The Devil Tree (7 page)

Is the above letter from Walter Howmet’s secretary intended to keep me at bay, or is it intended to involve me in the company’s doings? Either way, here I am, true royalty, the crown prince of American dreams, with power to effect changes in the lives of hundreds of thousands of men and women.

And I’ve gained all my wealth and power without risking my life in a war or a rebellion, without bravery or cowardice, betrayal, suffering, or sacrifice. Thus, as a dramatic hero I have no roots in Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or Stendhal. Am I merely an example of the banality of power and wealth in America?

•   •   •

A toothless old black man, unmistakably an addict, was sitting across from me on the subway. As two young policemen got on, he winked and mumbled, “I feel so good here, son, so good. You protect me.” He rocked back and forth, attracting the policemen’s attention. One of them came over and told him to get off at the next stop. “I’m just going home,” he protested, “just going home.” When the doors opened at the next stop and the man didn’t move, the policemen shoved him off the train. It was my stop, too, and I got off and followed them along the platform. The policemen jostled the man, and when he fell, insisting that he couldn’t get up again, they grabbed him by the arms and dragged him along the platform. I thought of coming to his defense, of placing myself between him and his oppressors, but I did not. It wouldn’t have helped: the policemen would have turned against both of us with renewed cruelty. The man’s shoe fell off, and one of the cops picked it up with the end of his nightstick and threw it onto the tracks. Only then did the other cop notice that I was behind them. He demanded to know what I wanted. “What did he do?” I asked them. “He threatened me,” said one of them, smiling coyly. Then they walked away, leaving the old man on his back, his face smeared with tears and blood.

I jumped down onto the subway tracks and retrieved the shoe from under the third rail. I returned it to him, but he wouldn’t move. “They won’t let me alone, they be waitin’ for me,” he cried. He was on his knees on the platform, rocking back and forth, staring at the blood on his hands.

It occurred to me that I should lodge a protest against the police, but in any court of law my own past of addiction and draft dodging would only make me seem unreliable as a witness. I thought of finding shelter for the addict and paying for his rehabilitation, but such a gesture would have been only a rich man’s arbitrary caprice, a further proof of injustice. Joining a political party devoted to the abolition of our unjust social order also crossed my mind, but it
would have to be a Marxist party, I reasoned, and what did I, a penthouse resident and the ultimate scion of corporate democracy, have in common with Marxism, which, in the words of Marx himself, held private wealth to be nothing but “a eunuch of industry,” with “
lack of moderation and intemperance
” as its true standards and
“fantasy, caprice, and infatuation
” as its only ideals?

•   •   •

A photograph of Karen entitled
American Champagne
made the cover of
Life
. It was by far the best, the most alluring, the most seductive picture of Karen I have ever seen, embodying all the magnetism that made her a true handmaiden of communal lust. Soon after it appeared, a caterer from Celebrities Cuisine, who was also an amateur photographer, claimed that he had taken the photograph—not the man who was credited with taking it.

The photographer who took credit for the picture was Karen’s intimate friend. I had met him several times. In his mid-forties, widowed, he was an abrasive, restless, mean neurotic with the face of an angry hawk. He and Karen had known each other for quite some time, and it was obvious that he had been involved with her. What annoyed me more than that was that he treated her as if she were his protégée, and that Karen responded by treating him as if he were hers. He had once been a writer, but his paranoiacally gruesome novels—sexual quid pro quos concerning industrial society—had failed to secure a niche for him in the intellectual marketplace, so years ago he had turned for a living to his old hobby—female portrait and figure photography. As the retrospective exhibition of his photographs proved, he was undoubtedly a talented artist. When he first took up photography,
he made a point of photographing ordinary women, often streetwalkers who were beaten down by poverty and misery. Many of them he photographed over long periods, up to twenty years, at two-to three-month intervals, starting when they were in their early teens. Owing to his obsession with these common women, he often managed with his camera to extract from them that uncommon beauty that sets each being apart from all others. Next, heralded by newspapers and magazines as the Kafka of the portrait and the Gogol of the nude, he became a favorite among advertisers and art directors. After that his allegiance, and possibly his obsession, changed. Now he photographed only women of uncommon beauty, society’s supermodels and actresses. But as beautiful as they all were—and Karen was one of them—his art failed to discover what was unique about each of them; in his photographs they all looked flawless—but a bit alike, and common.

The caterer agreed to see me, but only after I had told him that I was a close friend of Karen’s. Born in Poland, he was a skinny, aging man who spoke with a staccato accent. His lifetime ambition was to become a professional photographer, but his wages did not allow him the extravagance of hiring professional models, and until he took the picture of Karen, all the women he had ever photographed—nude, exotic, large-breasted—were really men—transsexuals or transvestites who posed for him out of vanity. He had made an effort to exhibit, and initially his photographs had proved quite a success with viewers and critics alike. Just as three of his widely exhibited pictures, entitled
Woman I, Woman
II, and
Woman III
, were about to be reproduced by
Century
, the nation’s most prestigious art collectors’ magazine, someone—possibly one of the models—leaked the information that Women I, II, and III were, biologically, men. Fearing public ridicule,
Century
changed
its plans and rejected the photographs, and the caterer’s chances of becoming a professional photographer sank once again to zero. Then one night when he was overseeing a dinner catered by Celebrities Cuisine, he saw Karen, who was one of the guests, being followed and photographed by the man on assignment from
Life.
At one point the
Life
photographer left the party for a few moments to try to find a parking place for his car, which he had double-parked in the street. As he dashed away, he left his loaded camera in the custody of the caterer.

During the photographer’s absence, Karen, egged on by a raucous crowd, attempted to open a magnum of domestic champagne. When the cork flew out, Karen was soaked by a jet of foaming champagne, and the caterer couldn’t resist snapping a few pictures of her with the camera left in his care. When the
Life
photographer returned, the caterer handed him his camera without a word about the pictures he had taken.

Soon the fetching picture of Karen soaked in champagne appeared on the cover of
Life
, and certain critics called it the most successful cover in the magazine’s long and distinguished history. The caterer then came forward and said that if Karen would testify on his behalf, the credit for the picture would launch him in a photographic career and fulfill his life’s dream.

In most arts, the artist remains physically detached. The writer starts with words, the composer with sounds, both of which, by nature, are abstract, yet which can trigger in the reader or listener concrete images or emotions. But a photographer starts with the concrete; in the immediate confrontation between his camera and his subject, the abstract is yet to be born. Thus, one can easily understand the caterer’s frustration and grief at being denied the truth of the existence of that confrontation.

Nevertheless, the
Life
photographer categorically insisted
that he and he alone had taken all the pictures of Karen that evening. And because neither Karen nor any other guest seemed—or wanted—to recall seeing the caterer take the now famous picture, the matter was put to rest, and with it the caterer’s prospects for a career in photography.

Karen’s
Life
cover led to a thirty-second spot TV commercial, in which she opens a bottle of California champagne and, as we all watch, gets soaked by it. As a result of the success of that TV commercial, she was also offered a small role in
Totem Taboo
, a Hollywood movie.

Even though I had no doubt that it was the caterer who had taken the
Life
cover photograph of Karen, I knew that his chances of proving it were nil. “I have always wanted to own a photography studio,” I said to him. “If I were to acquire one and finance its operation, would you be willing to accept a contract that would guarantee your employment and creative independence?”

He looked at me in disbelief. “But why—why would you do such a thing? That’s a lot of money. It will take a lot of planning, and I might never be able to pay you back.”

“So what?” I said. “My plans for the future have always turned out to be made for the past.”

A month later I owned one of Manhattan’s better-located studios, and the caterer ran it with the sureness of an old pro. The word that big money was behind him spread through the city, and soon customers were flocking to him. Thanks to the secrecy I insisted on, nobody, not even Karen, knew the studio was mine. The proof of the caterer’s success came when Karen, recalling that I had once met him, asked me whether I could introduce him to her. The man was on his way to becoming the best portrait and figure photographer in the business, she said, and inasmuch as she was the best model, it was time the two of them got to know each other.

•   •   •

“I’m so glad to see a fine young man like you, Jonathan, coming to pray at your father’s grave, God bless his soul. But you know, Jonathan, even cemeteries aren’t what they used to be. I mean yesterday there was this broad putting the make on this guy right here in a graveyard. Since I started working around here, I’ve seen a lot of different folks with a lot of different feelings, usually crying or just plain sad, but that broad was just plain horny. And there she was, I don’t know, about twenty, beautiful body, long hair, with this dude about twenty-five, maybe not even that. They weren’t mourning, let me tell you. And then right there, next to your father’s grave, God bless his soul, he’s got one hand on her tit and the other on her ass. I couldn’t believe it. Like it was really sexy seeing this chick worked up, you know? I kept wondering what those boobs felt like. I felt like jerking off myself right then and there, and I hope your father would forgive me for saying this. It’s the truth.”

•   •   •

The other day Karen remarked that while no profession could make me any richer, becoming a professional gambler could certainly render me poorer. I know that Karen likes gambling, and I know that some of her better-to-do friends occasionally stake her to her little games of chance in the casinos of Atlantic City and Las Vegas, in the Bahamas, in Europe.

For me, however, the gambler remains as unskilled as the assembly-line worker: he can no more influence the outcome of the cards or the wheel than the man on the assembly line can alter the design of the product. All either one can do is repeat a short activity which is meaningless in itself over and over again.

In the eighteenth century it was mainly aristocrats who gambled; given their adventurous and unpredictable lives, the very repetition involved in gambling probably provided them with some sense of reliable patterns. Today, however, gambling is primarily the domain of the working class, who feel comfortable because the game is as familiarly repetitious as their work, but who at the same time seek in it an easy escape from their own existence to a less predictable one.

•   •   •

These days I manage the details of my life in an orderly, almost predictable fashion. I eat regularly, either at my hotel or in the best restaurants; I exercise in the hotel gym and swim in the pool; and I’ve gotten rid of my acne. I note all my appointments on my calendar, along with lists of things to do and to buy, and neatly cross off chores as I complete them.

I now control my entire inheritance and meet with half a dozen lawyers regularly to settle the details of my affairs. At our first meeting I realized that these vassals of my payroll provided me with equal representation of the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faiths. At a time when nearly one-third of America’s youngest children live in families earning less than the median income and never receive such basic medical care as immunization and other simple treatment
for the prevention of disease, these lawyers from Yale, Harvard, and Princeton were still sufficiently indoctrinated by their Ivy League education to view me as the quintessential product of the work ethic rather than as merely the inheritor of millions—that is, an aberration of the working of this ethic. Nevertheless, familiar as they were with the details of my past, I could also see that they had difficulty hiding their curiosity about how ethically Protestant the child of Horace Sumner Whalen had turned out to be.

As we sat eyeing each other politely, I was reminded that the prime function of these lawyers, like that of company managers, is to represent this country’s business elite.

Calvin Coolidge, a lawyer and a president, once quipped that “the business of America is business,” and my father was known to say that his company was known by the men it kept. However, a recent nationwide survey of American business managers suggests that business—the heart of America—is ailing. Half of all the businessmen polled asserted that they found their work utterly unsatisfactory; one-third said that the strain of day-to-day business hurt their physical and mental health; and over seventy percent admitted that in order to conform to the standards established by their corporate superiors they frequently had to compromise their personal principles. No wonder, then, that in order to escape such growing business pressures, the average American watches television almost seven and a half hours a day.