Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (3 page)

In his faded red shorts, tattered T-shirt, and bargain running shoes, Marvin was no match for the sartorially splendid Mr. Monti. In a film of his life, Marv’s lovable shlumpiness could best be captured by Woody Allen in his pre-Ingmar Bergman phase. But Marvin is one of those low-key, high-fee attorneys who inspire confidence, and his thin reedy voice carried authority when he told Mr. Monti that if he wanted to go to the police with his accusations, go right ahead. All of us stared at Mr. Monti, who pushed aside the strawberries and vigorously attacked the sorbet, noting between spoonfuls that in fact he preferred not to go to the police. He said he just wanted his money back, his daughter back, and Wally permanently out of their life.

Josephine had stopped sobbing and was looking practically catatonic. Her eyes were blank, her face was dead-white, and she was twisting and turning a long strand of dark-red hair around her finger.

“Say something, Jo,” Wally begged her. “Say you believe in me.”

Josephine didn’t answer.

“Tell him he’s a bum and you never want to see him again,” Mr. Monti instructed her.

Josephine didn’t answer.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said to Josephine.

She shook her head from side to side in a violent, silent no, no, no. Then she left the porch and got into the front seat of her father’s car.

A moment later Mr. Monti, having polished off his dessert, and his daughter’s too, made his departure. “Talk to your client,” he told Marvin, “and I’ll talk to you around noon tomorrow.” As he opened the door to his Porsche he tossed off one last instruction: “Take good care of the money, folks. I’ll be counting every bill when it’s returned to me.”

“That son of a bitch. That son of a bitch,” Wally muttered as the Porsche took off.

“You didn’t do it, right, kid?” asked Marvin.

“Didn’t do it,” said Wally.

“So who did?”

“There’s only one person could have done it, but—” Wally rubbed the back of his head where it had crashed into the geranium plant. “Hey, I’ve got a really rotten headache right now. Could we wait and discuss this tomorrow, at your office?”

“Absolutely,” said Marv. “And think about the offer Monti made you. Innocent or not, maybe you don’t want to get mixed up with a cuckoo family like that.”

Wally launched into a “Jospehine is the woman I intend to marry” speech, but I tactfully cut him short and sent him to bed, recommending for his aching head two
pillows, two Bufferin, and an ice bag wrapped in a towel. Jake pointed out that we couldn’t leave a hundred and fifty thou in the trunk of a car, even on a quiet street like ours, so I brought out a giant green garbage bag and the three of us hastily stuffed the money into it. “I’ll pick it up tomorrow on my way down to work,” Marvin offered, after Jake had dragged the bag inside. “Now how about—” he hitched up his drooping running shorts “—a cup of your coffee.”

The three of us sat in silence, for a while, listening to the crickets’ raspy chorus. A light “breeze stirred our bright-blossomed crape myrtle and a couple of squirrels played last-game-of-tag-before-bedtime in one of our pines. The scene was serene, but I was certainly not. Sitting here at home on our leafy street on our wraparound porch, I had been feeling so sheltered and so safe. But Mr. Monti had clomped up the steps, disturbing the peace and reminding me what a mean and menacing place the world could be.

I explained to Marvin how deeply distraught (make that crazed) Mr. Monti had been about the conversion decision. I explained how I had tried on several occasions, unsuccessfully, to charm and argue and beg and press Mr. Monti into letting these sweet kids alone. I added that I thought that Mr. Monti would do anything—even something as wildly extreme as taking cash from his safe and putting it in the trunk of Wally’s car—if this would discredit him in Josephine’s eyes.

“He would do such a thing just because of this disagreement about converting?” Marvin asked me.

“No,” I answered. “He would do it to win. This is a man who always has to win.”

•  •  •

Jake never suffers from insomnia, and that night was no exception. He said he was sure that after Marvin and Wally met, Marvin would have some expensive and useful recommendations. I told him I thought we were dealing with psychological, not legal, issues here. He said we should first see what Marvin had to say and that I should try to get a good night’s sleep. I said that I assumed that he and I would be going to Marvin’s office with Wally. He didn’t answer because he was fast asleep.

Around 1
A.M.
I went down to the kitchen and began eating my way through a large bag of Hershey’s Kisses. A few minutes later I heard Wally’s feet on the stairs. We took the bag into the living room and when we reached the end of our conversation, the only kiss that was left was the one he gave to me before he disappeared.

I waited until six before I awakened Jake with the news that our son had taken off. Sparing him the details, I simply told him that Wally was feeling upset and needed some time by himself to think things through.

“Great,” Jake said. “Now he’s a fugitive from justice.”

“No, he’s not,” I explained. “He hasn’t been charged with a crime. He is perfectly within his constitutional rights if he wants to go away for a few days to clear his head.”

“Is that what you told him, Brenda?”

“More or less. But only after he asked.”

When Jake gets angry his voice becomes softer, not louder. By the time he was finished with what he had to say, he was almost whispering. Then he called Marvin, who said that he had a couple of legal tactics that would
put Mr. Monti on hold for a few days. He added that although he wished that Wally had talked with him first, he hadn’t been charged with a crime and was therefore perfectly within his constitutional rights if he wanted to . . .

I was listening in on the extension, but when the conversation was over I didn’t gloat. Instead, with tears in my eyes I told Jake that the tone he had taken with me displayed an absence of love and affection, not to mention considerable disrespect for my autonomy. (I strongly urge my readers, in marital disputes, to use the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger approach if they’re looking for an apology from their husbands.) Jake apologized.

•  •  •

Have I mentioned that Jake has a slim, muscular body and that from the neck down he looks almost as youthful as the twenty-nine-year-old who was another of the three men I went to bed with in those twenty-four hours shortly before my last birthday? Sometimes when I’m feeling unappreciated by Jake, I forget to acknowledge how attractive he is. And he is, even from the neck up, where his fifty years have pouched his eyes and stolen most of his hair, but have left him with the somewhat battered appeal of a—well, try to imagine a Jewish Sean Connery.

Furthermore, Jake has never been one of those surgeons who confuse themselves with God. He is reasonably modest, a very hard worker, a devoted father, and, until recently, a tolerant husband who had been perfectly happy to allow me to be in charge of human relationships and culture. But now, in indirect and not so indirect ways, he seems to be suggesting that my
column is bringing out the worst in me. I wonder if he’s jealous. I wonder if he thinks I’m confusing myself with God.

Actually, neither Jake nor I could possibly be God. The title has been claimed by Philip, an internationally known television personality whose name would be instantly recognizable to you if I weren’t calling him Philip, which I am doing because he’s the third of the men I went to bed with in those twenty-four hours before my forty-sixth birthday.

•  •  •

It has been quite a year. My birthday took place five months ago. Wally took off five weeks ago. And yesterday I decided to kill Mr. Monti.

•

O
nce I had chosen to say yes to adultery, I was faced with some tricky questions: (a) How could I be an adulteress (or are we saying adulterer these days?) and still feel like a basically good human being? (b) Was there a way to minimize the lying and sneaking and cheating while also making certain I didn’t get caught? (c) How many different men would it take to meet my need for sexual variety? And (d) What could I do to avoid the quite unwanted complication of falling in love with any or all of these men?

Now there are people all around us who maintain their sense of goodness by denying the negative aspects of themselves, by indulging in the blind belief that they harbor no wicked thoughts or malevolent feelings. I am proud to say I am not one of those people. Instead, I am well aware that each of us, including myself, contains both lightness and darkness, both good and evil. And I therefore believe that a “good” person is not one whose heart is pure, but one who stares into, and continually wrestles with, her heart of darkness (a stirring phrase taken from the fine novel of the same name by
Joseph Conrad). Goodness, I tell my readers, is a struggle, not a settled state of grace. And even the best of us sometimes struggle and lose.

I suppose you could say I had lost the adultery struggle. On the extenuating other hand, however, I intended to commit adultery not in a spirit of self-indulgent lust but more in a spirit of intellectual inquiry. Indeed, it would not be farfetched to call it . . . research. If you add to this analysis the tit-for-tat factor (Jake had not been a man of total fidelity) and the helpful-to-my-readers factor (engaging in adultery would certainly broaden my range of expertise) and the preponderance-of-good-over-evil factor (in my wrestling matches with my heart of darkness I win about 92 percent—well, okay, 85 percent—of the time), my answer to question (a) is that I indeed could be an adulteress/adulterer and still feel like a basically good human being.

I also concluded that limiting my adulterous activities to a narrow—a very narrow—time frame would contribute both to my sense of goodness (I would not, after all, be making extracurricular sex a way of life) and to my ability to minimize the lying and sneaking and cheating (as well as the likelihood of getting caught). Furthermore, I decided that the best way to work adultery into my already tight and overprogrammed schedule was to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Frankly, I don’t understand why adultery is as popular as it is, considering how time-consuming it is. I mean, it isn’t just the time involved in actually having sexual relations. It’s all the support systems, like locating matching bras and panties, plus panty hose without a run in the thigh. Like getting your hair done, a pedicure, a manicure. Like applying lotion not only to your
hands but to your heels and elbows as well, which, of course, we should all be doing anyway—but do we? And then there’s this constant searching for a working pay phone in order to call your lover without being overheard or (for the more paranoid) being tape-recorded by a less-than-trusting husband. There are so many time pressures on women today as they try to have it all (though, as I tell my readers, they
can
have it all but they can’t have it all at once) that I am slowly coming to the conclusion that one of the best arguments for marital fidelity is the incredible convenience of it.

Anyway, to get back to question (b), I decided that setting aside no more than a week, say, for adultery (who dreamed I could do it in less than twenty-four hours?) was the best way to limit my lying, sneaking, etc.

As for question (c)—and as I also tell my readers—there is nothing like sitting down and making a list, either lettered or numbered, to give you a sense of clarity and control. I therefore sat down last November and listed the
types
of men I wanted to carnally know, focusing initially on the generic, not the specific, and choosing the types that I chose for assorted complicated reasons that only my former analyst need comprehend: (1) a younger man; (2) a married man; (3) a black man; (4) a political activist; (5) a genius; (6) a celebrity; (7) a man of a different religious persuasion; and (8), I blush to add, an identical twin. Actually, I thought it might be nice to carnally know both identical twins, simultaneously, but although, like Publius Terentius Afer, nothing human is alien to me, I immediately banished that thought as . . . overreaching. Besides, the number of men on my list, counting only one twin, struck me as a
little bit excessive, and I decided I had to . . . not prune, really, but consolidate. Which eventually I was able to do, having established that I could satisfy eight different needs with only three different men, all of whom—it conveniently turned out—were already uncarnally known to me.

There was Louis, a dedicated black activist who, at age twenty-nine, also met the younger-man requirement.

There was Philip, the world-famous TV pundit who had been flirting with me for years at my friend Nora’s New Year’s Day parties and who, if you didn’t listen too closely, could pass for a genius.

And there was Joseph Augustus Monti.

•  •  •

My concern about falling in love with the men with whom I committed adultery—question (d)—might strike you as rather outdated at a time in our social history when sex (despite its risks) has become regarded as a form of entertainment. Like bowling or bridge or going to the movies. Like ordering in a pizza with mushrooms and anchovies. No big deal. Nevertheless, I found it hard to imagine how people who take off their clothes and lie down together can “have sex” without “making love,” without feeling a tenderness, a connectedness, an involvement with each other that could lead to major emotional complications. But as I contemplated the three men I had selected to become my short-term lovers, I realized that the danger of love was remote. Like Elvis Presley, whom in my youth I had passionately disapproved of and just as passionately lusted after, these men spoke to my loins, not to my soul. I could not fall in love with Louis. I could not fall in
love with Philip. And I could certainly not fall in love with Mr. Monti.

•  •  •

Mr. Monti was not at all lovable when, the day after his appearance on our front porch, Marvin and I showed up at his office with the hundred and fifty thousand dollars and no Wally. “You wanted your money back and my client out of your life,” said Marvin reasonably. “Your money is here. My client is gone. Your terms have been met.”