The Fourth K (11 page)

Christian switched to the brandy that the Oracle had provided. It was delicious and very expensive. The Oracle always served the very best. Christian enjoyed it, though he would never buy it; born rich, he never felt he deserved to treat himself so well. He said, “I’ve known you all my life, over forty-five years, and you haven’t changed. You are going to be a hundred next week. And you’re still the great man I always thought you were.”

The Oracle shook his head. “You know me only in my old age, from sixty to a hundred. That means nothing. The venom is gone then and the strength to enforce it. It’s no trick to be virtuous in old age, as that humbug Tolstoy knew.” He paused and sighed. “Now, how about this great birthday party of mine? Your friend Kennedy never really liked me and I know you pushed the idea of the White House Rose Garden and a big media event. Is he using this crisis situation to get out of it?”

Christian said, “No, no, he values your life’s work, he
wants to do it. Oliver, you were and are a great man. Just hang on. Hell, what’s a few months after a hundred years?” He paused. “But if you prefer, since you don’t like Francis, we can forget about his big plans for your birthday party, mass coverage by the media, your name and picture in all the papers and on TV. I can always throw you a little private party right away and get the whole thing over with.” He smiled at the Oracle to show that he was joking. Sometimes the old man took him too literally.

“Thank you, but no,” the Oracle said. “I want to have something to live for. Namely, a birthday party given by the President of the United States. But let me tell you, your Kennedy is shrewd. He knows my name still means something. The publicity will enhance his image. Your Francis Xavier Kennedy is as crafty as was his uncle Jack. Now, Bobby would have shown me the back of his hand.”

Christian said, “None of your contemporaries are left, but your protégés are some of the great men and women in the country, and they look forward to doing you this honor. Including the President. He doesn’t forget that you helped him on his way. He’s even inviting your buddies in the Socrates Club and he hates them. It will be your best birthday party.”

“And my last,” the Oracle said. “I’m hanging on by my fucking fingernails.”

Christian laughed. The Oracle had never used bad language until he was ninety, so now he used it as innocently as a child.

“That’s settled,” the Oracle said. “Now let me tell you something about great men, Kennedy and myself included. They finally consume themselves and the people around them. Not that I concede your Kennedy is a great man. So he’s become President of the United States. But that is an
illusionist’s trick. Do you know, by the way, that in show business the magician is considered to be completely without artistic talent?” Here the Oracle cocked his head; he astonishingly resembled an owl.

“I will concede that Kennedy is not your typical politician,” the Oracle said. “He is an idealist, he is far more intelligent and he has morals, though I wonder whether sexual rigidity is healthy. But all these virtues are a handicap to political greatness. A man without a vice? A sailing ship without a sail!”

Christian asked, “You disapprove of his actions. What course would you take?”

“That is not relevant,” the Oracle said. “His whole three years, he’s got his dick half in, half out, and that’s always trouble.” Now the Oracle’s eyes became cloudy. “I hope it doesn’t interfere with my birthday party too long. What a life I had, eh? Who had a better life than I? Poor at birth, so that I could appreciate the wealth I earned later. A homely man who learned to captivate and enjoy beautiful women. A good brain, a learned compassion so much better than the genetic kind. Enormous energy, enough to power me past old age. A good constitution, I’ve never been really sick in my life. A great life, and long! And that’s the trouble, maybe a little too long. I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror now, but as I said, I was never handsome.” He paused for a time and then said abruptly to Christian, “Leave government service. Dissociate yourself from everything that is happening now.”

“I can’t do that,” Christian said. “It’s too late.” He studied the old man’s freckled head and marveled at the brain that was still so alive. Christian stared into those aged eyes shrouded like a never-ending misty sea. Would he ever be so old, with his body shriveling like some dead insect?

And the Oracle watching him thought, How transparent they all are, as guileless as little children. It was obvious to the Oracle that his advice had been given too late, that Christian would commit a treachery to himself.

Christian finished his brandy and rose to leave. He tucked the blankets around the old man and rang for the nurses to come into the room. Then he whispered into the glazed skin of the Oracle’s ear. “Tell me the truth about Helen Du Pray, she was one of your protégées before she got married. I know you arranged for her first entry into politics. Did you ever screw her, or were you too old?”

The Oracle shook his head. “I was never too old until after ninety. And let me tell you that when your cock leaves you, that is real loneliness. But to answer your question. She didn’t fancy me, I was no beauty. I must say I was disappointed, she was very beautiful and very intelligent, my favorite combination. I could never love intelligent homely women—they were too much like myself. I could love beautiful dumb women, but when they were intelligent, then I was in heaven. Helen Du Pray—ah, I knew she would go far, she was very strong, a strong will. Yes I tried but never succeeded, a rare failure I must say. But we always remained good friends. That was a talent she had, to refuse a man sexually and yet be an intimate friend. Very rare. That was when I knew she was a seriously ambitious woman.”

Christian touched his hand, it felt like a scar. “I’ll phone or drop in to see you every day,” he said. “I’ll keep you up to date.”

The Oracle was very busy after Christian left. He had to pass on the information Klee had given him to the Socrates Club, whose members were important figures in the structure of
America. He did not consider this a betrayal of Christian, whom he dearly loved. Love was always secondary.

He had to take action, his country was sailing in dangerous waters. It was his duty to help guide it to safety. And what else could a man his age do to make life worth living? And to tell the truth he had always despised the Kennedy legend. Here was a chance to destroy it forever.

Finally the Oracle let the nurse fuss over him and prepare his bed. He remembered Helen Du Pray with affection, and now without disappointment. She had been very young, in her early twenties, her beauty enhanced by a tremendous vitality. He had often lectured her on power, its acquisition and uses, and, more important, on abstaining from its use. And she had listened with the patience that is necessary to acquire power.

He told her that one of the great mysteries of mankind was how people acted against their own self-interest. Points of pride ruined their lives. Envy and self-delusion took them down paths that led to nothingness. Why was it so important for people to maintain a self-image? There were those who would never truckle, never flatter, never lie, never back down, never betray or never deceive. There were those who lived in envy and jealousy of the happier fate of others.

It had all been a special sort of pleading and she had seen through it. She rejected him and went on, without his help, to achieve her own dream of power.

One of the problems of having a mind as clear as a bell when you are a hundred years old is that you can see the hatching of unconscious villainy in yourself, and ferret it out in past history. He had been mortified when Helen Du Pray had refused to make love with him. He knew she had other lovers, she was not prissy. But at seventy he, amazingly, had still been vain.

He had gone to the rejuvenation center in Switzerland, submitted to surgical erasing of wrinkles, the sanding of his skin, the injection of animal fetus pulp into his own veins. But nothing could be done for the shrinking of his skeleton, the freezing of his joints, the very turning of his blood into water.

Though it no longer did him any good, the Oracle believed he understood men and women in love. Even when he was past his sixtieth year young mistresses adored him. The whole secret was never to impose any rules on their behavior, never to be jealous, never to hurt their feelings. They took young men as their true loves and treated the Oracle with careless cruelty. It didn’t matter. He showered them with expensive gifts, paintings, jewelry in the best of taste. He let them call on his power to get unearned favors from society and the use of his money in generous but not lavish amounts. He was a prudent man and would always have three or four mistresses at one time. For they had their own lives to lead. They would fall in love and neglect him, they would take trips, they would be working hard at their careers. He could not make too many demands on their time. But when he needed female company (not only for sex but for the sweet music of their voices, the innocent deviousness of their wiles), one of the four would be available. And of course to be seen at important functions in his company gave them entree into circles it would be more difficult for them to penetrate on their own. Social cachet was one of his assets.

He made no secrets, they all knew about one another. He believed that in their hearts women disliked monogamous men.

How cruel that he remembered bad things he had done more often than the good. His money had built medical centers, churches, rest homes for the elderly; he had done
many good things. But his memories of himself were not good. Fortunately he thought about love often. In an interesting and peculiar way, it had been the most commercial thing in his life. And he had owned Wall Street firms, banks, airlines.

Anointed with the power of money, he had been invited to share in world-shaking events, been adviser to the powerful. He had helped shape the very world people lived in. A fascinating, important, valuable life. And yet the managing of his countless mistresses was far more vivid in his hundred-year-old brain. Ah, those intelligent headstrong beauties, how delightful they had been, and how they had vindicated his judgment, most of them. Now they were judges, heads of magazines, powers in Wall Street, TV news queens. How cunning they had been in their love affairs with him and how he had outwitted them. But without cheating them of their due. He had no guilt, only regrets. If one of them had truly loved him, he would have raised her to the skies. But then his mind reminded him that he had not deserved to be so loved. They had recognized his love, it was a hollow drum that made his body thump.

It was at the age of eighty that his skeleton began to contract inside its envelope of flesh. Physical desire receded and a vast ocean of youthful and lost images drowned his brain. And it was at this time he found it necessary to employ young women to lie innocently in his bed just so that he could look at them. Oh, that perversity so scorned in literature, so mocked by the young who must grow old. And yet what peace it gave his crumbling body to see the beauty he could no longer devour. How pure it was. The rolling mound of breast, satiny white skin crowned with its tiny red rose. The mysterious thighs, their rounded flesh giving off a golden glow, the surprising triangle of hair—a choice of
colors—and then on the other side the heartbreak of buttocks divided into two exquisite haunches. So much beauty, to his bodily senses dead and lost, but sparking the flickering billions of cells in his brain. And their faces, the mysterious shells of ears spiraling into some inner sea, the hollowed eyes with their banked fires of blue and gray and brown and green looking out from their private eternal cells, the planes of their faces descending into unshielded lips, so open to pleasure and to wounds. He would look upon them before he went to sleep. He would reach out and touch the warm flesh; the satin of thigh and buttocks, touch the burning lips, and oh so rarely smooth the crinkled pubic hair to feel the throbbing pulse beneath. There was so much comfort there that he would fall asleep and the pulse would soften the terror of his dreams. In his dreams he hated the very young and would devour them. He dreamed of the bodies of young men piled high in trenches, sailors by the thousands floating fathoms deep beneath the sea, vast skies clouded by the space-suited bodies of celestial explorers spinning endlessly into the black holes of the universe.

Awake he dreamed. But awake he recognized his dreams as a form of senile madness, his digust of his own body. He hated his skin, which gleamed like scar tissue, the brown spots on his hands and bald pate, those deadly freckles of death, his failing sight, the feebleness of his limbs, the spinning heart, the evilness tumoring his brain clear as a bell.

Oh, what a pity that fairy godmothers came to the cradle of newborn infants to bestow their three magical wishes! Those infants had no need; old men like himself should receive such gifts. Especially those with minds as clear as a bell.