Humboldt's Gift (34 page)

  “We’ve now had five sessions in court,” Urbanovich began. “This litigation is harmful to the parties—not to their lawyers, of course. Being on the stand is frightful for a sensitive creative person like Mr. Citrine. . . .” The judge meant me to feel the ironic weight of this. Sensitivity in a mature Chicagoan, if genuine, was a treatable form of pathology, but a man whose income passed two hundred thousand dollars in his peak years was putting you on about sensitivity. Sensitive plants didn’t make that kind of dough. “It can’t be pleasant,” Judge Urbanovich now said to me, “to be examined by Mr. Pinsker. He belongs to the hard-edge school. He can’t pronounce the titles of your works, or the names of French, Italian, or even English companies you deal with. Besides, you don’t like his tailor, his taste in shirts and ties....”

  In short it was too bad to turn this ugly violent moron Pinsker loose on me but if I remained uncooperative, the judge would unleash him.

  “Three, four, five separate times we’ve negotiated with Mrs. Citrine,” said Tomchek.

  “Your offers weren’t good enough.”

  “Your honor, Mrs. Citrine has received large amounts of money,” I said. “We offer more and she always increases her demands. If I capitulate, will you guarantee that I won’t be back in court next year?”

  “No, but I can try. I can make it
res judicata
. Your problem, Mr. Citrine, is your proven ability to earn big sums.”

  “Not lately.”

  “Only because you’re upset by the litigation. If I end the litigation, I set you free and there’s no limit to what you can make. You’ll thank me. . . .”

  “Judge, I’m old-fashioned and maybe even obsolete. I never learned mass-production methods.”

  “Don’t be so nervous about this, Mr. Citrine. We have confidence in you. We’ve seen your articles in
Look
and in
Life
.”

  “But
Life
and
Look
have gone out of business. They’re obsolete, too.”

  “We have your tax returns. They tell a different story.”

  “Still,” said Forrest Tomchek. “In terms of reliable business forecast. How can my client promise to produce?”

  Urbanovich said, “It’s inconceivable, whatever happens, for Mr. Citrine ever to fall below the fifty-percent tax bracket. So if he pays Mrs. Citrine thirty thousand per annum it only costs him fifteen thousand in real dollars. Until the majority of the littlest daughter.”

  “So for the next fourteen years, or until I’m about seventy, I must earn one hundred thousand dollars a year. I can’t help being a little amused by this, your Honor. Ha ha! I don’t think my brain is strong enough, it’s my only real asset. Other people have land, rent, inventories, management, capital gains, price supports, depletion allowances, federal subsidies. I have no such advantages.”

  “Ah but you’re a clever person, Mr. Citrine. Even in Chicago that’s obvious. So there’s no need to put this on a special-case basis. In the property division under the decree Mrs. Citrine got less than half and she alleges that records were falsified. You are a bit dreamy and probably were not aware of this. Perhaps the records were falsified by others. Nevertheless you are responsible under the law.”

  Srole said, “We deny any kind of fraud.”

  “Well, I don’t think fraud is a great issue here,” said the judge —and made an “out-the-window” gesture with open hands. Pisces was evidently his astrological sign. He wore tiny fish cuff links, tail to head.

  “As for Mr. Citrine’s lowered productivity of recent years, this may be deliberate to balk the plaintiff. Or it may actually be that he is mentally in transition.” The judge was having a good time, I could see that. Evidently he disliked Tomchek the Divorce Statesman, he agreed that Srole was only a stooge, and he was diverting himself with me. “I am sympathetic to the problems of intellectuals and I know you may get into special preoccupations that aren’t lucrative. But I understand that this Maharishi fellow by teaching people to turn their tongues backward past the palate so that they can get the tip of the tongue into their own sinuses has become a multimillionaire. Many ideas are marketable and perhaps your special preoccupations are more lucrative than you realize,” he said.

  Anthroposophy was having definite effects. I couldn’t take any of this too hard. Other-worldliness tinged it all and every little while my spirit seemed to disassociate itself. It left me and passed out of the window to float a bit over the civic plaza. Or else the meditative roses would start to glow in my head, set in dewy green. But the judge was giving me a going-over, reinterpreting the twentieth century for me, lest I forget, deciding how the rest of my life was to be spent. I was to quit being an old-time artisan and adopt the methods of soulless manufacture (Ruskin). Tomchek and Srole, at either side of the desk, in their hearts consented and agreed. They said almost nothing. Feeling deserted, vexed, I therefore spoke up for myself.

  “So it’s about half a million dollars more. And even if she remarries she wants a guaranteed income of ten thousand dollars?”

  “True.”

  “And Mr. Pinsker is asking for a fee of thirty thousand—ten thousand dollars for each month he spent on the case?”

  “That’s not really so unreasonable,” said the judge. “You haven’t been hurt hard in the way of fees.”

  “It doesn’t come to more than five hundred dollars an hour. That’s what I figure my own time to be worth, especially when I have to do what I dislike,” I said.

  “Mr. Citrine,” the judge said to me, “you’ve led a more or less bohemian life. Now you’ve had a taste of marriage, the family, middle-class institutions, and you want to drop out. But we can’t allow you to dabble like that.”

  Suddenly my detachment ended and I found myself in a state. I understood what emotions had torn at Humboldt’s heart when they grabbed him and tied him up and raced him to Bellevue. The man of talent struggled with cops and orderlies. And, up against the social order, he had had to fight his Shakespearian longing, too—the longing for passionate speech. This had to be resisted. I could have cried aloud now. I could have been eloquent and moving. But what if I were to burst out like Lear to his daughters, like Shylock telling off the Christians? It would get me nowhere to utter burning words. The daughters and the Christians understood. Tomchek, Srole, and the judge didn’t. Suppose I were to exclaim about morality, about flesh and blood and justice and evil and what it felt like to be me, Charlie Citrine? Wasn’t this a court of equity, a forum of conscience? And hadn’t I tried in my own confused way to bring some good into the world? Yes, and having pursued a higher purpose although without even getting close, now that I was aging, weakening, disheartened, doubting my endurance and even my sanity, they wanted to harness me to an even heavier load for the last decade or so. Denise was not correct in saying that I blurted out whatever entered my head. No sir. I crossed my arms on my chest and kept my mouth shut, taking a chance on heartbreak through tongue-holding. Besides, as suffering went, I was only in the middle rank or even lower. So out of respect for the real thing I clammed up. I shunted my thoughts onto a different track. At least I tried to. I wondered what Kathleen Fleisher Tigler was writing to me about.

  These were very tough guys. I had their attention because of my worldly goods. Otherwise I would already have been behind the steel meshes of the county jail. As for Denise, that marvelous lunatic with the great violet eyes, the slender downy nose, the breaking martial voice—suppose I were to offer her all of my money? It would make no difference whatever, she would want to get more. And the judge? The judge was a Chicagoan and a politician, and his racket was equal justice under the law. A government of laws? This was a government of lawyers. But no, no, inflammation of the heart and burning words would only aggravate matters. No, the name of the game was silence, hardness and silence. I wasn’t going to talk. A rose, or something that glowed like a rose, intruded itself, it wagged for an instant in my skull, and I felt that my decision was endorsed.

  The judge now began to strafe me in earnest. “I understand that Mr. Citrine has been leaving the country often and is planning to go abroad again.”

  “This is the first I hear of it,” said Tomchek. “Are you going anywhere?”

  “For the Christmas holidays,” I said. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t go?”

  “None,” said the judge, “if you’re not trying to escape jurisdiction. The plaintiff and Mr. Pinsker have suggested that Mr. Citrine is planning to leave the country for good. They say he hasn’t renewed his apartment lease and is selling his valuable collection of Oriental rugs. I assume that there are no numbered Swiss accounts. But what’s to prevent him taking his head, which is his big asset, to Ireland or to Spain, countries that have no reciprocal agreements with us?”

  “Is there any evidence for this, your honor?” I said.

  The lawyers began to discuss the matter and I wondered how Denise had come to know that I was going away. Renata of course told the Señora everything and the Señora, singing for her supper all over Chicago, needed bright items to sing about. If she couldn’t find something interesting to say at the dinner table, she might as well be dead. However, it was also possible that Denise’s spy network had a contact in Poliakoff’s Travel Bureau.

  “These frequent flights to Europe are thought to have a purpose.” Judge Urbanovich had his hand on the valve now and increased the heat still more. His genial glance said brilliantly, “Look out!” And suddenly Chicago was not my town at all. It was totally unrecognizable. I merely imagined that I had grown up here, that I knew the place, that I was known by it. In Chicago my personal aims were bunk, my outlook a foreign ideology, and I made out what the judge was telling me. It was that I had avoided all the Cannibal Pinskers and freed myself from unpleasant realities. He, Urbanovich, as clever a man as myself, with as much sensibility and better looks, bald or not, had paid his social dues in full, had played golf with all the Pinskers, had lunched with them. He had had to put up with this as man and citizen while I was at liberty to sail up and down elevator shafts expecting that a lovely being—”My Fate!”—would be smiling at me the next time the door opened. They’d give me Fate.

  “Plaintiff has asked for an order of
ne exeat
. I am considering whether a bond should not be posted,” said Urbanovich. “Two hundred thousand, say.”

  Indignant, Tomchek said, “With no evidence that my client is running out?”

  “He’s a very absent-minded fellow, your honor,” said Srole. “Not signing a lease is a normal oversight, for him.”

  “If Mr. Citrine owned a little retail business, a little factory, if he had a professional practice or a position in an institution,” said Urbanovich, “there would be no question of sudden flight.” With round-eyed terrible lightness he was gazing at me, speculative.

  Tomchek argued, “Citrine is a lifetime Chicagoan, a figure in this city.”

  “I understand that a great deal of money has slipped away this year. I hesitate to use the word squandered—it’s his money.” Urbanovich consulted a memo. “Large losses in a publishing enterprise called
The Ark
. A colleague, Mr. Thaxter .. . bad debts.”

  “Is it suggested these are not genuine losses and he’s been squirreling away money? These are Mrs. Citrine’s allegations and suspicions,” said Tomchek. “Does the court believe them to be facts?”

  The judge said, “This is a private conversation in chambers and only that. I feel, however, in view of the one indisputable fact that so much money is suddenly taking wing, Mr. Citrine should give me a full and current financial statement so that I can determine a bond figure, should that be necessary. You won’t refuse me that, will you, Mr. Citrine?”

  Oh bad! Very bad! What if Cantabilè had the right idea after all—run her down in a truck, kill the bitch.

  “I’ll have to sit down with my accountant, your honor,” I said.

  “Mr. Citrine, you have a slightly persecuted look. I hope you understand that I am impartial, that I shall be fair to both parties.” When the judge smiled certain muscles which unsubtle people never develop at all became visible. That was interesting. What did nature originally intend such muscles for? “I myself don’t think you intend to run away. Mrs. Citrine admits you’re a very affectionate father. Still, people do get desperate, and then they can be persuaded to do rash things.”

  He wanted me to know that my relations with Renata were no secret.

  “I hope that you and Mrs. Citrine and Mr. Pinsker will leave me a little something to live on, Judge.”

  Then we, the defendant’s group, were in the light gray speckled heavy polished stone corridor again and Srole said, “Charles, just as we told you, it’s the man’s technique. Now you’re supposed to be terrified and beg us to settle and save you from being butchered and hacked to pieces.”

  “Well, it’s working,” I said. I wished that I could spring from this official skyscraper with its multiple squares into another life, never to be seen again. “I am terrified,” I said. “And I’m dying to settle.”

  “Yes, but you can’t. She won’t accept it,” said Tomchek, “she’ll only pretend. She won’t hear of settle. It’s all in the books and at every dinner table every psychoanalyst I ever discussed it with told me the same thing—castration, that’s all it is, when a woman is after the money.”

  “It isn’t clear to me why Urbanovich is so keen to assist her.”

  “With him it seems a terrific fun thing,” said Srole. “I often think so.”

  “And in the end most of the money will go for legal fees,” 1 said. “I have asked myself sometimes why not give up and take a vow of poverty. . . .” But this was idle theorizing. Yes, I might surrender my small fortune and live and die in a hotel room like Humboldt. I was better equipped to lead a mental life as I was not a manic depressive and it might suit me very well. Only it wouldn’t suit me well enough. For then there would be no more Renatas, no more erotic life, and no more of the exciting anxieties associated with the erotic life, which were perhaps even more important to me than sex itself. A vow of poverty was not the vow Renata was looking for.