Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (8 page)

Bingo! Josephine gasped. stood rigidly still, and then backed back into the elevator.

We rode down to the lobby together in silence. In silence we walked together around the block. And a moment later Wally was buckling Josephine into the front seat of his car, after which he gave me a kiss, said, “Thanks a million, Mom,” and was heading his Chevy up Connecticut Avenue.

Just before my confrontation with Josephine, I had handed Wally a Care package consisting of my homemade curried squash and apple soup, my pasta primavera, a gorgeous olive bread from Marvelous Market, a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau, and the box of condoms, “Just in case,” I explained, as he set the carton of goodies in the trunk of his car, “you were too distracted to plan ahead.” I had also made him swear that he wouldn’t take Josephine to Rehoboth against her will. In turn I had promised that I’d be in charge of informing Mr. Monti that his daughter was—though I couldn’t say where—in safe hands.

•  •  •

Remember the movie
Raging Bull.
It starred Robert De Niro, who gave a truly compelling performance as the brutish boxer Jake La Motta, a man whose violent . . . Well, you don’t have to remember the movie—the title itself quite. nicely describes how Mr. Monti took the news about Josephine. Which I bravely delivered in person, that day, at his office.

When Mr. Monti stopped raging, he smoothed back his hair from his forehead and said, “So now your son is kidnapping my daughter.”

“She went with him of her own free will and volition.”

“Never!”

“Yes she did.”

“She went of her own volition with a person who stole money from her father?”

“You know that’s not true about the money, Mr. Monti.”

“You’re calling me a liar? Don’t you ever call me a liar. Don’t you ever ever ever call me a liar.”

Mr. Monti was moving back into his Raging Bull mode, but I refused to be intimidated. “I’m not calling you a liar,” I told him. “I’m calling you a megalomaniacal sociopath with a severe narcissistic personality disorder and some heavy-duty unresolved Oedipal problems. You need help.”

Mr. Monti flashed me a smile of the kind last seen on the nonhuman Star of
Jaws,
“And I’m going to get some help,” he said, as he reached for the telephone and dialed a number. He kept smiling his sharky smile as he waited impatiently until someone answered his call. “Hello,” he said. “This is Joseph Augustus Monti—and I want to report a kidnapping and a theft.”

•  •  •

Although my friend Carolyn’s taste in sexual partners is awesomely catholic, she still couldn’t understand why Joseph Monti had made my Definite Lovers list. Which, of course, he had done the moment I learned he was one of a pair of identical twins. Mr. Monti and I had seen each other a couple of times in the weeks shortly after our January dinner. Once, by accident, when we (with our spouses) ran into each other at the Kennedy Center. And again when Jake and I (at Wally’s urging)
invited the senior Montis to brunch at our house. Each time I saw him I mentally deplored his intellect and his ethical system, while also mentally tearing off his clothes. He was Catholic, married, and a twin, which covered three of the eight traits I sought in my liaisons, in addition to which he was someone to whom I kept on wanting to moan, “Oh, take me! Now!” So why, I asked Carolyn—shortly before Mr. Monti accepted my offer—shouldn’t he be on my Definite Lovers list?

“It’s just a gut feeling I have,” she replied. “I think he’s bad news.”

“And since when has your gut feeling been reliable?” I asked her. “Cast your mind back to Gabriel, Kevin, Jimmy, Owen, George, that entire Argentinean string quartet . . .”

“No fair bringing up the string quartet,” Carolyn grumbled, blowing strands of blond hair out of her eyes. “That was a scientific experiment. A sexual byway. A momentary lapse.”

“And,” I reminded her, “a big mistake.”

Both of us were breathing hard as we spoke—not because of the sexual subject matter but because our discussion was taking place as we briskly pedaled away on Carolyn’s side-by-side stationary bikes.

According to Carolyn, her relationships with men have been greatly improved since her purchase of that second bike. “It’s a very bonding experience, pumping together for forty-five minutes,” she told me. “In fact, I’d say there are many times when the pumping is much more bonding than the humping.”

“And definitely better,” I added, “for your calf muscles.”

It was an unseasonably warm late February day, and
a mild breeze blew through the open bedroom window as we pedaled round and round. Carolyn’s Cleveland Park house, just two blocks from mine, had been lavishly renovated, and her bedroom was three rooms combined into one vast suite with walk-in closets, a handsome tiled fireplace, and a bed that could hold all her past husbands at once. There was also plenty of space for the bikes, plus one of those giant-size television screens, plus a cabinet containing a fridge full of pricey champagne and boxes of Godiva chocolates. There was also Carolyn’s favorite toy—her tape recorder—which she used to record all sorts of indiscretions. But she never turned it on when we got together twice a week to improve our bodies and relieve our souls.

“How much biking time left?” I panted.

Carolyn checked. “Seventeen more minutes. Then I’ve got to shower and get out of here. I’m having my legs waxed, my nails wrapped, and my hair done. Then I pick up my new Calvin Klein. And this is my after noon to baby-sit Tiffany.”

If you want to meet the living incarnation of the phrase “contradiction in terms,” meet my friend Carolyn, who spends more on her body than anyone I know, who (thanks to an eight-figure trust fund) indulges her every materialistic whim, but who also engages in all kinds of gritty volunteer work—like baby-sitting Tiffany, a poor black two-and-a-half-year-old with AIDS, so her mom can get out three afternoons a week. Imagine a Big Is Beautiful (size 14–16) version of Grace Kelly and you’ll have a pretty clear picture of Carolyn’s gilded, polished, aristocratic good looks. But from what I’ve learned in our twenty-year exchanges of deep dark secrets, you’d need to be familiar with some
of the videos in the Adults Only, section to get a sense of Carolyn’s sexual style.

I’ve been best friends with Carolyn since ten minutes after we met, which happened soon after I moved to Cleveland Park, when Jeff, beguiled by the host of golden daffodils on her front lawn, addressed himself to picking every last one of them. Carolyn had a warm smile on her face when, hand in hand with Jeff, she showed up at my house and told me the story. “You have an
adorable
son,” she said, “but he’s got this thing about daffodils. How can we stop him before he strikes again?”

I loved her utter graciousness about the rape of her lawn. She loved my ardent apology and the homemade lemon pound cake I served with our tea. By the time she left my kitchen we had begun a conversation which we knew would never stop as long as we lived.

•  •  •

“So what makes you think Mr. Monti is seducible?” Carolyn asked me, as she climbed off her bike at the
ding
and removed her sweats. “For all you know he takes that ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife’s ass’ commandment seriously.”

I quit biking too, and followed Carolyn into the bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet seat so we could continue talking while she showered. “I don’t think so,” I shouted over the din of her luxe eight-faucet stall shower. “Remember when the Montis came for brunch? Well, I had a few moments alone with him in the kitchen—enough time to melt a little ice—and he gave me this look and he said that people just don’t understand that a woman’s beauty is always found in her eyes.”

“Sounds innocent enough.”

“Yeah. Right. Except he was patting my ass while he was saying it.”

Carolyn came out of the shower and started toweling off briskly. “God, look at these breasts. Why do they keep staring down at the ground instead of gazing up at the heavens?”

“Only the left one is looking down. The right one is fine. Anyway,” I continued, “when, instead of slapping his hand, I gave it a kind of reassuring squeeze, he suggested that we meet in his office soon—very soon—to discuss the Wally-Josephine situation.”

“I still think he’s bad news. Besides, don’t you feel guilty—just a little guilty—about
her?
Mrs. Monti?”

“This from the woman who slept with her own sister’s husband?”

Carolyn brushed some blusher across her alabaster skin and then went to work on her eyes with a blue-gray liner. “But I’m an Episcopalian. I can handle adultery.”

“Well, so can I. And besides,” I added, in my stuffiest voice, “one needn’t conceptualize this as adultery.”

Carolyn laughed. “Then how might one conceptualize it?”

“As a scientific experiment. As a sexual byway. As a momentary”—I sprayed myself with her million-dollar perfume—“as a very very momentary lapse.”

•  •  •

Although I use a word processor when I write the final draft of my newspaper column, I always like starting out with a pencil and pad. I like to write by hand curled up in our big brown living-room chair, or sprawled on the flowered chaise upstairs in our bedroom, or settled
on a bench in the Bishop’s Garden of the National Cathedral.

The cathedral is right in our neighborhood, an easy stroll away, but Carolyn drove me there on the way to her waxing. I found my bench in the garden, which is sort of a Secret Garden—small, cozy, lovingly tended, hidden from sight—and checked out the greenings and bloomings that would shortly ignite into a spring spectacular. Spring is different for sixteen-year-olds than it is for forty-six-year-olds, I told myself. And what if you’re seventy-six—what’s it like then? On such idle musings, I’ve found, are some of my finest columns built. I fished out my pad and pencil and started writing.

What does the old lady think about in the springtime? What, in a time of rebirth and new beginnings, can possibly be her expectations, her dreams? In autumn’s flaming finale, the old lady can find reflections of herself that speak to her glories as well as to her diminishments. But she will not find her reflection in the spring of fresh starts and everything-is-possible. So what exactly is springtime to the old lady? What does the old lady think about?

Every now and then I open one of my columns on this sort of poetic-melancholy note, but fear not—I instantly move on to affirmation. My column is, after all, intended to put people in control of their lives and to help them to develop a can-do attitude. Thus if spring means a new beginning, I go on to tell my readers, what all you old ladies in springtime must do is: Begin! Think about a new language you’d like to study, a new
city you’d like to visit, a new book you’d like to read, a great new recipe you’d like to try. Is going back to school an impossible dream? No way. Alice Carney from Grand Rapids, Michigan, has done just that and she writes to me that she hopes to have her B.A. next year at the age of seventy-eight! Is learning to tap dance simply out of the question? Of course not! Marlene Walters writes to me from a nursing home in Tulsa that she can do a fantastic tap dance to “Puttin’ On the Ritz”! And she does it sitting down!! In a wheelchair yet!!! (I try never to exceed three exclamation points.)

In this column I also said that the old lady could think, in spring, about the past, as long as she thought of the joys—not the regrets. And for my younger readers I urged that, before they become old ladies in the springtime, they should live a life that (without doing anything cruel, illegal, or too too irresponsible) “followed their bliss” and minimized their regrets.

I didn’t really mean “follow their bliss” in the Joseph Campbellian sense, but it didn’t seem terribly urgent to explain that. In its no-regrets message, I felt that the column spoke to every age and kind of bliss—though I don’t agree with Carolyn, who insists that my much admired O
LD
L
ADIES IN
S
PRINGTIME
was basically a sneaky, oblique, and deeply guilt-ridden effort to justify my own impending adulteries.

•  •  •

I have been writing my column three times a week for almost seven years and I’m proud to say that I’ve never yet missed a deadline, despite major family emergencies, heartaches of every kind, and some ongoing physical problems including—and here I’ll quote my urologist—“the worst cystitis this office has ever seen.”
I’m even prouder to say that I have managed to meet every deadline without shortchanging my family or my friends. And this is not, believe me, because I’m Superwoman. It’s because I plan ahead and include a lot of room in my plans for the unexpected and never take on more than I can feasibly, realistically hope to accomplish.

However, when I came home from that confessional lunch with Jeff on August 20 and sat down at my Zenith to finish my column (my subject that day was L
EARN
W
HILE
Y
OU
S
LEEP
), I was finding it somewhat difficult to concentrate. As I brooded about Jeff’s impending financial disaster and my promise to him that I would straighten things out, I found myself briefly wondering whether I had taken on a bit more than I could accomplish.

But then I reminded myself of what La Rochefoucauld once said (“Few things are of themselves impossible”) and what Carlyle once said (“The fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself”) and what Publilius Syrus once said (“No one knows what he can do till he tries”) and what The Little Engine That Could once said (“I think I can—I think I can—I think I can—I think I can”), and I put in a phone call to Louis, with whom (except for some moments of rapture back in March) I’ve enjoyed a warm but strictly platonic relationship.

Carolyn had met Louis three years ago when they worked together at a homeless shelter. She introduced us in the hope that I would be willing to write a column about Louis’s concept of a national network of group homes for the homeless. Louis, a mere twenty-six at the time, was already so persuasive and so dedicated that I not only wrote, the column (M
AHNO A
H
OME IN
Y
OUR
H
EART AND IN
Y
OUR
C
OMMUNITY
) but also agreed to serve on the board of Harmony House, the group house he was setting up in the District. Louis was probably the most secure black man (or maybe man, period) I had ever encountered, the product of Washington’s black upper-middle class, Yale University, and Harvard Business School. He wasn’t especially handsome (unless you happen to think the Gregory Hines type is handsome) but whenever he entered a room there wasn’t anybody else you wanted to look at. He had gone to business school sharing the basic make-it-big assumptions of his parents—that upon graduation he’d sign on with some major corporation and swiftly move onward and upward, straight to the top. But a funny tiling happened to Louis in between the MBA and the CEO—he fell in love with Adrienne, and she radicalized him.