The Devil Tree Read online

  In the morning, terrified about getting pregnant, she went to the emergency room of the public health service where, after she told the doctor she had been forced to have sex with an older man, she was given a “morning after” pill and a checkup.

  As I listened to her, I was overcome by a sense of futility: because I was, and always will be, part of her past, I could never absorb or influence her as a new lover. Suddenly I felt an overwhelming urge to break away from her past.

  I stretched out on my back and forced her head down between my thighs. “Do it,” I ordered her. “I don’t care whether you want to or not.”

  I felt her hands running over my body. Getting up on her knees and bending over my belly, she dug her fingers into my thighs. Her lips, then the tip of her tongue, drifted over me; she hesitated as she touched my flesh, brushing it against her cheeks, wrapping her hair around it, then, firmly, drawing it into her mouth. Her lips tightened around me, moving up and down, and she continued, her cheeks hollow from pulling, her hands stroking, her eyes wide open, watching me, gauging my response. I told her she was too gentle, and as if to smother her I pressed her head down, but she did not recoil. She was caught in her own rhythm, her body arching, racked with excitement. She kept swaying back and forth, her fingers clawing at my skin, but when she felt that I was about to ejaculate, she lost her balance and pulled back, hiding her face in the pillow. She did not cry.

  • • •

  Now that I have given Karen all the notes I scribbled during my travels abroad, I always wonder whether an incident from my past could one day alter what she has come to think of me. Since I have no idea exactly what that incident might be, perhaps I should have left out of my reminiscences anything that might sound nauseating or foul—or anything dull or banal.

  I have steadily progressed from experiencing the sensations of being alive to expressing my thoughts about such sensations, as if pure expression were now the only original experience that I’m still capable of. But because language belongs to everyone, I suspect that whatever I capture in words becomes a fictional account—of me, as well as of someone else. There must be a place beyond words—a place of pure experience—to which I wish I could return.

  • • •

  After all the times I have been with Karen and made love to her, I still want her so much that I panic before each date at the thought that she might not show up. When she is with me and is about to undress or join me in bed, I can hardly control my craving to touch, to lick, to taste, to know, to enter her. Then my mouth is dry, my stomach is in knots, and my mind is seized by one thought only: to have her and to have her soon, sooner and longer, if I could, than time, the immovable guardian, will allow. I panic again when she is about to leave me. Then, when she is gone, I feel empty, without purpose, devoid of energy, anxious to see her again and, until then, to kill time lest my anxiety kill me.

  • • •

  At a cocktail party Karen gave the other day, I began to sweat from tension. A contest was taking place within me: one moment I was a controlled adult, the next a screaming child. A woman was telling me about her yacht; a man spoke of some investments; a couple told me they had known my mother. But I heard only Karen’s voice: “I am going to forget you. Ours will be the only love I won’t remember.” I accepted a canapé and sipped my Scotch.

  As a child I used to lie on the floor with my eyes closed and hope that, because I refused to see, I would become invisible and that people would walk past without noticing me. But I remember how upset I was when Anthony, my father’s valet, did walk by without looking at me or even stopping to acknowledge my presence. What if Anthony did not like me anymore, I thought. I wanted to be at the same time invisible to those I feared and seen by those who loved me.

  Another time I hid behind my father’s filing cabinet and gave a scream. “Jonathan screamed,” said my father. My mother replied, “No one screamed. We’re late, let’s go.” I opened my mouth to scream again, to be found by them, but I couldn’t utter a sound: what if my mother didn’t want to hear me, no matter how loud my scream was?

  Yet, I have never been able to lose myself. If one self failed, another was always ready to take its place.

  Now I’m more than just visible; because of who I am, hundreds of people work to make my existence secure. My parents were the only ones who acted as though I didn’t exist.

  • • •

  “I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” exclaimed one of my father’s favorite Psalms. “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?” asked another. But the Britannica, my father’s favorite encyclopedia, answered by defining man as no more than “a seeker after the greatest degree of comfort for the least necessary expenditure of energy.” If comfort is all that should matter to me, how am I different from an amoeba? And what has happened to the spirit, the only mystery and miracle of man’s existence?

  While I was in the hospital recovering from addiction, one of the doctors introduced me to the works of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the American Jewish theologian. This is what Heschel had to say about man.

  In the eyes of the world . . . I am an average man. But to my heart I am not an average man. To my heart I am of great moment. The challenge I face is how to actualize, how to concretize, the quiet eminence of my being.

  Beyond all agony and anxiety lies the most important ingredient of self-reflection: the preciousness of my own existence . . . and I resist the thought of gambling away its meaning.

  • • •

  The United States constitutes only six percent of the world’s population, yet we consume over a third of all the world’s natural resources. At home, half of the nation’s income goes to one-fifth of the population.

  My own situation is thus an extension of a larger economic and social disproportion. The company’s researcher, who collected for me some newspaper clippings about the American superrich, came up with some interesting facts: over half a million Americans own assets worth a million or more dollars, and—I was amused to note—almost sixty thousand of them reside in New York.

  There are only a few other Americans who appear to be as wealthy as I am. Until recently there were three about my age. The business of one, selling pet food and accessories, was started by his German-born father, who, after arriving in New York, opened a pet shop—one room filled with canaries—on Canal Street. So much for his family’s contribution to America’s greatness. The next in line, a shaving cream princeling, was a disturbed man. Periodically he would offer his fortune to the poor, but when thousands of them showed up at his door begging for help, he would withdraw and get high on hashish. Last year he blew his head off with a hunting rifle.

  The youngest of the three is heir apparent to an old banking fortune. A health and nature nut, he occupies four floors of Chicago’s tallest residential building, which he has turned into a solarium filled with livestock, soil, fertilizer, mulch, feed, pots, plants, and the latest in gardening equipment. At various times he has made passes at Karen, and once when she went to a cocktail party in his house he offered to give her a guided tour of his hothouse bedroom. She refused to follow him there. “Sniffing shit was not my idea of comfort,” she said later.

  • • •

  And so here we are, the richest of the rich, all subspecies of American Mammon, each one, no doubt, wondering from time to time how to become great—since we are already rich. But how do I, the son of Horace Sumner Whalen, achieve greatness without attaining first what Thackeray called “the principal gift of great men”: success? What kind of success can I still attain? Am I not, by virtue of who I am and what I own, a success already?

  The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them.

  Our culture offers exciting, often desirable, archetypes: Politician, Explorer, Artist, Saint, Madman, Prophet, Murderer, Lover, Warrior, Sportsman, Messiah, Genius. But where, except on the Titanic, do we find the archetype of Mil
lionaire?

  As Oscar Wilde remarked, “Millionaire models are rare enough; but. . . model millionaires are rarer still!”

  Would our collective memory and imagination preserve the sinking of the Titanic as vividly if, in the place of its colorful millionaires, the ship had carried nondescript, poverty-stricken immigrants?

  But then the archetype of the millionaire is already implicit in our tradition and popular culture, which insist that to be rich is to be better off—if indeed not better—than to be poor. Our synonyms for the word rich include: independent, capitalist, swanky, productive, fruit-bearing, estimable, sublime, aesthetic, savory, delectable, nectareous, and harmonious. While synonymous with the word poor are the following: embarrassed, reduced, drained, distressed, inferior, trivial, sorry, contemptible, defective, worthless, vulgar, base, vapid, insipid, inept, lame, stale, dismal, and pitiable.

  The stronger the power of my money, the stronger am I. . . . Therefore what I am and what I can do is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money. . . . I am a wicked, dishonest, unscrupulous, and stupid individual, but money is respected, and so also is its owner. Money is the highest good, and consequently its owner is also good. Moreover, money spares me the trouble of being dishonest, and I am therefore presumed to be honest. I am mindless, but if money is the true mind of all things, how can its owner be mindless?. . . Through money I can have anything the human heart desires. Do I not therefore possess all human abilities? Does not money therefore transform all my incapacities into their opposite?

  That’s from Karl Marx.

  Am I, perhaps, my own archetype, a man who at any time can transform himself into his opposite?

  • • •

  If to live as one’s own archetype is to be an artistic creation whose medium is the present, I should accept being no more predictable or controllable than any other work of art.

  Then why not turn myself into a Sportsman? At one stylish New York dinner party I talked to a man who was a retired Olympic skiing coach. I asked him whether I could become, in one season, accomplished enough to reach the semifinals in the next year’s American downhill.

  “I’m not that good at sports,” I explained. “Given my disposition—I’m a bit sluggish and don’t like one-on-one competition—I need a sport that would speed me up by generating its own momentum and energy. I did a lot of skin diving in Africa, but I’m a terrible surfer. At Yale I failed in tennis, fencing, and handball.”

  “One question, Mr. Whalen.” The coach seemed excited. “Why skiing? Why not gliding, or car or boat racing?”

  “Because everyone would know that I could afford to have the best—the latest and fastest glider, boat, or car.”

  “And why the downhill?”

  “It’s straight. Man against himself and nature.”

  “You really would want to compete against the country’s best skiers?”

  “Not against. But why not with them? What do you say?”

  The man got up and paced the room. “I don’t want to discourage you, Mr. Whalen,” he said, “but for such a crash program you’d also need the help of an orthopedist and a physical therapist. You’d have to build up strength in your feet, legs, and abdomen. We’d start high-speed skiing during the summer in Porfirio, Chile; then in early fall we’d go to Europe, first to glaciers accessible only by plane or helicopter, then, in the winter, to Chamonix, St. Moritz, Crans-Montana, Cortina, Val d’Isère. With this kind of rapid training, you would have to wear specially constructed devices to help protect you in high-speed falls. A battery-powered gyroscope—a model no larger than a bicycle wheel, which you’d carry while skiing—would have to be ordered right away. It would help you learn the turns. Throughout your training we would employ two assistants and two video cameramen, all expert skiers themselves. During every run you’d be filmed from different angles, and we would analyze your progress on a portable video screen. At the end of the day we would examine the tapes on a larger screen, to see you in greater detail.

  “Barring a chance accident, by spring you could hire some of the past national downhill finalists and try to keep up with them. Then we’d hire some of the best French, Austrian, and Swiss professional downhillers—past Olympic and World Cup stars—to race against—or with—you.” He stopped, convinced by his own arguments. “Yes, Mr. Whalen, I think it can be done, and I’m at your disposal.”

  • • •

  My fear of violence began when as a boy I lay in bed and listened to my father rage. I couldn’t bear it, and I think everyone, including my mother, my governess, even Anthony, felt the same way. Those few times I dared to disagree with my father, he struck me even if others were around. One night in our summer house, I wakened to the howling of Mesabi, my little dog. I put on my bathrobe and went outside. In the garden I found Mesabi with its legstied together, and towering above it was my father, kicking the animal again and again. Seeing me, he explained that the dog had to be punished for disobedience and that the pain would break its future will to resist its master. I watched in silence, torn by pity for the dog, anger at my father, and hatred for my own weakness. After that, my defense against my weakness was to retreat to a world where I was the victor. I began to collect toy soldiers, and later, army and commando single-and doubled-edged knives and bayonets, among them many Nazi and Soviet World War II relics. I subscribed to Soldier of Fortune: The Journal of Professional Adventurers and read biographies of the great political, military, and business leaders, as well as stories about famous rogues, outlaws, and traitors, admiring only those among them who were orphans or who grew up alone, abandoned, or fatherless.

  • • •

  As children, Karen and I discovered sex together. We made up nicknames for genitals: chink for hers, bobolink for mine. She wanted to know where my bobolink was when I cycled. Did it lie along the top of the bicycle saddle or fall down on one side? Did it flatten when I lay on my stomach? I wondered how deep her chink was and whether it filled with water when she swam. Could it be sealed by tape? Could she hide money in it? Karen can still remember how one afternoon, as we played in the woods with other children, I put a branch inside her chink. One of the girls told Karen’s mother about the episode, and Karen was spanked. Karen’s mother, taking the fifty-cent piece I had given Karen to store in her chink, said it was dirty money from a dirty boy for a dirty thing. Another time, Karen tried to snatch my bobolink while I tried to deepen her chink with my hand. At first she screamed; then, as my fingers rested inside her, she grew silent and simply stared at me. Touching each other, we discovered sensations of desire that gave us far more pleasure than any plaything had ever given us. The desire was insistent, and it grew more insistent with each new opportunity for kissing and petting. Exploring each other gave way to feelings that demanded expression, that needed a language of love and devotion we had not yet acquired or developed. And so, to give drama to what we felt, we pretended to be characters from an imaginary fable: Karen was the beautiful and always difficult-to-please Lady Forsythia, and I, Lord Willow of Brook, was her proud though shy lover and defender.

  Changing her voice, Karen would telephone my house as Lady Forsythia. Finally Mam’selle d’Arcy, my governess, feeling it was her responsibility to know about my friends, asked me how I had met this Lady Forsythia. “I was introduced to her by her friend, Lord Willow of Brook,” I replied. “They’re lovers, you know.”

  Now, even more curious, Mam’selle d’Arcy probed further. “And where did you meet this Lord Willow of Brook?”

  “Where else but in the house of Yugo Slav?” I said.

  “And who is that Mr. Slav?”

  “Yugo Slav? A nice chap from Yugoslavia. He’s also in love with Lady Forsythia.”

  Mam’selle d’Arcy was distressed. “You’re so young, and already you know the strangest people, Jonathan,” she moaned.
r />   • • •

  Although Karen talked freely about herself and described the sex she liked, I could not do the same; often I merely said yes or no to the questions she asked, or, silent, I would simply begin to kiss her, my hands moving over her shoulders and breasts, slowly and hesitantly descending toward her belly and thighs, stroking or kneading, teasing her flesh. Or I would start by sitting at her feet, stroking her calves, kissing and licking the inside of her knees, my hands and mouth grazing her thighs, circling around her flesh until she would start to force herself upon me, insistent and demanding, dictating my pace and the direction of my touch.