The Devil Tree (13 page)

On the day Deborah and her date moved into their suite in Altos de Chavon, Keith checked into the suite next door. When he spotted the couple having cocktails on a terrace above the Chavon River, he casually walked over and introduced himself as a fellow American. The
Blind Date
couple did not mind his intrusion; Deborah was almost grateful for it, for Hugh had little to offer in the way of conversation. Keith, an old hand in matters of politesse, was not about to make the life of the North Dakotan any easier. Keith quickly invited several other American guests—all accomplished writers, filmmakers, and artists who were visiting Altos de Chavon at the local government’s invitation—to join them, first in conversation over drinks, then for dinner, and finally in a night canoe trip along the river to a picnic site on a moonlit Caribbean beach. Nor did Keith stop there: for the rest of the week, in a show of generosity toward Deborah, Hugh, and other “fellow Americans,” he arranged fishing trips to nearby islands, parties at the oceanfront hotels of the Costasur, and trips to the museums and historical sights of Santo Domingo.

The week passed quickly. The dating game was soon over for Deborah and Hugh, who were about to depart.
Saddened, Deborah admitted to Keith that she was sorry to leave behind such a stimulating companion and that she looked forward to continuing their friendship in New York. Her obvious interest was not lost on Keith, and when the airport taxi pulled up and Hugh began to load their luggage into it, Keith told Deborah that he did not want to lose her, that he wanted her to stay—not just in Altos de Chavon, but in his life.

Soon after that, Keith and Deborah were married. The wedding was widely covered in the society pages, and the couple moved into a Fifth Avenue penthouse purchased by Keith’s parents as a wedding gift. There Keith gave his bride a blank check, which she was to use to buy anything she wanted for herself and the apartment.

Because most of his friends, including me, were still living abroad, Keith said, during the marriage he tended to rely on Deborah’s friends. The newly weds entertained often, and before long Keith had met many people he considered far more interesting than anyone his parents or their friends had ever introduced him to.

“Why the divorce?” I asked.

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Keith with a touch of vehemence. “It happened without warning.” And sensing my curiosity, he continued. “Even though Deborah and I smoked only pot, many of our friends liked uppers and downers, coke, LSD—you name it—and as good hosts we kept on hand a large supply of all that stuff. One night I had a headache and asked Deborah for a painkiller and a sleeping pill, which knocked me out. I was awakened by the voices of two uniformed police officers, who were taking notes as they listened to Deborah, standing before them in her nightgown. On the table lay my .45 caliber revolver and next to it several small packets of our hospitality stuff. ‘What happened?’ I asked, suspecting robbery.

’“While you got yourself high on that,’ said one of the officers, pointing at the stash, ‘you tried to kill your
lady.’ He directed his gaze at four bullet holes that hadn’t been in the bedroom walls when I fell asleep. That’s some fire power to use against a defenseless young lady,’ said the other officer. ‘You went quite out of control, Keith,’ Deborah said, her voice soft, her expression full of innocent concern, ‘and thank God you missed me before you conked out again. But I’ve decided to take no more chances with my life—or yours, Keith.’ She looked at me with playful reproach. ‘So I called the police.’

“Suddenly it dawned on me what had happened. Deborah wanted a child, and when she found out that, because of my faulty genes, any child of ours could be born with a birth defect, she decided to divorce me. She knew I loved her and would oppose a divorce, so she decided to set me up. Taking full advantage of the damaging evidence—I had no permit for the gun, not to mention the coke, hash, and other illegal mindblowers the police had found in my desk—Deborah filed for divorce. She won easily; the settlement—in which she got everything she asked for—was her private March of Dimes.” He reflected. “Nietzsche claimed that everything about a woman is a riddle with one solution: pregnancy. But enough about Deborah,” he said peevishly. “What about you, Jonathan? Are you still in love with that bionic beauty, Karen?”

•   •   •

For Karen, her brief, perishable relationships—the end of one already linked to the beginning of another—are proof of her freedom and of her victory over an ordinary existence; she refuses to do what her parents expect of her: to become, one day, a wife and a mother.

Because Karen is what I want, she holds the secret of who I am. Thus my relationship with her is, for me, a
victory of self-knowledge over detached experience. But Karen, a living work of art, lives in time spans as short as those in which eye contact is made. Ceaselessly admired, a well-paid product of the industry of advertising, she cherishes her newly discovered independence. And so the two of us—she the Duchess of Independence, I the Duke of the Free—keep swearing to each other our love of freedom and independence. Even from and of each other.

•   •   •

Anthony was once my father’s valet. I recently asked him to lunch. During the meal Anthony revealed to me why my father had fired him. One of Anthony’s duties was to prepare my father’s shaving cream every morning and, once a week, to insert a new blade in his razor. To prove his faith in the quality of products made of American steel, my father always insisted on shaving for seven straight days with the same American-made steel blade. Then one day Anthony overheard my mother complaining to my father that for the last three days he had not seemed smoothly shaved. From then on, without telling my father, Anthony put a new blade in the razor every other day.

One morning my father turned to him and said, “Yesterday I shaved with a blade that had a slight defect at one end. Still, it was a perfectly good blade, and it should serve me until the end of the week. What happened to it?”

“I changed the blade, Mr. Whalen,” replied Anthony.

“What for?” asked my father.

“I thought you might need a fresh one,” said Anthony.

“I do not,” my father replied. “Bring back the old blade.”

Under the scrutinizing gaze of my father, Anthony
admitted that he had thrown the blade away and that he had been changing the blades every other day for some time. When he finished speaking, my father turned to him and said calmly, “If that’s what you think of our steel, Anthony, you needn’t work for me anymore. My secretary will prepare your paycheck, and after you’ve packed, the car will take you to the station.” Then, without another word to the man who for years had served him like a faithful dog, my father returned to his shaving.

Anthony also told me valuable truths he had learned from my father, who in the good old times would chat with him while shaving. On the day my father learned that General Motors had begun to manufacture its Corvette Sting Ray—a limited-appeal, very expensive fiberglass sports car—he promptly summoned a meeting of the board of directors of his company. He told them that every twenty-four hours, ten thousand new drivers and just as many new cars are added to our roads; that the American consumer spends one out of every four dollars on the automobile; that car production consumes twenty percent of our steel. What would become of the steel industry, the backbone of our economy, he asked, if all American cars were to be made of fiberglass? Regardless of the small market envisaged by Detroit for the two-seat Sting Ray, his company would no longer sell steel on preferential terms to General Motors. Soon after, having spotted the wife of a top-ranking Chrysler executive driving a Japanese-made compact, ’my father telephoned her husband to inquire why he let her do it. Annoyed, the executive replied that his wife was a free citizen—free to drive any damn car she chose; and promptly my father ceased doing business with Chrysler. That meant he was preferentially supplying steel only to Ford and Studebaker. Some years later, however, when Studebaker announced production of the Avanti, its five-seat mass-market fiberglass sedan, my father blew up, called the move blackmail,
withdrew his product, and swore that Studebaker would pay dearly for their desertion of the steel industry. Indeed, Studebaker soon faced serious financial difficulties and, on the verge of bankruptcy, ceased its car production in the United States.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do with yourself, Jonathan?” Anthony asked me. “Are you going into business? You’re still young, and it would be a real pity to waste yourself doing nothing—or doing the wrong thing.”

Anthony seemed to think that my present life, like my years of draft dodging and drugs, was nothing but evasion of responsibility. I changed the subject, chatted about my travels, said how much I had learned from my exile. Anthony remarked that I was lucky to have so much freedom—meaning money. When I tried to tell him that money could not buy the inner freedom I have always desired, he wasn’t interested. When he said how much I resembled my father, I became angry. I wanted to tell him that was a lie, as he of all people—a black man, the archetypical American servant—should know. But I checked myself. I started instead to talk about some of the women I had had, asking him pointed questions about his own sex life and telling him increasingly realistic stories. He laughed at first, but as the episodes became more lewd and violent, he began to grow uncomfortable, and exhausted by the thought of even the possibility of such adventures, he slumped in his chair. I don’t know why, but perversely I continued until I was sure he realized that my life was beyond his experience.

•   •   •

A penthouse tenant of my hotel called the police about something she saw from her balcony: a man attempting to
cross the East River Drive on foot in the midst of the evening rush hour was struck by a car that did not stop after it hit him. It took the police thirty minutes to arrive at the spot, and by then the dead body was flattened. Car after car had run over it; not a single one had attempted to slow down or stop.

I wonder if it ever occurred to my father that, whether the automobile was made of fiberglass or steel, more Americans have died in automobile accidents than in all the wars our country has fought in the last two centuries. Or that in fifty-three American cities highways occupy a third of all the land; that half of the land of Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis is given over to traffic and parking lots. My father, a clear-thinking businessman and industrialist, must have been aware that the societal cost in loss of life and property caused by car accidents was ten times higher than that caused by all other crime and violence combined. And if he was aware and did not speak up against such destruction, then was he guided—or corrupted—by his lust for profit?

•   •   •

The less you
are
, the less you give expression to your life, the more you
have
, the greater is your
alienated
life and the more you store up of your estranged life. Everything which the political economist takes from you in terms of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of
money
and
wealth
, and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you: it can eat, drink, go dancing, go to the theater, it can appropriate art, learning, historical curiosities, political power, it can travel, it is
capable
of doing
all those things for you; it can buy everything; it is genuine
wealth
, genuine
ability
. But for all that, it only
likes
to create itself, to buy itself, for after all everything else is its servant. And when I have the master I have the servant, and I have no need of his servant. So all passions and all activity are lost in
greed.

So says Karl Marx.

Have I reached a spiritual stalemate? Am I estranged from life? Do I, even with my income, need to work, just like the masses who commute daily on the subway or drive their cars for hours to and from grueling eight-hour jobs? Or am I to enter into competition with the captains of industry, who still work at increasing their power and wealth?

Why should I? My capital, invested and reinvested by my brokers, increases on its own so fast that nothing I could do would possibly add appreciably to it.

And finally, why should I feel ill at ease about enjoying the wealth that came to me legitimately, that originated in the hard work of hundreds of thousands of people and now benefits thousands of other people who, thanks to it, are employed and productive? Why should I lead a miser’s existence on a millionaire’s income?

Had I had a talent, it would define me as writer, composer, painter, or sculptor and carve out a place for me in society. But talent is one commodity that even I cannot buy. My only recourse, then, is finding a spontaneous, natural activity that will allow me to know myself and others—and do harm to no one.

Well, I’ve found one.

The immediate, natural, necessary relation of human being to human being is the
relationship
of
man
to
woman. . .
. Therefore, this relationship
reveals
in a
sensuous
form, reduced
to an
observable
fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature for man or nature has become the human essence.

I could have written it, but I did not. Karl Marx did.

•   •   •

Karen speaks fondly of Amsterdam and loves her modeling assignments there. She says it is an ultimately civilized city, where she doesn’t have to make many adjustments, where almost everyone speaks English, and where nobody cares if she sleeps with a man, a woman, or both at the same time. True Protestants at heart, the Dutch relegated sex to the realm of either a marital duty or a tourist diversion, saw it as just one of life’s many surfaces, and by doing so effectively dismissed any power it might have as a threatening obsession.