The Lost Prince Page 17

  “How am I supposed to live without booze? Who the fuck wouldn’t freak out with a wife like Lenore and a suicidal stepdaughter and a publisher breathing down my neck to deliver a novel or pay back an advance I’ve already spent? But I’m happy you’re here. Finally I have a friend.”

  “You’ve got hundreds of friends. From what Lenore says, they’ll all be at the party you’re throwing for me.”

  “They don’t matter, Mike. Not like you do. I can’t write here. Then I go to Fripp and get so damn lonely, I can’t write there either. It’d be different if you were around. We could work in the morning and talk in the afternoon.”

  “We talk on the phone almost every day.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  At a restaurant in Ghirardelli Square, we ordered fried calamari, as succulent as any you’d eat in Italy, we agreed. Pat had a bottle of wine, an Italian, not a California vintage, and finished it himself. “I wish we had never left Rome,” he said.

  “I realize this is heresy, but I’ve lost a little of my faith that the Eternal City is the answer to every question. You’ve lived there twice and bailed out both times. Me, I’m staying in the moment,” I added lightheartedly. “Tennis coaches tell me that’s the key to success.”

  “How’s that working for you?” He pushed unsteadily to his feet. “I want you to meet Tim Belk.”

  As we hiked through the Castro District, Pat’s limp grew more pronounced. “Tim’s supplying the musical accompaniment for your party. I rented a grand piano.”

  Tim and Pat had taught high school together in Beaufort, each an outcast in town, the one because of his sexuality, the other because of his liberal stance on race relations. Now in San Francisco, they acted as caregivers for AIDS patients whose cases were more advanced than Tim’s.

  “If you moved here,” Pat said, “you could help us.”

  “How can I be sure you won’t hole up on Fripp Island? Or uproot the family and ditch me for some other city?”

  “Question my stability all you like. But never doubt my loyalty.”

  I didn’t doubt that or his kindness. No sparrow ever fell in any dark forest that Pat didn’t volunteer to help. But all too often he failed to notice that the woods were on fire and his own house was in flames.

  At Tim Belk’s apartment, the two of them embraced, then promptly traded insults. It was male bonding, Southern style. As a sign of their intimacy, they said the unsayable, the unspeakable. Tim, who was pale as parchment and skeletally thin, referred to Pat as a fat slob. And Pat wisecracked that his buddy had so few T cells, he should give each of them a name.

  I told Pat that if I were sick, joking was the last thing I’d want from him.

  “What would you prefer?” he asked. “Poetry?”

  “I’d prefer tongue-tied grief.”

  Then they began bantering about the night Pat dropped by a local bar where Tim played piano. Who should cruise into the dive but Marlene Dietrich who broke out singing “Lili Marlene”?

  “It was a drag queen,” Tim insisted. “Marlene Dietrich spent the last ten years of her life confined to bed in Paris.”

  Pat refused to believe him and repeated the story in his post-humous oral biography, My Exaggerated Life, calling the occasion “one of the magic moments of all our lives.”

  BACK AT THE HOUSE, I asked Lenore about Pat’s hit-and-run encounter with a car.

  “I think he walked into it,” she said. “Since I wasn’t there, I don’t know the real story. The bottles of bourbon were in the bag unbroken. He didn’t have any blood or bruises on him, or we would have gone to the ER.

  “He had had back pains for years. This seemed no different. Finally he had surgery and spent a lot of time in bed. He drank a huge amount, starting with wine at lunch and a tumbler of bourbon he took to bed after lunch. Then at 4 p.m. when he woke up from his nap, he’d start his serious drinking.”

  It upset her that he mixed alcohol with his medications, and that he bribed the kids to run to the store to buy liquor. “I was done enabling him,” Lenore said, “and he was furious about that. He called me Carrie Nation. I brought him his meals in bed, but no alcohol.”

  She bet me Pat would never mention her room service. “He has a very selective memory. You can’t take everything he says literally.”

  AT A CHINESE RESTAURANT ON the flats below Presidio Heights, Melissa and Megan, now in their mid-twenties, met Pat, Lenore, Emily, Susannah, and me for brunch. On a large round table with a lazy Susan at its center, dishes of dim sum circulated while a heated discussion flared up about the party that night. Someone had to stay home to wait for the grand piano and the flowers to be delivered. Then there was a debate about valet parking. How many drivers should be hired? And where should they stash the cars?

  “These are Gucci Problems,” Pat said. “Trivial shit that rich kids worry about. I’ll take care of everything.”

  “Take care of it how?” Megan demanded.

  “I’ll write a check.”

  “That’s how you always deal with problems. Take the easy way and write a check.”

  Melodramatic as a roulette wheel, the lazy Susan spun slower, then it stopped. “What do you think, Mike?” Pat’s voice had dropped into a gunfighter’s drawl. “Is writing checks the easy way out?”

  “That depends on whether you have money in the bank.”

  “Goddamn right!” He walloped the table with the palm of his hand. “Wait until you girls start paying your own bills, then tell me how easy it is.”

  His wife and daughters looked stricken. This wasn’t, I recognized, a dispute about money or who paid the bills. It was about love and how deeply the women in his life resented his regular withdrawals into his own remoteness or across the continent to Fripp Island. That he didn’t understand only added to the sadness of the situation.

  THAT EVENING, THE OVER-THE-TOP LAVISHNESS of the party deepened my own distress. The food, the wine, the floral displays, the servants, Tim Belk’s rendition of the American songbook—everything suggested a profligate occasion whose purpose was anybody’s guess. Pat looked as out of sorts as I felt. It struck me that with the exception of his place on Fripp Island, all the houses and apartments Pat lived in were an awkward fit—much like the gorgeous shells that spiny hermit crabs inhabit.

  He kept his distance from me, standing at the bar and draining glass after glass of bourbon. I couldn’t help suspecting that he blamed me for all this wasted effort and expense.

  Incumbent mayor Art Agnos and former mayor Joe Alioto worked the room, backslapping as if at a fundraiser. Actors Peter Coyote and Michael O’Keefe, who had played Pat in the film of The Great Santini, were handsome faces in the crowd. O’Keefe’s wife, Bonnie Raitt, an eight-time Grammy winner, hung back as though she feared someone might ask her to sing.

  A pride of San Francisco writers—Herb Gold, Amy Tan, Armistead Maupin, Blair Fuller, and Mark Childress—stuck together, talking shop. I tried to strike up a conversation with Herb Gold, who, like me, had been a Fulbright fellow in France. That subject soon petered out, and I turned to Blair Fuller, whose daughter Mia I knew from Rome. Fuller asked if Luisa Stewart was still beautiful, and let it go at that.

  Calvin Trillin sidled up to me and whispered, “What are we celebrating?”

  “My new book.”

  He asked no more questions, not my name, not the book’s title. I didn’t blame him. His glazed expression was that of an author who had already met too many interchangeable egos.

  I ended up helping Lenore, Emily, and Susannah distribute hors d’oeuvres and collect empty glasses and plates. Long before the last guests departed, I climbed the stairs to my room and watched boat traffic sluice beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, whose far end was lost in the foggy hills of Marin County. Guilty at hiding here, I decided I’d thank the Conroys in the morning before my flight to LA.

  At 8 a.m., as I lugged my suitcase downstairs, the dregs of last night wafted up my nostrils—the smell of cigarette butts, wilti
ng flowers, and spilled whiskey. Lenore had brewed a pot of coffee and taped a note to a cup. “Had to run Susannah to soccer practice. Pat’s in bed. Wake him before you call a cab. XOXO.”

  I knocked at the master bedroom and got no answer. I knocked louder and Jimmy barked and Pat groaned. Swaddled in sheets like a half-risen Lazarus, he lay spraddle-legged next to the dog, who was snapping at imaginary flies. “Sorry,” Pat said. “I’m too hungover to get up.”

  “It’s me that’s sorry for not thanking you and Lenore last night.”

  “Don’t fucking mention last night. I had nothing to do with it. That was strictly a Lenore Fleischer production. The most humiliating night of my life!” There was an uncanny echo of the time he told Linda and me that Lenore had infected him with herpes. I hated to leave on this note, but Pat’s head had sagged back on the pillow and Jimmy was licking his face.

  On the plane to Los Angeles, I couldn’t stop replaying the past few days—the most disquieting stretch I had ever spent in Pat’s company. Had he insisted on my staying with him so he could persuade me to move to San Francisco? Or was it the opposite? Did he believe if I sampled his life here, I’d understand why he hid out on Fripp Island?

  At LAX, I learned the city was on emergency alert. The publisher’s rep said all my interviews had been cancelled in anticipation of riots after the verdict in the Rodney King case. Rather than pay for a hotel, the rep booked me a seat on a red-eye flight east. It came to me that on our trip to Munich, Pat and I had admitted we both feared flying. Now that I spent so much time up in the air, I had worse things to worry about.

  17

  On a travel magazine junket, I later crossed paths with Lenore in Paris and invited her to tea at Angelina under the arcade on rue de Rivoli. It was an old-fashioned café with a décor as deliciously confected as its pastries. Although supercharged with caffeine and sugar, we quickly subsided into a discussion of our grievances—my desire to live in Europe and start writing novels again, and Lenore’s desire for Pat to finish Beach Music and resume living with her. He had sent hundreds of yellow legal pages for her to type, but she couldn’t guess where the plot was headed or how it would end. Why, she wondered, couldn’t he work like me, at home with his family, keeping regular hours, not driving himself and everybody else nuts with his need for isolation, special pens, a particular chair, and his favorite music playlist?

  I defended Pat and confessed that, far from the low-maintenance, high-producing author she imagined, I wasn’t writing anything these days apart from articles. Although I shared her concerns about his drinking and his health, I stressed that she had to understand that after all he had gone through during childhood, his first marriage, and his breakdowns, she couldn’t expect him to behave like a conventional husband.

  Lenore swore she expected nothing more than that Pat be present in his children’s lives and emotionally available to her.

  “Be honest,” I said. “You expect him to fight Alan Fleischer, protect your kids, especially Emily, and pay the bills.”

  Lenore spoke as bluntly as I did. “You have no conception,” she said, “of how hard it is to get him to make reasonable choices. He’s great at solving other people’s problems and ignoring his own. He should be talking to a therapist, not wasting hours on the phone with his friends. If something’s wrong in our marriage, we should fix it together, not with him on the other side of the country doing who the hell knows what. You’re his best friend, Mike. What am I supposed to do?”

  “For starters, quit throwing parties like the one in San Francisco.”

  “I threw?” Her dark eyebrows spiked. “You mean we threw. It’s what Pat wanted for you. He said to invite everyone we know. We drew up the list together. It was his idea to hire a piano and have Tim play. We discussed the menu with the caterer. This is his usual passive-aggressive routine. He makes decisions—or doesn’t make them—then blames everybody else when he doesn’t like how things turn out.”

  “I’m sorry. I have no right sticking my nose into your business.”

  “I value your opinion, Mike. But like I’ve told you before, don’t take everything Pat tells you as literal truth.”

  THE SUMMER OF 1994, ALONG with the rest of America, Pat and I obsessed about the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. O.J. denied he had slit her throat and killed her friend Ron Goldman. But on the day he was supposed to surrender to the police, he bolted in a white Bronco SUV with his friend, A. C. Cowlings, at the wheel. Surrounded by squad cars and tracked overhead by TV helicopters, Cowlings supplied a running commentary; O.J. had a gun at his head and threatened to commit suicide.

  Pat identified with both men in the Bronco—Cowlings, ready to risk his life for a friend, O.J., the ruined hero, half longing to die, half hoping to be saved. “He’s going to do it,” Pat exclaimed by phone. “We’re about to witness America’s first televised suicide.” Then he added a line that chilled my blood. “Wouldn’t you love to check out with the whole country watching?”

  “I may not be at the top of my game these days,” I said. “But I’m not ready to commit suicide, with or without millions watching.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Weeks later, in what sounded like a postscript to our previous conversation, Pat called in tears and told me his brother Tom, age thirty-three, had jumped off a fourteen-floor building in Columbia, South Carolina. The baby of the family, Tom had been a schizophrenic, in and out of institutions, on and off his medications most of his life. Pat sobbed that the death had wounded his father so grievously, he feared the Great Santini would never bounce back.

  The story of Tom’s short, tragic life poured out of Pat with such vividness and power, it sounded ready to be set in type. He described the time that Tom, in a fugue state, had disappeared into the forest and been discovered lying naked on a bed of leaves. He had lain there so long and deathly still, Pat said, deer had licked salt from his body. Enthralled by this image, I didn’t question until later, when Pat wrote up the scene, whether it could conceivably be true.

  Then in late October, shortly before he turned forty-nine, Pat called again from Fripp and told me, “I’ve never been closer to killing myself.”

  The subject of self-harm played such a constant part of our conversations, I asked, “What’s wrong?” in what I hoped wasn’t an overly casual tone.

  “Lenore’s flying to South Carolina for my birthday.”

  “That’s hardly a reason to kill yourself.”

  “No bullshit, Mike, I’m in bad shape. I can’t write. I can’t sleep. I can’t stop drinking. Having Lenore around will make everything worse.”

  “She’s seen you like this before. Why not take a break from the book and celebrate with your wife?”

  “I’m in no fucking mood to celebrate. I’m in the mood to slit my wrists.” He started crying. “You have to help. If I tell Lenore not to come, she’ll talk me out of it. But she’ll listen to you.”

  “I doubt that. Anyway, it’s not my place to tell her.”

  “You’d rather I kill myself?”

  “I’d rather you stop talking like a crazy person.”

  “Listen, Mike, my marriage is over. It’s been over for years, and Lenore won’t accept that. I swear to Christ, this’ll end either with you convincing her not to come or me killing myself. Your choice.”

  “I’m not doing your dirty work. If you want a divorce, it’s up to you to let her know.”

  “You don’t have to tell her I want a divorce. Just tell her not to come to Fripp. Tell her we’ll talk once I have my head screwed on straight. Is that such a big favor to ask? If I can’t depend on my best friend, who can I count on? I don’t have anybody else.”

  If there was the slightest chance he was serious and I could save his life, I couldn’t say no. Still, I struck a bargain. I’d speak to Lenore if he promised to see a therapist.

  Pat gave me his word and even gave me the name of the therapist—Marion O’Neill. Her office was on Hilton Head, an hour’s drive from F
ripp, and she had treated him in the past. Weeping in gratitude, babbling about his abiding love, Pat pleaded for me to call back after I spoke to Lenore.

  Within minutes, I traded Pat’s sobs for Lenore’s. She skimmed from emotion to emotion in rapid succession—shock, embarrassment, pain, anger. “I don’t understand, I just don’t understand.”

  “He said he’ll explain later. Right now he’s all over the map.”

  “Explain what? It’s obvious he wants out of the marriage. What am I supposed to do? Wait here, take care of his kids, and type his manuscript while he makes up his mind? What am I supposed to do with all the food, his favorite dishes, I was fixing for his birthday?”

  I found myself apologizing for Pat, apologizing for the male race. She, however, demanded solid information and I had none. The best I could offer was to stay in touch.

  I hung up and rang Pat, and the call kicked over to voice mail. I left a message for him to let me know he was all right. When hours passed and I hadn’t heard from him, I dialed Fripp Island and left a second message, this one more urgent. Call me!

  Though I feared the worst—that he had killed himself—I thought it more likely that in drunken exhaustion he had blacked out. Dialing him a third time, I got a recorded announcement that Pat’s mailbox was full.

  In autumn, half the houses on the island were locked up until spring, and loneliness settled in along with a dank sea mist that turned the swamps the color of onion soup, thick with floating debris. Pat professed to love it there in this season—a strange preference for such a gregarious soul. But in an emergency, who would notice that something had gone wrong? I had numbers for Cliff Graubart in Atlanta and Doug Marlette in Hillsborough, North Carolina. But neither of them was in any better position than I to race over and ensure that Pat was safe.

  At daybreak, I dialed his number again, and he picked up immediately, as if expecting a different call. “I’m in a hurry,” Pat blurted. “I have an appointment with the shrink on Hilton Head.” He hung up so abruptly, I had no chance to ask questions.