Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (22 page)

Not even talking politics could rouse him. Paul Borg spent at least one October evening insisting that Kennedy’s handling of the crisis over the Cuban missile sites had been “masterly” – that when the Russian ships turned back it had “signified the end of the Cold War, for all history to see” – and Wilder didn’t argue with him except to ask once, in a small voice that was quickly overruled by both their wives, what Borg thought might have happened if the ships hadn’t turned back.

Then a month or two later Borg held forth at some length on his newfound admiration for the President’s brother Bobby: he had “grown” as Attorney General and developed into a responsible leader in his own right. He would almost certainly emerge as a hero in the Civil Rights Movement – ”Have you read some of his recent speeches?” – and there was every indication that in six years he would be a worthy successor to the Presidency.

“Oh, I think so too,” Janice said. “Isn’t it marvelous to think we’re all in such good hands? And aren’t they a beautiful family? All of them?”

If they would excuse him, Wilder said, he had a meeting to attend.

He did go to a few meetings – not only the one on West Houston but others uptown. Once he thought he spotted his old sponsor Bill Costello in the audience and approached him afterwards in the crowd around the coffee urns, but it was another white-haired man who turned out to be a gloomy Polish engineer.

On Christmas Eve he sat in the living room with Janice while she wrapped and tied the last few presents to be tucked under the spindly tree. Their Christmas trees seemed to get smaller and more apologetic-looking every year, but they always smelled the same – a green, pungent smell that took him back to early childhood. He was about to say Why didn’t we get a bigger tree? but that might spoil the gentle, innocent mood of the evening. Instead he strolled along her bookshelves until he came to Burn
All Your Cities
and pulled it out. “This any good?” he asked.

“Oh, it got good reviews,” she said, looking up from where she sat on the carpet and wiping a strand of hair away from her eyes, “but I thought it was a little – overwrought. Why?”

“No reason. I met him once, is all. The author.”

“Oh? Where?”

“At an AA meeting. Apparently he had a drinking problem at one time.”

“Did he give a talk?”

“No; I was just introduced to him.”

“Well, you might enjoy it, John; I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

It touched him that she seemed to feel he might “enjoy” reading a whole book. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll bother with it. Didn’t much like his looks, as a matter of fact.”

“Don’t, then. You’ve always had a sure instinct about people. That’s probably one reason you’re so good at your work.”

“Oh, I don’t know. In the kind of work I do almost anybody could make a living.”

“Why do you always say that? I think what you do must be very difficult, and you do it extremely well.” She got to her feet and turned off” all the other lights in the room, letting the colored lights of the tree bathe everything in a soft pinkish glow. Then she sat curled up on the sofa and said “How does it look?”

“Fine,” he said, and sat beside her. “It really looks fine, Janice.” After a pause, feeling as shy as a boy, he said “You always do everything right at Christmastime.”

“Shall I get some Christmas music on the radio?”

“No, don’t bother. Let’s just – sit here a while.”

And almost before he knew it they were in each other’s arms. Gasping and moaning, they were all over each other like a couple of crazed adolescents.

“…Oh John,” she said as he helped her into the bedroom, “it’s been so long.”

“No it hasn’t; it just seems that way.”

“That’s what I mean. So long since we really – since we both
really
– oh, John …”

He thought of Pamela only fleetingly as they rolled and locked; then he put her out of his mind. All that was over. This was probably where he belonged.

Janice called it “our second honeymoon,” which made him wince when she wasn’t looking, and it lasted through the winter and well into the spring. Finding he could make love to her out of something other than a sense of duty was a pleasure in itself,
and there were other pleasures: she talked less, or at least did less of the kind of talking whose only purpose was to fill silence, and many little things in her behavior seemed to suggest a renewal of self-esteem – almost a new serenity.

Then it was summer again, and he was nearly thirty-nine years old. When they went up to “the country” there were not one but three or four girls on the raft whose sweet young flesh was a daily torment, and on the kitchen shelves of the bungalow there wasn’t even so much as a bottle of cooking sherry.

“Think I’ll run into town for a meeting tonight,” he announced while she was snapping string beans for dinner.

“Well,” she said, “all right, but you’ve already been to three this week. You really think it’s necessary?”

“Sometimes,” he said, “you have to trust my judgment in these things.”

Once in town he made straight for the bar at the Biltmore, where he drank until past midnight; then he went over to the downstairs bar of the Commodore – the place from which Paul Borg had taken him to Bellevue – and drank until closing time. When he crept unsteadily up into the hotel for a room he knew his voice wouldn’t sound right if he called her, so he saved his lie until morning: he’d had trouble with the car; the mechanic had wanted to keep it overnight; he hadn’t called earlier for fear of waking her. And she apparently believed him, though it often seemed, looking back later, that the end of the second honeymoon could be dated from that night.

Nothing happened all fall until late in November, when he and George Taylor were strolling back from lunch and found a crowd blocking the sidewalk in front of a television store. Several women were crying and one or two of the men looked ready to cry too, and it wasn’t long before they learned that the
President had been shot in the head. The cameras were panning over the shocked, grieving crowds in Dallas, and then they cut to Walter Cronkite soberly repeating the news.

“Guess I’d better get home, George.”

“Right. I’m cutting out too.”

And by the time he got home Kennedy was dead.

“It’s one of the most frightful things in history,” Janice said to the television set. Her eyes were red and blinking; she used one hand to wipe them with Kleenex and kept the other arm around Tommy, who’d been sent home early from school. “
Oh
, he was such a great man; and he was so
young
. He’d only just
begun
his career….” Soon she would call Paul Borg, if she hadn’t already, for confirmation in her mourning.

“… shock that has shaken the nation and the entire Western world,” Walter Cronkite was saying.

And through it all Wilder sat numb, saying very little, wondering what was the matter with him.

Later in the afternoon there were scenes of the Dallas police hustling a suspect named Oswald into jail – all you could see of him was that he was scrawny and wore a T-shirt – and of a righteous cop holding up a scope-sighted rifle to the cameras. Only then did Wilder realize what he felt, and it sent him into the kitchen for a secret nip of the whiskey Janice kept for guests. He felt sympathy for the assassin and he felt he understood the motives. Kennedy had been too young, too rich, too handsome and too lucky; he had embodied elegance and wit and finesse. His murderer had spoken for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance, and John Wilder understood those forces all too well. He almost felt he’d pulled the trigger himself, and he was grateful to be here, trembling and safe in his own kitchen, two thousand miles away.

“It’s a terrible thing,” he said, rejoining his wife and son. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing.”

Everything changed in February.

He was sitting in the office, wondering whether to go out for a drink and kill the rest of the day – an indispensable man could afford to do things like that – when his phone rang and it was Pamela.

“My God,” he said. “Where are you?”

She sounded shy, as if she hadn’t been sure whether to call him or not. “I’m staying at the Plaza. I was wondering if you’d like to meet me here for a drink this afternoon.”

She had changed a little – that was the first thing he noticed when he found her in the cocktail lounge. Her eyes and mouth were different – older, more “sophisticated” – and her very way of sitting in a chair and talking had taken on a new authority, but instead of dwelling on these things he concentrated on something he’d noticed long ago: that the tip of her nose bobbed slightly with each pronunciation of
p
,
b
or
m
. She was, she said, “finished” with Washington, and that seemed to imply that she was finished with Chester Pratt too.

“… I mean it
was
pretty exciting, being in Justice,” she said. “I worked in the Public Information office – I was right across the hall from the Attorney General – and I’ll probably never have a more interesting job in my life. The trouble was mostly Chefs drinking – he really is a terrible soak, and he probably never would’ve been hired if Bob had known.”

“Who’s ‘Bob’?”

“Kennedy. Nobody but the family calls him ‘Bobby.’ Anyway, he hired Chet in a hurry because he needed a speechwriter right away, and it was two or three months before his FBI report came through. It was full of stuff about his alcoholism, but by then Bob
didn’t have the heart to fire him, so he let him stay on. And Chet did try, I guess – he wrote some good speeches – but he seemed to feel that if he stayed sober all day he could go to hell with himself at night and on the weekends; that made it kind of rough on me. Then toward the end, just before the Assassination, the drink began to show on him: he looked like hell and he had the shakes – he’d have to sneak out across the street for quick shots of vodka to get him through the day. In an awful kind of way the Assassination was a break for him: when people started handing in their resignations it meant he could quit decently. That’s when I quit too.”

“Where is he now?”

“Here in town someplace, I guess. I honestly don’t know, and I don’t care. I broke off with him last month, before I went up to see my father. It seems like years ago now.”

And no wonder, because the trip to see her father had changed her life. “I always forget how old he is,” she said. “He’s over sixty now, and sometimes he seems even older than that. I guess he’s never really been happy since my mother died; anyway, he’s always saying Mark and I are all he has in the world. Did I ever tell you about Mark?”

“Only that he was an absolute genius at the piano.”

“Did I say that? Well, I guess it’s true enough. He’s been studying in Rome for four or five years, and last summer Daddy went over to visit him. I think he thought it was time for him to stop studying and start performing. And he found him – John, if I tell you this will you promise not to laugh or say something awful? You have to promise.”

“Okay.”

“He found him playing cocktail piano in a tourists’ hotel; that’s part of it, and the rest is worse. He’s living with another man in an apartment that’s all mirrors and black velvet. He’s turned homosexual, you see.”

“Oh.”

“And I guess some other father might’ve been able to take it, but not Daddy. He thinks in terms of Sodom and Gomorrah. He says he doesn’t want anything to do with Mark any more, and I think he means it. Anyway, the whole thing has made him sort of a super-father to me, if you can understand that.”

“I think I can.”

“So when I went up there he said ‘What do you want, Pamela? What do you want in all the world?’ I think he was hoping I’d say marriage and a family, but I still don’t feel ready for that; maybe I never will. I thought it over for a few days – I mean that’s the kind of question you
have
to think over – and then I told him I wanted something to do with filmmaking. I even told him a little about you.”

“About me?”

“Oh, not really anything
about
you, just that I’d been – well, fond of a man who was interested in movies too, and that we’d worked together on an experimental film that hadn’t been finished. And the point is, John, by this time he was practically reaching for his checkbook. I mean I
know
he has more money than he knows what to do with, but I never expected anything like this. He said ‘Would you like to go to Hollywood?’ I said there were plenty of places besides Hollywood for making movies, and he said there were other places than Detroit for making cars, too; he said if a thing is worth doing it’s worth doing right. And John, he offered to finance me for any amount up to fifty thousand dollars.”

“That’s quite a lot.”

“I couldn’t believe it.” For a moment she looked like a little rich girl boasting of her father’s extravagant birthday gift. “But he said I wasn’t a child any more and I could be entrusted with responsibility, and he said ‘If you’re going out there you don’t
want to be poor.’ And John—” She got out a cigarette and lit it with a gold lighter that had probably been another of her father’s gifts; or maybe it had been a gift from Chester Pratt. “—John, the thing is, I do want to go, but I don’t want to go alone. I want to go with you.”

“Until Chester Pratt sobers up, you mean?”

“I knew you’d say something like that. How can I convince you? Listen: I read over Jerry’s screenplay of ‘Bellevue’ the other night and it made me cry, thinking of you. Oh, listen—” She put her cigarette in the ashtray and leaned close to hold his wrist in both tense hands, and all at once he knew what had drawn him to her in the beginning, even more than her perfect flesh; it was her voice. “Listen. Why
not
come with me? Do you have anything better to do with your life?”

“Janice,” he said a few nights later, “there’s something I have to tell you.”

He didn’t look at her face until he’d gotten through the hard part – he wanted a separation; he was going to California; he had an opportunity to become a producer; there was a girl – and when he did risk a glance at her he found she looked blank: he couldn’t tell if she was being “civilized” about it or if she was stunned.