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Steve Tesich was a screenwriter whose credits include The World According to Garp, Eleni, Four Friends and an Academy Award for the screenplay of Breaking Away. He died in 1996, aged 53, just after finishing this novel.

About the Book

Oscar-winning writer Steve Tesich masterfully creates and destroys the sad, mad world of Saul Karoo.

Karoo is an alcoholic who can’t get drunk, a loving father who can’t bear to be alone with his son, a fixer of film scripts who admits that he ruins every one of them.

Calamity and comedy accompany Saul on his odyssey through sex, death and showbusiness as he seeks to ‘fix’ both a master director’s greatest film and his own broken life at the same time.

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS THE night after Christmas and we were all chatting merrily about the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. His name was like a new song that everybody was singing. The New York Times carried a daily box listing the names of all the major players in the current crisis in Romania along with a phonetic guide to their authoritative pronunciation, so everybody at the party made it a point of honor to pronounce all the names properly and as often as possible.

SILVIU BRUCAN, an opposition leader: SEEL-vyoo broo-KAHN

NICOLAE CEAUSESCU, the ousted leader: nee-koh-LAH-yeh chow-SHESS-koo

ELENA CEAUSESCU, his wife and second in command: eh-LEH-nah

NICU CEAUSESCU, their eldest son and leader in the city of Sibiu: NEE-koo

Lieut. Gen. ILIE CEAUSESCU, the leader’s brother: ill-EE-yeh

Lieut. Gen. NICOLAE ANDRUTA CEAUSESCU, another brother: ahn-DROO-tsah

CONSTANTIN DASCALESCU, the Prime Minister: cohn-stahn-TEEN dass-kah-LESS-koo

ION DINCA, arrested Deputy Prime Minister: YAHN DINK-ah

Lieut. Gen. NICOLAE EFTIMESCU: nee-koh-LAH-yeh ehf-tee-MESS-coo

GHEORGHE GHEOR-GHIU-DEJ, Mr. Ceausescu’s predecessor: GYOR-gyeh gyor-GYOO-dehzh, with hard g’s

Maj. Gen. STEFAN GUSA, the Chief of Staff: Shtay-FAN GOO-sah.

ION ILIESCU, an opposition leader: YAHN ill-ee-YES-koo

CORNELIU MANESCU, a former Foreign Minister: kor-NEHL-yoo mah-NESS-koo

VASILE MILEA, the Defense Minister, who reportedly committed suicide: vah-SEE-leh MEEL-lah

Col. Gen. NICOLAE MILITARU: nee-koh-LAH-yeh mee-lee-TAH-roo

SORIN OPREA, an opposition leader in Timisoara: soh-REEN OHP-prah

TUDOR POSTELNICU, arrested Interior Minister: TOO-dor post-EL-nee-coo

FEREND RARPATI, Defense Minister: FEHR-end rahr-PAHTS-ih

Col. Gen. IULIAN VLAD: yool-lee-AHN VLAHD.

There was a quality to these names that made them delicious, almost irresistible to pronounce, and made speaking as pleasant as eating canapes.

I drained another glass of champagne and, picking up a glass of vodka, added my own voice to the din.

“The man to watch now,” I shouted, “is YAHN ill-ee-YES-koo. I don’t think that cohn-stahn-TEEN dass-kah-LESS-koo has much to say anymore about the situation in Romania, I really don’t.”

“Flux or no flux,” I insisted, “the man to watch now is YAHN! YAHN ill-ee-YES-koo.”

I downed my glass of vodka and poured myself another, Polish vodka this time, with a sprig of buffalo grass or something floating at the bottom of the bottle. It was all totally hopeless but I kept drinking, moving from tray to tray and group to group.

It was a tradition with the McNabs, George and Pat, to have a day-after-Christmas party but never before had the events of the world conspired to make the party so lively and appropriate. There was so much to celebrate and talk about. There was Havel, the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Communism, Gorbachev, and, for the next few days at least, there were all those Romanians with their delicious-sounding names.

I was now drinking red wine again, which I drank when I first came to the party. In between, I had drunk every form of alcoholic beverage available on the premises. White wine. Bourbon. Scotch. Three different kinds of vodka. Two different kinds of brandy. Champagne. Various liqueurs. Grappa. Rakija. Two bottles of Mexican beer and several goblets full of rum-spiked eggnog. All of this on an empty stomach and yet, alas, I was stone-cold sober.

By all rights I should have been strapped to a stretcher inside a speeding ambulance on my way to some emergency detox center where I would be treated for alcohol poisoning and yet I was sober. Completely sober. Lucid. Totally unimpaired. Nothing.

I had never heard of anyone having this disease before. I didn’t know where or how I had contracted it or its cause.

All I knew was that something was wrong with me. Something had snapped off or screwed off or come undone inside of me. It was something physiological or psychological or neurological, some little blood vessel somewhere had burst or clogged, some brain synapse had blown, some major chemical change had occurred in the dark interior of my body or my mind, I really didn’t have a clue. All I knew for sure was that getting drunk was gone from my life.

An odd side effect of my drunk disease, probably caused by denial, was that ever since I discovered that I couldn’t get drunk no matter how much I drank, I wound up drinking more than ever. I might have become immune to alcohol but not to hope, and no matter how hopeless things seemed I kept right on drinking and hoping that one evening, when I least expected it, I’d get intoxicated again as in the good old days and become my old self.

The music stopped. The record changed but not the composer and, after a brief interlude filled with the din of unaccompanied human voices, it was back to Beethoven. It was, as always with the McNabs, an all-Beethoven day-after-Christmas party.

I poured myself a glass of tequila, a nice tall glass meant for mineral water, and drank it down.

I couldn’t understand it. I just couldn’t. Blood, after all, was blood and if you put your mind to it and made sure that the alcohol content in your blood exceeded fivefold, all known standards for drunkenness, then you should be able to get drunk. Anybody should. It was a matter of biology. And not just human biology either. Dogs could get drunk. I had read about a plastered pit bull attacking a homeless man in the Bronx and then passing out a few blocks away. Some local kids were later apprehended and charged with intoxicating the animal. Horses could get drunk. Cattle. Pigs. There were wino rats who got pissed on Ripple wine. Bull elephants, I was sure, could get drunk. Rhinos. Walruses. Hammerhead sharks. No living creature, man or beast, was immune to alcohol. Except me.

It was this biological exclusion, the unnatural nature of my affliction, that made me feel ashamed and stigmatized, as if I had contracted a strain of AIDS in reverse and was rendered immune to everything. It was the fear of becoming a pariah in public should my disease become known that made me pretend to act drunk. I also couldn’t bear to disappoint those who knew me. They expected me to be drunk. I was the contrast by which their sobriety was measured.

But my immunity to alcohol, as disturbing as it was, was not the only disease I had. I had others. Many, many others. I was a sick man.

Unheard-of diseases with bizarre symptoms were making a home for themselves in my body and my mind. It was as if I were on some cosmic mailing list of maladies or had within me a fatal gravitational field that attracted strange new diseases.

The McNabs, George and Pat, our hosts, lived in a labyrinthine apartment on the seventh floor of the Dakota. Plants and lamps were everywhere. Quartz lamps. Table lamps. Italian floor lamps with marble bases. Antique lamps with cut-glass Tiffany shades purchased at auctions at Sotheby’s. There was a huge crystal chandelier in the huge living room and another huge crystal chandelier in the huge adjoining drawing room. But despite this delirium of illumination, there was something about the McNabs’ apartment that devoured light the way Venus flytraps devoured bugs. The atmosphere, far from being sunny and bright, was one of dimness and dusk.

To be drunk in that din of human voices and music and in that twilight was one thing. To be in the merciless grip of involuntary sobriety was something else.

“To freedom!” George and Pat McNab shouted and raised their glasses of champagne in the air. “To freedom everywhere!” Pat McNab added, her voice breaking with emotion.

“To freedom!” Everyone, myself included, replied. We all drank up whatever it was we were all drinking. Mine was another tequila.

The huge Christmas tree—it was at least nine feet tall—was a chandelier in itself. Its countless little bulbs of several colors blinked on and off in time, it seemed, to the music of Beethoven.

For some reason, that Christmas tree, the well-dressed crowd, the toast to freedom, and the chandeliers brought to mind a cruise ship sailing on the high seas.

We would soon be leaving the whole decade of the eighties and cruising into the “new gay nineties,” as somebody had dubbed the coming decade. In our wake lay the collapse of Communism, the fall of various tyrants, and ahead of us lay some new New World. Some new New Frontier. A magnificent recording of Beethoven’s Fifth was blasting out of the huge Bose speakers as we sailed on. You had to shout to be heard, but the mood of the party was so merry that you felt like shouting.

Despite my array of diseases, or because of them, I shouted along with the rest.

Even my divorce was turning into a divorce disease. My wife Dianah was at the party. I didn’t see her arrive, but I caught a glint of her platinum hair under the chandelier in the drawing room before she vanished in the crowd.

We had been officially separated for over two years but saw each other regularly in order to discuss our divorce. These far-ranging discussions at a French restaurant where we always went became, in the course of time, the basis for another form of marriage instead of divorce. We even celebrated the two anniversaries of our mutually agreed-upon separation. Apparently, it was easier for Eastern European countries to topple their totalitarian governments than it was for me to topple my marriage.

Although independently wealthy, she had gone into business for herself since our separation. She owned a boutique on Third Avenue called Paradise Lost. She didn’t run the place, she just owned it. Some second-generation Pakistani woman managed the store and its all-women sales force. The store carried dresses, designer T-shirts, and fashionable scarves of various fabrics, all of them bearing images of various endangered species: wolves, birds, bears, the Bengal tiger, the snow leopard, a snail. I could tell, before she vanished in the crowd, that she was wearing one of those dresses herself this evening, but I couldn’t tell which doomed creature adorned it.

We made a point of showing up at events we had attended before our separation. Her public position regarding our separation was this: No hard feelings. It was important to her that position be widely perceived, and everybody we knew did in fact perceive it and thought it admirable.

Our adopted son, Billy, had come with her. He was a freshman at Harvard and home for the holidays. Home, in this case, meant our old apartment on Central Park West where Dianah still lived. When I moved out, I got a place on Riverside Drive, going as far west from Central Park West as I could without moving to New Jersey.

No problem spotting Billy in the crowd. He was at least a full foot taller than anyone around him. He was six foot six, or something like that, and still growing. Surrounded presently by older women, meticulously made-up and lavishly begowned. Unlike most boys his age, he seemed at ease in their company.

His face was white, almost snow white, but on each cheek he had a silver-dollar circle of rosy pink so that, despite that strange whiteness of his complexion, it was easy to think of him as rosy-cheeked.

Deepest eyes. So deep-set and dark that from a distance he seemed to have no eyes at all.

His long black hair came down almost to his shoulders, but there was something about Billy which made long hair endearing rather than rebellious.

He saw me and waved. His hand, raised high above his head, almost grazed the chandelier. I waved back. He smiled. The older women around him turned to see who it was he was greeting.

I had an empty glass in my hand and headed for the bar again. I disappeared in the thick throng which obstructed my progress, but I couldn’t rid myself of the sensation that Billy, towering above everyone there, could see every move I made.

He wanted something from me. I knew what it was and it was very simple. He wanted to go home with me tonight. To my apartment. Just the two of us. To wake up in the morning and resume something we had begun the night before. Simply to be there with me without anyone else around for once. Just the two of us.

I knew this because it was nothing new. But I also knew, because I knew myself, that I would find a way to keep him from coming home with me tonight.

It had nothing to do with love. I loved Billy, but I was absolutely incapable of loving him in private where it was just the two of us.

That was another disease I had. I didn’t know what exactly to call it. Evasion of privacy. Evasion at all cost of privacy of any kind. With anyone.

I stumbled around, lurching and weaving, bumping into people, apologizing in a slurred voice if I caused their drinks to spill, and then moving on, did my best to appear drunk and therefore normal. It was no fun being an impostor. It was bad enough having been an irresponsible boring alcoholic who was getting on in years, without the necessity now of assuming that identity in order to hide some other, far more calamitous problem.

So I stumbled along from lamp to lamp, from plant to plant and group to group, mingling, engaging, disengaging, drinking whatever came my way and then moving on. I bumped into people I knew who introduced me to others I had only heard about. Some of them had heard of me as well. I met a woman who had gone to school with Corazon Aquino. Before I left her to move on again, I felt that in some genuine and profound way I now knew more about Corazon Aquino in Manila than I did about my own mother in Chicago.

Beethoven’s Sixth was blasting away now. Nobody was really sure if the McNabs played all nine symphonies on that day, as they claimed they did, because to play all nine they would have had to start playing them long before the party actually got going. All I knew was that I normally showed up during the Fourth. In the years past, I was pleasantly high by the time I heard the pom-pom-pom-pa-a opening of the Fifth and completely plastered by the time the “Pastorale” rolled around. Not tonight.

Suddenly, I felt ravenously hungry. In preparation for the party I hadn’t eaten all day. In the hope against hope that if I had a perfectly empty stomach on which to drink, I would manage to get, if not nicely blotto, at least a little high. It seemed self-evident now, even to a self like myself, that neither would occur tonight. So I began eating, grabbing things off stationary and passing trays, the latter carried by an all-women catering crew dressed in black-and-white uniforms like some New Age order of catering nuns.

I ate whatever I saw, whatever came my way. They were mostly little things stuffed with things. Phyllo dough stuffed with feta cheese and spinach. Stuffed vine leaves. Stuffed cabbage leaves. In between portions of meat, vegetable, and cheese, I stuffed myself with baklava.

Dr. Jerome Bickerstaff, my family physician from the days when I was still a family man and had a family, came up to me while I fed and he just stood there, looking on in disapproval as I devoured desserts and canapés in no particular order. Some of the things I ate had toothpicks stuck in them and I tossed these away, like bones, on the floor.

“You don’t look well, Saul. I haven’t seen you in a while, and you look a lot worse since the last time I saw you.”

Because we were at a party, because Beethoven’s Sixth was blasting away through Bose speakers, each the size of an imported subcompact car, and because the people around us were shouting almost at the top of their lungs so they could be heard above the din of music and conversation, Dr. Bickerstaff and I were not merely chatting about my unhealthy appearance, we were shouting for all we were worth.

“A doctor can tell a lot about a person from the look of his hair. Your hair looks dead, Saul. I’ve seen medium-priced dolls at F.A.O. Schwartz with healthier-looking hair. Your hair looks sick. Dead.”

He disregarded my comment as if he didn’t hear it. To be fair to the man, perhaps he didn’t hear it. It almost required risking a distended testicle to be heard in that atmosphere.

“And you’re putting on weight,” he continued, alluding with his chin to my stomach.

Being perceived as overweight hurt. It hurt more than actually being overweight, which I knew I was.

“But I’m not fat, am I?” I pleaded. “I’m not what you’d call a fat man! There is no history of fat people in my family.”

“There was no history of money in the Kennedy family either, till Joe came along,” he said, a little sorry to be wasting such a gem of a reply on somebody like me. I could tell, because such things are easy to tell, that he was filing it away for future use.

“I saw Dianah a couple of weeks ago,” he told me, giving me a grave stare meant to imply that he had more to tell.

“Oh, really.” I ignored the import of his stare. “I just saw her myself about half an hour ago.”

“How is she professionally?” I asked and laughed, encouraging him again to laugh along with me. He wouldn’t.

“She told me, I can’t really believe it’s true, that you no longer have any health insurance.”

“What’s to insure,” I screamed hysterically. “I no longer have any health.”

It was a waste of time trying to be funny around Bickerstaff, but it was a waste of time talking to him at all, so I thought I might as well waste my time in a lively endeavor.

“So it is true,” he said and looked away from me as if needing a moment to compose his next remark.

“Listen to me, Saul,” he then said and put his hand on my shoulder. Unlike most New Yorkers, Dr. Bickerstaff never touched anyone in public. It was an indication of the gravity of the situation that he did so now. “Please listen to me and listen well. I know you’re drunk but …”

“I’m not,” I interrupted him. “I’m not drunk at all. I’m sober. Cold stone sober.” I almost burst into tears at the memory of using these very words not that long ago and actually being drunk when I said them. My overemotional delivery confirmed to Bickerstaff that I was drunk.

“When you sober up in the morning,” he went on, “take a good look at yourself in the mirror. What you’ll see is an overweight man past fifty who’s an alcoholic with a history of cancer and madness in his family. You’ll see a sallow man with dead-looking hair. You’ll see a man, Saul, who not only needs health insurance, but who needs the most extensive coverage available. If you can, I would advise you to join plans from several carriers.”

I took all this in and replied: “But other than that, how do I look to you?”

My flippancy no longer amused anyone. It had never amused Bickerstaff. He shook his head once, like a pitcher shaking off a sign from the catcher and, squinting at me, turned to go. I grabbed his arm.

“Listen to this, Doc. I quit smoking!” The trumpet of the Annunciation could not have been more jubilant than my voice. A point arrives in every man’s life when he desperately wants to please his doctor, even if the doctor isn’t his anymore.

I couldn’t actually hear the groan for all the din around us, but Bickerstaff’s face assumed a groanlike expression. It was clear that he didn’t believe me.

I was telling the truth, but for some reason Bickerstaff’s conviction that I was lying seemed far more substantial and authoritative than my truth.

He pulled his arm loose from my hand and his parting look informed me that I had become officially boring. Then he left. The mouth of a medium-sized congregation of people parted and swallowed him whole.

The McNabs’ apartment had more vegetation per square foot than any other I had ever seen. There were plants around my ankles, waist-high plants, there were veritable groves of trees scattered around the premises. Sections of it could have served as a set for the old Ramar of the Jungle TV series. It was one of the most photographed apartments in North America. It had been featured in Architectural Digest, New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Ms., and at least a dozen other publications. From what I’d read of the devastation caused by acid rain, I was sure that this apartment had more greenery than did whole communities in the Ruhr Valley.

To the accompaniment of the “Pastorale” I stumbled around from grove to grove until I found one to my liking. There I sat down underneath a canopy of leaves and resumed drinking.

People came and went as they tend to do at parties. Singles, couples, trios. They lingered in my grove a while and then moved on. We talked about the chow-SHESS-koos, Bucharest, Broadway, and the Berlin Wall. People I barely knew and who barely knew me seemed to know all about me and I all about them. In the Information Revolution the world really had become a global village and, as in the villages of old, gossip was once again the dominant form of communication.

One of the most dispiriting side effects of my inability to get drunk was not just that I was sober while this global village gossip went on but that I would remember it the next day.

Loss of memory was one of the true pleasures of getting drunk and when I was my old healthy self and drunk every night, I would wake the next morning feeling refreshed and completely oblivious of the night before. Every day was a brand-new-day with no strings attached. Every morning was a new beginning. I was in synch with nature. Death at night, birth and renewal in the morning.

It all changed when I contracted my drunk disease. Ever since then whatever I did or said or heard the night before greeted me the morning after. A new, merciless continuity entered my life which I was not equipped to handle.

In the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times I had read an article on physics that described the theoretical possibility of the existence of antimatter in outer space, antiworlds, entire antigalaxies composed of subatomic antiparticles.

It made me wonder while I sat in my grove and gossiped along with the rest if, in this yin-and-yang scheme of things, an anti–Betty Ford clinic existed where diseased ex-alcoholics like myself could get help. Where my immunity to alcohol would be reversed and my system, after a two-week stay, would be completely retoxified by trained professionals.

My grove began to fill up with people. Some stood. Some sat. All of them talked and when they talked they had to shout if they wanted to be heard and all of them wanted to be heard. I was neither included nor excluded from various conversations. It was up to me. They babbled. I babbled back every now and then. It was therapeutic. The booze was having absolutely no effect on me, but the meaningless babble was almost intoxicating.

A horrific possibility suddenly presented itself to me. I wondered, what if my immunity to alcohol extended to other chemicals and drugs? Pain. Horrible pain. Unbearable pain. What if I came down with unbearable pain that no chemical substance could alleviate?

I saw my wife coming toward me. Serene, smiling, with a glass of champagne held away from her body, she looked like somebody crossing the grand ballroom of the QE2 to invite me to dance.

I slumped back in my chair and took in the dress she was wearing. The endangered beast du jour was an owl. There were little endangered owls all over her dress. A flock of little owls with those big, round eyes stared at me from her bosom and her belly. If I didn’t mend my ways, their eyes seemed to be warning me, I too would end up on an endangered-species list someday. Maybe even on a dress like this.

“Anjouan scops owl,” she answered, sighing, as if she was wasting her breath even talking to me.

“I thought so.” I nodded. “Delightful-looking birds. They look like a jury of insomniacs.”

I laughed, inviting her to laugh along with me, knowing ahead of time she wouldn’t. She didn’t. She didn’t even acknowledge the invitation. She just looked at me.

My wife. She was still my wife. My married life was over, but my marriage went on.

Dianah’s face had all the features of this year’s beautiful women. Everything about it was prominent. Eyes. Cheekbones. Lips. Teeth. Her platinum-blond hair extended at least six inches away from her ears, like some flung-open raincoat. The effect of that coiffure seemed to be that she was flashing me with her face.

“I don’t suppose you noticed that your son was here,” she said as her gaze wandered past me to the people in my grove whom she was summoning as witnesses to our conversation.

“Billy? Sure I noticed. He’s hard not to notice. There he is.” I pointed across the room where, in the distance, his head dominated the horizon.

“He needs to talk to you, Saul. He really does. What’s that on your shirt?”

I looked down at my crumpled blue shirt. Some stuffing from one of those canapes I had devoured had fallen and landed there. Some reddish stuff. I tried to brush it off, but it smeared. The resulting stain made it seem that I had been gored.

“No,” I shook my head. “Not even close. I’m completely lucid and, sad to say, all my faculties are intact.”

Some moral perversity made it pleasant for me to speak the truth in the complete assurance that it would be rejected by Dianah. The more sober I claimed to be, the drunker I appeared. Her conviction that I was drunk was so strong that for a moment at least I felt myself getting high on her conviction.

“Please, Saul. Enough. I’m tired of these games. Everyone here—” again she swept the grove with her gaze, summoning witnesses “—can tell you’re drunk. You’re not fooling anyone.” She stopped, heaved a huge sigh, and resumed. “We were talking about Billy, if you don’t remember.”

“Fine, have it your way. He needs to talk to me. What does he need to talk to me about?”

I had to look away from her dress. All those large, unblinking owl eyes were making me nervous.

“What does any son want from his father?” she addressed the gallery in my grove.

“He wants to be with you. He needs to be with you. I can’t remember the last time you spent any time alone with him.”

She raised her eyebrows, disgusted by my flippancy, and then proceeded again, slowly, patiently.

“He wants to go home with you tonight. He needs to spend a couple of days with you before he goes back to school. This is very important to him, Saul. Very, very important, and if you have any feelings for him …” She went on.

She had managed, in the short time she was there, to silence all the other conversations in the grove and now, as she went on, she had the full attention of all those people sitting or standing on either side of us. I was grateful for the presence of this audience. If marriages, like parades and parties, were strictly public affairs, Dianah and I would still be living together and I would probably consider myself happily married. It was the privacy, our time alone, that ruined my marriage. Not public privacy as we were having now, but private privacy. Just the two of us. In this regard, at least, I was totally blameless. I had done all I could to avoid all private moments between us.

“Fine, fine,” I gave in. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I’ll take him home with me tonight.”

“You will?” She regarded me with suspicion of rare vintage. “You won’t try to get out of it as you always do, will you?”

“You promise!” She laughed. The owls on her belly and breasts fluttered as if in preparation for takeoff. “You could pave all the potholes in Manhattan with your broken promises, darling. You know that. You do know that, don’t you?”

I did indeed and so did probably all those people in the grove who were listening to us.

“Do you think I’m putting on weight?” I asked her, patting the stain on my shirt and the stomach underneath the stain.

“Surely, darling, a fat monster like you has more important shortcomings to consider than the weight you’ve gained.”

“You’re falling apart, sweetheart. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically.”

“You,” she cut me off. “You’re like the last days of the Ottoman Empire. You’re the sick old man of Manhattan.”

“Don’t you think, then, that it would be a bad idea to have somebody like me spending time alone with Billy?”

“I certainly do. He deserves a better father, but unfortunately for him you’re the only father he has. You’re spilling your drink, darling.”

The “Pastorale” concluded. In the short hiatus without music, Dianah just stood there looking down at me and then gazing to her right and then to her left at the people in the grove. I was, she soulfully conveyed to them all, a cross she had to bear. And then Beethoven’s Seventh began.

She asked me, in that bearing-the-cross voice she now assumed, if I had done anything about my health insurance.

“You haven’t even noticed.” I switched from lies to truth the way liars like to do. “I’ve quit smoking. Not a puff since yesterday. Not one puff. Cold turkey. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “I think I’ve done it this time. I really do.”

I heard myself circumscribed by her sigh. She knew me, and everybody who knew me seemed to know me, better than I knew myself. Our audience in the grove had no doubts that either A, I was lying, or B, I would start smoking again very soon.

“The only thing you’ve quit cold turkey, my darling, is telling the truth and taking responsibility for your actions. You have become a menace to us all.”

“By the way,” she said. “This is the last time I’m going to ask you to come and take your father’s clothes out of my apartment, or I’m going to give them away.”

My father died three years ago. Cancer of the spine. The cancer worked its way up his spinal column to his brain. It took a while for him to die and for the last months of his life he was completely mad.

In his madness, he came to believe that he had two sons. The good son, Paul, whom he loved madly. And the worthless son, Saul, whom he hated, just as madly. I had no idea, whenever I visited him, which son he would see in me. It varied from visit to visit, from day to day, from hour to hour. Sometimes in mid-moment, in a blink of an eye, he switched from one to the other. All I could do was play along.

As his good son, I conspired with him and castigated the behavior of my worthless brother. As the worthless son, I sat in silence and contrition while he raved and condemned me to various forms of capital punishment. “I sentence you to death,” he told me over and over again. He was, before his premature retirement, a judge in the criminal court system in Chicago and when he sentenced me to death it was in his capacity as a judge, not father. Before he died, he left an insane will behind. In that will he commuted my sentence of death to life imprisonment without parole. To his good son Paul he left all his clothes. My mother, for reasons of her own, could not bring herself to throw his clothes away. She prevailed upon me to take them and, as the good son, I took them back to New York. When I left Dianah, I couldn’t bring myself to throw away his clothes either, but I certainly didn’t want to take them to my new apartment.

She turned to go again and stopped. Arrested for a moment in mid-flight, she bestowed upon me one of her famous forgiving looks. Forgiveness not just for the many, many wrongs I’d done up to now but, being the kind of man I was, forgiveness for the many, many wrongs I was bound to commit in the future. It was a look of daunting forgiveness. Were I to live two hundred years, I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly commit enough wrongs to warrant a forgiveness of that size.

And then she left, turning this way and that as she worked her way through the crowd, leading with her champagne glass. Her platinum hair brightened and dimmed as she walked past various lamps. In the distance, at the far end of the room, towering above the throng, I saw my son. His head was bowed as it always was when he conversed with normal-sized people.

A short time later, I left the grove myself. I moved around the rooms, mingled, drank, and babbled about the realignment of the nations of the world. I could babble about anything. The less I knew about the subject, the more convincing I sounded to others. To myself as well.

I loved parties at other people’s apartments. I had developed a home disease of some kind and felt at home only at other people’s homes. Almost always I was the first to arrive and the last to leave. The ambiance where music thundered and men and women screamed banalities at each other appealed to me.

It appealed to me as well (in an on-again, off-again kind of way) to think of myself as The Uninsured Man. I was positive that I was the only uninsured man there. This knowledge filled me with a reckless bravado. How bold of me! How independent. I not only took my uninsured status in stride, I made it a part of my stride as I journeyed from plant to plant and lamp to lamp and group to group. The Uninsured Man.

A European gentleman at the party did the European thing and offered me a cigarette before lighting one himself. No, I told him, no thank you. I quit. Not a puff since yesterday. Those around me who knew me laughed as if I were either telling a joke or lying. Strangely enough I really was beginning to feel that I was lying. That I hadn’t quit at all. Telling the truth was one thing, but feeling in touch with the truth after telling it was something that no longer seemed to depend on me. It was granted me or denied me by the response of others. It was a disease, a truth disease, and one of its symptoms was that I felt much more at home in other people’s truths than I did in mine. Even when their truths were the exact opposite of mine.

Wherever I went, I could see Billy in the crowd, keeping his eye on me lest I slip away and leave without him. Fleeing from my son’s eyes as if from an assassin, I moved on.

I had to pee and, doing my best imitation of a drunk who had to vomit, I stumbled into the McNabs’ men’s room and locked the door behind me.

One of the many decorative touches of the McNabs’ apartment was that they had a clearly marked men’s room and ladies’ room. The signs on the door were antiques that their fabled interior decorator Franklin had found for them.

The men’s room, in addition to a toilet, had a large antique public urinal. Another Franklin touch. The urinal rose from the floor half up to my chest. Its old porcelain was marbled with cracks and its overall color was the color of unhealthy old teeth of smokers like myself.

There were plants in the men’s room as well. So many plants that I felt I was taking a piss outdoors, in the park.

Used to be, whenever I peed all I had to do was point and shoot and wherever I pointed that’s where I shot. It was one of those activities I could do, and enjoyed doing, with my eyes closed.

My prostate was putting the squeeze on me. Like a pistol firing bullets out of the side of the barrel, my piss went wide left or wide right, or suddenly dried up to a dribble. Looking down, I observed a whole new development. Instead of a single stream, there were two streams shooting out of my prick like a V-sign. And all the time there was the burning sensation as if I were pissing ReaLemon.

There. I was done. I shook my prick and flushed. I sucked in my gut and zipped up my fly. The song of the ages sang in my ear: You can shake and you can dance, but the last drop always goes down your pants.

On top of the marble sink was an ashtray from the Plaza Athénée Hotel in Paris. Inside the ashtray was an extinguished cigarette, two-thirds unsmoked. I glanced at it and looked away. I washed my hands.

My latest attempt to stop smoking had been motivated primarily by my inability to get drunk. Lung cancer seemed like a terrible way to go, but what really terrified me was the thought of not even being able to get drunk on the day I got the news.

Years ago, I was completely cured of smoking and didn’t have a cigarette for almost three months. I was cured by a procedure I had been positive was a hoax. Hypnosis. The hypnotist was a Hungarian named Dr. Manny Horvath.

I took the treatment just to prove to a friend who had recommended it that the whole thing was a hoax. I went to Dr. Manny Horvath’s office positive that I couldn’t be hypnotized in the first place, not to mention be cured of smoking.

How wrong I was. Dr. Manny Horvath hypnotized me in record time. When I came out of the trance, the mere thought of a cigarette filled me with nausea. For several weeks, I chastised other smokers and proselytized the virtues of hypnosis.

But the cure, good for my cigarette habit, proved disastrous to the rest of my life.

I discovered that I loved being hypnotized and that the hypnotic trance into which Dr. Manny Horvath had put me never really left my mind. It was like plutonium or strontium 90. Once inside of you, it was inside of you for good. I learned, much to my surprise, that I could put myself in a hypnotic trance without any help from Manny Horvath. And so whenever I encountered some crisis in my life that I found too difficult or painful to handle, I simply drifted off into my self-induced trance and cured myself, so to speak, of the need to deal with it. The mere thought of dealing with crisis filled me with nausea.

This caused chaos in my life. Personal. Interpersonal. Professional. Everything.

In the end, in order to cure myself of this nausea for dealing with life’s problems, I had to cure myself of my newfound belief in hypnotism. I had to unhypnotize myself. And in order to do that, I had to prove to myself that Horvath was a charlatan who had never really cured me of smoking. And to do that, I had to start smoking again. It was very unpleasant at first, but eventually I was back to two packs a day and bad-mouthing Horvath all over town.

In the mirror above the sink, I saw my face. Instead of waiting until tomorrow morning, as Dr. Bickerstaff had suggested, I decided to take a real good look at myself now.

Everything he told me seemed true. My complexion was sallow. My hair did look dead.

The face of The Uninsured Man in the mirror did not seem sure of anything, nor was there even a hint now of that bravado of being uninsured.

I took a couple of steps back in order to see more of myself. I pulled the shirt out of my trousers and lifted it up to look at my gut in the mirror. It was not a pleasant sight. I was still a six-footer, but burly was too kind a description for the six feet of flesh I saw.

No doubt about it. I was at the age when things break down. The probability of somebody my age developing prostate cancer was high. Other cancers as well. Spleen. Pancreas. Lungs, of course. Lungs, by all means. All those years of smoking. But cancer wasn’t the only threat. The number one killers of white males in my bracket were the diseases of the cardiovascular system. All those years of smoking, and drinking, and eating suicidal orders of lamb chops and cottage fries. Clogged arteries. Like jammed telephone lines. And all the time, even if I was doing everything right, my brain cells were dying by the tens of thousands, so even if I managed to avoid crippling heart attacks and cancers of various kinds, I had senility to look forward to as my reward.

But, for the moment at least, the prospect of these catastrophic illnesses, the prospect of succumbing to them in my uninsured state, seemed of far less consequence than something else. Something else was wrong with me, which made the threat of these known and documented diseases of no more concern than the common cold. Something was drastically wrong with me and whatever it was, it was wrong through and through. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was something I was getting or something I was losing, but I knew, the way animals know that an earthquake is coming, that something huge was coming or going in my life. It hadn’t come yet fully, if it was coming. It hadn’t gone yet fully, if it was going.

So instead of it being a cause of concern, my unhealthy, flabby body, with its numerous disease-prone organs inside, was a sight, so to speak, for sore eyes. The hardening of my arteries while everything else went soft, the deterioration and the devaluation of my body, the shortness of breath, the pounding in my temples after the slightest exertion, the painful burning sensation when I peed—all these were blessings almost, welcome reminders all of them, that I was not totally abnormal and that my condition was something that I had in common with other people at the party and the rest of my fellow men. To be sick in this way made me feel healthy almost.

I sucked in my gut and tucked in my shirt, huffing and puffing as if I were setting up a circus tent.

Drawing close to the mirror, I took one last look at my face, and the face that looked back could have been anybody. Who was I to claim that I had stopped smoking when all those good people out there were positive that I hadn’t? They knew me better, all of them, than I knew myself, and basking in their knowledge and conviction and wanting so much to belong to a community of some kind, I plucked the cigarette from the ashtray and put it in my mouth. I then rejoined the party, looking for a light.

I smoked the rest of the night, borrowing cigarete after cigarette from the few smokers at the party. Everyone seemed pleased and relieved to see me smoking again. People like to be right about other people and I enjoyed having their view of me confirmed. Even Dianah and Dr. Bickerstaff, despite the almost operatic show of disapproval, seemed gratified to see smoke coming out of my mouth again.

Beethoven’s Ninth began to play. This was the McNabs’ polite, musical way of announcing that the party was winding down. Some, like Dianah and Dr. Bickerstaff, had already left. Others were leaving now. The huge rooms were becoming depopulated even before the first movement was over. The catering nuns were cleaning up, their friendly smiles no longer in evidence. Like scattered outposts, little groups of people were all that remained of the once mighty throng.

My son Billy was waiting patiently for me, chatting with some older women he had met during the evening. They were now leaving but had sought him out for a few final pleasantries. He obliged them all.

It had become a trait of his, this ease he had around women who were old enough to be his mother. He was far more comfortable around them than around girls his age. The women, in turn, were enchanted by him, as was the woman he was talking to now. Billy’s presence, his proximity, was making her act a little silly. She kept touching him and throwing back her head to laugh.

Listening to the last symphony that Beethoven wrote, I was reminded of Billy’s childhood. He was born with a little hearing problem which an operation corrected, but his habit of leaning toward the speaker in rapt attention, his head turned ever so slightly to favor his good ear, remained. It now gave him a quality of being eager to hear what somebody had to say, and that made an already beautiful young man positively irresistible.

I had habits of my own and one of them was to get overly sentimental about Billy prior to hurting him. The party was winding down and I had to dump him, get rid of him somehow. The question was not if I would do it but how.

The best way out of taking him home with me tonight was to take somebody else. Some woman. Any woman. Drink in one hand, a cigarette I had bummed in the other, I stumbled off on a hunt for an unescorted female. I scanned the horizon for signs of smoke, like a tourist lost in a wilderness and looking for civilization. In the various adjoining rooms, there were tight little clumps of people still left, but only one wisp of smoke other than mine.

Three men were there and five women and one of the women was smoking. But she wasn’t the one for me. She was far too vital-looking. The kind of woman who carried Mace in her purse and Mace in her eyes. As a hunter of women I was long past my prime, like some aging predator. A successful hunt was now not so much a function of my masculinity as of the chance encounter with a lame or sickly prey, which the rest of the healthy herd would want culled from their ranks. I sidled up to the group and took in the chatter. The chatter was about Gorbachev.

I smoked, listened, nodded significantly, and inspected the females for signs of weakness, low self-esteem, and general lack of group dominance. Everybody had something to say about Gorbachev, but I quickly noticed that when this one young woman spoke, nobody seemed to be listening. The only beta there. Neither the men nor the other women, alphas every one of them, seemed to have much use for her.

“He’s so different,” the young woman was saying of Gorbachev. “There isn’t a politician in this country who would dare run for the highest office in the land with that big blemish on his head and yet it’s that very blemish that makes him look so … so …”

“Yes.” She turned her squinty eyes toward me. “That’s what it is. So human. It makes him look so very, very human.”

Karoo

Steve Tesich

About the Author

About the Book

CHAPTER ONE

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