The Infinite Plan (39 page)

Timothy Duane never forgave his father for having brought him into the world, nor for continuing to thwart his heart's desires with his good health and bad humor. To defy him, Duane committed every known atrocity, always making sure his father knew about it, and so wasted fifty years in a festering hatred that cost him his peace and well-being. Sometimes his contrariness worked to his advantage, as when he decided to avoid military service because his father supported the war—not so much out of patriotism as because of financial interests in armaments—but usually his rebellion circled back to blow up in his face. He decided not to marry or have children, even on the few occasions when he was in love, in order to destroy his father's ambition to establish a dynasty. The family name he so detested would die with him—except for a branch of the Duanes in Ireland no one wanted to acknowledge because they reminded them of their humble origins. Cultured and refined, with the natural elegance of one born between monogrammed sheets, Timothy had a passionate interest in the arts and a congeniality that won him droves of friends, but before his father he somehow managed to hide these virtues and behave like a clod, for the sole purpose of annoying him. If the Duane patriarch was entertaining at a dinner for the cream of society, Timothy would appear without being invited and with a slut on his arm, eager to violate all rules of civility. While his father fumed that he never wanted to see his son again as long as he lived, Timothy's mother openly defended him, even when it meant a confrontation with her husband. You must see a psychiatrist, son, she often suggested, and get help with your problems; you can overcome the flaws in your character; but Timothy's response was that without the flaws he would not have any character left. In the meantime, he lived a miserable life, not for lack of means but because of his bent for self-torture. He had an apartment in the most expensive section of the city, an entire floor in an old building, decorated with modern furniture and strategically placed mirrors, and an income for the remainder of his lifetime, his grandfather's ultimate gift. Since he had never wanted for anything, he placed no importance on money and ridiculed the many foundations his father had invented, less to evade taxes than to deprive Timothy of his inheritance. His demons harassed him relentlessly, pushing him to vices he found repellent but indulged in to torment his father, even if it meant killing himself in the process. He spent his days in his pathology laboratory, sickened by human frailty and the infinite permutations of pain and putrefaction but also awed by the possibilities of science. He never admitted it, but the laboratory was the only place where he found a certain peace. He could lose himself in the painstaking analysis of a diseased cell, and when he emerged from among X-rays, test tubes, and laser beams, generally very late at night, the muscles of his neck and back might ache, but he was content. That sensation would last until he reached the street and started his car, but when he realized he had nowhere to go and no one waiting for him, he would sink back into self-hatred. He patronized the sleaziest bars, where he drank until he forgot even his name; he got into brawls with sailors and ended up in hospital emergency rooms; he spewed insults in homosexual bathhouses and only by a hair escaped the violence he detested; he picked up whores to buy an unwholesome gratification seasoned by the danger of lethal contagion. He would hurtle down a precipitous slope, experiencing a mixture of fear and pleasure, cursing God and invoking death, but, after a week or two of such defilement, suffer a crisis of guilt and stop short, shivering at the brink of the chasm opening at his feet. He would swear never again to swallow a drop of alcohol, shut himself in his apartment like an anchorite to read his favorite authors and listen to jazz into the early hours, and have his blood tested for evidence of the curse that in his heart he desired as punishment for his sins. A period of tranquillity would begin, during which he attended concerts and plays, visited his mother like a good son, and asked out girls who patiently waited with the everlasting hope of reforming him. He went on long solitary excursions into the mountains to listen to the voice of God calling to him on the wind. The only person he saw in both good and bad times was his friend Gregory Reeves, who rescued him from assorted predicaments and helped him get back on his feet. Duane made no mystery of his wastrel existence; on the contrary, he enjoyed exaggerating his infamy in order to cultivate his reputation as a lost soul. There was a side of his character, nevertheless, jealously hidden, that few suspected. While sneering with defiant cynicism at the mention of any high-minded cause, he surreptitiously contributed to those same projects, taking great care that his name be kept in strictest secrecy. He set aside part of his income for helping the needy within his sphere and for sustaining good works in distant lands—from starving children to political prisoners. Contrary to what he had expected when he chose his field of specialization, his work among cadavers increased his compassion for the living; all human suffering concerned him, but he had little emotional reserve to expend on endangered animals, vanishing forests, or polluted waters. He made fierce jokes about those campaigns, just as he railed on the subject of race, religion, and women—in part because such causes were in vogue and his greatest delight lay in creating a scandal. He was intolerant of the false virtue of people who were horrified by the thought of a dolphin trapped in a tuna net but indifferently passed homeless beggars on the street, pretending not to see them. His favorite expression was What a shitty world we live in!

“What you need is a woman who's all sugar on the outside but firm as steel underneath, someone who will take you by the ear and save you from yourself. I'm going to introduce you to Carmen Morales,” Gregory Reeves told Timothy once he had resigned himself to loving Carmen like a brother, after realizing that she was beyond his reach.

“It's too late, Greg. I'm not good for anything but whores,” Timothy Duane replied, for once without sarcasm.

Shannon blew into Reeves's life like a breath of fresh air. He had been climbing the ladder for years but despite his successes felt he was not getting anywhere, like the feeling of running in a nightmare. With a magician's legerdemain he was juggling debts, whirlwind trips, outrageous partying, an insane schedule, and a stable of women, with the sense, renewed every day, that at the slightest distraction everything would come tumbling down with earthquake force. He had more legal cases than he could manage, more debts than he could pay, and more lovers than he could satisfy. His good memory helped in remembering all the loose threads in that tangle; his good luck in not slipping into careless error; and his good health in not dying of exhaustion like an ox driven beyond endurance. Shannon arrived one Monday morning dressed in bridal white and smelling of flowers, with the sunniest smile ever seen in his firm's steel-and-glass building. She was twenty-two years old, but her girlish mannerisms and winsome personality made her seem younger. It was her first job as a receptionist; previously she had worked as a clerk in several shops, as a waitress, and as an amateur singer, but as she said with the voice of a beguiling adolescent, there was no future in those jobs. Gregory, dazzled by her radiance and intrigued by the variety of jobs held by someone so young, asked her what advantages she saw in answering the telephone behind a marble desk, and she enigmatically replied that there she would at least meet the right people. Reeves at once wrote her name in his address book and before the week was out had asked her to go dancing. She accepted with the calm confidence of a lioness in repose. I like older men, she remarked with a smile. Reeves did not really know what to say, because he was used to going out with young girls and had not considered the difference in their ages to be significant. Soon he would confront the generational abyss that separated them, but by then it would be too late to turn back. Shannon was a girl of her time. Escaping a violent father and a mother who covered the marks of her husband's beatings with makeup, she had set out on foot from the backwater Georgia town where she was born. A couple of miles out of town she hitched a ride with the first truck-driver who spotted her, a fantastic apparition standing by the endless ribbon of highway, and after miscellaneous adventures reached San Francisco. The combination of ingenuousness and self-confidence fascinated everyone who met her and helped her rise above sordid realities; doors flew open before her advance, and obstacles evaporated. The invitation in her verdant eyes disarmed women and seduced men. She gave the impression of being totally unaware of her power; she breezed through life like a celestial sprite, eternally surprised when everything turned out well. Her fickle nature caused her to flit from one situation to the next, always cheerful, with never a thought for the struggles and pain of other mortals. She did not concern herself about the present, much less the future. Through conscious amnesia, she suppressed the squalid scenes of her childhood, the poverty of adolescence, the betrayals of lovers who used her and left her, and the incontestable fact that she hadn't a cent to her name. Incapable of keeping two pennies to rub together, she survived with briefly held jobs where she earned barely enough to live, but she did not think of herself as poor because whenever she wanted something, all she had to do was ask: a few enthralled suitors were always at hand, eager to satisfy her whims. She did not use men maliciously or perversely; it merely seemed to her that there was no other reason for their being. She was innocent of the pain of love or any other meaningful emotion. She was fleetingly enthusiastic about each new lover—as long as the newness lasted—but soon she tired of him and moved on, with no sympathy for the person she left behind. She was unaware that she damned several lovers to the martyrdom of jealousy and hopeless dejection, because she herself was impervious to that kind of suffering; if it was she who was abandoned, she changed course without a regret—after all, the world held an inexhaustible supply of available men. Two years after they met, while bandaging the knuckles he had bloodied punching one of her conquests in the face, Shannon told Gregory Reeves in all seriousness: You have to forgive me, you know; I'm like an artichoke: a leaf here, a leaf there, but the heart is for you. From their first date it was obvious who was the stronger. Reeves was defeated on his own turf; all his experience and arrogant Don Juaning were no help now. He fell for the new receptionist the minute he saw her, not just for her physical charms—he had known more than one as beautiful as she—but also for her ready laugh and evident candor. That night, with true concern, he asked himself what he might do to save that splendid creature: he imagined her exposed to all sorts of dangers and difficulties and took upon himself the responsibility for protecting her.

“Fate led her to me for some reason,” he told Carmen. “According to my father's
Infinite Plan,
nothing happens by chance. This girl needs me.”

Carmen missed her opportunity to warn him because her intuitive antennae were tuned toward Dai; she was busily sewing him a costume to wear as one of the Three Wise Men in a Christmas play at school. With the telephone clamped between her ear and her shoulder, she was gluing feathers onto an emerald-colored turban before her son's attentive eyes.

“I just hope this one's not a vegetarian,” she commented distractedly.

She was not. Shannon savored her new lover's culinary treats with contagious enthusiasm and insatiable appetite; it was truly miraculous that she could devour such quantities of food and still keep her figure. She could also drink like a sailor. With the second drink her eyes took on a feverish shine, as the angelic child was transformed into the sensual woman. At that stage, Reeves never knew which of the two personalities was more appealing: the artless receptionist in a starched white blouse who reported every Monday to sit behind the marble desk or Sunday's stormy naked bacchante. She was a fascinating woman, and he the geographer charting new territories. They saw each other every day at work, where they feigned an indifference that was suspicious given one's reputation as a womanizer and the other's intrinsic flirtatiousness. Several nights a week they met in marathon encounters they confused with love, and even at the office they sometimes darted into a room, closed the door, and, ignoring the risk of being discovered, writhed and gyrated with adolescent urgency. Reeves was more in love than he had ever been, which may also have been true of Shannon—though in her case that was not saying much. Gregory began to relive that portion of his youth when the volcanic eruption of his hormones had sent him in hot pursuit of any girl who crossed his path, except that now all that charged passion was focused upon a single objective. He could not get Shannon out of his mind; he kept rising from his desk to look at her, even from a distance, tormented by jealousy of men in general and his officemates in particular, including the old man of the orchids, who also made frequent stops at the young receptionist's desk, tempted perhaps by the thought of one last trophy but arrested by his sense of the ridiculous and his awareness of the limitations of age. No one passed through the reception area without being struck by the lightning of Shannon's dazzling smile. If she was not free to go out in the evening, Gregory Reeves inevitably imagined her in another's arms, and the mere suspicion set him mad. He showered her with absurd presents, hoping to impress her, unaware that she did not appreciate hand-painted Russian boxes, bonsai trees, or pearls for her ears but would have preferred a pair of leather jeans to wear with biker friends her age. With a lover's passion to share everything with the beloved, he tried to warm her to his interests. When he took her to the opera she was fascinated with the audience's elegant clothes, but when the curtain rose she thought they were watching a farce. She contained herself until the third act, but when the fat woman dressed as a geisha plunged a knife into her own belly while her son waved a Japanese flag in one hand and an American flag in the other, her laughter roared above the orchestra and they had to flee the hall.