The Devil Tree (12 page)

She woke me at dawn, and with the reward I had mentioned in mind, she made love to me with the zeal of a wife about to part with her beloved husband. After I rewarded her, generously, she assured me she would gladly fuck me for free, and then she left. I was drained of sperm and nagged by a single thought: if the whore had been diseased, I might infect Karen.

•   •   •

I told Karen that while I was abroad I sometimes came across photographs of her in American, British, German, and French magazines. I said I was surprised that she had so often consented to seminude modeling. Even now, I said, when men surround her in my presence, I can’t help feeling uneasy knowing that so many of them have also seen her undressed—even if only in pictures.

“Have you ever known a woman who got old without being afraid of losing her looks?” Karen asked. “Have you ever known one who kept faith in herself? Thanks to modern medicine, we were supposed to have our youth extended well into old age. Instead, it all turns out the other way: we’re terrified of aging, and we consider the old—even the middle-aged—inefficient, ugly, and repulsive. Look at the ages of Olympic athletes, or of models and stars today. They’re kids.

“Sure I like to pose and be photographed that way—as naked and voluptuous as the law and the advertisers allow. Why not? My looks and my body are my defense against aging, the unavoidable law of nature. Beauty is my profession; and don’t think I’m not terrified of being condemned to professional death by the faggots of the advertising business whose terror of age is matched only by their fear of the moral majority.

“Have you ever gotten ‘prune fingers’—wrinkled fingertips after soaking a long time in a hot bath? One day all of me will be like that. Youth is the only commodity even you cannot buy for me. It’s my nude photographs that reassure me—along with the advertisers—that I have nothing to worry about yet.”

•   •   •

As a boy I would introduce my father to my friends by saying, “This is my father. He’s a businessman. He’s very rich. He owns everything.” Instantly he or my mother would reprimand me for bragging. I deduced from their reaction that it was wrong for me to find my father powerful and rich; even if his power and wealth made him a fine and lovable figure to others, it was somehow wrong for me to love him for them.

•   •   •

During my years abroad, Karen befriended Susan, a college acquaintance of hers who worked in a New York advertising agency. On the surface, Susan is all Karen is not: ordinary, unobtrusive, modest, predictable. When Karen’s professional career peaked and her income hit six figures, she told Susan that she could afford to hire a secretary to keep track of her appointments, expenses, and travel arrangements, and a housekeeper to cook and clean. When Susan volunteered to fill both jobs, Karen accepted. Susan quit her job and ever since has been a fixture in Karen’s life.

•   •   •

Karen has been out of town, so today I took Susan to lunch. She reminisced about their college days. What she
said casts a fascinating light on her own character and by implication illuminates Karen’s notion of whom she should depend on. It also might explain why Susan has become Karen’s most trusted ally, almost her Iago, ready to defend Karen against everyone—including me—and why I must be constantly wary of her.

Karen and Susan attended a women’s college that seemed to turn out only girls who were well mannered, well groomed, and pleasant to talk to—perfect wives for doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. Susan told me that even though her college boyfriends could accept the fact that she was not a virgin, they were all preoccupied with and jealous of her previous lovers.

For almost two years Susan dated Christopher, a charming, handsome, brilliant scholar. She mentioned in passing two earlier affairs, and he thereafter assumed that she considered her first lover a mistake and her second merely a test case; he convinced himself that only now, with him as her lover, could Susan be sexually mature, aware of the flaws in her two previous relationships, and ready to settle down. Toward the end of their second year together Susan told him the truth: before she met him, she had had many lovers, women as well as men, even one-night stands. Stunned by her admission, Christopher called her a whore and refused to see her again.

Last year Susan found out that Christopher, by then an assistant professor of literature at a Midwestern university, was preparing to defend his doctoral dissertation on medieval passion plays.

She also learned that one of the most prominent authorities in the field of medieval theater was teaching at a New York university. Posing as a graduate student at that university, she obtained a passkey and entered the professor’s office at night. The professor kept his notes neatly typed on small index cards in open files. Susan photographed
all the cards containing pertinent research and theories and then returned the cards to the files.

At home she typed the material on various odd sheets of paper and envelopes. These she sent to Christopher along with a typewritten letter, which she assumed he would believe came from one of his ex-fellow students whose full name he could no longer even recall.

Dear Chris,

I remember that during our college years you were always interested in the theater of the medieval period. In case it’s still your field, I enclose various notes on the subject left by my uncle, who died last week of lung cancer. Even though he was an advertising company executive, in his last few years he had become interested in passion plays. I’m sure he would be pleased to know that his research was not in vain, and that there is someone who can benefit from his—however amateurish—studies. All the very best,

Jim

After Christopher successfully defended his dissertation, it was filed in the university library. Susan then secured a copy and compared it with the material she had stolen. As she had hoped, Christopher had incorporated as his own a major portion of the information she had sent him.

Susan telephoned the New York professor and, pretending to be one of his past students, informed him that Christopher So-and-so, a recent doctoral candidate in the Midwest, may have plagiarized in his Ph.D. thesis certain ideas that she recalled from the professor’s lectures. Soon after her call, the professor investigated the case and demanded a special inquiry at Christopher’s university.

Christopher failed to explain satisfactorily how he had come into possession of the professor’s materials. He could
not even recall the name of the friend who, he claimed, had sent him the notes. He was dismissed from the university, and his academic career came to an abrupt end.

•   •   •

Volunteering her interpretation of my relationship with Karen, Susan remarked that it frequently benefited from my absence, when, like youthful masturbation, it could feed on fantasy. When distance separated us, Karen was forced to think about me, recall me, imagine me as her Byronic lover. As it was, Susan said, Karen and I saw each other only under “optimal conditions,” that is, when we were both fit, in a good mood, anxious to be together. Susan meant to imply that because she shared a house with Karen, she alone had penetrated the spiritual as well as the physical sphere of Karen’s selfhood.

Susan had indeed gotten to know Karen well. She had picked up Karen’s mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of speech until it seemed that she was deliberately imitating her. At first she had also dressed as Karen dressed, copied Karen’s hairstyle, taken up things that interested Karen, even went after men she knew Karen had been with. This continued until they became very close; then Susan grew self-confident enough to develop her own persona.

Karen once suggested that Susan and she and I live together, a possibility that involved no risks for Karen and Susan. I knew that Karen was not implying any three-part sexual relationship; still, I asked who would be the most expendable if our triad failed? Such an idea did not seem to have crossed Karen’s mind. She will not admit to her dependence on Susan, and she would resent my describing their relationship in terms of dependence; but what is it the two of them share that I could not share with Karen alone?
Is Susan merely a receptacle for Karen’s experiences, or does she mold them? I’m not convinced by Karen’s explanation that Susan is a good companion, completely forgiving and patient. Such companions normally come and go. They meet other people, get married, have families of their own. But Susan is not seeing anyone else now; Karen is her life. I could give Karen financial security, but that’s not what she wants from me, and I no more want to be Karen’s servant than she wants me to become her benefactor. Sometimes I feel protective toward her, and of course I want her to be comfortable, but if our relationship is to develop, she must ultimately choose between Susan and me, between the very different attachments we represent.

I have no idea where I stand on Karen’s list of emotional priorities, where I rank in relation to her work, to her pleasure trips, to her social life, or to Susan. Last week, to preserve her glamorous image in the society pages, Karen flew to Buenos Aires to be photographed with a bunch of local horse-breeding millionaires. Would she fly as far to preserve my image of her?

•   •   •

As the election nears, one of the local incumbent senators and his wife must have been reminded by their friends, the Howmets, that I am back in the country. My parents were always among the most generous of Republicans; with a little prompting I too might join and support the party.

I accepted the senator’s invitation to attend a Fourth of July garden party at his Oyster Bay estate. The afternoon was to be enhanced by the presence of the vice-president, the governor, and other state and federal luminaries.

Because the senator’s invitation was addressed to me
alone, Karen, upset that she had not been invited by name, refused to accompany me. I had to go alone.

The garden party was an elaborate affair, mixing food, drink, and dance with ad hoc tributes by film, stage, and TV stars. We were offered a political cocktail of well-prepared speeches by members of the senator’s reelection committee, and there were a few inept utterances by some of his financial backers.

Delighted that I had arrived alone, Helen Howmet, who had taken her role as my godmother as seriously as if God Himself had appointed her, promptly introduced me to every rich and eligible debutante there. No doubt every one of them would have proved an unexceptionable wife for a clean-cut lieutenant of capitalist enterprise. But none of these girls matched Karen in looks or bearing; none of them interested me at all.

Exhausted by her matchmaking efforts, Helen Howmet finally left me alone, and as I mingled with the crowd I came across a familiar face: Keith Cushman, whose family owns The Cushman, a department store, and who, like me, was a failure at Yale and a draft dodger—another miserable exile from the American Dream. We first met in an Istanbul youth hostel. He was then immersed in making a career for himself in marine biology, and I remember still his childlike excitement over what he had learned about the jellyfish. That creature, after being fertilized sexually, begets a polyp. The polyp propagates asexually by budding, but it begets a sexually reproducing jellyfish; then the cycle begins again, the jellyfish always taking after its grandparents.

The sea squid was the other creature that fascinated Keith. During copulation the male squid blocks the female’s breathing by inserting a sexual tentacle, one of its eight arms, into the female’s cavity. Choked and fighting to break away, the female tears off the tentacle. While the severed tentacle remains inside of the female, the mutilated male
swims away, to grow, in time, another tentacle in place of the missing one. The female later releases the tentacle, which starts a life of its own by becoming a sea serpent, a totally independent species.

I had also come across Keith in Amsterdam. He was then searching for another purpose, another label for his existence. He wanted to start a Marxist revolution in semantics, for he claimed that contemporary language had lost its ability to convey the spontaneous and could thus no longer serve as a meaningful revolutionary weapon.

Owing to a bad case of hepatitis, Keith had returned to America ahead of me. Now his health was restored, and he seemed glad to see me again. Drink in hand, talking in his usual dispirited, listless voice, he told me that while I was still bumming around abroad, he had married a young woman named Deborah, a City College graduate. However, he added, after two years of marriage, they were now divorced.

I asked how he had met her. He told me that she had been a contestant on
Blind Date
, a popular TV game show. In front of a live audience, she had had to select a date from among three bachelors who were hidden from her view behind a curtain.

From the moment she appeared on the screen, Keith knew that Deborah was the woman for him. In his travels, Keith said, he had been to a number of cathouses, and by the time he returned home he knew what it was in a woman that haunted his fantasies. He had also dated a lot, he said, and could recognize a woman perceptive enough to allow him to freely express himself sexually. On the show Deborah looked stunning; the questions she addressed to each bachelor were intelligent and witty, and her responses to their answers were effectively alluring. Even her final choice of Hugh—a rugged construction engineer from North Dakota—impressed Keith, despite his jealousy of that complete
stranger who would now spend a week with as perfect a creature as Deborah.

At the end of the show the moderator announced the prize for Deborah and her date: an all-expense-paid idyllic week in Altos de Chavon, a newly built mountaintop retreat almost a thousand feet up, looking out over the green Chavon River on one side and the blue Caribbean on the other. As photographs of Altos de Chavon flashed on the TV screen, Keith speculated that he himself was no more a stranger to Deborah than was Hugh, whose only advantage was a brief conversational parrying with her during the program. Prompted by such thoughts, Keith decided to go after Deborah, the figure of his tele-fatuation.