The Fourth K (50 page)

On the day they moved in, Jatney bought a few toys for Campbell so he wouldn’t be too disoriented. That first night, when Irene was ready to go to bed, she arranged pillows and a blanket on the sofa for the little boy, undressed him in the bathroom and put him into pajamas. Jatney saw the little boy looking at him. There was in that look an old wariness, a glint of fear and very faintly what seemed to be a habitual bewilderment. In a flash Jatney translated that look to himself. As a little boy he knew his father and mother would desert him to make love in their room.

He said to Irene, “Listen, I’ll sleep on the sofa and the kid can sleep with you.”

“That’s silly,” Irene said. “He doesn’t mind, do you, Campbell?”

The boy shook his head. He rarely spoke.

Irene said proudly, “He’s a brave boy, aren’t you, Campbell?”

At that moment, David Jatney felt a moment of pure hatred for her. He repressed it and said, “I have to do some writing and I’ll be up late. I think he should sleep with you the first few nights.”

“If you have to work, OK,” Irene said cheerfully.

She held out her hand to Campbell and the little boy jumped off the sofa and ran into her arms. He hid his head in her breasts. She said to him, “Aren’t you going to say good night to your uncle Jat?” And she smiled brilliantly at David, a smile that made her beautiful. And he understood it was her own little joke, an honest joke, a way of telling him that this had been the mode of her address and introduction for her child when she lived with other lovers, delicate, fearful moments in her life, and that she was grateful to him for his thoughtfulness, that her faith in the universe was sustained.

The boy kept his head buried in her breasts and David patted him gently and said, “Good night, Campbell.” The boy looked up and stared into Jatney’s eyes. It was the peculiar questioning look of small children, the regard of an object that is absolutely unknown to their universe.

David was stricken by that look. As if he could be a source of danger. He saw that the boy had an unusually elegant face for one so young. A broad forehead, luminous gray eyes, a firm, almost stern mouth.

Campbell smiled at Jatney and the effect was miraculous.
His whole face beamed with trust. He reached out a hand and touched David’s face. And then Irene took him with her into the bedroom.

A few minutes later she came out again and gave him a kiss. “Thanks for being so thoughtful,” she said. “We can have a quick screw before I go back in.” She made no seductive movement when she said this. It was simply a friendly offer.

David thought of the little boy behind the bedroom door waiting for his mother. “No,” he said.

“OK,” she said cheerfully and went back into the bedroom.

For the next few weeks Irene was furiously busy. She had taken an additional job for very little pay and long hours at night, to help in the reelection campaign—she was an ardent partisan of Francis Kennedy. She would talk about the social programs he favored, his fight against the rich in America, his struggle to reform the legal system. David thought she was in love with Kennedy’s physical appearance, the magic of his voice. He believed that she worked at campaign headquarters because of infatuation rather than political belief.

Three days after she moved in, he dropped by campaign headquarters in Santa Monica and found her working on a computer with little Campbell at her feet. The boy was in a sleeping bag but was wide awake. David could see his open eyes.

“I’ll take him home and put him to bed,” David said.

“He’s OK,” Irene said. “I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

David pulled Campbell out of the sleeping bag; the boy was fully clothed except for his shoes. He took the boy by the hand and he felt warm, soft skin, and for a moment he was happy.

“I’ll take him for a pizza and ice cream first, is that OK?” David said to Irene.

She was busy with her computer. “Don’t spoil him,” she said. “When you’re gone, he gets health yogurt out of the fridge.” She took a moment to smile at him and then gave Campbell a kiss.

“Should I wait up for you?” he asked.

“What for?” she said quickly, then added, “I’ll be late.” He went out, leading the little boy by the hand. He drove to Montana Avenue and stopped at a little Italian restaurant that made pizza on the side. He watched Campbell eat. One slice and he mangled that more than he ate it. But he was interested in eating and that made David happy.

In the apartment he put Campbell to bed, letting him wash and change into his pajamas by himself. He made his bed on the sofa, put on the TV very low and watched.

There was a lot of political talk on the air and interviews on the news programs. Francis Kennedy seemed to descend out of all the galaxies of cable. And David had to admit the man was overpowering on TV. He dreamed of being a victorious hero like Kennedy. You could see the Secret Service men with their stone faces hovering in the background. How safe he was, how rich he was, how loved he was. Often David dreamed of being Francis Kennedy. How Rosemary would be in love with him. And he thought about Hock and Gibson Grange. And they would all be eating in the White House and they would all talk to him and Rosemary would talk to him in her excited way, touching his knee, telling him her innermost feelings.

He thought about Irene and what he felt about her. And he realized he was more bewildered than entranced. It seemed to him that with all her openness she was really completely closed to him. He could never really love her. He
thought of Campbell, who had been named after the writer Joseph Campbell, famous for his books about myths, the boy so open and guileless with such an elegant innocence of countenance.

Campbell now called him Uncle Jat and always put a little hand in his. Jatney accepted. He loved the innocent touches of affection the boy gave him that Irene never did. And it was during these two weeks that this extension of feeling to another human being sustained him.

When he lost his job at the studio, he would have been in a jam if it had not been for Hock, his “uncle” Hock. When he was fired, there was a message for him to come by Hock’s office, and because he thought that Campbell would enjoy visiting a movie studio, he brought the child.

When Hock greeted him, David Jatney felt his overwhelming love for the man, Hock was so warm. Hock sent one of his secretaries immediately to the commissary to get ice cream for the little boy and then showed Campbell some props on his desk that would be used in the movie he was currently producing.

Campbell was enchanted by all this, and Jatney felt a twinge of jealousy. But then he could see it was Hock’s way of clearing away an obstacle in their meeting. With Campbell busy playing with the props, Hock shook Jatney’s hand and said, “I’m sorry you got fired. They are cutting down the story-reading department and the others had seniority. But stay in touch, I’ll get something for you.”

“I’ll be OK,” David Jatney said.

Hock was studying him closely. “You look awfully thin, David. Maybe you should go back home and visit a while. That good Utah air, that relaxing Mormon life. Is this kid your girlfriend’s?”

“Yeah,” Jatney said. “She’s not exactly my girl, she’s my
friend. We live together, but she’s trying to save money on rent so she can make a trip to India.”

Hock frowned for a moment and said, “If you financed every California girl who wanted to go to India, you’d be broke. And they all seem to have kids.”

He sat down at his desk, took a huge checkbook out of its drawer and wrote in it. He ripped a piece out of the book, and handed it to Jatney. “This is for all the birthday presents and graduation presents I never had the time to send you.” He smiled at Jatney. Jatney looked at the check. He was astonished to see it was for five thousand dollars.

“Ah, c’mon, Hock, I can’t take this,” he said. He felt tears coming into his eyes, tears of gratitude, humiliation and hatred.

“Sure, you can,” Hock said. “Listen, I want you to get some rest and have a good time. Maybe give this girl her airfare to India so she can get what she wants and you’ll be free to do what you want.” He smiled and then said very emphatically, “The trouble with being friends with a girl is that you get all the troubles of a lover and none of the advantages of a friend. But that’s quite a little boy she has. I might have something for him sometime if I ever have the balls to make a kid picture.”

Jatney pocketed the check. He understood everything that Hock had said. “Yeah, he’s a nice-looking kid.”

“It’s more than that,” Hock said. “Look, he has that elegant face, just made for tragedy. You look at him and you feel like crying.”

And Jatney thought how smart his friend Hock was. “Elegant” was just right and yet so odd to describe Campbell’s face. Irene was an elemental force—like God, she had constructed a future tragedy.

Hock hugged him and said, “David, stay in touch. I mean
it. Keep yourself together, times always get better when you’re young.” He gave Campbell one of the props, a beautiful miniature futuristic airplane, and Campbell hugged it to himself and said, “Uncle Jat, can I keep it?” And Jatney saw a smile on Hock’s face.

“Say hello to Rosemary for me,” David Jatney said. He had been trying to say this all through the meeting.

Hock gave him a startled look. “I will,” he said. “We’ve been invited to Kennedy’s inauguration in January, me and Gibson and Rosemary. I’ll tell her then.”

And suddenly David Jatney felt he had been flung off a spinning world.

Now, lying on the sofa, waiting for Irene to come home, dawn showing its smoky light through the living room window, Jatney thought of Rosemary Belair. How she had turned to him in bed and lost herself in his body. He remembered the smell of her perfume, the curious heaviness, perhaps caused by the sleeping pills traumatizing the muscles in her flesh. He thought of her in the morning in her jogging clothes, her assurance and her assumption of power, how she had dismissed him. He lived over that moment when she had offered to give him cash to tip the limo driver and how he had refused to take the money. But why had he insulted her, why had he said she knew better than he how much was needed, implying that she too had been sent home in such a fashion and in such a circumstance?

He found himself falling asleep in little short gaps of time, listening for Campbell, listening for Irene. He thought of his parents back in Utah; he knew they had forgotten about him, secure in their own happiness, their hypocritical angel pants fluttering outside as they joyfully and unceasingly fornicated in their bare skins. If he called them they would have to part.

David Jatney dreamed of how he would meet Rosemary Belair. How he would tell her he loved her. Listen, he would say, imagine you had cancer. I would take your cancer from you into my own body. Listen, he would say, if some great star fell from the sky I would cover your body. Listen, he would say, if someone tried to kill you I would stop the blade with my heart, the bullet with my body. Listen, he would say, if I had one drop from the fountain of youth that would keep me young forever and you were growing old, I would give you that drop so that you would never grow old.

And he perhaps understood that his memory of Rosemary Belair was haloed by her power. That he was praying to a god to make him something more than a common piece of clay. That he begged for power, unlimited riches, for beauty, for any and all the achievements so that his fellowman would mark his presence on this earth, and so he would not drown silently in the vast ocean of mankind.

When he showed Hock’s check to Irene, it was to impress her, to prove to her that someone cared enough about him to give him such a vast amount of money as a casual gift. She was not impressed; in her experience it was a commonplace that friends shared with each other and she even said that a man of Hock’s vast wealth could have easily given away a bigger amount. When David offered to give her half the amount of the check so that she could go to India immediately, she refused. “I always use my own money, I work for a living,” she said. “If I took money from you, you would feel you have rights over me. Besides, you really want to do it for Campbell, not me.”

He was astounded by her refusal and her statement of his interest in Campbell. He had simply wanted to be rid of both
of them. He wanted to be alone again to live with his dreams of the future.

Then she asked him what he would do if she took half the money and went to India, what he would do with his half. He noticed she did not suggest he go to India with her. He also noted that she had said “your half of the money,” so that in her mind she was accepting his offer.

Then he made the mistake of telling her what he would do with his twenty-five hundred.

“I want to see the country and I want to see Kennedy’s inauguration,” he said. “I thought it might be fun, something different. You know, take my car and drive through the whole country. See the whole United States. I even want to see the snow and ice and feel real cold.”

Irene seemed lost in thought for a moment. Then she went striding briskly through the apartment as if counting her possessions in it. “That’s a great idea,” she said. “I want to see Kennedy too. I want to see him in person or I’ll never really be able to know his karma. I’ll put in for my vacation, they owe me tons of days. And it will be good for Campbell to see the country, all the different states. We’ll take my van and save on motel bills.”

Irene owned a small van, which she had fitted out with shelves to hold books and a small bunk for Campbell. The van was invaluable to her because even when Campbell was a little infant she had taken trips up and down the state of California to attend meetings and seminars on Eastern religions.

David felt trapped as they started off on their trip. Irene was driving—she liked to drive. Campbell was between them, one little hand in David’s hand. David had deposited half the
check in Irene’s bank account for her trip to India, and now his twenty-five hundred would have to be used for three of them instead of only one. The only thing that comforted him was the .22-caliber handgun nestling in its leather glove, the glove in his jacket pocket. The East of America had too many robbers and muggers, and he had Irene and Campbell to protect.