Authors: George V. Higgins
“I moved to Foggy Bottom in July. Naturally I didn’t want to make them feel bad—I was still who I was, after all—so I said it
was because I was fed up with wasting six percent of my life, ten hours a week, fighting the traffic, morning and night, the
miserable
Fourteenth Street Bridge. It was true, but it wasn’t the reason.
“Then that November I went back to Knoxville for the twentieth homecoming reunion of my college class. There was a football game, of course, which I didn’t go to—because how on earth can you meet anybody, much less look for a woman, which was why I was going, by sittin’ in a stadium, watchin’ a damn football game?” He finished his fourth beer and refilled his glass.
“See, now finally I had a
plan.
When I was in college I’d had a few sort-of romances, never really went anywhere, and then I graduated. The years went by, and I didn’t meet anybody to have a romance with, and—see, I
knew
I was lonely, which was at least something. Lots of lonely people never do figure what is
bothering
them, go to their graves still kinda wonderin’, ‘Something was
wrong
—what
was
it?’ And I’d read in the alumni news that this one I’d dated’d gotten her graduate degree in nursing, and that one’d had her third kid … well, I suppose at first I didn’t realize I was doing it—but I was trying to follow their
lives
, in those pathetic little dispatches, thinking that the husbands Tom and Chris and Buddy, well, they could’ve been
me.
Tried to imagine what they looked like, how they acted. I was playing make-believe.
“I guess my logic must’ve been that since by then I’d spent seventeen
years
as a single man in Washington, a town
alive
with single women,
yearning
to get serious,
teeming
with them, if I’d heard right, and I hadn’t managed to have even
one
relationship; but I’d at least
dated
three or four women in college, the answer must be that I had to
know
I had something in common with a woman before I could even talk to her. Like I did when I was in college and the women were in college. And in Washington I hadn’t had that common ground. So the thing for me to do was go back to Knoxville sometime when I knew women of my vintage’d be going back there too, and, who knew? Maybe one of
my old, ah,
flames
would turn up, and, well, why not? It happens—turn
out
to’ve been
divorced.
And be even
better
-lookin’, and we’d
reignite
the flame.” He sighed, and drank.
“So I flew down in time for the Weekend-Kickoff Gala cocktail reception and informal dinner Friday night, and of course I recognized hardly anyone, or saw one single woman there. There were two other
guys
I knew, majored in finance with, both looking
great
and doing very
well
—like people at reunions always
are
doing, because those who’re doin’
terrible
don’t go to the reunions. Their smug little
wives
were with them, and one of our professors, by himself.
“Perfectly nice fellow, always neat, polite and friendly. Must be pushing seventy by now. Took a real interest in us students, back in my day, at least, but back then too he always came to our events by himself. Showed no evidence of family then and no signs of any now? I’d always assumed that he was gay, and now, by God, I knew I’d been right.
“Since he was alone that night, I assumed he was between boyfriends—although I’m actually not sure whether a gay man with a boyfriend on the faculty down there’d even
dare
to bring him to an alumni shindig. Anyway, I figured he probably had nothing else to do that weekend, a situation I was all too familiar with, and so to make a few easy brownie points with his colleagues he’d volunteered to be a faculty rep at one of those boring reunions. Him I wanted to avoid. I was there to look for women, not to fraternize with fairies.”
He drank some of his beer.
“B
UT
HE
WAS
DRINKING
IT
SLOWER
,” Farrier said, telling Cheri. “That gave me some hope I wouldn’t be putting him to bed and dishing dinner up by myself by the time the lads arrived.”
——
“B
UT
IT
WAS
LIKE
AVOIDING
swine flu—he made very sure on Friday night that I’d be at the cocktail party and formal dinner Saturday, so it was clear I’d caught a bad case of old professor, and I was going to have him next to me at every damned event I attended until I left for the airport Sunday afternoon. And I couldn’t figure it out, what the hell my attraction was. Did he think
I
was queer? Could’ve been—like I said, I’m sure people have. Or was he an FBI buff? You’re familiar with that breed, I’m sure.”
“Oh yeah, God love ’em,” Farrier said. “Them and their opposites, the people who despise you for it. The ones in tie-dyed jeans an’ Max Yasgur’s Farm tee shirts. Woodstockers with sixties hangovers, hate you for chasin’ their draft-dodgin’ boyfriends all the way to Canada.”
“But the reason didn’t matter,” Stoat said. “I was
beside
myself.
“I thought about trying to change my airplane reservation—just skipping the second cocktail party and dinner dance Saturday. But since I had one of those tightwad-specials, three-weeks-in-advance reservations, I didn’t know if I could. And anyway, why? As usual I had no plans in Washington,
that
Saturday either. I figured the hell with it, ‘I paid for this disaster fair and square, might as well at least get the drinks and dinner.’
“That night the professor arrived with a date, and a very presentable one. Lily, it seemed, was his teaching assistant. If you went by the dress that she nearly had on, he clearly was
not
homosexual. It was sleeveless, what she called ‘lettuce green,’ jersey or something, I don’t know fabrics, very soft and clingy, with a high stand-up collar and a very deep vee neckline. She still looks darned good, for a woman close to fifty, but that night, in that light, she looked
sensational
—could’ve passed for being in her late twenties. My two classmates were at
least
as impressed as I was—their wives didn’t like her at
all.
“They needn’t’ve worried. I still don’t know for sure whether my old professor’s queer—I’m surer now that he is—but he wasn’t
with
Lily. He was trolling her for me, at her behest. She’d obviously ingratiated herself with him; she’s good at that—beguiling older men’s not her
only
speciality, but it may be her best. She enlisted him to be on the lookout for a second husband for her, and by interviewing me the night before he’d found out enough to make her think I might be worth a look-see.
“She seemed to be very impressed that I was FBI, and she knew enough about how the bureau works—and what my place in it was—to make me ask her if she once considered applying for a job. She was vague about that, but of course she hadn’t. What she’d done was spend a couple hours at her computer in the library, swotting up on the Bureau to make me think, ‘My gosh, she’s smart’; and then three or four at the beauty parlor, so she could bowl me off my feet that night.
“Obviously it worked. I was back in Knoxville the next weekend. She came to Washington the weekend after that. And so on and so forth, her different strokes for different folks more than adequate to turn me into her little lapdog. We went out a few times with Rick and Ellen, three or four, not many, but enough to make it clear to them that if I was going to have Lily around all the time, there’d be no further need of them and their compassion.” He sighed again. “Too bad. I could use some of it now.” He drank some beer.
“Ah, cut it out, Darren,” Farrier said. “This’s a
temporary
thing. All marriages go through them. You think it’s all over, world’s come to an end, whole happy life’s been destroyed. You wanna know somethin’? People get through those periods. You’ll survive, believe it or not. Six months from now if I ask you about it, you’ll look at me like I’m crazy. ‘The hell’re you talkin’ about?’ The way that I see it, worst thing that can happen? Turns out she was right about Wallace, he did what she suspected, she
comes back with a new source of income. And the
best
that can happen’s exactly the same thing—she comes back with a whole bunch of money.
“Your masculine pride’s not involved in this, Darren. Try not to
get
it involved. Lily’s spending a few days with four other women anna corpse. She’s not between the sheets with her former husband, hummin’ ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in bed. And when her trip’s over, she’s coming back right here, not runnin’ off with him again—his runnin’ days’re over; he is dead.
“Look at the bright side. If what you say is true, money’s what’s on her mind, when she comes back she’ll be happy. A happy woman’s the best kind to have. The reason she’s happy don’t matter.” He drank.
Stoat was glum. “Well, I hope you’re right. She really
needs
money about now, more’n I can spare without damage.”
“You two got financial problems?” Farrier said. “How can that be? You said it yourself, you don’t exactly throw it around. You never did anything costly, I know about. This place’s nicer’n what Cheri and I’ve got, but like you say, we’re comin’ from lot different circumstances. You haven’t been married before and
divorced
; got no
kids
, don’t drive flashy
cars
, you don’t wear flashy
clothes
, you don’t blow a wad on
vacations
, and the stock market she plays ’s been up, never higher. Where the hell’ve you spent all the dough?”
“This past year or so, she’s been branching out,” Stoat said. He emptied his bottle into his glass and sat back in the leather chair. “She started playing the commodities markets, Chicago Board of Trade. You know, like Hillary Clinton says she did, buying some kind of commodities futures. Big money fast. Says she invested ten grand and made a big profit. She’s not really sure how she
did
it, or
where
, or what
in
—just that some guy named Red who her husband Bill knew. Red said she did, so she must’ve. I dunno whether she bought cattle futures or maybe it
was pork bellies—which I guess means bacon. She most likely doesn’t know either, but a few months after that, Red gives her another call, and now she finds out she
sold
all her contracts. Hillary still isn’t sure
what
she sold or to who—all she knows is she nets ninety grand on the deal, and this makes her think very highly of Red. Much more highly now’n she does of her husband, gettin’ blow jobs from a pudgy White House intern.
“
But
—and this’s how you can tell, if you didn’t think so before, how much smarter Mrs. Clinton is’n we are—where I suspect
you
—and I know damned well
I
—would at that point’ve said, ‘Way to go,
Red.
Now what you do for me is do that again. Buy some
more
stuff for me, anything looks good to you. Only this time buy ten times as much—,’ Mrs. Clinton didn’t. Mrs. Clinton says, ‘Thanks, Red, cash me out.’
“Lily’s pretty smart, but she’s nowhere near as smart as Mrs. Clinton, and she doesn’t know Red. She also doesn’t know as much about commodities as Red does, or as she
herself
does about stocks and bonds. She went into metals, big time. And what’s worse, she did it on double leverage. Borrowed money on stocks that she owned, what they’re worth at the time—much more’n she’d paid for them. So she was betting those stocks wouldn’t go down.
“Then with that borrowed money, she bet
again.
She didn’t exactly buy metals
futures
; she bought
calls
, which’re options to
buy
metals futures. Her theory is that if she borrows a dollar she can buy a dollar call, which will be worth at least ten dollars three months from now—the price of the metal will’ve gone up at least eleven, so the person with the option saves a buck buying it. She then sells those calls and buys her pledged stock back, leaving a bundle for profit.
“The trouble is that for her to win, at least two things have to happen her way. But to lose, and lose
big
, only one has to go against her.
“The metals market has to keep going up, so the options to buy it three months from now will be worth something. If metals go down, she will lose. And the stock that she pledged has to stay at least even. If it goes down before she pays off the loan, she’ll have to come up with more stock. But what’ll she use to buy some more stock? All her cash’s in metals futures. She’ll either have to start selling her other stocks, or borrow against something else. Like this place.” He drank some beer.
“Oh, no,” Farrier said, interrupting. “I wouldn’t care if she’s
swimming
in shit, I wouldn’t let her do that. I’ve been strapped for cash a good many times, had to borrow so much it scared me. But two things I know—no matter how broke you may get, you never touch where you live, and the
only
time you touch your pension is to finance the place where you live.”
“I agree with you,” Stoat said. “And she can’t get at my retirement. But the reason there’s so much in it is because unlike you and most people, I
didn’t
tap my retirement account for the down payment on this place. I was willing to, but I didn’t want to, and she didn’t want me to either. So I agreed to make the monthly payments and furnish the joint. Furniture—the stuff I had in Washington was
cheap
, and
old
, and worn out. Wouldn’t’ve been worth the cost of moving it up here—gave it to a battered-women’s shelter in Bethesda, took the tax deduction. And
she
made the down payment, twenty-seven grand, twenty percent of the purchase price—on the condition the place would be in her name. I had no objection; we hadn’t known each other that long. If it didn’t work out, she’d be where she didn’t really want to be, but at least she’d still have her money—and like I said, I needed new furniture anyway.