Of course, as a master manipulator himself, when Bernie left for Israel, he had Jenny and the baby safely on welfare as well as supported by the commune. So she didn’t really need my help when, as promised, I went to their apartment to offer it. It occurred to me while I drove there that evening a week or so after he left, whatever illusory assassins he may be running from, Bernie might also be running from his wife and child. He was almost thirty, with few marketable skills and no degree, and for the first time in his life he really needed money.
I didn’t know if Bernie had even shared the Big Secret with Jenny, but I would try to get as much as I could. It had been nearly two years since our near-miss in her bedroom. My mental state had only slightly improved in that time. I had had an ol’ lady but we broke up months ago. I was sexually starved and emotionally desperate and couldn’t connect with even one of the pack of acceptable single chicks in the Family, some as desperate as Jenny had been.
“Everything go o.k. at the airport?” I asked from the kitchen doorway. “He get off o.k.?”
She was at the sink making tea. The baby was asleep and the apartment was empty of other Family members, which was unusual.
“Yes,” she threw over her shoulder out of the clatter of tea-making. Then she sighed in exasperation. This trip was a burdensome indulgence of Bernie’s that she would just have to put up with. In ways, he was her firstborn.
Throughout the chat that followed, which included too little news about Bernie and too much gossip about the Family, I watched for an opening to ask her about the Big Secret.
“How’s Janet?” I asked when we were sitting over steaming cups at the kitchen table.
Janet was a short busty blonde with a great laugh, the sexiest of that pack of single chicks in the Family. I felt tremendous attraction to her and had blown it miserably when I came on to her. I suddenly felt depressed.
“Oh, she’s alright, I guess,” Jenny said and then smiled. “She came home late last night really drunk in her underwear and this morning she couldn’t remember what happened.”
The singles in the Family were notoriously wild partiers. This news about Janet depressed me even more.
I asked, “Was she one of your roommates in that flat down on Lower Haight Street ?”
“No, I met her when I joined the Family.”
“Oh.”
“You might be thinking of Cindy, she was sort of like Janet.”
“Oh… yeah.”
That’s when I fell through a trapdoor in time. I landed in that same Lower Haight Street flat and in the very moment we were sitting side-by-side on her bed, before I decided not to kiss her. I felt again all the desire and all the potential of that moment. This happened while I was looking across the table into her eyes. It took a while but she found her way to what I was thinking and she answered with an expression of horror. I had asked her for sex. And I was as surprised by it as she was.
After the shock wore off, I felt humiliated. If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have said I was at that moment hornier than usual. A few times I had masturbated over what might have been between us, still I hadn’t once thought consciously about approaching her. But, if it was a measure of my sexual desperation that I would try to seduce Bernie’s wife, it was also a measure of my anger with him.
“Uh, do you know why Bernie left?” I asked in order to distract her. “Do you know exactly what he was running from? I couldn’t get him to tell me.”
We were both grateful for a change of topic. Nevertheless, I could see by her smile that she did know Bernie’s secret and didn’t want to tell me. Then she frowned and began searching inside herself to see if she had in any way led me on. She was blameless, of course, and I should have relieved her by withdrawing the question, but I didn’t.
Then, in lieu of her body, she shared the Big Secret with me.
“Oh, he sold some information to the F.B.I.,” she said with the smile of an indulgent mother. “Nothing important.”
“I remember. . .” I said. “He told me about this meeting he had, in a restaurant in Chinatown . . .”
The baby cried out and Jenny got up from the chair.
“That was it?” I asked.
“Yes. That was it,” she said stepping away from the table.
“He never told me what it was for,” I said. “I guess I just figured it was… some… intrigue of his I would read about later.”
“I don’t know what he told them,” she said from the doorway, “but I know it wasn’t important. He just wanted to see what it was like – you know what I mean? – to have that experience.” She left the kitchen.
I remembered how he told the story with such relish, repeatedly punching his thigh and shaking his head as he laughed. He held up his hand to silence me as I was about to ask him a question. Then he overcame the hilarity enough to tell one more nugget. Watching from a corner table in the restaurant, he had been delighted by the spy-movie corniness as an agent came in and checked the place for an ambush and then left and wasn’t seen again. Then a few minutes later, Bernie’s “contact” came in and joined him.
Jenny thought what Bernie had done was a goof, a tweaking of the System, like the rent strike. And it seemed to me too that this was just a grand prank gone awry. He ripped off the FBI and now feared detection and retaliation.
Or did he rip them off? And why wouldn’t he tell me about it? I would have expected him to be crowing. Maybe he gave them valid information and the assassins were projections of his guilt. Could he have been less concerned with the prank than the money (for his new family)? His extreme extroversion and insensitivity to psychological nuance made him seem more liable to fooling himself about his true motives.
He had recently humiliated himself when he tried unsuccessfully to sell a collection of old articles and columns to book publishers. Also, he was resentful of incompetent friends who had money and the media spotlight dropped on them. Plus, he had a model of betrayal and corruption in an older brother who went from being a Berkeley radical to a corrupt official of the Lindsay administration in New York City . The brother and others surreptitiously bought the future site of a hospital before it was made public. Bernie accepted this as simply the way things were done in the Big Time.
All of this mixed with too much LSD could produce convincing government bogeymen.
Jenny returned, cooing to the baby yawning in her arms.
“Don’t tell him I told you that. O.K?” she said.
I was so anxious to ask more questions that I was twitching, but I had to say, “Oh yeah, no, no, I won’t say anything. I promise.”
She felt uncomfortable about having told me and wanted to drop the subject. I never again found a way to reopen it and I never knew for sure whether he ripped-off the F.B.I. or his ideals. But then something happened that made it all irrelevant anyway.
