That Cheating Heart

One Sweet Dream,/ Pick up the bags and get in the limousine. / Soon we'll be away from here. / Step on the gas and wipe that tear away...."

I had just plugged in my new remote-control CD and was testing it with Abbey Road, which is about as modern as I get, when the dogs started barking and hurling themselves at the front door. I opened it. There in the darkness of the Hollywood Hills stood my best friend, Lenny, a man whose life I had often admired from afar and even up close. He wore his usual mask of ironic detachment, but his hands were fluttering around his face as if he were warding off mosquitoes. On his back was one of the beautiful Polo jackets he always wore, this one a dark-blue silk-and-linen blazer. It was about 11 at night, which is the usual time that Lenny arrives to tell me about who was at Morton's or Spago and how much he has made or lost speculating in stocks.

He walked into the living room and sat down on an orange love seat. I handed him a Scotch on the rocks. In one gulp, he downed half a tumbler.

"I want to begin at the beginning," he said.

"Please do."

"About half an hour ago," Lenny said, "I was sitting in the bedroom with my wife. I had just gotten back from a date with Kathy, who is almost unendurably beautiful but is not, as you know, my wife. She's also twenty-five and I'm forty-two. My wife, Cassie, is lying there in bed with a cough from this bronchitis she's had for about a month.

"She looks at me with a wan smile and asks, 'Have I told you the fantasy that I use to keep from going completely insane when you're out at Morton's with Kathy? You might find it interesting.'

" 'I'd love to hear it,' I told her.

"Cassie says, 'I tell myself that the Lenny I know and love, that I've been in love with for twenty-two years, is away on a secret mission, and maybe he's been dropped into Nazi Germany or something like that. Maybe he's been captured. But you're doing something brave and wonderful, and that's where you are.

"'In the meantime,' Cassie says, 'I'm living with someone who's perfectly nice and he's paying for me to stay home so I can take care of our daughter, Marie. But he's not the Lenny I love. He's somebody else who I'm not really close to.

"'And what I hope every minute,' Cassie goes on, 'is that there'll be your key in the door and it'll be you, and it'll be as if there never had been any Kathy, and you'll be the same Lenny I've loved from the minute I met you.'

"So, she's saying this," Lenny told me, sipping again on his Scotch, "and I'm thinking that this is what it must be like to have lung surgery with no anesthetic.

"And meanwhile, Cassie goes on, 'I have to realize that you may not ever return, and then Marie and I will just have to deal with it like a million other women who deal with it when their husbands don't come back. But if you don't come back, I'll always remember you as the Lenny who looked so handsome and so confident that first night at the Stork Club, when you met me and explained why the Vietnam war had to stop.'

"You know," Lenny said to me, "I was wrong. It really wasn't like lung surgery at all. It was more like they were doing a quadruple bypass without anesthetics while they were holding my eyelids open and making me watch The Cosby Show. After she said those things, she walked into the nursery to check on Marie and I started thinking about Kathy, whom I had just left and who was not exactly bubbling over with the milk of human kindness, anyway.

"A half hour before Cassie told me what a great guy I was, I had been sitting in a chair in Kathy's bedroom, overlooking the Pacific in Malibu. She had just finished telling me that she did not feel like having sex with me that night, or any other night, for that matter, and that the few bits and pieces of sex we had had in the past were history, a chance escape past her mental guards. 'I have a big psychological problem with your being married,' is what she tells me. 'It's a big thing, you know, 'cause you have this big, important wife, and every night, you go back to her bed. I don't wake up and see you next to me in the morning. So if I have a problem having sex with you, don't start yelling that I'm an ungrateful bitch. You're always saying that you love me, but listen to yourself, Lenny. You're married. Married.'

"So I reminded her that she had just had a two-year relationship with a married guy and that I gave her presents and took her to nice places and treated her about a thousand times better than he did.

"'Yes,' she says. 'I don't deny it. You treat me like a queen. But that's like saying that because you're riding a horse and it throws you, and you break your back, and you go into traction for two years and you really, really suffer, that when they offer you the chance to ride the same horse again, you should just get right back up on it and ride it. Besides, I was twenty-two then, I'm twenty-five now. I've learned a lot about life. I'm still naive, but I'm nowhere near as naive. Can you hear me? Can you understand? Do you even care what I say, or do you only care if I say I'll go down on you?'

"So I say, 'But, Kathy, I treat you so well--' and she won't let me finish.

" 'Yeah, you treat me too well,' she says. 'It bugs me sometimes. You're all over me, and you're married, and it would be too much even if you weren't married.'

"I told her that I didn't have to be married, that maybe that would change, and she says, 'Don't do it on my account. I'm not promising a thing.'

"So I sat in her chair, and I looked out at the waves, and I looked at the pictures of her and her old boyfriends, and the new picture of me and Kathy in Santa Fe. I tried to think of whether any person who was physically well in a free, democratic, industrial country felt as bad as I did at that moment. While I was thinking about it, Kathy says to me, 'Don't sit all the way over there. Come over here and get in bed with me and hug me. But just hug me and hold me and listen to me.

" 'Sometime,' she tells me, 'I'm going to just go up to your house and get some of those pills out of your closet and take some of them and sleep forever. I could easily do it after some guy's just gone home or I'm going home alone from some guy's house, and I start to cry and just wish I could sleep forever.'

"Kathy fell asleep and I went home and I heard my wife tell me about how she imagined that I was away on a secret mission, and then she changed Marie, and then she took a righteous dose of benzo-diazepines to keep from losing it over her problems, mainly one problem, a husband who has a girlfriend. And the pills knock her flat in about three minutes, so she doesn't have the slightest problem sleeping, either, just like Kathy.

"There's really only one person who has a lot of trouble sleeping around this whole thing."

"I can imagine," I said. Lenny looked to me, too, as if he were on a dangerous mission from which he might not return. I wondered how well secret agents slept when they were in enemy territory.

"Usually," Lenny said, "I read The Wall Street Journal and make circles around every story where someone is stealing money from stockholders until I can fall asleep, but the fun has gone out of it, because by then,. I'm circling just about every story on every page. I get so panicky that I take a chloral hydrate, which looks exactly like an emerald, and then a Com-pazine, which is a pastel-canary color, and then a meprobamate, which is just blah white, and then a lovely Percocet, and I start wondering how many I would have to take to get out of the whole story. But I know my hypothalamus pretty well now. I just take enough to sleep, and preferably not to dream."

Lenny lit a cigarette. He inhaled so deeply that in one puff, he turned a third of the cigarette to ash. "That's what I do most nights," he went on. "But tonight, I'm going to tell you why I do this, even though it makes me and everybody around me crazy.

"I have to tell you, even though you probably don't want to hear. It's like one of those monsters from a Fifties horror picture: A surgeon has to wrench it out, and it's covered with blood and tentacles and ooze, and it slides onto the laboratory floor and scuttles away.

"Only it really isn't ugly. It's really almost sweet. It's really almost pretty. It's like a cute little monkey, and you can't get it off your back, no matter what you do, and I think it's called life"

God help us; talk to me about anything but not about life. That's too hard, I thought, but I said nothing. I don't like to interrupt Lenny, and I knew he wouldn't interrupt me if our roles were reversed, which they sometimes have been.

"First," Lenny said, "I'm forty-two, and that's right up there in middle-aged land, as far as I'm concerned. I don't like it. The way I see it, being young is where it's at. Being old is the last place I ever want to be.

"So far, life's been going only one way. It's going from being young to being old. Now, at three A.M., you know and I know that there's not really a goddamn thing I can do about it. But at some other hours, it occurs to me that there definitely are a few things I can do about it. I can start jogging, or I can buy some new clothes at Bijan, or I can buy a new car.

"But those don't really accomplish much, except as a by-product. The only thing that really works is a girlfriend. (continued on page 149) That Cheating Heart (continued from page 134) Not just someone you meet at a bar or take off a street corner: a girlfriend.

"I'm not talking about sex here," Lenny said to me, staring at me as if I were a cobra ready to strike. "I'm talking about falling in love."

God, I thought, I knew it. Tell me about your gallstones or your proctosigmoid-oscopy. But please, not about love. It hurts too much. Even to listen. But I said nothing and Lenny went on.

"It's that feeling you have when you're in the sixth grade or at junior prom or at the end of the best date of your whole life. It's the feeling that you've met someone so wonderful, someone who makes you feel so good that you're not going to die. It's that feeling of spring in the East, of the little fishies swimming upstream in your blood, of every edge being sharp, of every color being Technicolor.

"It's that feeling that life has just begun. It just started the minute the elevator door slid shut and you leaned forward to kiss her and she shut her light-blue eyes and opened her mouth and kissed back. At that moment, there is no such thing as death. There's just that moist, warm kiss and a feeling that life is a gracefully arching skyrocket that will burst sometime, but the burst will go on forever.

"Do you honestly think that anyone would give up that feeling just because he got married?" Lenny said. "Who would give up that feeling for anything?"

"Of course," I said. "But you know it never lasts."

Lenny stubbed out his cigarette and lit another, then waved the match around as if it were a pointer. "Of course it never lasts," he nodded. "But I'm not talking about the smell of a new car. I'm talking about the ultimate euphoria of the human condition. I'm talking about the temporary but extremely sound defeat of death, and I'm not giving that up.

"By the way, do you think I'm the only man on my block who has affairs after he gets married?"

"I know you're not," I said.

"You bet you know it," Lenny said, smiling and drinking his Scotch. "1 really believe I am speaking for every one of them when I say that I don't want to give up that feeling of love. Eros versus Thanatos. We're not giving up the Eros part of the equation, even if we know we're doing something wrong, according to some people. Life is too precarious. If you take out that weight balancing the death ball, there's nothing between here and there except down, down, down, down, and I want to avoid that trip for as long as I can."

Lenny looked at me like the mind reader he is and went on. "Of course, I love my wife. How could I not love her? But I've known her for twenty-two years. She's not that new face, those new lips. Yes, she's a queen, but she's not the first kiss in spin the bottle. She's my wife."

"Lenny," I said, "you're an addict."

"Exactly," Lenny said, nodding energetically. "The hook is in my flesh, right to the bone. That hook is so strong that it keeps me in Kathy's orbit. And before her, in Lisa-Marie's orbit and "ferry's orbit. I take her to The Palm and she asks me to introduce her to other men who can get her important jobs. I take her to my class and she flirts with the star tennis player in the back row. She does it and then she stares at me when I call her a psycho bitch, and she says, 'You're married, Lenny.'

"But then there are the moments when she's lying in bed with me, showing me her high school yearbook and I think, Dear God, these are from eight years ago, when I was already pretty near middle age. Jesus, this kid is doing cart wheels in front of her high school, and now she's here with her head on my shoulder.

"I put up with her anger, because those moments are perfect Lucite instants that make me feel as if I'm outside time, outside history, outside entropy. Don't get me wrong. A lot of the time with Kathy, I feel as if the entire Czech soccer team were kicking me in the teeth. But when I see the head on my shoulder, it's all worth while. It's worth anything.

"Then there's another thing. I'm a lawyer. I also teach a class in law. I am also the father of a little girl and two German shepherds. Those jobs involve cleaning up an incredible amount of shit, human and animal. In fact, I often feel as if my whole life is putting shit into a brown-paper bag for someone else, then sealing it up in plastic and waiting for someone to take it away, and then no one ever does.

"Except," Lenny added, almost breathlessly, "when I fall in love. Then everything comes together. Then the shit is someone else's problem. The repetitiveness, the ugliness, the boredom, the feeling that life is just incredibly short and I'm wasting what little of it there is just disappears. It's just gone. Gar nicht.

"The girl who stops me on the corner in Beverly Hills and offers me a bite of her yogurt. The woman at Yanks who asks me if I go there often. The woman down the hall who wants help with something she's writing. 'Gimme shelter.'"

" 'It's just a shot away,' " I said.

"And you know what comes last? The sex. Sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's so-so. Sometimes it's so filled with guilt and conflict that it's barely there. When it's great, it's euphoria. It's everything in my life lining up where it's supposed to be. It's all of my confidence and everything strong in me bursting out in a major way, so that when I'm in court, I know the judge is going to buy my arguments, and when I'm talking with the general counsel of a corporation, I know he's going to hire our firm to do his work. When the sex is really happening, it's rockabye sweet baby Lenny, and I feel powerful and confident and aggressive and peaceful all at the same time.

"But the photos of the debate team, with Kathy standing up at a battered table, are every bit as valuable.

"Of course, I have pals I play cards with who tell me that the real thrill is getting away with something. They like the conspiracy," Lenny said. "And I have still other friends who do it pure and simple to get back at their wives. Marriages sometimes go on for a long time. Men and women in those marriages inevitably do something that hurts. The night the wife got drunk and passed out when the boss was at dinner. The night the wife said she had a headache and then stayed up reading for two hours. The day the hubby won a big case and the wife didn't say a word. A husband can even the score for a lot of those by taking another woman to bed."

"Let's play Global Thermonuclear War," I said.

"Yes, let's," Lenny said. "In the bedroom." He started to pick at imaginary lint on his silk jacket, and then he went back to his story. "Then there's the power aspect. The idea of the potentate of Baghdad, only he's in Beverly Hills. The law may say he can have only one wife, but his power is too great for that. He can have as many girlfriends as he has time and personality for. I know for a fact that there are men in Los Angeles who have fifty mistresses stashed around town. It's the caliph of Cairo all over again. It's pure power. Real simple.

"But I'm not talking about that situation," Lenny said. He got up and walked over to my stereo and looked at the CD. "I love Abbey Road, too," he said. "I'm not talking about that power game or getting back at my wife. It's not that. It's something else. It's falling in love.

"In a way, that's a lot more dangerous, because if you make an appointment with a callgirl and she misses the date, you don't lose any sleep over it. But when you fall in love, you're gambling with your self-respect and your future, and that's a big gamble. 'You play around, you lose your wife,' the song goes. 'You play too long, you lose your life."

"I know that song," I agreed.

"Still," Lenny said, heading for the door, pursued by my dogs, "it's the only game I'm interested in playing. Kathy will disappear, just like the others. My wife is perfect, and I hope she'll be around for all eternity; but then, I'd like to keep falling in love for all eternity.

"They say that falling in love is wonderful, and even if they're only half-right, that's enough."

Lenny stopped and walked over to my chair. He patted me on the shoulder. "Now I'm going to sleep," he said, "if I can sleep."

He said that and then he opened the door, walked out into the Hollywood night and was gone.