It was the end of October and Kentfield was unusually balmy during
the day but cold enough at night, especially when the fog climbed over mount
Tamalpais from the ocean and rubbed shoulders with that unwilling assortment
of hippies, hot tubbers, drug dealers, Vietnam war protesters, utopianists,
nudists, vegetarians, Buddhists, Born Again Christians, gay and Lesbian activists,
acid heads, pot heads, freedom riders, black separatists, socialists, advocates
of free love, rockers, criminals and squares. It was 1968 and the nation slouched forward,
nervously, towards a Presidential election or a civil war. No one was really sure which.
Brad’s relationship
with his Finnish Juliet was at a perfect stalemate. She seemed adamant about her fiancé, Sean.
Sean didn’t love her but she had known him since high school, their
families were a perfect fit and he was going to be a lawyer.
Brad went to the College
of Marin theater to meet her. She greeted
him with great warmth. She said the
theater was closed that night and she was free to do what she wanted for the
rest of the night.
Brad decided that Juliet was an avatar of Brunnhilda: She was a force of nature, a woman in the agony
of self-immolation. She was a self-proclaimed
virgin, sleeping in her self-built and self-ignited ring of fire.
She said, “I want you always to remember me.”
They held hands on
the redwood bench under the redwood trees in the dark.
He said, “Why not just run away with me and release yourself
from this blond, success-bound American surfer boy who doesn’t love you and
whom you don’t love.”
Juliet said, “We’ve been over this so many times. I don’t want to write novels anymore. I’m finished with that. I’ve got to live in the real world now. I’ll have a family and a good husband.”
“Why not write just
one more. The novel of your life. Drop him.” She
didn’t answer. He said, “OK. I
understand. Of course I understand. But why should I understand? I could grab you and throw you in my car and
drive you to Mexico. Baja. I know a place there called La Paz. It is a sleepy little fishing town. We could disappear there for awhile and then
we could go down to Cabo San Lucas and lie on the beach and …”
She wiped a tear away,
looked up bravely and smiled.
He said, “Or we could go to Manhattan. It is the most beautiful few miles of real estate
on the planet. Greenwich village.
Washington square. Central Park.
The museums. It is a miracle.
We could live three lifetimes there.
And then Paris.”
“I didn’t know you
were rich.”
“I’m not Juliet.”
He made an evasive motion with his hand.
“I told you about my mother. We
did a lot of traveling when I was a kid.”
“I’ve never been to
Europe or Mexico or even New York.”
“Look. We could hang out at Lake Tahoe.”
“Brad.” There was a silence. “I want you to put me in your novel just as
I am. I can’t run with you. I know what I said about the ring of fire but
it doesn’t apply to me.”
“What the hell.
I’m not talking about eternity. The
only thing I know for certain about myself is that three years from now I
won’t be a lawyer.”
“That’s cruel.”
She was a gentle soul and he was surprised by her quick anger.
“I didn’t mean it
that way.” He was covering all his
bases. He didn’t have any idea of what
it was that offended her. Brad felt
pretty certain that if he could get her between the sheets, in Cabo San Lucas
or even in a Hotel 6, he could take her away from her lawyer.
They had been through this several times. After each meeting she almost begged him to
return and he always did, but at longer intervals. It seemed to him that when the intervals were
longer she was happier to see him.
He asked, “Why do
you like to hold hands?”
“I want you to remember
me.”
“I’ve got a better idea. I’ll put you in my novel. Then the world will know how you sacrificed
yourself for Sean and for your children and your father and mother. And how it was the right thing for you and for
all the female readers too, who will immediately put the book down and refuse
to read any more of my thoroughly unromantic and implausible novel. It will be the final straw.”
“Life is implausible.”
“True. No one will believe this.”
Juliet said, forcefully, “So
what?”
He said, “They’ll know that
you weren’t ready to exercise your great intelligence and creativity, the
brilliance of every great warrior woman, of every Brunhilda. You weren’t ready for an idiot like me to play
Siegfried to your Brunhilda.”
She said, “I just heard the
sound of three million women closing your novel and two million men not getting
past chapter 1.”
He smiled. He looked out into
the darkness theatrically and assumed a mock pose. His voice was melodramatic, “You weren’t ready for an idiot like William
Bradford who wants nothing because he wants everything and who strives for
nothing because he stands in the void with empty hands waiting for anything.
Bradford, who will stumble in the darkness of this world and who will
need constant help and whose wounds will need eternal dressing and who will
endlessly seek out battles and yet be endlessly defeated.”
She said, “Well, your book will
never be published anyway. My 6th grade teacher, Mrs.
Chesterton used to tell us that the worst books get published and that great
books are usually trashed by the critics.
After you’re dead they’ll give you a Nobel prize.”
Brad had learned not to offend people with long quotations. He offered, tentatively, “The critic Clifton Fadiman said, in an article
in The New Yorker, about William Faulkner’s Absolom! Absolom! ‘The final blowup
of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.’ ” He smiled apologetically. I memorized about a hundred rotten reviews,
just to keep my sanity.”
She said, “Tell me another one.”
“One of my favorites is a review
of Melville’s Moby Dick: ‘a huge dose of hyperbolic slang, maudlin sentimentalism
and tragi-comic bubble and squeak.’ Or this one about Emily Dickenson, ‘An eccentric,
dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village- or
anywhere else- cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravity and
grammar. Oblivion lurks in the immediate
neighborhood.”
“Impressive.”
“What?”
“Your memory. How many of those
do you know?”
He sidestepped her compliment with his “trick memory” explanation,
“I have a trick memory, I suppose.
My grandfather helped me develop it.
And my mother too. I can’t leave her out of it. She memorized the Bible, of course and forced
me to memorize a good deal of it too.”
“Is that why you’re so good at mathematics?”
“Not at all! Memory has nothing
much to do with mathematics. Well,
it helps you get through classes without doing much work, but it doesn’t help
with doing real mathematics. I think
the only thing it helped me with was differential equations.
I was a real whiz at differential equations because you have to know
a lot of recipes but it’s no real sign of mathematical talent, believe me.”
“You must be a genius.”
“I met a 10 year old boy who was a lot smarter than I am. I mean he learned to speak fluent Russian almost
on his own in less than a year, when he was eight years old. One of his teachers happened to be Russian so
he taught him Russian! I learned German
in about two years but I had to study every day for about two hours. This kid learned how to speak German better
than I can after studying it for about three months! He could speak French, Spanish and Latin too. And he was only ten years old. He learned languages in a few months!”
“I took four years of French and I still can’t speak it.”
Brad hated this conversation although he knew that some variation of
it was inevitable after a display of his memory. He preferred the “you’re a genius” song and
dance to the “you’re a goddamned self-involved braggart” routine but he was
silent.
She asked, “What was your favorite
mathematics course?”
He answered evasively, “Oh,
I guess Number Theory.” He looked for
the usual blank stare. It wasn’t there. “Well, I proved a bunch of theorems about prime
numbers. It’s all pretty theoretical.
I mean it doesn’t have much practical value.
My grandfather was an amateur mathematician who really knew number
theory well and he taught me a lot of it.
Have you ever heard of the zeta function or Bernhard Riemann?”
She said, “No. I took calculus in high school. What theorems did you prove?”
He was surprised. “Well, it’s
not easy to explain. It’s got to do
with the Riemann Hypothesis. We proved
a bunch of things about the non-trivial zeros of the Zeta function.” He smiled down at her indulgently.
She smiled back and said, ironically, “I understand everything now.”
He said, “For a very short time,
we thought we had proved the Riemann Hypothesis itself. That would have been a very big deal. But I’ll explain it later. It’s too complicated to go into now.”
She persisted, “What’s the Riemann
Hypothesis?”
“A very ….a, well, a very useless theorem.” He didn’t want to talk about it. “Believe me, I’ll tell you all about it some
other time.”
After a silence she said, with a cheerful and yet resigned tone of
voice, “Our families are going out
to a restaurant on Saturday night. All
of us. Sean’s brother and sister and
my three brothers and their girlfriends and our parents. It’s really something. His family is Swedish and mine is Finnish.
All we do is sit there smiling at each other and the women make sure
the men aren’t drinking too much.”
“I knew a Finnish
guy who was a real rabble rouser. He
was in the Co-op movement in Wisconsin. He
was a socialist. And some of those
Swedes are something else too. Do you
know Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries?”
“Of course. But it’s not about Sean’s family, believe me.”
He lifted his arm
in a another mock, romantic gesture. “Mexico
awaits. Spain. Parts unknown.”
She smiled, “You won’t believe it, but we’re going to the
Parts Unknown restaurant.”
“I’ve seen it there
on College avenue. But I can’t put
it in my novel. It would lack verisimilitude.”
She said, “I think
you’re just a romantic.”
“I’m not. You feel exactly they way I do Juliet. I’m trying to tell you the truth. Don’t think I’m just talking poetic nonsense.”
“I don’t think you
are just talking poetic nonsense.”
He said, “You have a first class
mind. You have mathematical talent.
Why waste your mind playing housewife?”
“I don’t have a mathematical mind.
That’s just one of your fantasies.”
She had told him that she had got A’s in all of her high school mathematics
classes and had scored close to a perfect 800 on the advanced mathematics
achievement test and the scholastic aptitude tests.
It was the last night of their short, chaste love affair. He never saw her again.
During the next week, Brad,
Cheryl and Jasmine spent a lot of time together. It started when, early one morning, over breakfast,
they decided to go up the California coast on scenic highway 1 to see Drake’s
Bay, near Point Reyes. Derrin didn’t
want to go with them because he wanted to work in the garden so they took
Brad’s red, 1961 Volkswagen bug. They were in an adventurous mood and didn’t
stop until they reached Mendocino. After
having lunch in Mendocino, Cheryl remembered that the Redwood National Forest
had just been opened that year, near Crescent City, and so they decided to
continue up highway 1 to Leggett where they could get onto highway 101 and
proceed to Crescent City. However,
Jasmine wanted to go “the back way” and see a “real” forest and so they got
lost and finally ended up on highway 96 in the mountains of the Hoopa Indian
reservation. At 1:30 in the morning,
they found a seven dollar a night log cabin motel somewhere not too far from
the town of Hoopa and all three fell exhausted onto a single king size bed.
They slept peacefully together, engulfed in the black night of the
Six Rivers National Forest. They were awakened, at 11:30 the next morning,
by what they assumed was a Hoopa Indian cleaning lady but they were afraid
to ask. Back on the road, in the bright
daylight, they still couldn’t find
the Redwood National Forest and were grateful to even find highway 101, very
late in the afternoon. Except for one
stop at a Denny’s restaurant, they drove directly to the San Anselmo turnoff
and from there to Kentfield.
During the trip they shared many details of their past. Jasmine talked at length of her parents’ divorce
and of her father. She said that even
though her father had made a small fortune in real estate, he considered himself
to be a failed novelist. She said that
money was of little importance to him because he said that any idiot could
make money. But no one would publish
any of his four novels and, as a consequence, he had been seeing a psychiatrist
for the last five years, almost crippled with depression. He divorced his wife because he felt as if he
had let her down and that he was not worthy of being a husband and father. Cheryl talked at length of her affair with the
head master at the orphanage and how it had started when she was fourteen
and lasted until she left the orphanage at age eighteen. It haunted her and she said that she had always
thought she should try to prosecute him for statutory rape but was afraid
to. Finally, she talked of a group
of lawyers who were associated with a San Francisco women’s advocacy group
who had tried to help her, for almost a year. She said that they were all Lesbians and she
had finally got fed up with them. They
never got anywhere with her case and she felt that, at bottom, they only wanted
to seduce her. Brad talked at length
about his childhood affair with Jeanette and about the scandal that almost
resulted in his going to jail for child molesting when he was eighteen and
Jeanette was seventeen. He explained
that she still looked like a junior high school girl but they had got together
again for a few months after he had won the Fields medal. He described his mother’s behavior that led
up to his breakup with his Jewish high school sweetheart and he described
the period after his grandfather’s death. They were like travelers who meet
by chance on a long voyage, draw close together for a few days and reveal
more to each other than they have ever revealed to anyone else, only to part
and never see each other again.
It was the beginning of a single
week of intimacy that ended as abruptly as it had begun. Brad was happy that the tension between him
and Cheryl had finally dissipated.. He thought that Jasmine was the catalyst
who would allow a friendship to develop between all three of them They hiked up and down Sir Francis Drake boulevard,
from Greenbrae all the way to Fairfax, took trips to Sausalito and Golden
Gate park and on Sunday, Brad even convinced them to go to Oakland with him
to watch an Oakland Raiders football game at Frank Youell field. It was the first professional football game
either had attended and to their surprise, they both enjoyed the game, with
the help of Brad’s play-by-play description.
They left at half time and he took them to Piedmont and made dinner
for them in his mother’s mansion while she was away on a Crusade for Christ.
When they returned to the commune
that night, the house was dark and empty. They found a note on the big mahogany table.
It was from Derrin saying that he had decided to visit his father in
Pebble Beach and that he wouldn’t be home until Monday night.
Rod Green, it turned out, rarely slept in his room in the commune and
he was not there either. It was very late and they all went to bed in
separate beds.
Since his fiasco with Deborah and the ice-cream cone, he had returned,
on principle, to the pleasures of Onan. Although he was no longer a believer in the
orgone theory of Wilhelm Reich, he was still convinced that the sexual drive
should not be suppressed or even be allowed to go underground. To remind himself not to be controlled by his
sexual appetite, he put a picture on the wall, over his bed, of an ancient
Greek carrying a large phallus on his back.
He took it down during the week that he had his affair with Raney but
he put it back up a week after she told him to wait for her telephone call
and didn’t call. It was still on the
wall next to a poster of Sigmund Freud.
The next morning, he felt a great urge to make love to Cheryl and Jasmine,
together, and so he did, in his imagination. However, despite
his best laid plans, after breakfast, he found himself in Jasmine’s bedroom
helping Cheryl with the fingering of John Dowland’s Orlando Sleepeth. Jasmine was wearing a white terry cloth robe
with nothing on underneath and Cheryl was dressed in shorts and a halter. In a few moments they were on the king size
bed making love. Brad was surprised
that he was ready for sex again after only an hour’s rest. He hardly knew how they managed to get him onto
the unmade bed but he knew that if he stopped, life in the commune would be
very difficult and he would inspire their undying scorn. When Cheryl began to undress him, to his astonishment
Jasmine got up and left, without a word. His desire almost vanished and he required every
fantasy in his arsenal to make love to Cheryl. Afterwards, Cheryl was clearly unhappy and didn’t
wait for him to satisfy her but jumped out of bed, dressed hurriedly and bounded
down the steps and out the front door. Brad
went into his own room and saw her go through the front gate and turn down
Main street towards Sir Frances Drake Boulevard. He laid himself on his bed and stared at the
ceiling. He dozed for awhile and was
awakened by the sound of Warren, Cheryl’s ex-boyfriend, coming through the
gate. He looked through the window
and saw him with the wolf, straining against his leash. He went downstairs.
Warren asked, “Where is everybody?”
“I don’t know. Cheryl left about
an hour ago. Didn’t you see Jasmine?”
“Nope.” Warren rubbed the head
of the smiling wolf and bent over and nuzzled into the thick fur of his neck.
Brad said, “He looks like he’s part German shepherd.”
Warren said, “He’s 100% timber
wolf.”
“I thought you couldn’t domesticate timber wolves.”
“That’s what they say, but I think you can. I’m going to raise them and sell them to families.
Domesticated.”
Brad asked, with strained politeness, “Do you really think they can be domesticated?”
“It’s supposed to be hard, but I think I can do it.”
“So. What are you going to do that’s different?”
“I’ve been raising him in the car with me and I take him everywhere
I go. He never leaves my sight. I sleep with him in the car and my beagle puppy
Holmes is always with us too. I think
that helps.”
Brad reached out his hand towards the wolf. The wolf sniffed it and turned away, indifferently.
“He doesn’t seem too friendly.”
“He’s friendly with me. Ain’t
cha pooch.” Warren leaned down and
the wolf licked his face but not with enthusiasm.
“But I have an idea. Until I
can afford a kennel I need somewhere for him to stay when I have to go somewhere.”
He added, apologetically, “I
mean I don’t leave him very often but sometimes it’s unavoidable.”
He leaned down and talked baby talk to his wolf again. “The little guy is getting too big isn’t he? Needs a place to run around.”
The wolf’s feet were large and even though he was as big as a full
grown German Shepherd, he looked like he was about six months old. Brad asked,
“How are you going to keep him from jumping the fence.”
“Oh. I would never allow him
to run free. I’ll tie him up. There. Under
that big magnolia tree. With a rope
and a water dish and a food dish.”
Brad looked at the magnolia tree and then back at the wolf. He
said, “Wolves are pretty clever.”
He looked up at his cat Zeta who was sitting on the roof, just outside
the window of Brad’s room, peering down at them.
“I don’t know if I would trust a wolf around my cat Zeta.”
Zeta was a very large calico cat but he knew his limits.
Warren said, “You wouldn’t hurt
a fly, woudja pooch?”
Brad said, very politely, “I
guess you’ll have to ask Derrin and the rest of them what they think.”
“I’ll pay. I’ve already talked
to Derrin. I’m prepared to pay $50
a month.”
Brad cringed. He knew that Derrin
would do almost anything for rent money. He
said, “Well, I don’t suppose he could
do too much harm as a puppy. But he’s
already as big as a German Shepherd.”
“Believe me, he’s harmless.” Warren
reached out his hand again but the wolf was busy smelling something and ignored
his hand.
It was agreed later, without consulting with Brad, that the wolf,
whose name was Honcho, although no one, including Warren, ever called
him by his name, would stay at the commune on Main street when Warren couldn’t
be with him. He would stay in the front yard, tied to the
magnolia tree and Warren would feed him and put him in the car at night and
keep him with him whenever possible. Warren
promised that most days the wolf would be with him and his puppy, Holmes,
and they would be training him. Brad
shrugged his shoulders and said to himself that the commune wasn’t really
important to him anyway and therefore he didn’t give a damn.
The next night, at dinner, Derrin announced that a woman with a three-year-old
child had decided to rent both the vacant room and the large hall behind her
room and Brad’s room, for $150. The
formality of all commune members interviewing prospective members was dropped.
$150 a month was too much for Derrin to let slip away.
She received alimony and he assumed it was a sure thing. The large hall in question was as long as two
large bedrooms and about half as wide, with a bathtub at one end and a washbasin
at the other end, opposite Brad’s room. He protested, instinctively but without conviction,
that he should have control of half of the hall but Derrin asked him how he
proposed to divide the room since the wash basin was on his end and the bathtub
was on the other end. Brad could come
up with no obvious answer and capitulated again because, at bottom, he didn’t
really give a damn about the hall and never even went in there except occasionally,
to use the washbasin.
Derrin said the woman would be there the following night and they could
all meet her at that time. Although
she had a three-and-a-half-year old daughter no one mentioned the wolf.
Brad didn’t say a word. He reasoned that there would be time enough
to deal with it.
After the meeting, Derrin called Brad aside and said there was a possibility
of working at the airport as a baggage handler; he said that Rod Green knew
some people at Hughes Air West who were looking for seasonal baggage men.
Derrin was planning on working there himself and if Brad could work
there for a few weeks or even a month, during the holiday season, and pay
his salary into a rent fund, the commune could be solvent well into 1969.
Brad smiled at his audacity and said he would think about it. Derrin added that he was sure that they could
get four Avis rental cars, for the following weekend, to return to the Seattle-Tacoma
airport for $50 a car. That would solved
their immediate problem which was a short-fall of rent, before the new woman
moved in. But there was another problem:
no one had seen or heard from Cheryl for three days, including Warren.