The Devil Tree (20 page)

I envy Karen’s temperament, even though I’m frightened by it. She is never indifferent, she is seldom withdrawn, and she is always ready to change her mood. I’ve witnessed so many of her explosions, and her subsequent
remorse, that when she swears they won’t happen again, I can’t believe her. She is critical of my restraint, claiming that I’ve been emotionally programmed by the patterns demanded by my addiction and my withdrawal, and she says it with a straight face, unable to realize how much in her own life she relies on self-imposed arbitrary patterns. Isn’t she aware that unless she is well tanned she feels insecure? That while having sex, with me and apparently with others, in order to speed up her excitement and potentiate her orgasms, she more and more often depends on inhaling Onsense, the illegally manufactured and dangerous derivative of amyl, alkyl, and butyl nitrate, which, mindless of her lover, and right in the middle of her lovemaking, she will greedily breathe in straight from an ampule she breaks under her nose? That by her own admission, in search of easy sexual diversion, more and more often she joins casually met twosomes and threesomes? That at social gatherings she can no longer do without several vodkas on the rocks, which slur her speech? And what about her chain smoking? Sex with me is probably the last domain where patterns don’t yet rule: after all the days and nights we have spent together talking, making love, staring at each other, and falling asleep in each other’s arms, I still don’t know what triggers her need of me. In every other woman I’ve made love to, sexuality has been a channel to her mystery, but Karen’s sexuality shields her from me.

The last time I saw her she was recovering from a virus and the side effects of antibiotics. She prowled naked around her apartment, watering her already sodden plants, smoking one cigarette after another, washing a dish or spoon as soon as she used it, and from time to time glancing at me. She had just discovered, she said, that the dry cleaner had lost the sash to her new Oscar de la Renta gown. Then she said, “I’ve been without sex for so long now that I can’t wait to start playing around again!”

I felt a cold intake of breath. Was I to be a partner in her “playing around”? Or did she merely feel that I deserved to know of her playing around with others, since for her to have sex with others was indeed to play around—around me. Reminded of her need of other lovers, I felt defeated, as if I knew in advance that each one of them would take her away from me on a path I didn’t know. Later Karen took a bath, but I, immobilized by her calm and unable to master her mood, remained dressed, staring at her lean form in the foam. Each time she closed her eyes I assumed she was far away, already getting laid in her mind by her new lover.

•   •   •

I’ve been in bed for three days, unable to move, to read, or to think. The high fever is gone now, but my eyes are still tired and my body aches. The hotel waiters and maids silently come and go, feeding me, cleaning the place, doing all those chores that are usually performed for the sick person by family members or trusted servants.

I’ve had these symptoms before: once when I was about to leave the country and once in Rangoon after my mother’s detectives found me. In those days I used to panic at the approach of the symptoms, but now I refuse to give in to them. Wednesday was the worst day. My doctor sent two nurses from Doctors Hospital to look after me, but what I needed—tender care and human concern—they couldn’t give; they just sat all day in the living room giggling, watching TV, listening to music. Meanwhile, alone in the bedroom, I fought off my fear of sudden death. My heart raced and I could barely feel my pulse. Then my blood pressure seemed to drop and it was difficult for me to breathe. Still,
even then, part of me refused to become engaged, so in part, at least, I was able to remain fascinated by my own terror. Then, a moment later, I was calm and no longer even felt the need for a doctor.

I thought about the black girl who had gone with me to Whalenburg. Once she found out who I was, she refused to have anything more to do with me. I had enjoyed the intensity of our lovemaking—the search for the source of sensation, the simple breakdown of the barriers the mind and body erect so easily—and I wanted to keep her with me. I even pleaded with her, promised to take her abroad, insinuated that I would make her rich. She wouldn’t listen. She had made up her mind. I meant trouble to her, she said, for no matter how much I wanted her, I would soon have had enough of the sex and then I would say to her, “Go home, blackbird, there’s no longer a place for you in my white cage.” Fear of being used and rejected by a white man was still stronger in her than the desire for any new experience I might give her—regardless of its cost.

I wanted to call Karen but I felt drained. What’s more, I knew she had better things to do than attend to a sick man.

I’ll never forget the day I found her with her face caked in a natural mud mask and her body wrapped in towels that had been soaked in her own urine. As most dermatologists and beauticians know, she told me, urine is the ideal moisturizer, the best remedy for dry, cracked skin, and it has been used by beauty-conscious men and women since Babylonian times. The best of the commercially produced moisturizers all contain some urea, but Karen assured me that the natural fluid is more effective. She should know. She said she’s been using it for years and that, in spite of all her sunbathing and sitting under studio lights, her skin is as smooth and lustrous as it was when she was a little girl.

•   •   •

Sometimes, when I was a child, I wouldn’t see my father for months, and I would nourish a fantasy of him visiting hundreds of Whalenburg workers one after another and having supper in their homes. I told myself that I was lucky to have a father who was important enough to bring employment, money, and happiness to so many people and to so many other children, even though it meant that he never had enough time for me. I never imagined that my father didn’t really care about me deep down; I simply knew that I was just one child, but that he had to feel responsible for the fate of every smoking chimney in Whalenburg.

If he were alive today, my father would have no idea of who I am. I doubt if he could answer the simplest questionnaire about my height, weight, or childhood illnesses. He certainly would know nothing about my tastes, my friends, or the state of my mind. And what would he, a man who refused even to travel unless it was for business, have to say about the idle years I spent abroad?

•   •   •

In Nepal I lived among many Tibetan refugees. To a Tibetan, death is a transition either into an incarnate state—a bodily form possessed in the past or an entirely new one—or into a discarnate state—a bodiless, immaterial form of existence. How a person has lived his life determines whether or not he will be reincarnated. Only a lama, a master of the topography of discarnation and incarnation,
can perform the rituals liberating the spirit from the cycle of death and rebirth; and only he has foreknowledge of what death is like.

The rituals to be performed when death approaches are codified in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
. If one follows these guidelines with great care, after death he will still be able to hear the voice of the lama and to act on his precepts.

As I listened to my Tibetan friends, I had an uneasy sensation that once before, as if in a previous life, I had heard the voice of the lama. Before going abroad I was shown my living trust, an agreement between my father and the trustees that placed a large part of my father’s estate in an irrevocable trust for me. It instructed the trustees on how to administer the principal and interest from my father’s estate during his lifetime until I came of age, and it also prescribed how the trust was to be continued in the—then so unlikely—event of his death. Unlike my father’s last will, which he could change from time to time, the living trust was a final, absolute commitment of his wealth, and because of the substantial estate tax benefits and savings it involved, once it was created the law required its creator to surrender all supervisory powers to a group of trustees.

Thus, during his short lifetime, which spanned great economic and social changes, Horace Sumner Whalen, a Protestant lama from Whalenburg, created the living trust, his own
Book of the Dead
, to aid me, his uninitiated son, in the course of my future life.

•   •   •

“In addition to the steel, glass, aluminum, oil, and tooling industries that he and his company owned, your father was an acute land and real estate investor, Mr. Whalen.

“Shortly before his untimely death, your father realized the risks involved in owning real estate in slums, where so many blacks, Latins, Jews, and various Slavs live. Month after month many of them either refused or were unable to pay the rent, and their slums soon became an economic burden on your father’s company. Now, according to law, the city must take title to any property that falls four years behind on its taxes. That’s why, after a few years of ownership, acting on the excellent advice of Walter Howmet, your father relinquished some of those slum buildings; that is, he let the city take them over, at a substantial, but tax-deductible, loss to the company, which, however, in view of the company’s skyrocketing profits, turned out to be a good tax shelter. Then the city had to get rid of those unprofitable buildings. It tried to unload them at public auction but there were few buyers; most of the properties remained unsold. As a result, the city was forced to offer your father’s company a sizable fee to manage these slums and maintain them for their tenants—who are, incidentally, paying their rent with money received from the city’s welfare rolls. Now that is a perfect dialectical example of turning public funds into private profit!

“Your father even found ways to avoid responsibility for downright abominable slum buildings the company owned in the Bowery. For instance, he would award the operating leases to other syndicates or conglomerates, which in turn would lease them to individual landlords, who, unfortunately, are often not too scrupulous. Be that as it may, your father did not personally supervise the buildings. And it was very unfair when at times the so-called liberal press referred to him as another ‘invisible slumlord.’ He was hardly that. And you, as your father’s heir, are no more responsible for the slums than your father was.”

•   •   •

Whalen put down the roof of his convertible and rolled down the windows. A sharp wind was blowing, and he felt small droplets of mist on his face and hands and neck. Like a huge sand yacht without its sail, the car rocked to the right and left in time with the swaying birches that arched high above the road. In front of him, the highway and the alley of trees seemed to disappear into the distance. Whalen stopped the car. He got out, wrapped his coat tighter around him, and walked toward the dense woods.

High above him the wind continued to snap the treetops back and forth, but within the shelter of the woods the ground was dry and sandy; nearby, in the tall grass, a grasshopper chirped. The sound, a voice of the earth, warmed him, and for a moment he felt at peace.

•   •   •

“I remember you, Mr. Whalen, when you were still a tiny kid, riding with your father in that black company limo that would stop in here to fill up. Down here in steel country, you might say folks are as patriotic as your father was; they just don’t like foreign things. It’s good you’ve gotten yourself a nice American-made automobile, Mr. Whalen. Things are rough here for anybody coming in with one of those little Japanese or German imports; the gas station attendant might just slip a couple of sugar cubes into their gas tank, courtesy of Detroit, you might say. Soon after they swallow that sugar, those little foreigners get awfully sick; they cough, spit, puff. And nobody can repair them anymore! No, sir!

“What I’m saying, Mr. Whalen, is that since Detroit don’t make convertibles anymore, you were smart to have one of their Fords decapitated, like, to your own specifications.
And smarter yet to hide a twelve-cylinder supercharged Ferrari gas-guzzler under that fine-looking American hood. Yes, sir! Your father would have been mighty proud of his boy!”

•   •   •

I went with Karen to the American Cancer Society charity ball. As we watched the gala parade of the latest whims in fashion, extravagances whipped up by the country’s best designers and shown by one stunning model after another, Karen introduced me to a good-looking middle-aged man. He was an old acquaintance of hers, she said; together they had smoked and snorted the best coke in town. The man told me he was in “special investments” and said that he had learned a lot about me from Karen. At first, as if letting me in on a well-kept secret, he spoke of the advantages of smoking—rather than sniffing—cocaine in its most potent form: a free base. Since Pizarro’s time, this has been a favorite pleasure of Latin American Indians. The free base is considerably more expensive than regular coke because a certain salt has been separated out of it which in regular coke represents at least one-fifth of the weight. Thanks to the proximity of the heart to the lungs, the free base, because it is smoked, is absorbed into the bloodstream quickly, and the exhilaration it causes lasts for several hours and is many times more intense than the one caused by snorting regular coke.

Just as he started to tell me how to increase the potency of the free base by smoking it in special ways, I interrupted him. I said there was hardly anything about cocaine that I did not know from past experience. I told him my doctors in Rangoon had scrupulously obtained only the best cocaine—as
long as I was paying for it—for my treatment, because it is still the most effective opium disintoxicant known to science. I also said I had read most of the available literature on opium and coke, beginning with Freud, who suffered for years from depression, apathy, and anxiety and referred to cocaine as his ideal and beloved drug. Freud’s enemies claimed that by overpraising the efficacy of the drug in this way in his writings, he had made it, after alcohol and opium, the third scourge of mankind.