Stochastic Man (14 page)

18

It was a troublesome week. On the political front the news was all bad. New Democrats everywhere were falling all over themselves to pledge their support to Senator Kane, and Kane, instead of keeping his vice- presidential options open in the traditional manner of front-running politicians, felt so secure that he cheerfully told a press conference that he would like to see Socorro share the ticket with him. Quinn, who had begun to gain a national following after the oil-gellation thing, abruptly ceased to matter to party leaders west of the Hudson River. Invitations to speak stopped coming in, the requests for autographed photos dried to a trickle—trifling signs, but significant ones. Quinn knew what was going on, and he wasn’t happy about it.

“How did it happen so fast, this Kane-Socorro tie-up?” he demanded. “One day I was the great white hope of the party, the next all the clubhouse doors were slamming in my face.” He gave us the famous intense Quinn stare, eyes clicking from one man to another, searching out the one who somehow had failed him. His presence was as overwhelming-as ever; the presence of his disappointment was almost intolerably painful.

Mardikian had no answers for him. Neither did Lombroso. What could I say? That I had had the clues and had fumbled them? I took refuge behind a shrug and a “that’s politics” alibi. I was being paid to come up with reasonable hunches, not to function as an all-out psychic. “Wait,” I promised him. “New patterns are shaping up. Give me a month and I’ll have all of next year mapped out for you.”

“I’ll settle for the next six weeks,” Quinn said grumpily.

His annoyance subsided after a couple of tense days. He was too busy with local problems, of which there were suddenly a great many—the traditional hot-weather social unrest that hits New York every summer like a cloud of mosquitoes—to fret very long about a nomination he hadn’t actually wanted to win.

It was a week of domestic problems, too. Sundara’s ever-deepening involvement with the Transit Creed was beginning to get to me. Her behavior now was as wild, as unpredictable, as motiveless as Carvajal’s; but they were coming to their crazy randomness from opposite directions, Carvajal’s behavior governed by blind obedience to an inexplicable revelation, Sundara’s by the desire to break free of all pattern and structure.

Whim reigned. The day I went to see Carvajal, she quietly went over to the Municipal Building to apply for a prostitute’s license. It took her the better part of the afternoon, what with the medical exam, the union interview, the photography and fingerprinting, and all the rest of the bureaucratic intricacies. When I came home, my head full of Carvajal, she triumphantly flourished the little laminated card that made it legal for her to sell her body anywhere in the five boroughs.

“My God,” I said.

“Is something wrong?”

“You just stood there in line like any twenty-dollar hooker out of Vegas?”

“Should I have used political influence to get my card?”

“What if some reporter had seen you down there, though?”

“So?”

“The wife of Lew Nichols, special administrative assistant to Mayor Quinn, joining the whores’ union?”

“Do you think I’m the only married woman in that union?”

“I don’t mean that I’m thinking in terms of potential scandal, Sundara.”

“Prostitution is a legal activity, and regulated prostitution is generally recognized as having social benefits which—”

“It’s legal in New York City,” I said. “Not in Kankakee. Not in Tallahassee. Not in Sioux City. One of these days Quinn’s going to be looking for votes in those places and others like them, maybe, and some wise guy will dig up the information that one of Quinn’s closest advisers is married to a woman who sells her body in a public brothel, and—”

“Am I supposed to govern my life by Quinn’s need to conform to the morality of small-town voters?” she asked, dark eyes blazing, color glowing under the darkness of her cheeks.

“Do you
want
to be a whore, Sundara?”

“Prostitute
is the term that the union leadership prefers to use.”

“Prostitute
isn’t any prettier than whore. Aren’t you satisfied with the arrangements we’ve been making? Why do you want to sell yourself?”

“What I want to be,” she said icily, “is a free human being, released from all constricting ego attachments.”

“And you’ll get there through prostitution?”

“Prostitutes learn to dismantle their egos. Prostitutes exist only to serve the needs of others. A week or two in a city brothel will teach me how to subordinate the demands of my ego to the needs of those who come to me.”

“You could become a nurse. You could become a masseuse. You could—”

“I chose what I chose.”

“And that’s what you’re going to do? Spend the next week or two in a city brothel?”

“Probably.”

“Did Catalina Yarber suggest this?”

“I thought of it myself,” said Sundara solemnly. Her eyes flashed fire. We were at the edge of the worst quarrel of our life together, a straight I-forbid-this/don’t-you- give-me-orders clash. I trembled. I pictured Sundara, sleek and elegant, Sundara whom all men and many women desired, punching the timeclock in one of those grim sterile municipal cubicles, Sundara standing at a sink swabbing her loins with antiseptic lotions, Sundara on her narrow cot with her knees pulled up to her breasts, servicing some stubble-faced sweat-stinking clod while an endless line waited, tickets in hand, at her door. No. I couldn’t swallow it. Four-group, six-group, ten-group, whatever kind of communal sex she liked, yes, but not n-group, not infinity-group, not offering her precious tender body to every hideous misfit in New York City who had the price of admission. For an instant I really was tempted to rise up in old-fashioned husbandly wrath and tell her to drop all this foolishness, or else. But of course that was impossible. So I said nothing, while chasms opened between us. We were on separate islands in a stormy sea, borne away from each other by mighty surging currents, and I was unable even to shout across the widening strait, unable even to reach toward her with futile hands. Where had it gone, the oneness that had been ours for a few years? Why was the strait growing wider?

“Go to your whorehouse, then,” I muttered, and left the apartment in a blind wild unstochastic frenzy of anger and fear.

Instead of registering at a brothel, though, Sundara podded to JFK airport and boarded a rocket bound for India. She bathed in the Ganges at one of the Benares ghats, spent an hour unsuccessfully searching for her family’s ancestral neighborhood in Bombay, had a curry dinner at Green’s Hotel, and caught the next rocket home. Her pilgrimage covered forty hours
in toto
and cost her exactly forty dollars an hour, a symmetry that failed to lighten my mood. I had the good sense not to make an issue of it. In any case I was helpless; Sundara was a free being and growing more free every day, and it was her privilege to consume her own money on anything she chose, even crazy overnight excursions to India.
I
was careful not to ask her, in the days following her return, whether she planned actually to use her new prostitute’s license. Perhaps she already had. I preferred not to know.

19

A week after my visit to Carvajal he phoned to ask if I cared to have lunch with him the next day. So I met him, at his suggestion, at the Merchants and Shippers Club down in the financial district.

The venue surprised me. Merchants and Shippers is one of those venerable Wall Street watering holes populated exclusively by high-echelon brokers and bankers on a members-only basis, and when I say exclusively I mean that even Bob Lombroso, who is a tenth-generation American and very much a power on the Street, is tacitly barred from membership by his Judaism and chooses not to make a fuss about it. As in all such places, wealth alone isn’t enough to get you in: you must be clubbable, a congenial and decorous man of the right ancestry who went to the right schools and belongs to the right firm. So far as I could see, Carvajal had nothing going for him along those lines. His
richesse
was
nouveau
and he was by nature an outsider, with none of the required prep-school background and high corporate affiliations. How had he managed to wangle a membership?

“I inherited it,” he told me smugly as we settled into cozy
,
resilient well-upholstered chairs beside a window sixty floors above the turbulent street. “One of my forefathers was a founding member, in 1823. The charter provides that the eleven founding memberships descend automatically to the eldest sons of eldest sons, world without end. Some very disreputable sorts have marred the sanctity of the organization because of that clause.” He flashed a sudden and surprisingly wicked grin. “I come here about once every five years. You’ll notice I’ve worn my best suit.”

Indeed he had—a pleated gold and green herringbone doublet that was perhaps a decade past its prime but still had far more glitter and dash than the rest of his dim and fusty wardrobe. Carvajal, in fact, seemed considerably transformed today, more animated, more vigorous, even playful, distinctly younger than the bleak and ashen man I had come to know.

I said, “I didn’t realize you had ancestors.”

“There were Carvajals in the New World long before the
Mayflower
set out for Plymouth. We were very important in Florida in the early eighteenth century. When the English annexed Florida in 1763, one branch of the family moved to New York, and I think there was a time when we owned half the waterfront and most of the Upper West Side. But we were wiped out in the Panic of 1837 and I’m the first member of the family in a century and a half who’s risen above genteel poverty. But even in the worst times we kept up our hereditary membership in the club.” He gestured at the splendid redwood- paneled walls, the gleaming chrome-trimmed windows, the discreet recessed lighting. All about us sat titans of industry and finance, making and unmaking empires between drinks. Carvajal said, “I’ll never forget the first time my father brought me here for cocktails. I was about eighteen, so that would be, say, 1957. The club hadn’t moved into this building yet—it was still over on Broad Street in a cobwebbed nineteenth-century place—and we came in, my father and I, in our twenty-dollar suits and our wool neckties, and everyone looked like a senator to me, even the waiters, but no one sneered at us, no one patronized us. I had my first martini and my first filet mignon, and it was like an excursion to Vahalla, you know, or to Versailles, to Xanadu. A visit to a strange dazzling world where everyone was rich and powerful and magnificent. And as I sat at the huge old oak table across from my father a vision came to me, I began to
see,
I
saw
myself as an old man, the man I am today, dried out, with a fringe of gray hair here and there, the elderly self that I had already come to know and recognize, and that older me was sitting in a room that was truly opulent, a room of sleek lines and brilliantly imaginative furnishings, in fact this very room where we are now, and I was sharing a table with a much younger man, a tall, strongly built, dark-haired man, who leaned forward, staring at me in a tense and uncertain way, listening to my every word as if he were trying to memorize it. Then the vision passed and I was with my father again, and he was asking me if I was all right, and I tried to pretend it was the martini hitting me all at once that had made my eyes glaze over and my face go slack, for I wasn’t much of a drinker even then. And I wondered if what I had
seen
was a kind of resonant counterimage of my father and me at the club, that is, I had
seen
my older self bringing my own son to the Merchants and Shippers Club of the distant future. For several years I speculated about who my wife would be and what my son would be like, and then I came to know that there would be no wife and no son. And the years went by and here we are, and there you sit opposite me, leaning forward, staring at me in a tense and uncertain way—”

A shiver rippled along my backbone. “You
saw
me here with you, more than forty years ago?”

He nodded nonchalantly and in the same gesture swung around to summon a waiter, stabbing the air with his forefinger as imperiously as though he were J. P. Morgan. The waiter hurried to Carvajal’s side and greeted him obsequiously by name. Carvajal ordered a martini for me —because he had
seen
it long ago?—and dry sherry for himself.

“They treat you courteously here,” I remarked.

“It’s a point of honor for them to treat every member as if he’s the Czar’s cousin,” Carvajal said. “What they say about me in private is probably less flattering. My membership is going to die with me, and I imagine the club will be relieved that no more shabby little Carvajals will deface the premises.”

The drinks arrived almost at once. Solemnly we dipped glasses at each other in a perfunctory vestigial toast.

“To the future,” Carvajal said, “the radiant, beckoning future,” and broke into hoarse laughter.

“You’re in lively spirits today.”

“Yes, I feel bounder than I have in years. A second springtime for the old man, eh? Waiter!
Waiter!”

Again the waiter hustled over. To my astonishment Carvajal now ordered cigars, selecting two of the most costly from the tray the cigar girl brought. Once more the wicked grin. To me he said, “Are you supposed to save these things for after the meal? I think I want mine right away.”