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    Bread to the Wise: Book I of The Libertine
    Bread to the Wise: Book I of The Libertine
    Bread to the Wise: Book I of The Libertine
    Ebook496 pages8 hours

    Bread to the Wise: Book I of The Libertine

    By Angus Brownfield

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    Bread to the Wise is Book I of The Libertine trilogy. In 1964 Robert Gattling is an assistant vice-president at a prestigious university, a wunderkind. By 1972 he’s a janitor. Bad things end a life-long lucky streak. He begins recovering his mojo when a mentor, Jake Pritchett, urges him to woo beautiful, classy Mary Clare Morrison. Obstacles impede the way to true love. He’s used to easy conquests of women who attract him. He has lost the self-confidence to approach a serious relationship with someone like Mary Clare. She too has a mentor, real estate tycoon and political king-maker V. M. Meany, who rescued her from drugs and a degrading relationship and now keeps her in a penthouse apartment. Gattling and Meany battle it out. Jake gets involved and ends up shot by a Meany hired thug. When Meany threatens to rip Gattling’s face off, Mary Clare shoots him. Jake dies, Meany survives. It’s like the bad things that interrupted Gattling’s lucky streak come back to haunt him. Is ardent love enough to bring him back from the depths? It has worked magic on Mary Clare, but will she wait patiently for her lover to lay his ghosts and face life in a loving relationship? Tune in.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAngus Brownfield
    Release dateOct 23, 2015
    ISBN9781310228759
    Bread to the Wise: Book I of The Libertine
    Author

    Angus Brownfield

    Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

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      Book preview

      Bread to the Wise - Angus Brownfield

      BREAD TO THE WISE

      A Novel by

      ANGUS BROWNFIELD

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      ***

      Published By

      Angus Brownfield on Smashwords

      Also by Angus Brownfield

      The Day’s Vanity, The Night’s Remorse

      The Mechanic of San Martín

      Pool of Tears

      She’s Got Her Own

      Abrupt Edge

      Copyright © 2015 by Angus Brownfield

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this eBook.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please download an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this Ebook and did not download it, or it was not downloaded for your use only, then you should return to the eBook retailer from whom it was acquired and download your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

      To Don Meyer and to

      the memory of Art Holstein

      The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,

      nor bread to the wise. For man does not know his time.

      Ecclesiastes

      Little Bill Daggett: I don't deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house.

      Will Munny: Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.

      From the movie, Unforgiven

      Table of Contents

      About The Libertine

      Bread to the Wise

      Bonus First Chapter, Río Penitente

      The Libertine . . .

      Bread to the Wise asks whether Robert Gattling is the most amoral man in nine Bay Area counties, or just oversexed? He’s handsome and charming, but attracts women more because they believe he cares for their wellbeing and sexual pleasure as much as his own. Conversely, memories haunt him that make monogamy seem futile. He’s blown by an ever-shifting wind, and it will take a mentor of superior wisdom and a lover of superior sensuality to anchor him.

      In Río Penitente, as Gattling turns fifty, he has become a near caricature of himself—handsomer than at thirty-five, financially secure, still a magnate for women. He’s haunted by the death of that wise mentor and by that sensuous lover’s rejection, and a jolt of clarity binds those two losses to all the sins he’s committed since his mother’s death when he was six. So he goes on a quest for redemption, choosing as his venue Mexico, where he meets two kinds of fates.

      Finally, a dignified elder in Monogamy, Gattling has eschewed his libertine ways, settling down with a woman who returns his love with interest . . . until she dies prematurely. Now he finds himself tempted to return to his former life style, tempted by three women: an old love, a woman as dangerous as she’s beautiful, and one who is taboo but also the only person who can keep him from becoming a foolish, decrepit Don Juan.

      The Beginning Is A Hole In Time

      one

      I met Jake Pritchett in May of 1972 and said goodbye to him, at his interment, in September of 1973. If he hadn’t taken the initiative, I might never have got to know him. He occupied a ground floor office at 45 Bobwhite Court. I was a one-man janitorial service and my one client was V.M. Meany, who owned everything on this cul-de-sac in La Morinda, California, just south of where California Route 24 dumps a couple of hundred thousand cars a day into Interstate 680.

      I walked into Jake’s office, expecting to find it empty as it had been the night before and the one before that. The man I hadn’t expected to be sitting at his desk said, Would you like me to clear out for a few minutes? Not a pro forma question: his body language said he was ready to leave his chair.

      When, in a former life, I had sat at a desk like his working late, I never cleared out for a janitor. Blue collars don’t ask white collars to accommodate them. It’s the law of the land.

      I can work around you, if it won’t disturb you, I replied.

      Though a humble occupation, being a janitor, even a faux janitor, a man hiding out as a janitor, actually, yields minor rewards. One is that no one is around to bother you as you dust and sweep. You can whistle, you can sing, you can swear if you spill ashes on the rug, you can cut the cheese without offending.

      The man sitting at his desk said, When it’s time to vacuum, yell, I’ll make myself scarce.

      I don’t vacuum every night.

      I emptied his ashtray and wastebasket and dusted his bookcase and file cabinets, sensing he was watching me. He hadn’t moved in but a few days before, so the place still had that new smell. As I aimed my cart for the door he said, I'm liable to be in your way most every weeknight. I've begun writing a novel in my spare time, you see. My latest calling.

      You know, I said, slightly uneasy with his admission, I haven’t been at this janitoring business long enough to have a hard and fast routine, so I could start on the third floor and work down, do your office last, if you like.

      But then I'd feel obliged to clear out when you got here, the gentleman said. I'm new to this writing business, too, so I'm trying to figure out how many hours a night I'm good for. I'd sure like it if you’d just clean around me. My day job takes me out of town once in a while; you can do the heavy-duty stuff then.

      He wasn’t being a sidewalk superintendent, in fact, he was really trying to be nice, so I smiled and nodded. Again I started for the door and this time he said, a hint of irony in his voice, You haven’t asked me what my novel’s about. People seem to want to know.

      I turned in the doorway and said, Once upon a time I majored in English Lit. They taught us that novels aren’t about anything, they’re things unto themselves.

      He said, I majored in statistics and business, and I didn’t know that. My name’s Jake Pritchett, by the way.

      I had not once introduced myself to a janitor when I sat behind a desk, and I wasn’t sure how to respond, but he got out of his chair with his hand offered, so I hastened to shake it. Robert Gattling. If I’d been a real janitor I probably would have been abashed.

      Jake was an inch shorter than I, a little round in the shoulders, balding. His grip was firm without being a macho statement. His eyes were sad as if from too much wisdom, and I was struck by them.

      See you around, I said, finally to escape. Pushing my cart down the hall I debated if that was too chummy for a janitor, but I'd blown my cover anyway, admitting my college major, so I shrugged it off. I thought, if a statistician can write a novel, a former academician can be a janitor.

      *****

      That was the beginning of our very short lifelong friendship. I didn’t pursue it at first, I’d come over the hill to La Morinda to escape my former Berkeley colleagues and erstwhile friends—in other words, to find refuge. I had made one friend of a sort since then, a neighbor named Janice Lippert, who was of a sort because we’d become something more than friends, we wrestled each other into frantic sweats now and again, when her cokehead husband was out of town.

      Another friend was John Barleycorn, or rather his genever cousin, which I drank in quantity with a twist of lemon, it being the best sleeping potion I knew of (or perhaps the most forgiving sleeping potion, seldom causing more than a washed-out feeling the next morning).

      Janice was not the kind of friend Jake became, she was my crutch and I hers. True, we shared confidences, such as why she put up with her husband, whose cocaine habit made him regularly nasty and sometimes downright cruel, and what had gone on not in Berkeley but in the wilds of Nevada that caused me to flee into exile. She was the only person I'd confided in about that since my wife, Lana, divorced me over those same Nevada goings-on, and I think it meant a great deal to Janice that I'd let her in on it. She guarded the secret.

      Gin was the lubricant that allowed such confidences. That and, somewhere between the first gin-over and sloshedness, tussles in the sack that left us both panting and me cursed with mixed feelings.

      I was thirty-five when we met; Jake, it turned out, eight years older. It is a tricky time to become friends for life. In the sandbox tots make ad hoc alliances or enmities, a mother or a nanny encouraging the former and discouraging the latter, sharing the daily mantra, names not exchanged, often simply playing in tandem, solitary games played side by side. Beyond the sandbox—say when you’re old enough to ride a bicycle—there are friendships without any awareness of emotional investment, though there are hurt feelings and, at times, angers and jealousies. You play, you explore, you argue about trivia (DiMaggio was better than Gehrig any day), you begin to expose isolated tidbits of your soul, longings for things or places, dreams of the future, but without any scrutiny of the me and thee.

      After that comes a time when friendship is a serious pursuit, one without a road map, but quite full of emotion, the kind that will make you back up your friend in a fight, even if the odds are bleak and you know you’ll take a pounding. You share the quart of beer you were able to score, you confess your passion for Carol or Jeanne, and your friend commiserates or encourages. You go on double dates, you lend him your last five bucks because your friend needs it. Some people sustain those friendships through the fortieth class reunion and beyond.

      For adults—men, at least—making new friends is not so easy. It’s not that you are much more aware of the emotional investment, it’s that to invest at all takes weighing so many commitments, so much detritus: creeping inertia.

      Foremost for Jake it was this new career of writing serious fiction. He had clients from his old career—he was a planner of hospitals and health systems—he was not going to abandon as he eased into his new writing career, he was going to gently wean them. He had a wife with her own profession, two young children, he had, I discovered towards the end of his life, a secret lover. So little time, so many commitments. He seemed to have a premonition that his time would be short, so he put out the extra effort to keep all these commitments. And finally one to me as well.

      I, on the other hand, was relatively free of commitments but was not only in self-imposed exile, I was under a severe self-imposed sentence for the sins that had forced me there. A lot of self-loathing and not a little of self-pity are a twin handicap that might have made friendship impossible had Jake not been such a generous man. And too, I wasn’t sure I knew how to make friends, even if I should admit I needed one.

      Soon after we met I needed one but didn’t know it.

      two

      The summer of 1972 was a newsy season: the Watergate burglars were caught, the Supreme Court suspended the death penalty and, of course, there were the usual shootings. Most headline-grabbing shootings took place overseas: eleven Israeli Olympians and their handlers kidnapped and killed in Munich; twenty-six civilians massacred at the Lodi Airport in Tel Aviv. And, though it only made the local papers, my friend, Jake Pritchett, died prematurely from complications of a gunshot wound.

      Jake wasn’t in the wrong place, nor was it the wrong time; it was the shooter who was guilty of both blunders. Since death came not days but months after the bullet left the gun, the shooter had already pled out to a felony charge far less serious than homicide. The DA thought it impossible to get a conviction for anything more and would not retry him.

      Which left a number of us with the question: who’s to blame?

      Jake blamed himself for getting shot; Jake’s widow, Amanda, blamed me and, incidentally my true love, Mary Clare; Mary Clare insisted it was pure accident—if you can call anything an accident when gunshots are exchanged. More on accidents later. Mary Clare could have said ‘Fate’ and had as much credence.

      I side with Amanda but only in relation to myself. Like a quarterback who audibles a pass in the last minute of the fourth quarter, only to throw a game-losing interception, I accept the blame.

      You can decide who was right; I had to decide what to do with the guilt that attended the blame.

      *****

      You can read about Watergate and the death penalty ruling in high school history books; there have been reams written on the two terrorist attacks. Only a scattering of people, besides me, remember Jake’s shooting. I talked to some of them about it—with a couple I still do. We endlessly sift the ‘what ifs,’ as people will. What if it had happened ten years later (when, presumably, cardiovascular surgery had advanced)? What if he’d been helicoptered to Moffitt Hospital in San Francisco, perhaps the best trauma center in the land? What if the bullet hadn’t shattered? What if Jake hadn’t been carrying a shotgun from his car to the garage, freaking-out the sleep-deprived prick who shot him from ambush?

      You can noodle around all you want. Both of Jake’s parents had bad hearts, and, not surprisingly, so did Jake. It was the kicker in the complication.

      Blame Mom, blame Dad for passing on bad genes?

      Maybe.

      Blame the guy who hired the prick who shot Jake? I’ll give him a piece of the action. A consummate poker player, literally and figuratively, for once in his life V.M. Meany didn’t know when to fold. He couldn’t let go of Mary Clare, whose life he’d saved a couple of years before, a woman whom he had selflessly sheltered, no strings attached, but had to fall in love with at an age when most men look back to their youth for fond memories of such feelings.

      You really can't blame the surgeon who opened Jake’s chest to remove a bullet fragment resting against his heart. Mary Clare will count as part of the accident that the cutter discovered something more alarming than that piece of lead, an aortic aneurism which he judged to be a ticking time bomb. If it ruptured it could cause death in minutes. Since he was in the patient’s chest already, the man felt morally bound to repair it. It was no accident that, Amanda, an anesthesiologist, was quite familiar with the usual risk-benefit analysis in situations like this. Fix the damned thing, she told the surgeon.

      I was old enough when this happened to be inured to life’s more random exigencies. So I didn’t blame God or anything like that when Jake died. It’s just that I’d got used to him in my life, a warm, kind alter ego with enough added years to be a lot wiser than I. Now I had to get used to him not being in my life. I thought, well, I’ll just do it; I’ll find my own wisdom. I told myself, you don’t get all that attached to someone in a few months. Or do you? I debated this with Mac, the bartender at Berkeley Square, as I stopped in for a quick one on the way home from work a few days after the funeral.

      At that time I was working in the basement of the Claremont Hotel, where the Association of Bay Area Governments, my employer, had its offices. There is more than one bar upstairs, but no Mac. Mac had known Jake, known him back when he was courting Amanda the anesthesiologist, and kept current with him. Furthermore, Mac kept under the bar a yellowing photocopy of Jake’s rules for living. The third rule read, Remember, nobody owns tomorrow. Just about every other time I sat at his bar, if we weren’t talking 49ers or Giants, Mac would bring out that piece of paper and we’d talk what Mac termed ‘philosophy,’ by which he meant life’s eternal verities.

      Jake was one of Mac’s favorite customers, though not a regular, and it grieved Mac that Jake had become an exemplar of his own third rule.

      The person I talked to most about Jake’s demise was Mary Clare. When he died we were sharing a cottage behind a house on Milvia Street, walking distance to the UC Berkeley campus, where she was working her way back into the academic life. The cottage was a gem, designed by Bernard Maybeck and there is a story in that, too.

      It became evident that I hadn’t dealt well with Jake’s death when I began waking in the middle of the night, sometimes in tears, and Mary Clare would say, What is it, baby? and I couldn’t say for sure: nightmares, a sensation of pressure around my heart. Accepting blame is a social norm; it’s guilt that shrivels your soul.

      Clare was very patient. She studied early and late, kept in shape, she did her share of the housework. She needed her sleep. But she would coo at me, there in our little Maybeck doll house in the middle of the night, and hug me. Sometimes she would make love to me, even if we’d made love earlier, because she knew it would put me back to sleep.

      She offered it as a solution preferable to the premixed martinis I kept in the freezer. She said, "I love you, Robert Gattling, but I swear, I’m not going to sit around watching you drink yourself shit-faced as a way of avoiding whatever’s eating at you. If you’d rather dive in the bottle than fuck me, okay, but it’s adios if you do."

      That street-talking ultimatum set me straight for a while. I’d been through an ordeal in order to share a cunning cottage with the girl of my dreams, and I was not going to lose her because I couldn’t stop lambasting myself over Jake’s death.

      Actually, Jake’ death was a culmination, the last in a string of deaths going back to my mother dying when I was a tot, and somehow I saw myself responsible for them all. I was the Grim Reaper’s henchman.

      That is crazy, I know. I did not willfully kill any of these persons. But I was there, in the background, a veritable Joe Btfsplk, my own little black cloud following wherever I went. The rain that fell on my head said, Gattling, you are a worthless prick, you can sweat and strain, you will never make up for the bad things you’ve done.

      *****

      This is how I got to be The Janitor of Bobwhite Court. Before I came over the hill, some entrepreneur with more vision than capital had started to develop the cul-de-sac but went belly up just about the time I stopped being an Assistant Vice-President at UC Berkeley. The project got as far as framing the first floor of what the fading sign in front advertized as condominiums. Then activity just stopped. The two-by-fours bleached in the sun and rain, the weeds returned around the foundation. I noticed the decay as I took my daily constitutional along the abandoned Southern Pacific tracks that ran behind Bobwhite Court. One day I said to myself, Robert, those bleached bones could be something else: offices, apartments. Why don’t you use your retirement money and buy them?

      Before I could overcome the amateur’s fear of the risk involved, V.M. Meany, who already owned about half of central Contra Costa County, saw the same potential as I and didn’t hesitate one bit. He bought the derelict.

      By the way, being an Assistant Vice-President, working for Stu Katz, the Vice-President for Medical Education for the statewide University system, became a not-such-exalted niche on the corporate ladder. From my bureaucratic desk I was tasked to ride herd on the funding of biomedical research—until the day Mario Savio got himself arrested for climbing atop a police car and speaking out against the University’s paternalistic treatment of its students. This became the revolution named The Free Speech Movement. Stu Katz, who had inherited me and didn’t much like me, nominated me as the guy to carry the University’s latest offer to the protesting students. The University’s President agreed they needed a spokesperson who wouldn’t flinch when an enraged long-hair screamed in his face. (You were an amateur boxer, Robert? Olympic Auditorium? Golden Gloves? You wouldn’t actually strike a protester, if things got heated, would you? Only in self-defense, sir.) Out on the steps of the Admin Building with the latest offer from the President, I shouted back when necessary and I didn’t flinch, though I quickly learned the therapeutic benefits of double martinis in evenings of jarred nerves.

      During the institutionalization phase of the revolution, as poli-sci profs are wont to call it, I needed to get the hell out of the middle. I asked for a leave of absence. I’ll resign if you’d rather I told Stu Katz, leading with my chin because I was frazzled and tuckered out from all the tension. He would have loved to fire me but his reactionary instincts had him consult the Big Boss, and away I went. You can’t believe how thankful I was to be quit of the superheated rhetoric (or, as my piled higher-and-deeper colleagues would say, the Sturm-und-Drang-Zeit).

      I sublet my digs and pursued a zaftig young woman named Lana up to Reno, where she had learned to deal twenty-one and was learning to be her own person. It was there, or rather, outside of Reno, up an arroyo I’m not sure I could find on the map today, where I did something that was frowned upon by academicians, was not good for a man’s soul nor for his relationship with the zaftig Lana. We married under a cloud, and the cloud rained on us throughout a trip camping out through Mexico and led to an ultimate falling out.

      It had to do with a sawed-off shotgun and a man who would now be called ‘homeless’ but back in those days was simply called a drifter.

      three

      Jake asked me, on his deathbed, to finish the novel he’d been working on since that night I agreed to work around him. This seemed a preposterous request at the time. I knew as much about writing as I did about driving an automobile, and asking me to finish his novel was like asking me to take his place in the cockpit of a Ferrari at Le Mans It was pure manipulation, but manipulation I unthinkingly submitted to in that solemn moment of watching his life ebb away. Sure Jake, anything. I promised.

      If this is the second Robert Gattling effort you’re reading, you know I didn’t finish the novel, which was the story of a man falling in love with a witch. I never gathered enough nerve to try. It’s true, I read the unfinished manuscript of The Witch’s House a half-dozen times and poured through cryptic notes Jake made to himself, going back to what he scribbled in a notebook he kept by his bed the night he had the dream upon which he based the novel.

      I got so worked up, unable to keep my promise, I went to see a shrink about it. Dr. Deary was Jake’s contemporary, a woman whose face bore the chiseled marks of great (I suspect physical) pain. She was recommended by a friend, wasn’t licensed by the state because she didn’t like the state’s rules, but had a full practice of persons , like me, only mildly regretted their insurance wouldn’t pay any part of her robust fee. She listened to me rant, she listened to me cry tears of frustration and regret, she listened to me try to rationalize why I couldn’t keep my promise, and this took four sessions. During the fifth session she became prescriptive, for which I’m very grateful. It saved me lots of time and money.

      Look, Mr. Gattling, (she never got around to calling me anything less formal) I don’t need to tell you, dreams are highly personal. Your Jake didn’t try to parse his witch dream because it would have ruined what he perceived as its high drama. The only problem is, if I hear you correctly, the drama never came out in the writing. He left all the emotion inside, never got it down on paper. This doesn’t surprise me. He was like a man shadow-boxing, that is not coming to terms with whatever or whomever is the real foe. If you were really going to write a novel based on the outline of his dream, you’d have to make the witch your witch, and the psychic battle with her your battle. Then it wouldn’t be finishing Jake’s novel, it would be writing your own. And if the idea of writing your own novel about falling in love with a witch leaves you cold (your expression is telling me that’s so) then doing so is betraying yourself.

      But what about my promise?

      She said, Unless you believe Jake’s up there (she pointed towards the ceiling without looking up) "looking down and shaking a cautionary finger at you like your fifth grade teacher, you haven’t betrayed anyone. If he’d said, ‘Look after my wife and kids’ it would have been one thing. I believe, from what you’ve told me of the man, he had a fairly complex and perhaps pixyish reason for tasking you this way.

      So, by the power vested in me by my overweening self-confidence as a therapist, I absolve you of all worldly guilt. Now you need to go home and absolve yourself. Knock off the mea culpas. Write a novel with a Jake Pritchett in it.

      *****

      Driving home, I thought about a novel with a Jake Pritchett in it. That evening I wound down with a couple of glasses of Louis Martini’s Dry Chenin Blanc in lieu of dry martinis. I told Mary Clare about my final session with Dr. Deary and what I got from her was a broad grin.

      What? I asked, puzzled by the grin.

      She said, That Jake. He told me you wouldn’t be able to keep your promise.

      Shit. Then why’d he ask me to do it?

      She smiled. He wanted you to spend so much energy getting pissed at him for sending you on a snipe hunt that you wouldn’t have time to beat yourself up about his dying.

      He said that? I was actually starting to get pissed.

      Would I lie to you?

      Not about something like that. Why didn’t you tell me this sooner, goddamnit?

      Because he made me promise.

      I said, Oh, so you got to keep your promise to him while I break mine.

      She said, But he knew you weren’t going to be able to do it.

      Why waste my time, then?

      Ah, Grasshopper, if you must ask, you would not understand the answer. We were sitting hip to haunch on the couch. She reached up and ruffled my hair. Somehow my pique was endearing.

      Try me, I said.

      Does the Buddhist monk, daily raking the gravel in the monastery’s rock garden, waste time when he makes it look exactly like the day before?

      Smarty pants. What else did Jake and you discuss that I should know about?

      She said, I told him you were the best lover a woman ever had.

      I laughed.

      I did.

      I bet that merited a big ‘so what.’

      Why? Now she was playing with my hair.

      Jake wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about my love-making ability. Isn’t that something you might better have shared with a female friend?

      She said, Heck no. I’m not about to stimulate some woman’s curiosity about Robert-in-the-sack.

      I put my forehead against hers. I’d like to stimulate your curiosity.

      Good. Then, after, I can catch a nap while you cook dinner. I have a long night ahead, because I have to finish this paper by morning or I’m in deep doo-doo.

      So now I’m going to put you to sleep?

      Turn about and all that.

      I said, I prefer tit for tat.

      Last one upstairs gets to be on the bottom.

      And by the time I figured that out, she was in bed waiting for me.

      four

      So there was no real beginning to my post-University and post-Lana life until I saw excavators moving earth one morning as I took my constitutional along the Southern Pacific tracks. There was a spanking new sign stating the name of the construction firm and the name of the project, Quail’s Reach. At the bottom in named V.M. Meany as the developer. A lot of noise, dump trucks, men talking with their heads close together, hard hats, plans spread out on the hood of a pickup.

      I went home and looked up V.M. Meany in the yellow pages. Based on what I saw, I assumed Meany was a big frog in a small pond. Later I would go to the library and go through microfilm archives of the Diablo Valley Courier and the San Francisco Chronicle to discover that Meany moved freely among small, medium and large ponds while his relative size didn’t change much at all. He was long past the stage in his career that he needed to advertise. Investors, politicians and other movers and shakers came to him.

      The man was used to getting his way. Witness how he added to the footprint of the Bobwhite Court complex in order to build on every square inch of property the zoning ordinance allowed. Then he got a variance allowing a penthouse one floor higher than the zoning ordinance limit. Which was the whole point of Bobwhite Court: that penthouse and its tenant, the woman I would, in short order, dub the Penthouse Lady.

      In other words, although the project was an efficient use of Meany’s money, it had at its core a quixotic gesture.

      Efficiency was definitely in Meany’s lexicon, quixotic was a stretch. Still, the man had always done things first cabin. It was part of his larger-than-life reputation. In keeping with this quality, the grounds around Quail’s Reach were nicely landscaped, with a tasteful Moroccan fountain out front and a couple of mature shade trees moved in on the flanks. He deeded an easement to the county so that the cul-de-sac could be connected to the Southern Pacific right-of-way, which was, in the county master plan, slated to become a bicycle and pedestrian trail through the heart of central county. This, rumor had it, was a horse trade for the height variance.

      I walked home and mulled the sign. Before long I got the idea of playing Meany as a way of staying alive. It put me on a par with the son of a Zulu warrior working in a South African diamond mine, but when you’ve been pissing away your life and decide it’s time to reform, you figure on starting at the bottom. As an undergrad I’d been a student laboratory assistant at the University, but ended up an Assistant Vice-President, so I thought I might start out a janitor and end up—what? I had no idea. I had no idea what baronies there might be in Meany’s empire.

      So I cashed in my classic BMW for a cherry 1941 Chevy panel truck, plus enough cash to paint it (café au lait body, chocolate fenders) and have Janet Lippert, a sign painter by trade, decorate its panels with a fanciful Gatling gun and the motto, We Fight Dirt. She also added pin stripes, her own personal touch.

      See, the truck’s first use was as an advertising ploy. Before he moved to Bobwhite Court, Meany had offices in Martinez, the county seat. For two weeks I parked the truck in various places near his digs, intending it to stir his curiosity. When I felt he must have registered this odd vehicle, and wondered at its provenance, I made an appointment to see him. I never learned whether he even noticed the truck, let alone connected it to me.

      *****

      Meany looked like a retired NFL offensive tackle. As he rose from the chair behind his massive mahogany desk, I had the same reaction as when I once came upon Teddy Roosevelt’s grizzly bear exhibited in the rotunda of the Smithsonian.

      My hackle rose.

      I hesitated before sticking my average sized hand into his enormous mitt. His eyes hid behind rimless optical gray specs. His extra large galluses suspended pleated trousers in a subdued gray wool worsted with stripes so fine I couldn’t make out the color. A banker’s suit. His white shirt was starched, his silk rep tie as conservative as his suiting.

      I didn’t put out any invitations to bid, he said. What makes you think I need someone to clean Quail’s Reach?

      I said, I take my exercise walking the train tracks mornings. I’ve watched the progress, and it looks like move-in isn’t far off.

      As a matter of fact, I’m moving my own offices there the first of the month. I’ll want it to be a showcase. You have a résumé?

      I said, "I have a résumé and a work proposal. The résumé was going to stretch some definitions of what I’d done in the past to make me sound like, if not a janitor, a man capable of bossing janitors. I was hoping the carefully thought out work plan would get me the gig.

      He went rapidly through the documents. Are you a man of your word, Mr. Gattling?

      Yes, sir. I reddened slightly, as if a man of the cloth had asked me, out of the blue, if I were keeping the faith.

      What about the apartments? he asked.

      I sensed a warming on his part, although his jowly expression, suggestive of chronic depression, changed not at all.

      I'd clean the common areas, the elevators, vacuum the hallways and wash the front doors once a week, wash the windows every six months. Police the area around the dumpster—I assume you’ll have dumpster service.

      He said, Wash the windows the end of the rainy season and the end of summer. Don’t care what the calendar says. For about a minute he sat and looked out the window behind him, Carquinez Strait stretching west to east, when he swiveled his chair about, rose again, and stuck out that enormous paw.

      I rose, too, not just from native politeness, but because his looming over me was intimidating.

      Watch for me to move in. —I assume I can I keep these? He gestured with the documents I’d given him.

      Of course. How soon do you think you’ll be moving?

      Like I said, first of the month.

      Anyone else moving in before you?

      He hesitated a moment and shook his head.

      Thank you, sir, I said.

      No, thank you, son. You saved me some bother.

      As I left I realized that was the first time I’d been called ‘son’ since I went to college.

      *****

      When I started working for him, he handed me a contract to sign, the boilerplate of which looked as if it had come from a stationery store, and before I could more than glance at it, he summarized it for me.

      The amount’s what we agreed to. Your work proposal is incorporated by reference. Otherwise, I want this place kept looking as good as the day I move in—simple as that. You have any day-to-day questions, talk to Meryl. He gestured towards the formidable woman guarding his office door. She’ll give you the keys.

      In her three inch heels, Meryl Destrier’s pompadour, a blond version of Linda Darnell’s, topped me by a good two inches. If Meany reminded me of Leo Nomellini or Dan Dierdorf, Meryl reminded me Dick Butkus. She outweighed me, but to say that she was plump would be entirely misleading. Straight of back, broad of shoulders, as age added padding to her body, every part of her stayed in the same relationship to the other parts. If she had an appearance problem it wasn’t size and proportions it was latent pixie-ism—she would wear clothes better suited to a younger, slimmer woman.

      As Meryl and I went over door keys—she had labeled them—I said, What about the penthouse?

      Never mind the penthouse. (Emphatic, final, as if she’d anticipated the question.)

      I asked what was up there, and the answer—a frown and a repeat of her ‘never mind’—naturally piqued my interest.

      Not even the elevator?

      Meryl said, Nope; not even the elevator.

      And if I wanted to rent one of the apartments myself, whom would I see?

      She said, That would be me.

      Is there a studio? Ground floor rear? Nothing fancy, mind you.

      Wait a sec. She went into Meany’s office and conferred with him while standing on one foot and leaning across his desk, the other foot pointed at me, another pixie-ism.

      Mr. Meany would prefer that you not, she said. She added no reason, I assume because, if Meany wanted to fire me, he’d rather not have me hanging about.

      five

      The buildings Meany added to Quail’s Reach—parentheses around the original—were constructed with parking below grade. The excavating added significantly to the, but it allowed him to build more units. The original building with the penthouse had parking to the rear. Passing a second story window the first day I started work, I looked into the parking lot and watched a pale yellow Jaguar roadster—an XKE—pull into a reserved parking space. A woman in butt-hugging Levi’s and tall boots, a bomber jacket and a newsboy cap cocked over one eye, alighted and slung a messenger bag over one shoulder. She strode briskly towards the exterior elevator to the penthouse. I wanted her to look up, but she didn’t. I thought I glimpsed an elegant profile, but maybe I just wanted her to have an elegant profile.

      The Jag, the clothes, the walk: a woman beyond my current means. That speaks to the top of the brain, but something underneath, in the storm cellar of the mind, ignores those practicalities. God, how I wanted to see her face. Something in her motion, her carriage, in her cockiness, spoke to the old me. Married once to a woman who’d folded all too quickly in the face of adversity and cared not at all if her succumbing dragged me down, too, I longed for a woman able to stare down hard times.

      It didn’t occur to me then, building my fantasy of the Penthouse Lady, what she was doing up there. Neither Meany nor his bodyguard, Meryl, had said someone was moving in up there, not at the same time as Meany moved his offices. A collaborator? A colleague? A silent partner? I got the ‘hands off’ message, I just couldn’t come up with a reason why. Oh well.

      *****

      After we got to know each other, Jake Pritchett mentioned he’d watch me on the back porch of the office building, taking a smoke break and staring up at the penthouse. He, too, had spotted the Penthouse Lady’s swagger, but more accurately parsed it as bravado. Nor was he fooled for one instant about what she was doing up there.

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