Chapter 23
It
was December and the days were cold even by
The baggage men wore white uniforms with the company logo, Hugh’s Air West, sewn over their right shirt pockets. Most of them were all in their late teens or twenties. When the stewardesses walked through the ready room with the pilots on their way to the airplane they gave them the eye. The stewardesses pretended not to notice and the pilots affected haughty disdain. The baggage men had a mixture of admiration and contempt for the pilots. Their cigarettes were all recently snuffed out or held behind cuffs because they weren’t supposed to smoke in the ready room.
The two supervisors both had brothers who were baggage men and the brothers told the rest of the baggage men not to worry about the no-smoking rule. As long as they didn’t get caught, their brothers had told them they could smoke as much as they wanted. Since the supervisors only made obligatory appearances in the ready room a few times a day, there wasn’t much effort to hide cigarettes.
Brad didn’t stand out very much among them. They were all over six feet tall and the biggest was called Sandy, who was six five and weighed about 240 pounds. There were only 9 baggage men because Air West was a small company and only provided five or six flights a day out of San Francisco International. They were all athletic and with Brad at quarterback they certainly could have formed an nine man football team that would have given a challenge to most of the high school teams in the Bay Area and maybe a few college teams.
Derrin wasn’t a baggage man. He was an oiler, so-called because he drove an oil truck, which serviced the airplanes. He spent the entire day alone in his truck, reading newspapers or daydreaming while he waited for the planes to land. He didn’t wander the airport halls during slow times as the other baggage men did or sneak off somewhere to drink, blow a joint or meet his girlfriend for a couple of hours. Brad’s easy affability and acceptance by the other baggage men surprised Derrin who thought of Brad as a loner like himself and Derrin’s anti-social behavior surprised Brad.
Brad had teamed up with 19-year-old Bob Young. Bob and Brad usually worked side-by-side in the belly of the airplanes or sat side-by-side on the carts that hauled baggage from the airplane to the conveyor belts and from the conveyer belts back to the airplane. Bob was boyish and immature but he was full of high spirits and good humor and Brad enjoyed being with him. He also provided Brad with an excuse not to have to spend too much time the rest of the baggage men who were mostly working class men whose highest aspiration was to become managers or save enough money to go to college.
During slow periods Brad usually went off by himself. He continued his meetings with the United Airlines beauty queen who greeted passengers, but, under pressure from management not to talk to her, kept the meetings shorter than before and more spaced apart. He told her about the commune and his former life as a football player. She told him about the Miss America pageant and the politics of winning the Miss Illinois contest and they were both pleased with each other and laughed at the ridiculous obstacles that their bosses had placed between them. They thought it was amusing that everyone was afraid they might develop an embarrassing romantic attachment when in fact they simply enjoyed being in each other’s company. It was ironic because the reason they felt so comfortable was that each knew the other was not romantically interested.
The next weekend, on cold, blue-sky Saturday afternoon, Jasmine and Cheryl were sitting in the big living room talking about Raney’s upcoming birthday party. Raney had invited everyone in the commune. The well-known Jazz musician, Rolf Lewis, had agreed to come. Raney had met him at a party the week before and invited him without expecting that he would accept.
Jasmine asked Cheryl, “Who’s he?”
Cheryl said, “He’s a big time jazz player. I think he plays the sax.”
Jasmine whispered, “I’ll bet he’s really sexy.” She looked away into a private and lascivious place. Cheryl shifted in her chair uneasily. Jasmine persisted, “I’ll bet he’s coming just because he thinks he can get a piece of ass from Raney.” When her eyes met Cheryl’s, the lascivious look had intensified. Cheryl was displeased by Jasmine’s seeming obsession with sex. She regretted an incident that happened at the beach a few weeks earlier and she had felt a mild feeling of sexual aggression coming from Jasmine ever since. They had got quite drunk one afternoon and lost all of their inhibitions on a secluded spot on the beach with the surf roaring in their ears and the seagulls screeching overhead. Cheryl felt mildly ashamed of herself the next day and acted as if nothing had happened. She didn’t want to do it again and she didn’t want to talk about it either. She said, “Raney is giving a party next Saturday. He’ll be there. We’re all invited.”
Jasmine said, “I can’t wait to meet him.”
“He’s a big frog. I’ve met him. He’s fat and ugly.”
“They say the ugly ones are the best in bed. They really appreciate you.”
“He’s 44 years old.”
“I like older men.”
Cheryl’s voice was tired and rasped slightly, “Would you please stop?” Her eyebrows arched and her smile was crooked with irritation. She looked across at 17-year-old girl sternly, like a scolding mother. “I wonder what Brad is going to say. She and Raney were really close for a couple of weeks.”
Jasmine said, “Brad is an idiot.”
Cheryl looked displeased again.
“Well, you said so yourself,” Jasmine said defensively.
“I didn’t say he was an idiot. I said he doesn’t know what’s good for him.”
“It means the same thing in my book.” She began chewing her gum furiously. She gave Cheryl a petulant, bored look.
Cheryl said, “Raney doesn’t know what is good for her either. Throwing Brad away for a middle age has-been saxophone player.”
“He’s famous! It’s so cool.” Jasmine looked at Cheryl with a mixture of defiance and mirth. She stretched her arm around the back of her neck and scratched her nose with an elegant, double-jointed gesture.
“Jasmine! Would you please stop?”
Jasmine smiled playfully. She got up and looked down at Cheryl impishly. She turned and went into the kitchen calling over her back, “You’d give your left tit for Brad.”
Cheryl’s brow creased slightly. She looked up at Jasmine, speechless. She suppressed the desire to tell her that she was being crude and said instead, “Leave me out of it please.” She wanted to tell her that she was a self-centered, middle class brat and hypocrite.
Derrin came in from the Garden. A mini-bushel of straw-blond hair fell over his forehead and it occurred to Cheryl that he looked like an impotent satyr. His voice was sharpened by irritation, “What are you two arguing about?”
Cheryl said, “Were not arguing. We’re talking about Raney’s new boyfriend, Rolf Lewis, the jazz-man.”
Derrin laid the garden shears on the table and took off his gloves. His hands were white and delicate but the backs were covered with wiry, blond hair. He said, “I’m a little worried about Raney. Lewis has a big reputation as a womanizer. And a drunk.”
Jasmine asked, “Are you going to the party?”
He said, using one of his occasional cliché’s, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Cheryl said, “I heard he used to be a friend of Alain Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.”
Derrin snapped, “Not hardly. It was the other way around. Alain Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were befriended by Lewis before they became famous. He is one of the best saxophonists in the world.
Jasmine said, “I’ll bet he’s rich.”
Derrin said in his best fatherly tone, “They say that he lives way beyond his means. He had some best seller albums in the early sixties and he invested some of the money wisely.” He paused. “And some of it unwisely. He drives a white Rolls Royce. I know that much. But he’s not really rich. Just well off.”
Jasmine laughed, “Well off!”
Derrin said, “He might be a
millionaire but he probably isn’t. I
just read an article about him in the Berkeley Barb.
He went through a lot of money in the late fifties and early sixties. That was when he started drinking heavily. The article said he’s Jewish but he’s an atheist.
It said he used to make a ritual of being gross.
He wanted to irritate the Jewish community so he went out of his way
not to eat kosher and to proclaim his atheism publicly.
They said he had himself photographed at a banquet eating a suckling
pig with his friends. His parents are
orthodox Jews and they ostracized him or exorcised him or something like that. Anyway, they had a ritual funeral for him and
said he was dead and no longer a Jew. It
was a big deal in
Jasmine said, “He’s rich.”
Derrin picked up a large corrugated iron watering can and began watering the houseplants. He said, thoughtfully, “He isn’t poor. At least not now. But he probably will be if he keeps drinking the way he does. The article said he’s an alcoholic.”
Cheryl said, “It doesn’t seem like Raney would go for a guy like that.”
Derrin smiled and said, “At least he’s Jewish.”
When Brad heard about Rolf Lewis, he became angry and immediately recalled Cheryl’s pithy expression: that fat-assed little Jewish hypocrite. But his anger changed rapidly to sadness. He called Joyce and asked her to come to the party with him but she refused. Then he called Gloria, Bob’s mother, and she refused also and advised him not to go. Like Dr. Orenstein, she thought Joyce was the obvious choice for a wife and that Raney was irrelevant. Her opinion didn’t please Brad but he liked and respected her very much and he was happy that he had not lost his talent for attracting interesting women.
The next day, Joyce made an appointment to see Dr. Orenstein, in his
office at the Jungian Institute in
Joyce was faced with an American dilemma. She was an aristocrat of intelligence, health and sensibility and she was a millionaire. She had gone to an exclusive private girl’s school on the East Coast and she had been friends with the social elite. But she had found the super rich and famous to be mostly shallow: she had met professional athletes, actors and rock and roll stars with the intelligence of gas station attendants. She wanted desperately to judge people for the content of their character and not for the size of their inherited bank accounts or popularity with the masses. She hated the American need to love what is popular and to ridicule what is rare and difficult. She experienced the corruption within her own soul as an attraction to powerful men whose intellects and sensibilities she was repelled by.
Joyce sat in the same chair that Brad had sat in so many times and said to Dr. Orenstein, “Bill asked me to go to a party given by an ex-girlfriend.”
“You’re talking about the Raney business?”
She looked at him questioningly. He said, “Bill told me yesterday. Rolf Lewis. He’s a beatnik. I don’t think you would fit in there.”
Joyce said, “I don’t like it. He’s trying to use me as a pawn in his chess game with an ex-girlfriend.”
Dr. O said, “It doesn’t sound that cut and dried to me.”
She asked, “Isn’t Bill just continuing with his search for experience? Working as a baggage man and living in a commune? Now he wants me to go the this party. It’s just like it was when he was having affairs with all those women. Why should I stand for that?”
“There will always be an element of the adventurer in Bill. If you kill that you’ll kill Bill.”
“So
you think I should go to the party?” Joyce
loved classical music and she knew that Rolf Lewis had left a promising career
in the
“Not exactly. I think you might have fun. I know that’s basically Bill’s approach. But he’s playing too much. And you haven’t played enough. You’ve been pretty serious with all of your social duties and activities.”
“That’s all over with now.” She hung her head. She looked up suddenly and smiled. “Well, I guess I’m being a little melodramatic. But I know I need something else. Going to a party with a bunch of beatniks and hippies to meet an ex-girlfriend of Bill’s seems really stupid.”
“You would be going with Bill. I’ve never known him not to be able to handle himself well, in any situation. I have to admit, I’m not certain why he wants to go to the party. When I asked him why he was going to the party, he just smiled, implying, I suppose, that I was a hopeless old fuddy-duddy for even asking.”
“I feel as if Bill likes me as a friend but that he doesn’t really love me.”
“That isn’t true. Remember his past with women. He has been wounded by them and he went down a very difficult path with them for awhile. He’s finished with all that but habits die slowly. Don’t forget Rhonda Bradford! He needs you.”
She was silent for a moment. “He needs me but doesn’t know it.” There was a touch of cynicism in her voice.
“You could build a happy and a good life together. Tell me what it is that Bill couldn’t do? He could become a real estate mogul or a world class mathematician.”
She said, with a defiant smirk, “He’ll never be a politician. Not with a past like he has.”
“And that’s a shame for this American democracy that the best people
can’t run for office because they’ve had some irregularities in their past.
Joyce said, “I suppose you want me to save him from himself.”
Dr. Orenstein said, “I’m not worried about Bill. He’s finished with that stupid period he went through. We’re just seeing the tail end of it. He’s beginning the springtime of his emotional life. We’ll see a few April showers, that’s all.”
“This looks like a downpour to me.
Did I tell you that I met one of the girls in the commune?
She was about as crude a woman as I’ve ever seen. I can’t describe the impression she made on
me. She was incredible. I can’t believe that
“Americans are trying to live down their Puritanical heritage. They’re rediscovering Thoreau and Emerson and
Whitman. They want to move back to
the land and live in communes and they want free sex. You and I know it’s immature and futile and
is probably just a reaction against the
“She was crude. And I can’t believe Bill has taken another one of those proletarian jobs. He’s acting like one of those French aristocrats, before the French Revolution, who played at being peasants. He’s really too good for that kind of thing.”
“He’s not from an aristocratic family, Joyce.” She was silent. Dr. O said, “He tells me that he’s just honoring a promise by working at the airport and that he’s moving out of the commune at the end of the month.”
She said, softly, “I know we shouldn’t forget his past, his mother, especially. But how does Raney fit into that?”
“Did he tell you anything about her?”
“A little. He spoke very highly of her. He called her a mathematical genius. She’s Jewish. Very pretty. But I don’t trust Bill anymore about that. Any woman he falls in love with is the most beautiful woman on earth, and lately, it seems, a mathematical genius. Jane was pretty, but she was not beautiful.”
“Jane was attractive in the same way you are.”
Joyce smiled and took it as a compliment. She said, “Tell me what you know about Raney.”
“I don’t know much more than you do. He has been indulging a fantasy that he can find a woman who has mathematical talent and who he can also fall in love with.”
Joyce said, “I think the only thing those women can admire about Bill is his enormous physical appeal. He was a magician on the football field.”
“He was seduced by the admiration of boys and girls for being so good at sports and he can’t forget it. He hates the idea of being confined to a room pushing around symbols so that a handful of mathematicians and physicists will be happy.”
She said, “He burned his athletic bridges behind him because he knew he would be tempted to go back if he didn’t. I think he regrets it now but he would never admit it.”
“Brad is like Ulysses who had himself tied to the mast of his ship and instructed his men not to set him free no matter how much he begged them when he heard the siren song. That’s what he did by refusing the athletic scholarships. But he couldn’t resist the women.”
She said, “It’s probably a good thing. I don’t sense that he has a need for more experience. His brother Richard said he hasn’t got near any of the women in the commune.”
“No. He’s pretty honest with me. It doesn’t sound like he has. He had a brief and ridiculous encounter at the end of the summer but it ended very quickly.” He paused. “You know, he didn’t hear about you and Collin breaking up until very recently.”
“We didn’t break up until the end of September. I didn’t tell anyone at first. It was so sudden. I guess I was ashamed and very hurt. And then I woke up.”
“Can you still be happy with Bill? Would you encourage him to become a mathematics professor?”
“I don’t know. He is so different from any mathematics professor I’ve ever known. He’s never hung around mathematicians. He’s gone to some conferences. No one would ever know that he was a mathematician. It’s true that he used to sit in his room and write equations for hours on end and sit on the couch and stare at the wall while he was trying to prove some theorem.”
Dr. O said, “He doesn’t have the ballast of football anymore. I believe the loss of sports, along with the death of Graham of course, has set him off course.”
She said, “He could still play.”
“Maybe. But he’s 25-years-old. It would be a very odd thing for him to make
a comeback. He’s resisted this long. I doubt if any coach in
She was silent.
He said, “I’ve always thought you two would make a perfect match. But Jeanette was always there.”
“I know. I suppose you know she’s getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry at UC. She is still as brilliant as ever. I ran into her a few months ago. She asked about Bill.”
“That was such an odd situation. I never suspected that they were sexually active so young. She followed him like a shadow and then her mother moved out of town. Graham said, more than once, that she was a powerful mathematician in her own right.”
“He and Jane were lovers too. In their senior year in high school.”
“I learned that later too.”
She said, “So he probably felt that he needed to have experience with other women after that. After such an early, … such a…” She was unable to finish the sentence.
He sighed and said, softly, “Yes, apparently so.”
Joyce blushed slightly. Dr. Orenstein pretended not to notice and said, “But he doesn’t need any more experience. I can’t hide from you that I am a little worried about him. He has an irrational streak that runs right through him. It seems ready to take over, suddenly, almost without warning. And since Graham died, his interest in mathematics seems to be finished. There are several professors at UC Berkeley who contact me regularly to say that he should be persuaded to return to the mathematics at all costs, that it will be a big loss to mathematics if he doesn’t. He would be guaranteed a professorship at almost any large university in the country just on the basis of those theorems and the work he did around The Riemann Hypothesis. I think that you two could forge a very nice life for yourselves. You could travel in the summer and holidays and take sabbaticals and at his level he probably would only have to teach one graduate class. It could be a good life.”
She said, “Math didn’t seem to cramp his style when he was a boy. He was so disciplined. Sports, girls and mathematics. He didn’t even have any close friends off the field. Except for his brother.”
“Brad’s an individual. Taken for all and all, we will never see anyone like him again.”
“Uncle Norman! Bill is not going to die for a long time. Please don’t start the funeral oration just yet.” Joyce looked at her hands and fingers, as if she were studying youth itself and contemplating its fleeting quality. “You know I still love him. I guess he loves me. It’s funny, we never talk about love but it doesn’t worry me. We don’t have to talk about it. We both know it and I think we are a little afraid. We don’t say anything.”
“Give it a little more time. Think of it as a kind of thawing for Bill. Remember what I said, as he comes into his springtime there will be some April showers. Maybe Rolf Lewis is a godsend: he might be a downpour on the picnic of his illusions.”
“It’s a little strained, but I like the metaphor anyway.”
Brad and Joyce had talked long and often about her experiences with the American upper class and how she still missed the excitement and parties. She had cut a fine figure among the wealthy but she did not like the beautiful, cultured, “kept women” and their frantic social activities. And she hated the almost universal adultery. It was all part of the unspoken knowledge that Brad and Joyce had of each other’s lives. It was the invisible ocean they swam in together. Her weakness was a deep yearning for the excitement, attraction and glitter of money and power. She was wary of her weakness and not sure of herself. She had expressed it to Dr. Orenstein as well, and he had explained it not as a weakness but as a source of incredible energy and power that she would someday find within herself. Dr. Orenstein was still a disciple of Carl Jung even though he was aware of Jung’s all-too-human character flaws. He accepted that human existence is a Search for the Self, which consists of integrating those seemingly external sources of beauty and power into the personality, and that this Process of Individuation is a life-long quest, which only ends in death.
Dr. Orenstein agreed to Joyce’s wish that he talk to him before he
went to the party. He took a day off
from the airport and drove into
Sitting in the same chair that Joyce had occupied the day before, Brad said, “I love Joyce but I hate bourgeois living. I can’t imagine myself in a house with three children and a dog and no horizons.”
Dr. Orenstein, undaunted, replied, “Are you telling me you don’t want to marry her?”
“No. I’m saying I’ll go through any ancient ceremony she wants me to, including ritual tattooing but I wont believe in it any more than I believe in Holy Water or kissing the Pope’s ring. Marriage is an alliance of the heart and not something that can be sanctioned by the state or watched over by God.”
“What you just said would certainly please Joyce. I don’t even think she wants children and she’s
allergic to dogs. She has said that
she admires all those hippies who are having weddings on the top of
Brad laughed. “I didn’t say I didn’t want to have a family or children. I just don’t want to sacrifice myself for them. I don’t want to be the prisoner of my familial duties. I think it is stupid and crazy to sacrifice yourself for children who wont be able to be happy because they will have to sacrifice themselves for their children, ad infinitum. I’m not Chinese. And Joyce understands that. I need to be together again with a partner. I’m not sure I’ll be able to be completely faithful. I wasn’t even faithful to Jeanette.”
Dr. Orenstein knew the story already. He knew that Jeanette had two sisters and there were several friends as well. He said, “You were faithful to Jane.”
“Yes. I was faithful to Jane. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Jane. I guess I just don’t know if I will be able to be faithful.”
“Haven’t you slept with just about every kind of woman your imagination could convince you that you wanted?”
“I don’t know what the future will bring. There seems to be a never ending stream of interesting women.”
Dr. Orenstein knew that Brad liked a foil and that he liked to play mental chess. His grandfather had urged him to question everything and had taught him that nothing was too sacred to argue about.
“Do you still want Raney?”
“I think Joyce just stepped in and took her place. I don’t feel the same thing for Raney anymore. Maybe that’s what worries me. My incredible fickleness.”
Dr. Orenstein said, “Maybe Rolf Lewis fascinates you. Maybe you just want to meet him and you’re flattered that a woman that you fell in love with would be a woman he’s fallen in love with too.”
Brad smiled. “It’s a little too Freudian.”
Dr. O. persisted: he knew his quarry well, “Maybe you’ve fallen into a kind of ego trip with women. You like the challenge of the conquest. You’ve learned that love doesn’t last and the fun is going from one conquest to another. Raney is a tempting conquest.”
Brad said, sarcastically, “Sure. So what. We figured that one out last year.”
“It isn’t something you figure out, it’s a truth you live. You make choices in life. If you travel the road less traveled, you don’t travel the other road. I think Raney represents the road more traveled. Joyce and marriage are the true exception: a real marriage of equals, a real partnership that turns into a friendship and mellows from the original passion into a true marriage of minds. It is rare, it’s the road less traveled. Hugh Heffner of Playboy magazine has given himself the illusion that hedonism is somehow enlightened and intelligent behavior. He thinks he is a modern day saint battling the ghost of Puritanism but he is really just a common womanizer who is becoming rich in the process.”
They sat in silence awhile as Brad digested what Dr. Orenstein had said. The doctor continued, “Joyce suffered deeply from Collin’s infidelities and I think she was lucky that Collin’s father convinced him to dump her, unceremoniously, or she would have had the difficult life of marriage to an aesthete and a Don Juan. She is far too good for that.”
Brad took a deep breath.
Dr. Orenstein said, “You know, of course, that she had already caught Collin several times in compromising situations and there were even more rumors.” He paused, Brad thought, for theatrical effect. He continued, “An honest marriage isn’t easy or as common as people think.”
Brad said, “That’s what I’m worried about. That I won’t have the strength for it. I don’t want to make a mess out of two lives and even more lives if we have children.”
“I don’t believe it. Except when you were 18 and 19 and seduced all those older women and became a true Don Juan for about a year, you never lied to any of your girlfriends and more than a few of them left you before you left them, as I recall.”
Brad said with a sigh, “Maybe I’m more of a Don Quixote than a Don Juan.”
“I remember making you quite angry suggesting that once.”
“Not really. I suppose it hit too close to home, that’s all.”
“An irresponsible life seems easier but it isn’t in the long run.”
“You
don’t know how often I wish I had played football at Stanford. My life as a football hero at
“Don’t forget that your grandfather was alive then too. He made all the difference, not football. I think it is an illusion to think that football would have made you happy.”