Karoo Read online

  I turn a page.

  5

  The homeless are becoming a nuisance. There are more and more of them. It’s a new decade and there is a new impatience with this old problem.

  Racism is on the rise on college campuses. Hate crimes are on the rise. I read the story carefully and make a mental note to remember it as a useful topic to interpose between myself and my son when I call him tonight. Should things get tense in our conversation after I tell him the good news about my health insurance, I could go right to it.

  “Oh, by the way, Billy, I’ve been meaning to ask you something. There are all these stories in the paper about the rise of racism on college campuses. What, in your opinion, is causing this to happen? Do you have any idea?”

  6

  I take a short break from the Times and regard the screenplay I’m supposed to be rewriting. It’s almost an historic occasion. I have rewriter’s block. I’ve never had it before, but this particular screenplay has given it to me.

  The problem with the screenplay I’m supposed to be rewriting is that I rewrote it once already. That was three years ago. It had another title then, and it was with another studio. At that time, the problem with it was that it had no plot. It had a cast of characters larger than a high school graduation class but no story. So I got rid of all kinds of people and gave it a story line. It then moved on to be rewritten several more times by other rewriters. Now it’s back on my desk with a whole new set of problems. Now it’s all plot and no characters. In the intervening years, its plot has not only thickened, it has congealed. It has become the La Brea Tar Pits of plots. Our hero, his friends, his enemies, his love interest are all trapped in the tar pits, but you can’t tell one from the other. My job is to fix the problem and give our hero and his love interest a sense of humor.

  I consider the possibility, as I regard the 118-page screenplay on my desk, that in the near future rewriting one screenplay will provide a lifetime of work for a team of rewriters like myself, the way the building of a single Gothic cathedral did for generations of medieval craftsmen.

  7

  The telephone rings. I snap out of my trance. I rub my hands, anticipating a call from Jerry Fry, who will inform me that Fidelity Health has taken me back into its family of insured Americans.

  I pick up the phone.

  It’s Guido. Calling to tell me that he will have to cancel our lunch at the Tea Room this Friday. He’s going to LA on business. Guido Ventura, my last friend, is a talent agent.

  We chat. He tells me about the clients he has lost and the clients he has gained and the new client he hopes to snare in LA, and implies that the arithmetic is in his favor. I could remind him that the clients he has lost he once considered irreplaceable and that the clients he has gained, including this client he hopes to snare in LA, he once found beneath contempt. But I don’t. He is my very last friend and I don’t want to lose him. And besides, since I tend to balance my books using the same moral arithmetic he employs, who am I to talk? So I concur with his results and wish him happy hunting in LA.

  I light another cigarette and, while waiting for Jerry to call, continue my journey through the New York Times.

  8

  The Arts and Leisure section. Theater reviews. Movie reviews. Music reviews. Book reviews. TV reviews. I read them all. There’s a tone that emerges, the tone of Arts in review, which is like a wonderful gin and tonic to me, or what a gin and tonic used to be. I can no longer get drunk, but this tone makes me high.

  I think about Billy’s letter while I read the paper, but my thoughts are now in tune with the tone in the Times.

  I now appreciate his letter on a whole other level. His command of the English language. His mature style for one so young. His ability to explore emotional territory without becoming overly sentimental. His easy alliteration. His vivid imagery.

  The more I praise his letter to myself, the more the point and the purpose of it fade.

  This is a new disease I have picked up. I don’t know what to call it. It could either be called an objectivity disease or a subjectivity disease, depending upon how you look at it.

  The symptoms are always the same.

  Despite my nauseating preoccupation with myself, that self seems to slip away rather easily. Try as I might, I am unable to remain subjective about anything for very long. An hour or so, a day or so, a couple of days at best, and my subjectivity leaves me and I move on to begin observing the event in question from some other point of view.

  I don’t do it on purpose. My mind simply moves on and starts to orbit the event.

  The event can be a person, an idea, an issue, a heartbreaking letter from my son. It doesn’t matter what it is, the fact is, it’s only mine, truly mine, subjectively mine, for a little while. And then I start to orbit. I circle the issue, the idea, the letter, the telephone call. I see it from many different angles, various points of view. I do this until I become almost totally objective. Meaning that I can no longer experience how I felt about the letter, the telephone call, the idea, the issue, in the first place. Meaning that I can no longer summon any subjective emotions about the event one way or another. Meaning that it no longer has any meaning for me.

  I turn a page.

  9

  The telephone rings.

  Jerry, I think.

  “Hello, sweetheart.”

  It’s Dianah.

  I tell her that I can’t talk to her now because I’m expecting an important phone call. She laughs and sighs. She laughs and sighs all in one sound. The only woman, the only man, woman, or child I know who can do that.

  “Oh, Saul,” she laughs and sighs.

  I have never heard the sound of my own name used against me so effectively.

  “I’m not kidding, Dianah,” I say, trying to be firm but friendly, “I have an important business call I’m expecting, so if you wouldn’t mind …”

  She cuts me off.

  “Maybe this is it, sweetheart. Maybe I’m the call you’ve been waiting for.”

  “I hate to be rude, Dianah, but …”

  She cuts me off again.

  “Oh, I know,” she says. She is speaking in italics now. “It’s pure hell for you to have to be rude.”

  Her words, if printed on a page, would require several fonts to do it justice. The months of painstaking labor that it took for the monks in the Middle Ages to create a single illuminated letter, Dianah can conjure into existence in an instant with the sound of her voice.

  We go on in our adversarial way. Me telling her that I can’t talk, she telling me in sounds more than words what she thinks of me. I try to resist, but eventually I become enraptured by the brilliance of her performance. She’s in wonderful voice today. I could be listening to Hildegard Behrens doing Wagner and not my wife, Dianah, doing me in on the telephone.

  Finally, she tells me what it was she wanted to tell me when she called.

  “I’ve given away all your father’s clothes to this church group that was making a collection for the homeless. I warned you I would do it if you didn’t come to pick them up and so I’ve done it. Somebody around here has to keep their word and we both know, don’t we, darling, that it’s not going to be you. Ciao, darling. You have yourself a wonderful day, all right?”

  She hangs up.

  10

  While I smoke and wait for Jerry to call me, I grow more and more certain that it was a disastrous mistake on my part to have ever left Arnold, my former accountant.

  I was very fond of Arnold. An accountant from the old, almost Dickensian school. He even looked like an accountant. His father, I was sure, had been an accountant. Gaunt, pale, overworked, nearsighted. Unlike Jerry Fry, with his tan. There is something suspicious about an accountant with a year-round tan, who keeps a tennis racquet in his office.

  I could have kept Arnold and told Dianah to get a new accountant but, as a way of easing the strain of separation and providing some continuity in her life, I decided to be generous and get a new accountant
myself. So she kept Arnold and continuity, and I got Jerry. With his tennis racquet.

  I’ve only had Jerry for a little over a year and already I’m uninsured.

  Somewhere along the way, a fuckup occurred with my health insurance carrier, Fidelity Health. According to Jerry, although his office informed them of my change of billing address, some dippy secretary at Fidelity kept sending my premium-due notices to Arnold’s office, just as they had been doing for the last twenty years or so. And, according to Jerry, some dippy secretary at Arnold’s office kept sending them back to Fidelity, with a note saying that I was no longer with Arnold but without telling them who it was I was with now.

  By the time the fuckup was discovered, my health insurance policy was canceled.

  In all fairness to Jerry, as soon as the fuckup was discovered, he wanted to institute reinstatement procedures on the spot. The fault from then on was mine. It struck me as a novelty, an almost pleasant change of pace, to find myself uninsured. So I told Jerry to do nothing until he heard from me. I wanted, I told him, to consider my options.

  “What’re you talking about?” Jerry wanted to know. “What options? Being uninsured is not an option.”

  But the longer I remained uninsured, the better it felt. I had so many personal problems and diseases that were, I suspected, insoluble and incurable, that it was genuinely refreshing to have a problem that I could resolve whenever I felt like it. The quicker I resolved it, the quicker I would be back to having only problems that could not be resolved.

  My problem also provided me with a temporary persona I enjoyed playing. The bravado, the overly sentimental fatalism of being the only uninsured man I knew. The cachet of not caring that I was. The opportunity it offered me to say things like: “So what if I’m not? Neither Alexander the Great, nor Alexander Hamilton, nor Thomas Jefferson, had health insurance.”

  And there was something else as well. It seemed fitting and honest to be uninsured. In moments of rare clarity and blinding insight, which I usually had while taking a long shower, I saw that there was no insurance policy on earth for what was wrong with me. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew it wasn’t covered.

  Had Billy not brought up the issue in the postscript to his letter, I might have let the whole thing slide indefinitely.

  I light another cigarette and turn to the Business section in the Times. The power of the labor unions is weakening.

  The telephone rings.

  11

  “Saul.”

  It’s Jerry.

  “Jerry,” I say.

  “Got a minute?” says he.

  “Sure,” say I.

  There’s something about this opening that’s not to my liking, but I withhold judgment and listen.

  Jerry starts by reviewing, once again, my whole insurance fuckup with Fidelity. It’s back to dippy secretaries doing dippy things. I try to stop him because I know the whole history, but Jerry insists on the review “as a matter of record,” as he calls it.

  Serves me right, I think, for leaving Arnold. Jerry is just not a proper name for an accountant. Jerry is a name for an office boy who makes Xerox copies and runs out for sandwiches.

  The gist of Jerry’s review “as a matter of record” is that his firm is not to blame for anything.

  “Fine, fine,” I tell him. “Your firm is not to blame. I’m not interested in blaming anyone. I just want to be reinstated by Fidelity, that’s all.”

  There is a pause and out of the pause comes Jerry’s voice.

  “It’s too late now,” says he.

  “What’s too late?” I almost scream.

  “You waited too long,” he says and goes on. “Your grace period is over. You see, there was an administrative grace period for members in good standing during which time you could have been reinstated easily. During that time, although your policy was canceled, it was only canceled in an administrative way.”

  “And now?” I ask.

  “Now you have been canceled in a corporate way.”

  I start to sweat. I reach for another cigarette and as I light it, I see that my hand is shaking. I don’t know what it means to be canceled in a corporate way, but the word “canceled” suddenly sounds different. I don’t know why, but it does. My whole cavalier attitude to having no insurance, my whole Byronic persona of being The Uninsured Man, my whole reason for wanting to be insured again as a way of reestablishing contact with my son—it all goes out the window. I am canceled! My God, I am canceled in a corporate way. Not my insurance policy. It somehow seems that it’s me, personally, who is being canceled. Me. Saul Karoo. The word “canceled” acquires an existential quality of being cast out, beyond the pale. What excommunication means to a lifelong Catholic, this canceled in a corporate way now means to me.

  I am sweating like a horse.

  “What?” I stammer. “What does that mean, Jerry?”

  “It means that you can’t be reinstated with Fidelity without having a complete physical examination. And I know how you feel about that. And then, depending on the results of your physical, they’ll either take you back or reject you as being medically unqualified. You see, you’re starting from scratch with them.”

  “But I’ve been with them for over twenty years!”

  “Not anymore you haven’t,” he tells me. “You’ve been purged. Canceled in a corporate way.”

  There is a ringing in my ears and a pounding in my chest.

  “But did you talk to them? Did you talk to Fidelity? Did you tell them it was just a fuckup by some dippy secretaries?”

  “You can’t talk to Fidelity,” Jerry tells me as if he’s telling me one of the great truths of our time.

  My breathing is now so loud it’s drowning out the sound of the air conditioner in my office. Jerry can hear me breathing and tries to calm me down.

  “Saul, Saul,” he says, “listen to me. Nothing to worry about. This whole thing is a blessing in disguise. In my opinion, you never should have been with Fidelity in the first place. I don’t want to say anything against Arnold, but had I been advising you, I would have had you leave Fidelity a long time ago. I think we can do a lot better with some other insurance carrier. Wider coverage. Psychiatric and organ transplant included. Lower premiums even. We’re now in a position to shop around for the best deal. See what I mean?”

  “Tell me, Jerry. What should I do?”

  “I think you should forget about Fidelity and go with GenMed.”

  “GenMed,” I scream. “What’s GenMed?”

  “What’s GenMed?” Jerry can’t believe that I’ve never heard of GenMed. They’re only one of the top Fortune 500 companies, that’s all, he tells me. Have I seen what their stock has been doing lately, he wants to know.

  I remember using his tone of incredulity myself. I was stunned to discover that a girl I was taking out on a date in college had never heard of Tolstoy. Never heard of Tolstoy, I lambasted the poor girl. Leo Tolstoy! Count Leo Tolstoy? GenMed was Jerry’s Tolstoy.

  “So let’s say,” I say to Jerry while sweat is pouring down my face, “let’s say I do as you suggest and go with GenMed. What then? Do I have to have a complete physical for them, too?”

  I’m positive that I can’t pass a complete physical. I can’t even pass water properly, not to mention a thorough physical exam.

  “You do, yes,” Jerry tells me, “but it’s a lot more relaxed.”

  “Relaxed,” I scream. “How so, Jerry?”

  “You see,” says he, “with Fidelity, they have this list of doctors. You have to be checked out by a doctor who’s on their list, and these guys on their list have no flexibility. No sense of humor, if you know what I mean. With GenMed, on the other hand, we get to pick our own doctor. I know this great guy, Dr. Kolodny. Ever hear of him?”

  “Kolodny?” I just can’t stop screaming. “No! What’s he, Hungarian or something?”

  “He is, but that’s the least of his charms,” Jerry laughs. “The guy’s great. Very flexible. I use
him all the time for cases like this. You see, with Kolodny you go in knowing ahead of time that he’s not going to find anything wrong with you. He does all the tests that they all do. He checks out your-blood pressure. He takes a blood sample and a urine sample. He attaches you to an electrocardiogram, but with Kolodny, you might as well be attached to a toaster oven for all the problems he’ll find. Know what I mean? If they hoisted Lenin out of his tomb in Red Square and shipped him to Kolodny for a physical, Lenin would pass with flying colors. It’s all very relaxed. You go in, you’re fine. Kolodny signs the forms. We send the forms to GenMed, along with your premium, and you’re back on cruise control. Covered from head to foot, psychiatric and organ transplant included. What do you say?”

  “Can I think about it?” I scream.

  “What’s there to think about?” Jerry wants to know.

  He has me there. I suddenly can’t think of anything to think about.

  So I agree.

  “Great,” Jerry says. “I’ll have Janice make an appointment for you and we’ll get back to you. Or better yet, I’ll put you on hold and have Janice take care of it now. No sense in wasting time. Janice!” I hear him call his secretary and then I’m suddenly put on hold.

  12

  It was as if there were a vacuum in my head. Not just a vacuum in my mind, but a vacuum inside my head. As if there were no mind inside my head. A void. Nothing.

  This wasn’t the first time that I’d been put on hold, but it was the first time that I’d sat there holding without having something to think about while on hold. I just couldn’t think of anything to think about. Or, more to the point, I seemed to have nothing with which to think.

  I was canceled.

  Canceled in a corporate way.

  Everything was on hold. My thoughts. My plans. My memories. My breathing. I was holding my breath. There is no way of saying what I want to say without having it sound grandiose, so I might as well be grandiose and say it: My whole life seemed to be suddenly on hold.