Chapter 4
Brad sat in the familiar leather chair in Dr. Orenstein’s office in the Jung Institute in San Francisco. He had never consented to a Jungian analysis but went there simply to talk. Dr. Orenstein had made himself available for Brad since his grandfather’s death, seven years earlier. In fact, Brad had know Dr. Orenstein all of his life. He was his grandfather’s best friend and was as close as a member of the family. His niece, Joyce Orenstein was like a sister to Brad. Dr. Orenstein looked at Brad with his familiar indulgent, if slightly worried look. He said, “I think a Jewish woman will capture you yet.”
Brad said, “I’ve given them a lot of chances, haven’t I?”
“None of your Jewish girlfriends has been the equal of Jane. And she would have made a wonderful wife for you.” Brad had never truly recovered from his breakup with Jane and had never forgiven his Christian fundamentalist mother for breaking up their relationship.
“The Jewish lawyer who married her is a very happy man, I suppose.”
“It’s better not to try to duplicate the past. Jane was an exceptional woman, it’s true. You can find another woman like her but she will just as likely be Chinese or African American as Jewish.”
“I know. I’m already suspicious of my feelings for Raney anyway. For one thing, she’s very pretty.”
“You’ve been involved with too many beautiful women for me to care to remember. When you tell me a woman is pretty, I feel like laughing. It’s like telling me the sky is blue. It doesn’t really mean anything except that you think she will be vain and have a thousand suitors and it gives you a right to defend yourself from the possibility of infatuation by finding something terribly wrong with her.”
“I suppose I’ve never forgiven my mother for ruining my relationship with Jane when I wasn’t even out of high school. Maybe all the womanizing was just getting even with her.”
“Being the star quarterback in high school and then winning the Fields Medal has something to do with it. Beautiful women are still attracted to that. They attract each other also, as you discovered: if you are with a beautiful woman then others become interested.” They had discussed the topic often. Brad merely shrugged and looked distracted. Dr. Orenstein adjusted his steel-rim glasses and ran his hand over his full head of white hair. He said, “I think taking a room in this commune is another way of getting back at your mother.”
Brad was silent for a moment. He didn’t like the implication that he was not in control of his life. He said, with an ironic and slightly hostile smile, “Hey, Dr. Jung, maybe sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Maybe I’m just trying to go to bed with a lot of women.”
“I think you’ve had enough of that.”
Lately they had talked a great deal about marriage. Dr. Orenstein thought it would be best for Brad to settle down and marry.
Dr. O said, “I wish you hadn’t consented to help construct that damned apartment building of your mother’s. Graham wanted you to keep away from your mother, emotionally, as much as possible. Be polite to her and try to keep her happy, but stay uninvolved. You don’t need to be a carpenter.”
Graham was Brad’s grandfather and Dr. Orenstein’s closest friend. He had died seven years earlier, at 71, leaving Brad with a large sum of money. He had not approved of his son’s marriage to Brad’s mother, Rhonda Evanston, and after Brad’s father disappeared, he took on the role of father for Brad. Brad’s father had been a well-known detective and had disappeared, mysteriously when Brad was 3 1/2 years old.
Brad said, “I suppose I’m just watching out for my little brother.” Dr. Orenstein didn’t comment. Brad added, “As you know, one of my several orthogonal plans is to make my fortune in real estate. It doesn’t hurt to get some first-hand knowledge of building: nailing sub floors and building rafters, things like that. I could use the money I inherited from my grandfather to make a fortune in real estate. I think real estate values are going to go way up in the next 20 years.”
“Joyce could help you towards independence. You don’t have to make a million dollars in real estate. You should dedicate yourself to something worthy of your talent.”
Joyce was his niece, and she had been given a very substantial amount of money by her grandmother, Dr. Orenstein’s sister.
Brad shrugged his shoulders. He had known Joyce since they were children and she was like a sister to him. He said, “Give me a little more time. Joyce and I have done some talking. I think she’s beginning to see things more my way. She’s ready to do some traveling and she’s more open to living an unconventional life.”
Joyce and Brad had a very short affair after he had broken up with Jane, the summer before she went to the East Coast to attend college at Wellesley.
He said, “I was surprised when Joyce and Collin broke up. I guess I thought all she wanted kids and a house, and a millionaire.”
Dr. Orenstein raised his eyebrow and closed one eye in a familiar theatrical gesture. “I think you know she has always been a romantic.”
“To be honest, I’m glad she finally realized that Collin was a mistake.”
“You always thought she wasn’t serious enough for you, or ‘intellectual’ enough.”
“She didn’t want me to get a Ph.D. in philosophy.”
“You decided against that about five years ago, as I recall. Taking a few classes is one thing, but a Ph.D. in philosophy would be ridiculous for you. Didn’t you say, then, that philosophy is about two things, questions that have solutions but are trivial and questions that are not solvable but are crucially important.”
“I suppose so. At least that seems to be what British philosophy is all about. But I can’t shake the feeling that the real issues of philosophy are still alive for me and for the rest of the human race.”
“But you only revert to being a philosopher when your life presents you with problems.”
“Isn’t that the only way philosophy is ever interesting: to help us solve vital problems?”
“Like the problem of your mother, for example.”
“That’s right. Philosophy is more than clarifying thought. That’s just the British legacy to the world after the fall of their Empire. When they began to lose power at around the turn of the 19th century and could no longer control the rest of the world with force, they tried to control the thought processes of the world instead, by subjecting all human thought to the cleansing power of their superior minds. I think it was just another aspect of their doctrine of The White Man’s Burden.”
Dr. O smiled. Brad liked to talk about the problems of philosophy but they had decided it was a weakness like playing chess instead of doing mathematics. Brad had come to the later-Wittgensteinian view that philosophy was a Zen-like process of clearing the mind of psychological problems and that most of philosophy’s problems, such as those arising from ethics and aesthetics were well-worn philosophical puzzles that were either insoluble or pseudo-problems. Certainly it would be better for everyone if he dedicated himself to solving mathematical problems instead of philosophical ones.
Dr. Orenstein said, “You were interested in the pathological personality and especially neurological problems like autism and their relationship to free will: how can an autistic person or a sociopath be held responsible for their actions.”
“Among other things, yes. I used to hate my mother until I realized that she was a sociopath or possibly a sub-clinical autistic personality and that she wasn’t responsible for the evil and suffering she was causing in the world. But it doesn’t really solve the problem. Maybe philosophy has a place after all. It might be necessary some day for philosophers of the future to become socially active or even revolutionaries who fight against ideologies that serve the purpose of pathological personalities who use them for their personal power. For example, religions have become refuges for human weakness. America is fighting a cold war of ideology with Russia and China over the question of socialism and yet tolerates superstitious and irrational religions and even encourages them.”
“Well, you sound like your grandfather now. I can’t understand how your free-thinking grandfather managed to live in the same house with your mother for so long.”
Brad smiled. “It was a very large house. And she was gone a lot. Don’t forget the Crusades for Christ.”
Dr. O said, ”One of Graham’s favorite images was that of the Buddha’s shadow on the wall. After the Buddha died his shadow remained on the wall for a 1,000 years. I believe he was also remembering Nietzsche who said that the shadow of God would be cast over the philosophy of the West for 1,000 years after His death.”
“People hide behind God. All the important questions of life are avoided by simple-minded slogans, like ‘God is on our side. We are fighting Evil. It’s God’s will.’ The simple problems associated with marriage and family, for example, are defined and discussed within the tight parameters of various religions and border on superstition.”
Dr. Orenstein smiled tolerantly. “You tend to get extreme when you are trying to make a point.”
Brad had gathered steam and continued. His voice rose with emotion, “So many of my wealthy friends had huge, gaudy marriages with families and not women. The girl’s families spent thousands of dollars on symbolic matches that were nothing more than economic and social alliances without love or even friendship. It was appalling. Joe French didn’t even bother to stop womanizing the week before his wedding. All those weddings were sanctioned by and held in churches and officiated by the most corrupt looking, hypocritical holy men.” Brad shook his head in disbelief. In fact, he wasn’t talking about his own friends but friends of Joyce, Dr. Orenstein’s niece. Joe French was a friend of hers. “Marriage, for them, is a crude form of social eugenics.” He waved his hand in disgust.
“O.K. Granted. And granted that philosophy is still of vital importance in law, medicine, psychology, education and everywhere else. But what you are interested in right now is one problem, the problem of marriage.”
Brad was silent for a while. He ran his hand through his thick, brown hair and looked out the window at a patch of blue sky. He thought of Joyce again. Then he thought of the Existentialism class at San Francisco State. “It was the Navy Chief that did it,” he said.
Dr. O looked puzzled.
“You know, the assistant who taught most of the class. He didn’t even have a college degree. His grammar was terrible. He was a former Chief in the Navy. That caused me to drop out of the philosophy program at San Francisco State.”
Dr. O said, simply, “I’m glad he caused you to drop that class.”
“Thank God for the Chief. I couldn’t believe it. It was a kind of epiphany, I suppose. I walked out after he said ‘seen’ instead of ‘saw,’ for the third time. The arrogance of that tenured professor allowing a man like that to teach his class. It should be against the law.”
Dr. O said, “You know what I think of that Jesuitical prestidigitator and philosophical charlatan Jean-Paul Sartre, anyway.”
They sat in silence for a few moments contemplating the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. It seemed to have a calming effect on Brad. Dr. Orenstein said. “You said you didn’t think Joyce could stand being married to a mathematician.”
Brad said, “Yes, I said that. More than once.”
“I’ve noticed that you had exactly one mathematical girlfriend. She was a Marxist and vegetarian, if I remember correctly.”
Brad colored. “Don’t rag on Margie. She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“I’ve never tried. I just remember that the relationship lasted about three weeks.”
“It lasted at least six.” He paused and assumed an air of mock despair. “If I lived in the Middle Ages I would probably have been a monk.” Dr. Orenstein’s eyes glinted with mischief. The doctor knew what was coming. Brad added, as he had on other occasions when he made the remark, “You know they weren’t celibate anyway. Their favorite dish was preadolescent girls because they didn’t have to worry about pregnancy.”
They knew each other so well that much of their conversation consisted in telegraphed, shorthand statements which an outsider would not be able to understand. For a very long time, since Brad’s grandfather’s death, they had met in his office at the Jung Institute under the guise of a Jungian analysis but it was simply an excuse to talk and a nice place to meet.
Brad said, “Joyce graduated near the top of her class at Wellesley but she doesn’t read much. She likes movies. She knows classical music and art better than I do and has a beautiful operatic voice but she only listens to popular music.”
Dr. O looked uncomfortable. He and Brad’s grandfather had always let Brad know that they had been quite rowdy in their youth and had not been perfect scholars. In fact, Brad’s grandfather had lived his mathematical dreams only through Brad. He was forced to work at a bank, for years, after his bankruptcy.
Brad continued, “She thinks the novel is dead and that movies are the future. But making movies costs a fortune. Anyway, I think movie making is a beautiful example of what corporate America can produce as art but it isn’t the product of an individual imagination. It’s the product of the group mind like the great cathedrals of Europe.” He paused and said with a cynical shrug of his shoulders, “She doesn’t want to make movies anyway. Sometimes I think she just wants to have fun.”
“You’ve convinced me yourself that the novel is dead.”
“It’s being killed by the universities and their Creative Writing programs. They’re a kind of branch of corporate marketing. “Write to sell.” Even when they’re serious, they preach that the main task of art is to entertain. That is pernicious nonsense.” He assumed a mock look of despair again. “Like I said, if I lived in the Middle Ages, I would have been a monk.”
Dr. O took his pipe from his mouth and, holding the bowl in his right hand, wagged the stem in Brad’s direction. “Your grandfather wouldn’t have approved of your womanizing.” His eyes crinkled into a smile. “Even though we did enough of it ourselves, in our own youths.”
Brad shrugged his shoulders and said, “I could never figure out how Joyce could hate football and yet never forgive me for not using my football scholarship at Cal or Stanford.”
“You were one of the best quarterbacks ever to come out of Piedmont High School. If your grandfather had lived, I suspect a lot of things would have been different.”
“Maybe at bottom, I’m just neurotic. I’m torn between the sensual life and mathematics and physics, which seem like modern-day theology. And also, of course, art. My novel. But the novel, seems like... I don’t know what... I suppose a waste time. I don’t really know why I want to write a novel. I agree with Joyce, that the novel is dead. The novel will be to the 21st century what poetry is to the 20th century.”
“It’s still not too late for you to stop accumulating useless experiences for a useless career as a novelist. And you don’t have to become a mathematician. You have many other choices. You could still be an engineer.”
“You know I think Ayn Rand is full of crap.”
Dr O laughed. “So do I.” It was a reference to an old discussion. Dr. O had injudiciously recommended that he read Atlas Shrugged, one of Ayn Rand’s novels, before he had read it himself. He thought it might interest Brad in engineering. After trying to read it, Dr. O apologized to Brad. It was a crude panegyric for laissez-faire capitalism. He said, “Well, you’ve always said you could make your fortune in real estate.”
“But as I’ve also always said, there is something so harsh and ugly about the world of big money that I’m afraid to even get started. I don’t think there is any return from a life like that.”
Dr. Orenstein smiled. “I remember when you were reading all those books about the shenanigans of the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson. It was the end of your illusions about politics too.”
“It wasn’t just the books. I started reading those books during the time when I was trying to get involved with the Democratic Presidential Campaign, that summer in 1963, just before the assassination.”
“You thought John Kennedy was a prince.”
“True… he was. I still think he was. But that’s another story.”
“You were only 20 years old when you met him.”
“I was impressed with Jack Kennedy. But some of the people around him, well, I mean the ones I met, the ones who were working on his campaign, were the most cynical bunch of bastards I’ve ever met. I guess I wanted to get to the bottom of the rumors about Jack too. So I started reading the books.”
“But you never got to the bottom of the rumors.”
Brad stretched in the chair and smiled. “Well, when I became an admirer of Fidel Castro I decided it was time to get out of politics once and for all.”
Dr. O chose not to respond to the irony in Brad’s voice. Instead he said, “You were lucky that you were too small to understand what was going on during the Macarthy era.”
“All I know is that when I first heard about Bobby Kennedy being assassinated, all I could think of was that the bastard got what was coming to him.”
Dr. O said, “There are ways to make money without becoming like his father, Joe Kennedy.”
“I know, but it is a lot more difficult.” Brad sighed and looked confused. He was glad that there was a fat lady in the lobby waiting to see Dr. Orenstein. When she knocked on the door for the second time, he got up to leave.
Brad burst through the front door, into the living room to find Derrin and Beatrice sitting at the big mahogany table. Derrin was sitting at the head of the table with Beatrice at his left side. She looked tired and unhappy. They both looked as if they hadn’t slept much the night before. Her blonde, wavy hair was bunched up on top of her head and she was wearing a colorful floor length dress with a flower pattern on it. It was rumpled and wrinkled and it looked as if she had slept in it the night before. Brad felt sorry for her and wished he had gone to bed with her on that first morning that he met her. Somehow, he couldn’t stand the thought of Beatrice sleeping with Derrin. Derrin looked serious and somewhat elated, if such a term could be applied to him. He said, “We were waiting for you to come back Brad. We need to meet as a group.” He cupped his hand to his mouth and called out sharply, “Cheryl.” They were silent for a moment and listened to the faint sound of guitar music. It stopped. Cheryl emerged from her room holding her guitar. She came downstairs with it in her hand, placed it on the long table and sat down. She was wearing a full-length, dark-maroon velour dress. Her thick, chestnut hair fell onto her shoulders and her clear white cheeks had little red marks on them, as if she had just come in from outside.
Derrin said, “I’ve got several pieces of information.” He looked at Brad. “Raney has decided not to move in with us.” He paused to let it sink in. “And Beatrice has decided to move out. In a week.”
Brad was relieved that Beatrice was moving out and he wasn’t surprised that Raney didn’t want to move into the commune: she hadn’t been in touch with him for almost a week. Beatrice didn’t look up. She smiled, self-consciously. Brad thought she looked much younger than 19.
“Cheryl has decided to stay and there are two more prospects, one of which I am certain will move in, an old friend of mine, Rod Green.” Cheryl began strumming her guitar.
Brad asked, “Who is the other one?” Beatrice’s eyes had been fixed on his and dropped, demurely.
Derrin said, “She is young. A very young woman of 17.” Brad’s eyebrows shot up. Derrin paused to stuff his corncob pipe with more American Indian tobacco-free leaves. “I wasn’t sure it was a good idea either, but I’ve already talked to her on the phone and she seems very mature. She’s going to go to The College of Marin in the fall.”
Brad had never believed in the viability of communes and had no ideas about the kind of people who would be good commune members. He said, “When do we get to meet them?”
“Rod will move into the small bedroom across from you right away. I’ll vouch for him. He works full-time at the airport and he won’t be around much anyway. Jasmine will be here tomorrow to talk to everyone.”
The next morning, Brad was out jogging and Derrin, Cheryl and Beatrice were sitting at the table, after breakfast. Derrin asked, “What on earth makes Brad think he has the talent to write a novel about us?” The look on Derrin’s face was rather too antic and Cheryl didn’t bother to look up, but her lip curled in agreement. She was picking out an exercise on the guitar for the second and third positions. Her music book lay open on the table. She said, “I say we give him something to write about. I mean he is so incredibly arrogant and at the same time so standoffish, so aloof.” She looked at Derrin and then at Beatrice. “I’ve tried to get close to him but I can’t.”
There was a silence. Beatrice, who was wearing bell bottom jeans and an acrylic sweater, said, “I think he is very talented. He can probably do anything he wants.” She drew a deep breath. “Maybe he just doesn’t want to get involved with you Cheryl.” Beatrice looked rested. She had sprung up out of her chair and was pacing around the table holding a cup of tea.
“Nonsense.” Derrin snapped. “He has a superiority complex because he was the quarterback on his high school football team, that’s all. He told me all about it. It was incredible. It set him back ten years in his emotional development.” His eyes flashed. Derrin had told no one that he was the fastest sprinter at his own high school in Los Angeles and that, in fact, he had run the hundred-yard dash in 9.6 seconds and had refused to play football himself. It was a point of great pride with him and he felt superior to Brad because of it. He cleared his throat and said, “I knew people like him in high school. They think football is everything. They go around praising each other and think they are better than everyone else.”
Beatrice stood up and stretched herself to her full height. She was not really short but she seemed tiny, like a small, delicate doll and her skin was pink and clear like a toy doll’s. She said, “I admire him for not playing football in college.”
Derrin stared at Beatrice with a glare that seemed malevolent but was, in fact, simply one of his ways of hiding surprise. She continued, “He said football was a symbol for American imperialism. He said it’s like two countries fighting for territory. Like each team tries to take the other’s territory. He said America has taken other people’s territory for its entire history. First from the Indians and then from the Spanish, the French and the English. He said that one day, he realized after reading something that Thoreau wrote, that he didn’t want to play football anymore, because it symbolized something he was against.” She spread her arms out. “Even the referees use chains to measure first downs that are replicas of the old 19th-century surveyor’s chains.”
Derrin’s malevolent gaze turned inwards and he seemed to be struggling with himself. Derrin couldn’t allow himself to admire Brad and he was trying to think of something to say. Beatrice added, “He’s more complicated than you think, Derrin. He does things for his own reasons. He follows his own conscience and doesn’t do things just because other people think he should.” Cheryl went back to playing the exercise on her guitar, almost as if she weren’t listening. Her head was bent down in contemplation, looking first at the music and then at her left hand, which struggled with the notes and cords. Beatrice frowned and the skin of her forehead moved without wrinkling. She placed her hands on her hips and said, spitefully, “Brad is extremely intelligent, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Cheryl stopped playing the guitar for a moment and tossed her dark hair over her shoulder. She said, with a hint of bitterness in her voice, “He has a master’s degree in mathematics. He must be a complete grind.” She took a deep breath and thrust out her chest, as if to emphasize the size of her breasts which were much larger than Beatrice’s.
Beatrice said, “I wish I had a master’s degree in mathematics.”
Derrin said, “What makes him think he is qualified to write a novel? He doesn’t even have a degree in English. He doesn’t even bother to ask me about my minor, which is in Creative Writing. He thinks classes in Creative Writing are irrelevant.” His voice almost squeaked the word ‘irrelevant.’ He shook his head in disgust and puffed on his corncob pipe.
Beatrice snapped, “At least he’s writing something, I don’t see you doing that,” Her wavy blonde hair moved from side to side as she ran into the kitchen to take the whistling teapot off the stove.
Derrin said, with scorn, “Anyone can scribble notes on paper. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Why are you defending him, Beatrice?” Cheryl asked.
Beatrice had returned from the kitchen with the teapot. She arched her eyebrows. “I don’t know. I just think you’re being unfair to him that’s all.”
Derrin stuffed his pipe with herb-leaves and lit it again. He smoked a non-tobacco mixture, which consisted of a blend of leaves, and herbs that a tribe of northwestern American Indians were said to smoke. He said, “Well, he should be back soon. Jasmine is supposed to show up sometime this afternoon so that we can interview her.”
Cheryl carefully placed her guitar in its case and carried it back to her room. She didn’t leave it there because she didn’t want Brad to play it.
A huge sadness entered Cheryl’s body as she lay on her bed looking up at the ceiling. Warren had been gone for a week, and she missed him. She imagined them in the shower, making love but then Brad appeared, with his sinewy, muscled body and his shock of dark hair, his sudden laugh and his magnetic blue-green eyes. He knocked on the door, rather imperiously, and she rose to open it. He pushed his way past her and entered the room. He told her to take off her shorts and she obeyed meekly. It went rather quickly. He ordered her to suck his cock while he went down on her and then he fucked her, rather imperiously and animalistically. The entire procedure took less than five minutes. She came rather gloriously but without much noise. Afterwards, naked from the waist down except for her tennis shoes, she hated him again. She felt rather desperate. She knew, however, that Beatrice was leaving and that Derrin wanted her for a replacement. She knew that it was hopeless to expect anything from Brad and she knew that she had little choice. She barely allowed her love for Brad to reach consciousness. She was full of reasons not to like him. She had finally broken off with Warren and was certain that she never wanted to sleep with him again. She remembered the orphanage and having sex with the head master. Then she remembered Brad’s mother calling on the telephone and how she had taken pleasure hanging up without saying a word. It gave her a great pleasure to listen to his mother’s voice, expectant and hypocritical. The few times Cheryl had picked up the phone, she listened for a few delicious seconds and then plunged the voice into silence.
She needed the famous spasm that was more like an earthquake and she didn’t even care if anyone heard. In fact, she knew that Brad was doing it too because she had listened in the long hall and even stood next to the door. She was awed and aroused by his huge, almost violent orgasm. She had done more than listen and she was not ashamed of it and in fact, she was proud of herself, proud that she was a free woman and she had the strength to do what she knew was right and necessary for her. In fact, one rainy night, she had fucked herself right outside his door while he was fucking himself on the bed with the noisy bed springs and she was as happy as a thief.
The next day was a very good day for Cheryl. She awoke to an empty house and almost every star and planet had swum into the right place in her astrological chart. In addition to that huge piece of luck, there was a very large, deafening jackhammer tearing up concrete next door. There had been no plan or forethought for what occurred that day. There had been no fantasy. The event was beyond, if not against, her will. She entered the hall again that morning, the long hall with the washbasin on the far end and Brad’s back bedroom door next to it. Vibrations from the jackhammer outside shook the walls. She undressed, slowly to the bone rattling noise and danced nude in the long hall, moving closer and closer to the bedroom door. Without plan, she mounted the brass knob and fucked it, gently at first and then furiously and when she came, she could feel the hinges of the wooden door clinging to the wall and then all of the walls and the entire house which seemed to move with the vibrations of her ecstasy. Afterwards, she knew she had done something extraordinary. She knew that fucking the doorknob, the door and finally the entire house, was one of the great sexual experiences of her life. She felt that she was a woman of the Sixties and that free women all over America were probably fucking door knobs and houses too and she always laughed to herself, a wonderful, tolerant and proud laugh whenever she remembered that she had fucked a house; that she had, in fact, fucked the entire commune that day.
Beatrice said, “Brad, I thought we should talk before I leave.” They sat in a multicolored, hippie-theme café, drinking tea together. Brad looked across at her angelic, dreaming face, framed by her light colored brown-blonde hair. Her small, doll-like body was nearly perfect and Brad thought that she would make a perfect wife for just about anyone in the world except him. He said, “Beatrice. I wanted to tell you some things that I never got around to telling you.”
She looked into her teacup and arched her shoulders, waiting silently for him to tell her. He said, “Life with me would make you unhappy.”
She thought, “You prick, that is supposed to be my line not yours.” She hid her disappointment with a smile. Brad was afraid she might say something stupid and maybe even sentimental. Instead, she was silent until he became uncomfortable. After what seemed like a very long time to Brad, she said, “They’re talking about you behind your back Brad.”
He looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“It’s harmless. Just gossip like. They think you’re arrogant. I don’t know. I suppose it’s no big deal.”
He said, “Cheryl is.... She ... ”
“What?”
“She’s not very, uh....”
She finished his thought, “I know: hell hath no fury like a woman spurned. It’s pretty obvious.”
“I didn’t know it was obvious.”
Beatrice asked, “Why don’t you like her?”
“It’s not that I don’t like her. I mean she’s beautiful and...”
She interrupted him, “You men are so hung up on beauty.”
“No, I’m not. I mean I’m surprised when the beauty doesn’t matter anymore, when it kind of changes and becomes invisible. I mean it disappears and…”
They sat in silence, in respect for Brad’s incoherence. She broke the silence again, “I have to tell you something about Derrin too. I suppose I shouldn’t but I have to.”
An impish smile appeared on her doll-like face. “He’s completely impotent. I mean it’s been almost three weeks and nothing.”
He laughed. “He is such a prick sometimes. And he can’t get it up.”
“There’s nothing between us.” She smiled a funny, crooked, almost disappointed smile. “There never was. Derrin seems to think he can will anything to happen. But he can’t will an erection.” She looked into her teacup. “You know, he reminds me of Dr. Spock.” She didn’t look up and her small, well-proportioned body shook with a laugh.
Brad said, “I can’t believe it. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world. What else could he want.” He realized with a start that he was talking about beauty again. He looked into her eyes and she wasn’t angry. He continued, “You’re so perfect. Your soul sparkles like the reflections from a diamond.” The metaphor was forced, but the feelings were not. “Leave this ridiculous commune and find the man who’s looking for you.”
“Brad.”
“I haven’t told you anything
about my life. I have a past. A big messy past. You don’t know anything about
it. I haven’t told you any of it. Forgive me.”
“I forgive you.”
“If I told you the truth you would kill me.” He reached inside his pocket for a small gold band. He said, “Open your hand.” He dropped the ring into her hand and then stood up.
She put it on the table. She looked up at him. “Brad. I can’t take this ring.”
“It was meant for a girl who was a lot like you.” He got up. “Please take it.” They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. He said, “The ring is going to be your good luck piece in life. It is going to bring you happiness. It will make me happy too, if you take it.” She picked it up and looked at it. She read the tiny inscription on the inside of the ring that was written to someone else. Her mouth opened slightly and she looked into his eyes. He said, “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a meeting with the Leader.” He smiled an ironic smile and said, “Good luck.” He turned and left the café. He never saw Beatrice again.