all means. All those years of smoking. But cancer wasn’t the only threat. The number one killers of white males in my bracket were the diseases of the cardiovascular system. All those years of smoking, and drinking, and eating suic
idal orders of lamb chops and cottage fries. Clogged arteries. Like jammed telephone lines. And all the time, even if I was doing everything right, my brain cells were dying by the tens of thousands, so even if I managed to avoid crippling heart attacks and cancers of various kinds, I had senility to look forward to as my reward.

  But, for the moment at least, the prospect of these catastrophic illnesses, the prospect of succumbing to them in my uninsured state, seemed of far less consequence than something else. Something else was wrong with me, which made the threat of these known and documented diseases of no more concern than the common cold. Something was drastically wrong with me and whatever it was, it was wrong through and through. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was something I was getting or something I was losing, but I knew, the way animals know that an earthquake is coming, that something huge was coming or going in my life. It hadn’t come yet fully, if it was coming. It hadn’t gone yet fully, if it was going.

  So instead of it being a cause of concern, my unhealthy, flabby body, with its numerous disease-prone organs inside, was a sight, so to speak, for sore eyes. The hardening of my arteries while everything else went soft, the deterioration and the devaluation of my body, the shortness of breath, the pounding in my temples after the slightest exertion, the painful burning sensation when I peed—all these were blessings almost, welcome reminders all of them, that I was not totally abnormal and that my condition was something that I had in common with other people at the party and the rest of my fellow men. To be sick in this way made me feel healthy almost.

  I sucked in my gut and tucked in my shirt, huffing and puffing as if I were setting up a circus tent.

  Drawing close to the mirror, I took one last look at my face, and the face that looked back could have been anybody. Who was I to claim that I had stopped smoking when all those good people out there were positive that I hadn’t? They knew me better, all of them, than I knew myself, and basking in their knowledge and conviction and wanting so much to belong to a community of some kind, I plucked the cigarette from the ashtray and put it in my mouth. I then rejoined the party, looking for a light.

  I smoked the rest of the night, borrowing cigarete after cigarette from the few smokers at the party. Everyone seemed pleased and relieved to see me smoking again. People like to be right about other people and I enjoyed having their view of me confirmed. Even Dianah and Dr. Bickerstaff, despite the almost operatic show of disapproval, seemed gratified to see smoke coming out of my mouth again.

  7

  Beethoven’s Ninth began to play. This was the McNabs’ polite, musical way of announcing that the party was winding down. Some, like Dianah and Dr. Bickerstaff, had already left. Others were leaving now. The huge rooms were becoming depopulated even before the first movement was over. The catering nuns were cleaning up, their friendly smiles no longer in evidence. Like scattered outposts, little groups of people were all that remained of the once mighty throng.

  My son Billy was waiting patiently for me, chatting with some older women he had met during the evening. They were now leaving but had sought him out for a few final pleasantries. He obliged them all.

  It had become a trait of his, this ease he had around women who were old enough to be his mother. He was far more comfortable around them than around girls his age. The women, in turn, were enchanted by him, as was the woman he was talking to now. Billy’s presence, his proximity, was making her act a little silly. She kept touching him and throwing back her head to laugh.

  Listening to the last symphony that Beethoven wrote, I was reminded of Billy’s childhood. He was born with a little hearing problem which an operation corrected, but his habit of leaning toward the speaker in rapt attention, his head turned ever so slightly to favor his good ear, remained. It now gave him a quality of being eager to hear what somebody had to say, and that made an already beautiful young man positively irresistible.

  I had habits of my own and one of them was to get overly sentimental about Billy prior to hurting him. The party was winding down and I had to dump him, get rid of him somehow. The question was not if I would do it but how.

  The best way out of taking him home with me tonight was to take somebody else. Some woman. Any woman. Drink in one hand, a cigarette I had bummed in the other, I stumbled off on a hunt for an unescorted female. I scanned the horizon for signs of smoke, like a tourist lost in a wilderness and looking for civilization. In the various adjoining rooms, there were tight little clumps of people still left, but only one wisp of smoke other than mine.

  Three men were there and five women and one of the women was smoking. But she wasn’t the one for me. She was far too vital-looking. The kind of woman who carried Mace in her purse and Mace in her eyes. As a hunter of women I was long past my prime, like some aging predator. A successful hunt was now not so much a function of my masculinity as of the chance encounter with a lame or sickly prey, which the rest of the healthy herd would want culled from their ranks. I sidled up to the group and took in the chatter. The chatter was about Gorbachev.

  I smoked, listened, nodded significantly, and inspected the females for signs of weakness, low self-esteem, and general lack of group dominance. Everybody had something to say about Gorbachev, but I quickly noticed that when this one young woman spoke, nobody seemed to be listening. The only beta there. Neither the men nor the other women, alphas every one of them, seemed to have much use for her.

  “He’s so different,” the young woman was saying of Gorbachev. “There isn’t a politician in this country who would dare run for the highest office in the land with that big blemish on his head and yet it’s that very blemish that makes him look so … so …”

  “So human,” I jumped in.

  “Yes.” She turned her squinty eyes toward me. “That’s what it is. So human. It makes him look so very, very human.”

  It didn’t take the others long to perceive the purpose of my interest in the squinty-eyed woman. They exchanged little looks and little smiles which she failed to observe and then, amused by the whole thing, the game, if you will, they withdrew, letting me know in a mocking kind of way that she was mine for the taking. I bummed a couple of very long cigarettes from the Mace-eyed woman before she left and then turned all my attention on the abandoned young woman before me.

  We exchanged names. Hers was Margaret. Margaret Mandel. Peggy, I started calling her.

  “Only my daddy still calls me Peggy,” she said, swaying as if the floor were rocking.

  “Well, since I’m old enough to be your father, I will too,” I told her.

  Her eyes got all misty. She was dead drunk but trying hard to appear sober. I was the other way around. With a little token maneuvering on my part, I knew that I could get her to come home with me tonight.

  She was not totally unattractive. I like squinty-eyed women, and she was almost pretty in that squinty-eyed way of hers. The fact was that I had no real or virtual desire to take her home and sleep with her. I would do my best to seduce her as I was seducing her now, but it was a seduction with an ulterior motive. To keep my son away. She was somebody else’s child and if I had to be alone with somebody tonight, it was easier with a total stranger, somebody else’s child rather than my own.

  We talked politics, perestroika, glasnost, the fall of the house of chow-SHESS-koo. The quality of banalities we exchanged never slipped below the acceptable level. By and by, I steered the conversation back to fathers. When trying to seduce women under thirty, I always zero in on their fathers. When they’re over thirty, I’ve learned that it’s much more productive to inquire about their former husbands or lovers, or in some cases siblings.

  “Are you close to your dad?”

  “We were. We were very close at one time.”

  “And now?”

  Her eyes welled with drunken tears.

  “Now—” she shrugged and shook her head “—now, I don’t know. Something’s changed, but I don’t know what it is. He just seems to …”

&n
bsp; She went on. I lit another cigarette and listened. I had a talent for inspiring strangers to open up to me. It was not so much a talent, actually, as a knack, the same kind of knack I had in the profession I pursued. I asked questions about my colleagues’ lives and then I listened. They mistook, just as Peggy was doing, the affection they felt for the sound of their own voices, the closeness they felt to their own stories and memories, for a closeness to me.

  This technique was not always as cold-blooded as it was tonight. It was something that had evolved during my drunken days when I was simply too far gone to do much talking myself, when in fact I had no idea what I was doing and was innocent of using any technique at all. The unfortunate consequence of my disease was that the technique remained even though I could no longer get drunk. To be perfectly sober and completely conscious of using this technique was not pleasant. But it wasn’t unpleasant enough to stop me.

  It was getting late. The last little group of people was heading toward the door.

  “Shall we?” I asked Peggy. The question was pitched perfectly to cover the next ten to twelve hours of her life. Although drunk, she understood its implications. She took a deep breath, drained her glass, and said: “Yes, let’s go.”

  Billy was waiting for me in the foyer, by the coat rack. He was already wearing his long, down-filled jacket. He was ready to go and seemed to have no doubts about where he was going. His innocence was maddening. It both infuriated me and made me love him all the more. Made me all the more determined that someday, somehow, I would make it up to him. For the harm I’d caused him over the years and for the hurt I would inflict upon him tonight. In one fell swoop. That’s how I envisioned myself doing it. In one magnificent fell swoop.