Just One Catch (74 page)

*   *   *

“SO WE WERE SITTING
by Joe's pool one day and he asked me to be the agent for his novel
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man
,” says Deborah Karl. “I said sure. He was very easy to work with. He was who he was, and the book wasn't that hard to sell. He liked me and I loved him almost as a parent.”

In her forties, Karl had built an impressive client list as a literary agent, but Joe turned to her as a friend. She had grown up with his kids. Despite his public professions of impatience with children, he loved her son, Christopher, and her baby daughter, Sofia. His backyard pool was a favorite gathering spot for Karl's family. She knew Erica and Ted had a hard time with Valerie, but she enjoyed spending summer days with the couple. “Valerie was a good wife to Joe,” she says.

Karl appreciated the way Joe stayed loyal to her mother and father despite Fred's disapproval of Joe's “celebrity” life. Fred had been diagnosed with kidney disease. “He was determined not to let illness be a topic of conversation,” Deborah says. Her mother recalls, “People would phone and say casually, ‘Hi, how are you?' and Fred would get furious at me. He'd say, ‘You've been telling people I'm sick,' and I'd say no. He'd say, ‘People keep saying “How are you?”' It was just a normal greeting!”

Joe “broke through” to her father, says Deborah. He got him to talk about his fears. He was the only person who could. In turn, Fred was the only one who could tell Joe he was wasting time on “being famous” and should get back to work. Joe knew it wasn't so easy.

“Joe was a disappointed man—disappointed with himself. I do think that,” Dolores says. “One night, he and Valerie came to dinner. We were having a conversation about people like Gaddis and Pynchon who avoided publicity. And Valerie said something about, ‘Oh well, they're crazy. Why do they do that?' She went on and on about it. And Joe looked at us and said, ‘She doesn't understand.' He enjoyed the celebrity. But he knew.”

*   *   *

IN FEBRUARY 1999
, Joe and Valerie took a two-week cruise to Norway's Arctic region. Joe was paid to give a reading and a talk—he had done a similar cruise the year before.

To her delight, Diane Armstrong, a fellow passenger, found that “instead of shying away from inquisitive strangers, [Joe] had a friendly word for everyone on board, and [chatted] with them whether they [spoke] English or not. But then … [he'd profess] he [didn't] like meeting people. ‘They usually end up boring me,' [he'd say].”

One day on deck, Armstrong's husband, Michael, started to tell a joke. “Don't bother,” Joe said. “I've heard them all. They're all variations of each other. Why don't you save time and tell me the punch line? Or just tell me the beginning and I'll know if I've heard it already.”

“There was this guy—”

“I've heard that one!”

Later, Armstrong overheard Joe muttering to Valerie, “Why are you telling me this? I don't want to know about that.”

Valerie rolled her eyes. “He's not interested in anything,” she said.

One chilly afternoon, Armstrong came upon Joe leaning against the ship's railing. He watched the boat's prow nudge the ice barrier. A brisk and gusty North Pole breeze ruffled his still-thick hair. She made small talk. “I've heard that already!” Joe snapped. “Time to get off the ship.”

By now, she'd witnessed this routine often enough to know it was pose as much as truth. She asked what he
did
like to speak about. What did he enjoy in life?

“Little,” he replied. “I feel passionately about nothing anymore.” Back home, he still went to lunch with old friends, but they didn't talk much these days, he admitted. “We've said it all. There's nothing new to say.”

The wind reddened his cheeks. Ice walls rose around the ship. “I'd like to be in love again,” Joe confessed. “Women seem more beautiful to me now than they ever were, or else I'm noticing them more than ever now that I can't make use of them. I love sex and I miss it.”

Gingerly, Armstrong mentioned Viagra.

Joe shook his head. “There's a big difference between desire and arousal. First, you have to find someone exciting enough to want to use it. Sex starts in the head. I need some sense of romance. Men have one fatal flaw.” He watched a seabird tilt against cloud light. “It's the yearning for love and romance. And that longing for love outlasts the capacity for sex. It persists to old age.”

Armstrong was silent. Joe shrugged. Despite the cold, he suggested they go below for ice cream. Ever since childhood, he said, ice cream had been his favorite comfort food.

They joined Valerie and Michael. Later, on deck, Joe continued to be in a ruminative mood. “I'm realistic and resigned about life, but there's one thing I regret,” he said. “I wish I'd been more adventurous, more confrontational. I'm a bit of a moral coward, really. Maybe it's because I want people to like me. I've never had the courage to live like Norman Mailer, have four wives and stab one.” Armstrong couldn't tell if he was joking. “I'm too conventional.” Joe sighed.

Valerie shook her head. “He's lying,” she said. “He's not at all conventional.”

“I don't like arguments,” Joe insisted. “I withdraw and stop talking. I do anything to avoid confrontation. Maybe that's because at home my family never talked about deep feelings.” The light was fading. The ship had eased into a narrow fjord. Joe stepped away from the group. Intently, he gazed at the jagged line of granitic mountains on the yellow-and-blue horizon.

*   *   *

FAITH SALE HAD CANCER.

Frederick Karl was on dialysis.

Mario Puzo's legs pained him.

Speed Vogel was susceptible to respiratory infections.

Sister Sylvia took Coumadin for blood clots.

Candida Donadio was deteriorating.

Shirley was gone. Perlie was gone. Lee was gone. So was Lou Berkman.

What was it Willa Cather once said? When you reach a certain age, life rains death all around you.

The good news: Ted's book had moved closer to publication. Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster had bought
Portrait of an Artist, as an old Man.
“What next, then?” Joe's alter ego in the novel, the aging scribbler Eugene Pota, asks himself. “The artificer who lives long enough, particularly the writer of fictions … may come to a time in his life when he feels he has nothing new to write about but wishes to continue anyway.” It isn't a choice, even though the “singular fact about the creation of fiction is that it … turn[s] more, not less, difficult with seasoning and accomplishment.”

On most days, Joe still had interest and—knock wood—time. Nothing forced him more deeply into himself than the writing of novels.

And then Erica announced she was getting married.

She had met the Dutch artist Ronald van den Boogaard. He owned an advertising agency in Amsterdam called Brains-in-the-Box. He shared Erica's wry sense of humor and was “incredibly expressive about his feelings,” an honesty that, in her experience, had been “verboten on this side of the Atlantic.”

The couple planned a small wedding at the Brant Point Lighthouse on Nantucket Island in November. Joe met them one day at a diner in Manhattan. He said he was pleased to see them looking so happy and hoped they would have a long life together. Marriages were made to last a lifetime, he told Erica with tears in his eyes, just like mine and your mom's.

If you need money, we'll talk, he said. Don't fax anything to the house.

At Thanksgiving, he dropped in on Deborah Karl and her husband, Bob Massie. Sofia, their eighteen-month-old, had eaten a Popsicle and smeared chocolate all over her face. Joe was so amused by her surprised and messy expression, he took Valerie back the next day to watch Sofia eat another Popsicle.

At the end of November—now a proud father-in-law—he underwent a complete physical exam. The doctor pronounced him fit. He said it wouldn't be a bad idea for Joe to consult a cardiologist, but there was no hurry. It just made good sense for a man of his age and weight (he was back up to 185 pounds) to take precautions.

During the first week of December, Arthur Gelb saw Joe at a dinner party in East Hampton. “That evening he was sweet-tempered and subdued,” Gelb recalled. “I asked him if he was feeling well. He said he regretted to report that age seemed to be mellowing him, and that people would have to stop referring to him as curmudgeonly.”

Walking to lunch a day or so later with George Mandel, Joe “expressed horror of the exceptionally broad avenue we were crossing, but strode right on to the safer side … short of breath,” Mandel said. “I think that disturbing symptom … escaped me because of his unfailing nerve.”

On the evening of December 10, 1999, a Friday, “Joe was on the phone, trying to get a friend to get him off the hook … so he wouldn't have to go to the movies [with me],” Valerie said. “But no one answered, so Joe and I went to see James Bond. And
did
have a good time. He was laughing out loud, grabbing my arm, slapping my knee. So much laughing. Thrilling at the special effects. It was a wonderful date.”

The movie was
The World Is Not Enough
, starring Pierce Brosnan. Perhaps the film's finest moment was the line “If you can't trust a Swiss banker, what's the world come to?” Joe could have delivered something better—
had
topped it, in fact, with greater wit and timing in his part of the screenplay for
Casino Royale
so many years ago.

The next day, he sent Chris Buckley a fax: “We both may have reason to be [smug] for backing what thus far looks like a winner of sorts with Ted's novel. As a … proud father, I'm taking the liberty of sending you a couple of good pre-pub reviews.” Afterward, he and Valerie drove to a restaurant called the Palm, in the Hunting Inn on Main Street in East Hampton, for steaks and Nova Scotian lobster.

The following morning, clear skies ushered unusual winter light and warmth into the backyard. Joe and Valerie talked of the trips they'd take in the coming year—a new century, a new millennium—Italy, Ireland at the end of the summer. The publication of his novel would bring a fresh round of travel and events—enjoyable if planned well in advance and not scheduled too close together. “He was looking forward to so much,” Valerie said. A copy of the galleys for Ted's book,
Slab Rat,
lay open on a living room table. Joe smiled each time his glance fell on the pages.

After dinner that evening, he said the house felt stuffy. He wanted to take a walk on the beach. The stars were as clear as the sunshine earlier. Later, Valerie couldn't remember how long he'd been gone. When he returned, he was sweating and pale. He went to bed early (Phillipe following quietly at his heels) with what he thought was indigestion. “That night … he became my patient again,” Valerie said.

*   *   *

“VALERIE CALLED
us at about five
A.M.,
” Dolores Karl recalled. “I heard the phone ring. Fred was already awake, and I got up. Who would call that early? Fred came out of his study and said, ‘Dolores, sit down. Joe is dead.' I could see how shaken he was. Right away, I phoned Valerie and asked if she needed help, and she said she would appreciate it if I came over. When I told Fred, he said, ‘Don't leave me alone.' Well, if you knew Fred—‘Don't leave me alone' was not one of his statements. Usually, he was happy to be left alone to work. I knew something was wrong. So I called the doctor and immediately the doctor hospitalized him. He was suffering a severe heart attack.”

Much later, once Fred was resting comfortably and Dolores knew he would be all right, she learned from Valerie that
Joe's
heart attack had probably started during his walk on the beach. Back in the house, in bed, he took some medication for indigestion. It didn't help. Soon, he slipped into unconsciousness, breathing shallowly. Valerie tried to resuscitate him. By the time she got the ambulance there, he was dead.

She spent the morning of December 13 phoning East Hampton friends and friends in the city. Finally, she called Joe's kids.

“Oh God, this is a calamity for American literature,” Kurt Vonnegut said when he got the news.

John Updike was more restrained: “[As a novelist,] he wasn't top of the chart, [but] he was a sweet man. And
Catch-22
is an important book.”

Taken together, the comments traced Joe's critical reputation during his lifetime.

Elie Wiesel said, “I will miss reading the books he didn't write.”

On the afternoon of the thirteenth, Chris Buckley faxed Valerie: “Sweetheart, he
loved
you so deeply. He talked about you at every lunch and dinner we had, always with pride.… [Years ago,] if someone had told 2nd Lieutenant Joey Heller, as he was about to set off on one of those harrowing sixty missions in his B-25 that he would survive the war and die peacefully more than half a century later, one of the most celebrated writers in American history, a proud father, in the arms of the woman he loved, surely he would have said, ‘What's the catch?'”

*   *   *

THE RABBI
at Joe's funeral service did not know Joe's son and daughter would appear, and so he did not mention them in his remarks. He had understood from Valerie that Joe's kids were estranged from him. Joe's nephew, Paul, who now ran a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, managed to plug the restaurant in his eulogy for his uncle.

Joe had wanted to be cremated, but he was placed in a casket draped with an American flag. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” Erica said. Someone told her that because her father was a war veteran, the costs of the funeral would be mitigated if it were conducted military-style. Erica's weeping appeared to unnerve Valerie.