Chapter 19
The
four men sat in the bare living room. It
was Anne’s ex husband, Red Freddy’s place.
Red sat in his leather armchair smoking a
“Shit.” Walt rubbed his unshaven chin. He glowered at Warren who had always seemed like a wimp to him.
Red
said, “Chickenshit.” He flicked the long ash of his Cuban cigar onto
the dirty rug and worked it into the rug with the toe of his shoe. He was the bantam rooster who had roughed up
Anne many times. He was five foot seven
with thick red hair on his muscled, freckled forearms. He, Walt and Mark imagined that Brad and Derrin
participated in orgies with Anne, Cheryl and Jasmine. Anne had obtained a restraining order against
Red from the state of
Walt thought he had a right and duty to hate Brad because he was corrupting innocent women, including his sister, in an immoral commune. In truth, Walt hated him because Brad was protecting Anne from his own sexual advances.
Mark imagined that Jasmine was being corrupted by Brad and Derrin. He said, “We can’t bring down that animal without you Warren. Unless we use a baseball bat.” Mark was thin, wore glasses and was five foot six inches tall. Jasmine, who was ashamed of her ex boyfriend, always described him as “a friend from high school.”
Walt said, “You don’t know shit about Brad.”
“What do you mean?”
“I found out about that asshole a couple of nights ago. I was blocking his way to Anne’s room. I wanted to see what he would do.”
Walt glared at Warren whom he considered an idiot. He said, “You believe that?”
“I
think I know Cheryl pretty well. I
believe what she says.” If
Red flicked another ash from his cigar onto the rug and looked up at Walt expectantly.
Walt answered his own question, “He said to me, ‘are you for real?’ And I said, ‘what’s real Brad?’ He put his fist in my face and said ‘this is real.’ ”
Red said, “He’s fucking your woman Warren. Are you going to let him get away with that?”
“He’s not fucking my woman. She’s a free agent. I don’t control what she does.”
Mark said, “No, but you don’t have to suck his cock too.”
“Fuck that,” Walt said. “Sports are bullshit. They don’t mean anything to me.”
“What it means is all three of you guys together couldn’t bring him down with three baseball bats.”
Red said, “You could bring him down with your bare hands.”
Walt said, “You wouldn’t know if...” He let his voice trail off and spat on the rug.
Mark said, “I suppose you’re going to tell us Brad’s a queer.” He cut a long piece of wood from the stick with his pocketknife.
Red laughed. He said, “Anne told me that he had a lot of girlfriends before he moved into the commune.”
Red said, “I don’t believe Anne either. I can tell when a woman’s got the hots for a guy. But we can’t touch him without you man.”
“Well, you can count me out. Even if I my hands weren’t lethal weapons, there’s no reason to hurt Brad and Derrin. Especially Derrin. He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag and I’m sure he wouldn’t even put up a fight.”
Mark sneered and looked at Walt as he said, “He’s sleeping with Cheryl isn’t he?” Walt’s eyes glowed with contempt and scorn.
Walt
turned to Anne’s ex, Red, “I say we
go after them without
Jasmine’s high school boyfriend, Mark, laid his knife on the oak table and took a pair of brass knuckles from his pocket, “These will take Brad out.”
“I’ll take care of his groin,” Walt said, “once we get him down.”
Red said, “He doesn’t know where any of us live. He couldn’t do anything anyway. I’ve got friends.”
“His brother is bigger than he is. And he has friends too. You’ll never get away with it. Besides, he’ll probably kick the shit out of all three of you anyway. I’ve sparred around with him myself. He’s a natural. He’s a lot faster than I am and I shouldn’t admit it, but he is the kind of guy that could get lucky and take me out. I’m telling you, you won’t have a chance.”
Red said, “He won’t see it coming. I know him. He’s a certified idiot. All you have to do is smile at him and get him to look away and then hit him in the face. Or just sneak up from behind him and hit him with a two by four. He’ll think you’re inviting him to a party.”
Red said, “We don’t need to kill him, man.”
Walt
said, “Leave it to us
They were small men, except for Walt who was six feet tall and weighed 150 pounds. Red had been in prison for petty theft. He was a bully and a coward who was naturally afraid of men like Brad. Mark was very thin and had developed a hatred for high school athletes, although he didn’t know until that day that Brad had been one. Walt hated Brad because his sister had fallen in love with him.
On
Derrin
followed Cheryl closely on highway 5 all the way to
Brad went to the Marin county courthouse with Anne the following Monday morning. They had driven past it many times but it was the first time either of them had been inside the huge, low slung circular building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The T-Bird had uninsured motorist insurance so there wasn’t much to worry about. It looked as if the judge would make Anne attend traffic school and buy car insurance and there would be several hearings, but there would be no fines and she would keep her license.
Brad told Anne that he had agreed to work at the airport to help pay the rent and Hughes Air West was now hiring extra baggage handlers for the increased holiday traffic so he wouldn’t be able to go to court with her. Anne accepted it gracefully and went to the rest of the court hearings alone.
Rich
said, “Why are you going to work as a baggage man
at the
Brad grinned at his brother apologetically. “Don’t worry about me. I agreed to work there for about three weeks. Is that a big deal?”
“And your car. I know you’ve never had a thing for cars, but a used Volkswagen that looks like a hippie wagon. That’s too much.”
Brad sat in the big leather couch of his brother’s well-decorated living room holding a bottle of German beer. He was holding the brown bottle close to his face and reading the label in German. “God this language is difficult. I thought I had mastered it once. Sort of.”
“You’re going to be a baggage man at the
“What? What are you talking about? I’m not going to BE a baggage man. I told Derrin I would work there for a few weeks to help them pay the rent. That’s all. No big deal.”
“No big deal! I’ve watched you go from one campus to another and one woman to two women and then back and then nothing for almost a year. When are you going to find yourself?”
“I’m right here Rich.” He took a long drink of beer. “I’m not looking for myself. Why don’t you relax?”
“You’re twenty five years old man. You’re not a kid anymore.”
“So what do you want me to do, get younger or what?”
“You’ve got, what, ten top universities that still want to give you a Ph.D. and let you teach for them. Why don’t you do something besides hanging out in a commune like a hippie.”
“I’m not a hippie. I don’t like to turn my back on people that’s all. I told Derrin that I would do this and I’m doing fine living there. I’m not going to work at the airport for more than a month, at the most. I told him that at the beginning. He doesn’t expect anymore.”
“A month! But what’s the point? You’re rich. You don’t need the money.”
“I’m not rich.”
“What are you talking about? I inherited the same amount as you did from Gramps. You haven’t exactly squandered your money. You won the Fields medal on top of it. Mom knows you’ve got money too.”
“The Fields Medal was only about $15,000.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“Fine. They don’t know anything at the commune. Just don’t let anyone else know.”
Rich shook his head in disbelief. “So you’re going to work at the airport just to prove that you’re a regular commune-guy. Just like they are.”
“I don’t want them to know anything about my past. I want them to think I’m just a normal guy like they are.”
“Some people find the right people to hang around with. If you didn’t surround yourself with bums you wouldn’t get hit up for money all the time.”
“I don’t want to choose my friends by the size of their bank accounts or my girlfriends by the lengths of their noses.”
Brad’s tone of voice was sharp and his brother was hurt and a little angry. “I’m just your little brother, I couldn’t possibly know anything. You and Gramps were always studying Gauss and feeling so superior.” His brother was referring to Gauss’s very difficult study of Number Theory called Disquisitiones Arithemeticae, which Brad’s grandfather knew by heart and transmitted to Brad.
“You were always welcome.”
“I was too young. I couldn’t keep up with you. And gramps didn’t have time for me. Even Jeanette couldn’t keep up with you.”
“Not true. Jeanette was a very competent mathematician. She simply lost interest in Number Theory. After she got interested in geometry, I couldn’t keep up with her either. Especially after she got interested in biochemistry. They even went off into Knot Theory together. Mathematics is a very big topic.” Brad and Jeanette had taken calculus together at Piedmont high school when they were in the eighth grade at Piedmont middle school. After that there was nothing left for the Piedmont mathematics department to teach them.
Brad said, “Look. I’m lucky to have a brother like you. But this is no big deal. I promise to get out of there after I work at the airport. I admit that I made a mistake. But you should lighten up a little yourself. The country is going through a revolution. Haven’t you noticed?”
“I’ve
noticed. But I want to be a biochemist
myself. It isn’t easy. UC is a very competitive place. I want to get into a good graduate school next
fall. I’ve got to keep my nose to the
grindstone until I get out of graduate school. Caroline’s doing the same thing. So are our friends. If you just did what we are doing, you could
get your Ph.D. at
Brad
lifted his bottle again. He was silent. They had had this conversation many times before.
He loved mathematics but he was afraid that if he gave in to his passion
he might wake up twenty years afterwards in a dingy office, surrounded with
papers, stacks of books and a bunch of grimy, bearded graduate students.
He thought of the many textbooks that he had almost memorized as an
adolescent: A Course of Pure Mathematics by G.H. Hardy, Handbuch der Lehre
von der Verteilung der Primzahlen by Edmund Landau, The Collected Papers of
Ramanujan and that impenetrable book by Gauss, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. Without the help of his grandfather Brad knew
he would never have been able to understand Gauss’s book. They were universes, which he was afraid to
visit again, countries whose passports he had purposely put aside and then
forgotten where he had put them. He
had gone back to mathematics, briefly, and they had awarded him a perfunctory
master’s degree at the
Moving
to
“I’ll be out of there within a few months. I’ll get serious. I promise.”
“What about graduate school?”
“I don’t know. I still don’t know.”
Rich said, “You’re still searching for something, isn’t that it?”
“I suppose so. Remember Goethe.”
“Yeah.” Rich smirked. “The Eternal Feminine leads us on.”
“I know, most people think that’s crap. Especially women.”
“It’s something deeper Brad. What does Dr. Orenstein call it? The search for the Self, the process of individuation. Whatever.” He waved his hand in the air dismissively. “But I think it’s because of mom. What she did to us with her religious fanaticism.”
“What do you mean?”
Rich said, “You know. Inauthentic religion. ‘Just accept my superstitions boys, accept that the world was created in 4004 BC and stop thinking.’ ”
“Why is she like that Rich?”
“I don’t know, but she obviously left us both with a spiritual vacuum. I know how you feel about the theories of Carl Jung and all of that spiritual stuff, that it’s all bullshit, but I still think you are looking for some deeper meaning in life, some kind of substitute for God.”
Brad said, “I came across a passage from Goethe that has been haunting me for a few days. I was reading his Conversations with Eckerman about the Eternal Feminine and all that stuff and I came across this passage.” He looked up at the wall and quoted from memory, “Goethe says, ‘Basically it has all been toil and work and I have not had more than four weeks of real happiness in all my seventy five years. There were too many demands on my activities outside as well as inside of me. My real good fortune has lain in my poetic reflections and creations. Only how greatly these have been disturbed, limited and hindered by my external situation. If I had been able to hold myself back from public and business endeavors and activities and been able to live more in solitude, I would have been happier and have accomplished far more as a poet.’ ”
“OK, I’ll bite. How’s your novel coming?”
“I’m not ready to write it yet. I’m just taking notes.”
“What is Dr. O saying about your situation these days?”
“Mostly the same old Jungian stuff. He thinks mathematics represents my overdeveloped rational side and that I have a need to integrate the irrational, spiritual side of myself before I can continue with mathematics. He thinks my sexual obsessions were a way of avoiding the problem. He’s afraid I’m becoming a hippie too even though he doesn’t say it. But I suspect he actually thinks it might be a good thing if it doesn’t become another excuse for ‘more sexual adventures,’ as he puts it. You know how he talks.”
“Yeah. It’s one of the reasons we love him. His old fashioned integrity.”
“You know, he means as much to me as anyone in the world now. Every time I see him, I notice how old he is and it scares me.”
Rich said, “You and grand pop were pretty close.”
“So were you.”
“He was our father.”
Brad added, “And mother.”
“But you two were inseparable with your mathematics and games.”
“True. He made it fun. I never knew it was work until I got to U.C.”
Rich said, “I played some of the games too. And I was always tops in mathematics, like you were. I sort of came up with your reputation to follow. But you were in never-never land as far as I was concerned: Number Theory, Functions of a Complex Variable… I mean looking back, it was kind of incredible. You were studying books when you were twelve years old that are still beyond me.”
“It’s just another language. They’re not beyond you anymore than Greek is beyond a bright, twelve-year-old Greek boy. I was never aware of any difficulty. Even Gauss’s book. Gramps had so many notes and explanations the book almost seemed simple. Later, I realized that without those notes I wouldn’t have understood anything.”
“I never learned to read Latin.”
“Rich. I didn’t either. Latin wasn’t the problem, believe me. Remember the chess books? You studied the same chess books I did. I don’t think it would have bothered you if they were written in Sanskrit. You would have found a way.”
Rich said, “Yeah. But he wouldn’t let you read ‘em. Remember that?” He laughed.
Brad said, “Are you kidding? I read them anyway just so I could beat you!”
“Bull shit. You couldn’t beat me.”
“Hey brother, I had to LET you beat me just to make him happy.”
“Brad, if you don’t watch yourself, I’m going to bring out the chess board.”
“All right Capablanca, you weren’t too bad. I’ll admit it. You got pretty good at the end.”
Rich said, “Pretty good! I beat Bobby Fischer didn’t I?”
“Yeah Rich, and he was blindfolded and playing twenty other people at the same time, taking about 3 seconds per move.”
They laughed.
Rich said, “Hey, I take what I can get. I beat Bobby Fischer. And you never could beat me after what, your thirteenth birthday. Not once.”
Brad said, “You’re a genius.”
“I didn’t think you’d ever admit it.”