The Daredevils (20 page)

“Awful lot of poor decisions made here tonight,” she sputtered furiously, “and you are going to choose
mine
to condemn?”

Charles said he was there because he loved Vera. The woman shushed him, speaking clearly to him but not looking up from Vera's wound, waiting for Jules's hypocrisy to catch up with his anger, which it finally did. He deflated visibly and hung his head. He was ashamed of himself, he apologized, but managed to leave the room nevertheless with an air of unappeased anger. The women smoldered with scorn while the bandaging and smaller, murmuring ministrations went their full course and were, at long last, complete.

A little while later, Jules, the woman, and Charles escorted Vera to the office of a nearby dentist who was competent to stitch flesh, and this man, though sleepy or drugged, put twelve perfect stitches over Vera's right eye. It was then decided that drinks were in order, so they went to the Fior d'Italia and sat outside. Vera insisted on whiskey, so a bottle and a pitcher of water were brought to the little table. A glass was prepared for Charles and he drank it in a manner and at a speed that seemed commensurate with the tempo of the table, but it went with incredible speed straight to his head. He had not realized how earnestly in composure he'd been holding himself. Not one
breath or flicker of muscle had been expended that was not strictly necessary. With the coursing of the whiskey, however, he began to feel as if composure were a gift of the gods, and he glowed with easy gratitude. Anxiety and tension and pain he hadn't let himself recognize began to flow out of him, like blood from a mortal wound, and he laughed warmly and generously but quietly at whatever was being said.

“He had no business being down there,” Vera said flatly but with conviction.

“No business?” Jules wondered. “
No
business?”

“Shut up, Jules,” suggested the woman quite pleasantly, whose name Charles still had neither caught nor sought.

“We had an agreement,” said Vera, less flatly and with less conviction.

“What sort of agreement?” asked the woman.

“No doubt,” said Jules breezily, “an unspoken one.”

“Shut up, Jules,” said Vera.

“That room,” the woman reminded Jules, “was until very recently a room about which there was an unspoken agreement on which lives depended.”

“Until very recently. More recently it's become a room about which agreements can be negotiated. Pretty much on the spot. If need be.”

The women reserved their answers and the table was quiet for a moment. Conversations from other tables washed in as if the table were a container being filled. Then Charles told Jules to shut up, even though he hadn't actually said anything. The table became so quiet that it seemed it had in fact been filled with a viscous liquid. Lacking the bearings his ears might have provided, he lost himself and had difficulty focusing on his companions. Once he thought he'd looked them all in the eye, he shrugged in a kind of apology and said it was a matter of comic timing. One feels a rhythm that one cannot resist.

“
That is my room
,” said Vera, her teeth angrily clenched.

“It is,” said the woman. “He's got no business appearing there, as it were, on your doorstep assuming rights and privileges he does not have.”

“Never has had and never will have,” said Vera. “Whatever
the fuck
he may think about it.”

“You're his girl, Vera. You can't pretend—”

“I am not his girl!”

“Vera, look, no, of course you're not ‘his,' but he thought so, and you know he thought so. You let him think so, isn't that right?”

“No, that is
not
right.”

“I think that's right,” said Jules.

“Shut up, Jules,” Charles said again.

Jules turned on him instantly and had his nose almost touching Charles's nose. “Tell me to shut up one more time and I'll make you suck your own cock, you understand me?” He was speaking softly, but visibly trembling.

Charles looked away with a sneer, but felt the woman touch his arm, and looked back.

“Tell me you understand me.”

“It was a joke.”

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Charles said, not sobering up exactly but gaining some purchase he hadn't realized he'd lost. “I, um, yes, I understand you. I apologize. I am sorry and I understand you, loud and clear. I—”

“Thank you. Where was I?”

“It's all timing,” said Charles. “My timing's off. That's all. Don't get so—”

“Vera is not Warren's girl, no matter what Warren thinks,” the woman reminded everybody.

“Underwear in a fucking
bundle
over some piddly little thing like timing—”

“He doesn't own me. Where does he get off thinking he owns me? Where
the fuck
does he get off thinking
that
?”

“
The Revolutionary Catechism,
maybe,” the woman couldn't resist saying.

“I thought we were done with that horseshit,” said Vera.

“Oh, we are,” said the woman.

Suddenly Vera was shouting and crying. “I CAN TELL YOU I AM DONE WITH THAT HORSESHIT!”

“We are all equal and we are all free,” said the woman very quietly, more or less into Vera's ear, and Vera quieted down. Jules took a drink and then Vera took one. After a moment, in which he was obsessed with notions of timing, Charles took one.

“I've got to read this
Revolutionary Catechism
,” he said. No one said anything, either in reproach or agreement or even indifference, and he pulled the bottle over again. It was a prop. He poured himself, ever so carefully, a drink, and ever so carefully slid the bottle back to the center of the table. He drank the drink with careful
savoir faire
and sat back judiciously.

“It's got absolutely fucking
nothing
to do with the fucking
Revolutionary Catechism
,” said Jules. “He's a man and he thought you were his girl. He's a lonely guy and he leads a pretty rugged life. He does all the shit work and he thought you respected that more than the rest of us do.”

“I did,” said Vera. “I do.”

“He probably thought you were not only his girl but a refuge.”

“All that is true but I AM NOT HIS FUCKING GIRL!” Vera was shouting again. “I'VE GOT TWELVE FUCKING STITCHES IN MY HEAD! IS THAT WHAT A GUY DOES TO HIS FUCKING REFUGE?”

“YES!” shouted Jules.

“HE PRACTICALLY BASHED MY SKULL OPEN! I SUPPOSE HE CAN FUCKING KILL HIS FUCKING GIRL AND YOU WILL BUY HIM WHISKEY AND CIGARS TO CHEER HIM UP!”

“I'm not here to defend him,” said Jules, shutting down abruptly.

“No?” asked the still nameless woman.

“I am here to say he is thinking certain thoughts and will continue thinking certain thoughts and we all had best take those thoughts and beliefs into account in order that they not have permanent consequences.”

“If I see him again, I'll fucking kill him,” said Charles.

“He's probably saying the same thing. Where does
that
leave us?”

“All right now,” said the woman. “You're drunk. Shut up.”

“I'm drunk?” Charles asked. “Because my
timing
is off you think—”

“
You're drunk,
Chuckles,” said Jules. “And if I'm not mistaken, it's the
first time. You got fucked and you got drunk and now it's beddy-bye time. Back up to your palace on the heights, looking out over your glittering little city by the sea.”

White-hot anger flared up in Charles. It was so sudden and so strong that it took him by surprise and he could not properly direct it. But his face became a neutral mask of its own accord and he said he did not have any trouble sorting out the ethics of their little situation. He said he would fuck up the little prick if he saw him again. He said he would kick the little bully's ass until his spine snapped and then he would roll him in a ball, stuff him through the hole in an outhouse, and piss on him. He admitted he was drunk and that his timing was off but asked his friends to fully describe what aspect particularly of that condition troubled them so. He was able for the first time in his
fucking life
to say what was on his mind, do what he felt like doing, and if that offended their dainty anarchism, well, he could live with
that.
He launched himself into a dramatic lecture on the classics because it struck him as a spectacularly appropriate thing to do. That was to say:
spectacular
and
appropriate
at the same time. He was a Platonic Republican Gone Mad. Did that make any sense to them? No? Jules said he knew Plato as a fellow who kept the cards pretty close to his vest, oftentimes said what he meant but said he didn't really mean it, and vice versa. Sometimes he's talking about the state, sometimes he's talking about the soul, liked to talk about Ideal Forms but was seriously involved in smoky backroom politics in Syracuse.

Charles waved his hands to dispel Jules. “
Flux,
he shouted.
Flux.
First you have Heraclitus, who says everything is constantly changing and then you have Parmenides who says nothing ever changes. Plato—who, you're right, Jules, had to keep them close to his vest because he was born and raised amongst tyrants at war—Plato says there is one world of unchanging perfect forms and ideas, and another one, the one we live in, that knows only corruption and degradation. That is to say, this world isn't the real one and all changes occurring in it are for the worse. But here we are. How can we make most of the people happy most of the time? Communism. The
leaders live like the slaves, which is to say,
not badly.
Wealth and poverty are both corruptions of the Original Happiness. But because I'm educated, I get to be a leader. I get to be a leader because my father was a leader. My son will be a leader because I was a leader. But if my son doesn't measure up, boom, he's not a leader anymore. He's a soldier or a worker. Vera grows up as a button worker but shows such incredible intellectual vibrancy everybody agrees:
she should be a leader
! Voilà. Vera's a leader. Vera and I are trained to think it virtuous to die in battle. We are trained to be clever and savage. We can't listen to sad music or imitate inferior people, like in a play, or listen to poetry in which the gods are mocked. The gods are corrupt to be sure, but they come from God. We ought not raise our voices. We cannot indulge in unchecked laughter.” Here he laughed in an unchecked way, somewhat comically, somewhat hysterically. “No sorrowful Lydian tunes, no relaxing Ionian tunes: only Dorian and Phrygian for, respectively, courage and temperance. Can't eat fish. Meat must be roasted. No sauces. No confectionery. We will never need doctors. We must experience enchantments, e.g., terrors that do not truly terrify, bad pleasures that do seduce the will. ‘Worlds on worlds are rolling ever, from creation to decay, like the bubbles on a river, sparkling, bursting, borne away.' All of our efforts must go toward keeping ourselves still and quiet and sparkling until we burst or are borne away. And I'm saying, yes, Plato's got it right, this is not the real world, everything's changing, and all change is for the worse. But I am exempt because I have been inspired by a god. I am bidden to cause change. Eros and Dionysus will see me through. You anarchists are merely confused—at
best
confused, at worst
hypocritical
—eccentrics.”

He felt no remorse the following morning. His head ached, and he was embarrassed by some of the things he had said, but on the whole he believed he had released something in himself that had been imprisoned. But when he arrived—riding a horse—at the shop to pick up Vera for their date, he found the unnamed woman standing in the shade under the awning. She
started to say something, but stopped when Vera tapped on the glass behind her and waved at them. Charles waved and smiled at Vera, then returned his gaze to the woman, not so much encouraging her to say what she had to say, as daring her. But the woman said nothing. She refused to look away, but would say nothing.

The Minot party was once again parked at the end of a long line of limousines on a dirt road that led to a clearing deep in the Presidio. Charles arrived with a woman nobody knew and whom nobody sought to know—apparently one of his actresses. Even if she hadn't had stitches and bruises on her face and been the subject of rumors relating her to terrorist factions within San Francisco's radical labor organizations she would have been ignored. His family had attended opening night and been wholly caught up, they said, in the enthusiasm—and Mother had been quoted in the
Chronicle
saying she was “delighted but not at all surprised” at her son's accomplishment. Amelia had been quoted in the
Examiner,
where she insisted that he could not be more proud of her brother, while her husband laughed off suggestions that theater had no place in a social gospel. Alexander and Andrew assured the critics from the
Call
and the
Bee
that everyone in the capital knew about what a treat the production was, and how there was serious talk of bringing it to Sacramento. Al, who was Governor Hiram Johnson's Chief of Staff (they had come together in ‘08, when Father took a bullet in the Ruef and Schmitz graft prosecutions and Johnson took over the lead, and stayed together when Al helped run the VP side of the 1912 Bull Moose run—and he had Huguenot blood as well, endearing him to Mother), Al went so far, with enthusiasm he admitted was somewhat calculated, as to say that “The American” exemplified everything progressive politics in California stood for. And Charles's younger brothers had been at nearly every show the first two weeks of the run, putting their arms around the shoulders of all the actresses, hanging on them, resting their heads against their necks while they applied their makeup, staring raptly into the mirrored eyes and quickly
becoming part of pre-show superstition. Little charming rich boys: How long would they last in this pristine state? But it was pointedly not spoken of during either breakfast or dinner. Mother had made it clear that she had neither the time nor the inclination for any conversation along those lines, she hadn't the strength, and that had been that.