Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence

D
ECIDING TO
D
O
I
T

1 THE MURDERING KIND

2 YES TO ADULTERY

3 OY, IS THAT A GENIUS!

4 THIGHS AND WHISPERS

5 AND DO NOT FORGET THAT YOUR MOTHER, THOUGH DEAD, STILL LOVES YOU

6 SHE MATES AND SHE KILLS

D
ARING TO
D
O
I
T

7 HEAVY-DUTY RASKOLNIKOV-TYPE GUILT

8 THIS IS A HOSTAGE SITUATION

9 THE MYTH OF THE G-SPOT

10 BANANA, BANANA, BANANA

11 MY MOM IS A SLUT

S
TILL
D
OING
I
T

12 A LEAN MEAN KILLING MACHINE

13 AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

14 I-THINK-I-CAN-I’THINK-I-CAN

D
ONE

EPILOGUE

for my two beautiful and beloved daughters-in-law Jane Hamill Viorst and Hyla Stacey Viorst.

• 
September 21

•

I
am not the murdering kind, but I am planning to kill Mr. Monti because he is doing harm to my family. I don’t look like the murdering kind, being a short, blond, rounded, very married lady, with bifocals and a softness under the chin. On the other hand, I don’t look like the kind who, just a few weeks before her forty-sixth birthday, slept with three different men within twenty-four hours. And since I indeed did do that, I might indeed be able to murder Mr. Monti.

Nine months ago Mr. Monti’s daughter Josephine told him that she was engaged to marry my Wally. Five weeks ago poor Josephine was having a nervous breakdown and Wally was being accused of stealing a large sum of money from Mr. Monti’s safe.

“I know you didn’t do it,” I said to Wally in my most reassuring maternal-supportive voice. “But could you just explain how a hundred and fifty thousand dollars happened to be in the trunk of your Chevrolet?”

“It’s a really long story, Mom,” he said, so we sat in the living room and he told me the story. And then he kissed me goodbye and disappeared.

I have complete confidence in Wally. Jeff, my other son, the older one, is a whole different matter. I mean, who could have complete confidence in a real estate developer? But Wally, who is going for his Master’s in Social Work at Catholic University, is a good boy, a truly lovely person. And it doesn’t hurt a bit that in the right light, with his perfect profile and roguish blue eyes, he is definitely a Mel Gibson look-alike. In fact, if someone told Mel Gibson that he looked like Wally Kovner, Mel could take it as a major compliment.

Though I ought to have known better, I tried, on the second day of Wally’s disappearance, to talk over possible plans of action with my husband, Jake. Not the murder part, which I hadn’t come to yet, but several other thoughts I had on the subject. Jake did not wish to hear about them.

“We’ve got a lawyer handling this now, Brenda. So I’m going to ask you, nicely and politely and with a great deal of respect for your autonomy, to back off.” He took a big sip of coffee and resumed reading
The Washington Post.

We’ve been married forever, but I continue to be fascinated by the way Jake can push a button in his brain and switch off the outside world as if it’s a TV program he no longer wishes to watch. Lately, however, I have noticed that I am the TV program that Jake keeps switching off. Who could resist a line like “I’ve got something desperately important to discuss with you”? Who could ignore a statement like “What I have to say could totally alter our lives, the lives of our children, and perhaps the lives of our future grandchildren as well”? Jake could, can, does, and—that second day after Wally’s disappearance—did.

I tried again. “I know you’re feeling annoyed with me,” I told him, trying to sound hurt but not reproachful. He swigged down the rest of his coffee, got up, gave me an insincere pat on the behind, and was out the door and into the car before I could finish the rest of my sentence. I was going to say “. . . and I can even understand why you might feel that way,” which would have added just the right tone of empathy
and
humility. I often tell my readers that if you put yourself in the other person’s shoes and display a little good-natured self-effacement, you will greatly enhance your communication skills.

It’s a shame that my column (which appears in 372 newspapers around the country) doesn’t run in
The Washington Post,
where Jake might stumble upon it from time to time. I believe he is confusing the name of my column—“I
N
C
ONTROL OF
O
UR
L
IVES
”—with my character, which he seems to view as far more controlling than I am emotionally or philosophically capable of being. Indeed, I often make the point, in the 750 words allotted to me three times a week, that (as Spinoza or somebody very much like him once said) “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.” Which means that, when confronted with a stone wall that is blocking your path, you need to recognize its stone-walledness and not go banging your head against it. But which also means that you could dig a tunnel under it, walk around it, climb over it, dismantle it, or find another road to where you want to go.

This is an attitude that has equipped me to help hundreds of thousands of readers (and two dozen or so of my closest friends) with troubled marriages, difficult children, midlife crises, aging parents, and blasted
dreams. This is an attitude that has also equipped me to provide them with a wide array of useful household hints (including foolproof gourmet recipes), the names and phone numbers of first-class psychotherapists, thoughtfully annotated book and film recommendations, and (though there is not a lot of call for this) the lyrics to vast numbers of popular songs from the nineteen twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties.

In other words, what we’ve got here is a “can-do” attitude, which is something quite quite different from “controlling.” So I don’t intend to sit around and wait for a lawyer (who may be more into necessity than freedom) to protect my family from harm when there is, in fact, something I can do. Like murder Mr. Monti.

You must understand that never once, in my column, have I recommended murder. I am, however, in favor of capital punishment. My problem here is that I have recently lost some of my once starry-eyed confidence in judges and the jury system, and therefore would want to be the one who personally decided which criminals merited the death penalty. I acknowledge that this philosopher-king approach (derived from Plato’s
Republic,
a surprisingly good read) is at odds with my basic liberal-humanistic-ACLU bent, but—as I often tell my readers—the capacity to live with ambivalence is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of healthy adulthood.

Jake doesn’t think that I live with ambivalence. He thinks that I am absolutely positive about absolutely everything. He has always thought this about me, but when, at age eighteen, I
was absolutely positive that he was the man with whom I wished to lose my virginity, he thought I was adorable. And when, at age twenty, I was absolutely positive that he was the man with whom I wished to spend the rest of my life, he thought I was irresistible. Over the years, however, his enthusiasm for my certainties has waned, and he now insists on seeing me as a black/white, day/night, wrong/right, unnuanced kind of person. I could resent his failure to appreciate my subtleties, but instead I accept responsibility for his misperception and intend to keep working (marriage, I tell my readers, is a full-time occupation) at correcting it.

Actually, if you want to see a truly unambivalent, un subtle, absolutist controller, take a look at Mr. Monti. A nonnegotiable Roman Catholic, he has bullied his wife into pious submission and made sure that his two older daughters married in the faith. When Josephine began dating Wally, a distinctly Jewish person, last autumn, Mr. Monti brought out priests, nuns, and other big guns, but failed to prevent Josephine from continuing to see Wally and very quickly falling in love with him. When, during the Christmas-Chanukah season, Josephine agreed to marry Wally, Mr. Monti, moving to his next line of defense, launched into a passionate pitch for conversion. He told Wally and Josephine that this was the kind of accommodation—okay, call it sacrifice, even—that people in love were more than willing to make. Such sacrifices, he said, were good not merely for the marriage but for the soul. Wally completely agreed with him and went on to praise his sensitivity to the needs and obligations inherent in all committed human relations. (Wally has learned a lot from me over the years.) He also said he was certain that Mr. Monti would understand if his soul took a while to get used to the whole idea. Accustomed to having his way, Mr.
Monti confidently waited through the first three months of the new year. So in April, when he was informed that Wally wouldn’t be converting, he felt not only defied and disdained but personally and publicly humiliated.

Mr. Monti has no sense of humor and no sense of proportion, both of which are also necessary (though not sufficient) conditions of healthy adulthood. He is a large, vain man who, though vision-impaired without his tinted glasses, instantly whips them off when there’s an attractive woman around, the better to dazzle her with his expressive eyes. He also seems quite enamored of his overly styled black hair, through which he fondly runs his fingers while bragging about his vast wealth, extraordinary business acumen, and the fact that he has never ever ever lost a fight. It’s true that his suits fit him to perfection, but he wears a bit too much gold to make a favorable impression on us less affluent but more tasteful types. (I confess to being hostile to gold chains worn by men of a certain age. Make that any age.) As for his pinky ring . . . Well, suffice it to say that Mr. Monti—with his bullying and boastful ways, his manicured nails, his custom-made shirts with the monogram on the left cuff, and all that gold—would not be my first choice for one of my future grandchild’s four grandparents. But if that’s what he was going to be, I have to say I was pleased that this hypothetical grandchild was going to be raised by a Jewish father. Pleased not only because I wished to perpetuate our heritage (which I did), but also because (and I grant that this is a deeply unattractive part of my character) it gave me a lot of pleasure to screw Mr. Monti.

Which, to get back to an earlier point, I had already done.

What I mean is that, while I wouldn’t ever choose a person like Joseph Augustus Monti to be one of my future grandchild’s four grandparents, I had in fact chosen him to be one of the three men I went to bed with just a few weeks before my forty-sixth birthday.

I could plead insanity, but I won’t. As I often tell my readers, all of us—if we wish to call ourselves adults—must take responsibility for our actions. Despite unhappy childhoods. Despite social and economic inequities. Despite life’s cruel, random blows. We are responsible and, within the limits imposed by necessity, we are in control. No one is forcing us to have sexual congress with burly, bullying Italians who wear gold chains and pinky rings (though he did, in response to a moan not entirely of pain, have the courtesy to remove the ring). We make—I made—that choice.

•  •  •

I had taken the coming of age forty-six very hard. This may well surprise my readers, to whom I have confided that, despite an innate optimism (which has carried me through many a dark moment), I have long possessed a tragic sense of life and been well aware that someday I too would grow old and die. I had presented myself, and had thought of myself, as someone who had come to terms with mortality.

Several months before my birthday, however, I became increasingly obsessed with a grim statistic: My grandmother had died at sixty-nine. My mother had died at sixty-nine. And so had her only sister. As a rational person committed to staring unflinchingly at the truth, I had to conclude that, given this relentless family history, officially my life was about to be two-thirds over.

As a rational person I then had to ask myself, Why am I taking this so hard? First of all, I still had twenty-three years left. Second of all, I had already enjoyed a richly fulfilling life: Love and work. Marriage and the family. Personal satisfaction and public recognition. Good friends and good health. Indeed, I had often proclaimed that, were I on a plane that was going down in flames, I could not complain that I was being significantly cheated of life’s delights. Except . . . Except . . . Except for one thing. Sex.