Authors: Jane Smiley
She pressed, with all apparent casualness, more closely against me, then said, “Big crowd tonight.” Her fingers skated across my fly, went away, came back. She kept talking the whole time. “What did they decide on?”
“Dutch Colonial. One of those ones on Praed Circle that your father built ten years ago.”
“It took them a year to find a house like that?”
“They seem enthusiastic. You know, I’ve given up trying to figure out what people”—she squeezed me—“see. Ah.”
She grinned. She spoke in a low voice. “Have you ever been in New York, in a really crowded subway car, all pressed together, and everyone is avoiding your gaze and someone just feels you up?” She was smiling. “It’s so dangerous, isn’t it? I mean, I knew someone who had her purse opened and her wallet stolen. Anything could happen in a situation like that.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “I always wait for the next car if the one that comes seems too crowded. But this just reminds me.” She pressed her side against me again; then she leaned around me and said to Fern, “Did you get those books I left at Mom’s for you?”
“I haven’t been over there today,” said Fern.
She squeezed me harder this time, and I stood quietly, looking down at my beer.
“Well, they’re on the front hall table there. You’ll see them.” In a quieter voice, as if through a trick of producing two voices at once, she said to me, “I’ve missed you.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Show me that house in Deacon, on Fourth Street.”
“That California-style bungalow?”
“Yeah. Tomorrow at ten. I saw those people moving out last week.”
“They’re in Vermont by now.”
“Mmmm.” She went back to her public voice. She said to Bobby, “Well, I’ve delivered, so I’m going now.” She backed away from the bar.
I said, “Yes, you have. Good to see you.”
She grinned. “You too. I don’t see you enough, really.”
Neither Bobby nor Fern looked up, so I allowed myself a smile. I could feel her track through the barroom and out the door. It opened. It closed. I knew where she was every step of the way, even though I was still looking down at my half-full glass.
At nine-thirty the next morning, just as I was taking the keys to the Deacon house off the keyboard, the phone rang. It was George Sloan. He said, “Has that house sold?”
“You put in the first offer, Mr. Sloan, and it was accepted. We should be absolutely fine.”
“Not that one. The other one.”
He didn’t have to tell me. I said, “It’s still listed.”
“I want to go see it again.”
After a moment, I said, “I think it’s time to put that idea out of your mind, Mr. Sloan—uh, George.”
“I went up there last night and stood on the front step, on my way home from work. It’s only thirteen minutes door-to-door from work. It’s twenty-six minutes to the other house.”
“Even twenty-six minutes isn’t a major commute around here. I–”
“Can you get the keys again?”
“Sure, but, say, you know. George.” Felicity was enlarging in my mind. “George. Think of it—this house, I mean—as something you really want but shouldn’t have. Something that is hugely tempting but not good for you. Something that will
hurt
you. Do you know what I mean?”
Surely he did.
I said, “Did you ever—ah, smoke?”
He said, “Yes.”
“But now you’ve quit, right?”
“No.”
“You know you should, though, right?”
“Well, sure.”
Oh, I didn’t want to be having this conversation. It was twenty to ten. “Do you ever calculate how much money you spend on cigarettes in a year? That’s something that’s supposed to help you stop, right?”
“About a couple hundred bucks.”
“Well, this house is going to cost you, in repairs alone, about fifty or sixty
thousand
bucks.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“George, I’m going to be frank with you. You can’t afford it. I’ve seen the financial statement you made out for the bank. You could get in there and pay the mortgage, but that’s all, and that’s not enough.”
“Can I get the key again?”
“You call her. You’ve got the number.”
“That’s okay?”
“That’s okay.”
He hung up.
I got there at ten-ten. The driveway was empty and the house looked a little too uninhabited—the windows were shut tight and the kid I’d hired to mow the lawn was a couple of days late. There was a weekly shopper on the front porch, yellowed and flat, and the porch itself needed sweeping. All these annoyances vanished when Felicity’s BMW rounded the corner and pulled up to the curb. She got out of the car with a wave, turned, locked the driver’s side door, and came toward me up the walk, swinging her handbag. She was wearing a loose moss-green dress, about knee length, and sandals. Her hair was spread out down her back in a dark wave. I opened the front door of the empty house, and she stepped up onto the porch and held out her hand. I shook it. Her face was alive with playfulness. She said, “Good morning, Mr. Stratford. Thank you so much for showing me this house. I’m sure it will be lovely.”
I said, “There’s plush carpeting in the main bedroom.”
“Let’s have a look at it, then.”
I closed the door behind us and heard the lock click. Morning shadows, crisp and cool, fell across the living room floor. The house was quiet, the way closed empty houses are. Even the hum of the refrigerator was missing. I said, “I feel snowed in.”
She said, “Ooh, Joey. I feel indescribable.”
We crossed the kitchen and entered the back hall, which was dim and close. She moved toward me and put her hand into my shirt. I put my arm around her waist and felt that she was wearing nothing underneath her dress. There was only the slip of mossy fabric over the smoothness of her skin. We stopped right there and began kissing against the wall of the empty pantry. She unbuttoned my shirt and opened it, then lifted her dress and pressed her breasts against my solar plexus. I whispered, “You are so undomesticated.”
She whispered, “No one knows that but you and me.”
I couldn’t kiss her enough. Her lips fit with perfect softness inside mine. She didn’t move them, but they were electric, and I seemed to feel their every little charge in my balls and my cock, which was pressed against her belly. It went inside her and she squeezed, and then pressed her tongue into my kiss and against my tongue. We seemed equal in this—I was pushing into her and she was pushing into me. It was painfully exciting. I lifted her over to the washer/dryer and sat her against it, then leaned into her. She began to cry out and I did too, at first kissing and then with our heads back and our mouths open. She hooked her ankles behind the small of my back. The heel of her foot seemed to dig into my lower spine, causing waves of sensation to move outward like rays. I pushed harder into her. I thought, She can take it. She can take a simple thing, the throwing off of all restraint. I had never known any other woman who could take that. I ran my hands down her sides and gripped her waist and she opened her legs even wider, anchoring her hands on my shoulders and coming all over me in a wet wave. Then it was my turn.
The next thing she said, in a low, pleased voice, was, “That took four minutes.”
I laughed and said, “Is that good?”
“It was great. Wasn’t it?”
“Of course. But why did you time it?”
“It didn’t seem like four minutes, did it? It seemed like forever. I love that.” She sighed and lay back across the washer/dryer combo. I eased out of her and she twisted her legs away, making a spot for me on the corner of the washer. She said, “This is comfortable in a way. Cool.” She pulled her dress down and smoothed it, then lifted her hair off the back of her neck. I said, “The bedroom is nice, too.”
“Look in my bag.”
I pulled out a cotton sheet, single-bed size.
“I thought the carpet might be rough, but this is nice. Private.”
“Old Realtor’s trick.”
She stretched her back and lifted her arms, then put her hands on my cheeks. “I wish I could roll over next to you now and just tickle you all over and chat about something. What do you think we would chat about if we were comfortable?”
“We’d probably complain. I’d probably complain. Or we’d gossip.” I still felt enjoyably drained. “Maybe I’d add up money. I’ve made a lot of sales lately, especially over there with those townhouses. Maybe I’d lie there and talk myself into being rich.”
“Daddy thinks those townhouses are a sow’s-ear silk-purse sort of thing. Marcus just sits there looking quietly confident. Let’s go lie down on the floor of the bedroom.”
I helped her off the washer/dryer and led her to the back of the house, where she spread the white sheet over the thick champagne-colored carpet. We lay down. She said, “This room has nice windows. You know, I’ve lived in the same house for twelve years. I think everyone is moving but me. When the boys were twelve and thirteen, we could have expanded, but now it’s time to contract.”
“Is this chatting?”
“Yes, I believe it is.”
“Maybe it will lead to second thoughts.”
“On your part?”
“No. On yours.”
She looked at me. She said, “It’s okay for us to have no future. Two people having a future is more or less a habit, when you think about it. It’s what you do in high school when you don’t have any idea of what else to do. Look at Fern. The reason they can’t get her to marry Bobby is because she has other things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Study cats.”
“Is that really something to do?”
“It is for her. You’d be surprised how little is known about cats. If you were chatting with Fern, she would have something to say. It would be about cats, but it would be something.”
“You have something to say.”
She ran her finger around my lips for a moment. “I’ll tell you about me. I am a person who is interested, but I’ve never really pursued anything, so I’m still more
interested
than
interesting
. I changed my major six times in college, and then I got married instead of graduating. I mean, I’ve never—”
“I think you’re very interesting.”
“I know you do, but that’s essentially reproductive behavior. When you smell my hair or want to fuck me because I have a certain demeanor, you are not really finding me interesting. It’s not the same for me. I find you interesting because you’re different from other men.”
“I never would have thought that.”
“I know. The funniest thing about you is that you think you’re an average guy. But you are
kind
.”
“Maybe I’m just not very, oh—”
“Ruthless?”
“Well, I was going to say smart.”
“I don’t know about that, but you do tempt me to find the limits of your kindness.”
I tried to make a joke of this. “That doesn’t sound like fun. At least not for me.”
“Do you know that I’m
not
kind?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“I’m not. I am affectionate, though. And I like you very much. As much as anyone.” She put her head back and looked at me. “You know I only use the word
love
in its most technical sense. Mother, father, husband, wife, sister, brother.”
“You don’t have to use the word
love
with me.”
“It’s better if I don’t. There’s no precedent, and it’s too confusing.”
Now the frenzy of our earlier coupling seemed distant. I wasn’t sure why. I said, “Right now, I have to say, you are very
interesting
.”
“If I thought that was a laudable goal, I would be glad to hear it, but I don’t. I am just enjoying myself.” She kissed me.
“Tell me what’s enjoyable about talking like this.”
“Well, it’s not the same sort of talking we always do, for one thing. I mean, haven’t you noticed that people always talk about the same things over and over? I look at my parents and hear them say the same things they’ve been saying for years to each other, as if they were in church or something. ‘How was your day?’ ‘Could’ve been worse. Where do you want to eat tonight?’ ‘I don’t care. Do you want me to cook?’ ‘You don’t want to cook.’ ‘I can cook. I don’t mind cooking.’ ‘Ah, why mess up the kitchen?’ Then he kisses her.”
“I’ve heard that conversation.”
“Who hasn’t? That’s the Betty-and-Gordon conversation. The Hank-and-Felicity conversation isn’t as long, but it’s just as—you know. I’m not going to complain about him to you.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Linda and I were talking about that at lunch yesterday. When you start having a friend—a woman friend, I mean—one of the first things you always do is complain about your husband and kids. It’s incredibly tempting. You make fun of them a little and you throw your hands around and you use a certain tone of voice, a very emphatic tone of voice.”
“I know that.” But what I really wondered was what Linda said about Marcus.
“It takes on a life of its own. You start getting outside your own family and then it’s hard to feel inside it again. You’re easy to talk to, like Gordon.”
“I don’t have a lot else to offer, dear.”
“I don’t know if that’s true.”
“Are you upset about something?”
“No.” She lay back on the sheet and looked up at the ceiling. “I miss Sally. Sally would have led the march
out of here.
I couldn’t do it by myself. Anyway, I just want you to appreciate what a pleasure this is, to have no future.”
“And nothing public.”
“Exactly.” She looked at me. “Do you miss Sally?”
“Not the way you do.” I wanted right then to tell her that I loved her, but I didn’t dare.
She nestled into me and I started kissing her again. The desire that had receded returned effortlessly.
Afterward, we folded up the sheet and looked around the house for a minute or two, and then we went out of the house, and I shook her hand on the step and we went to our separate cars without looking at each other.
CHAPTER
11
S
EVERAL DAYS LATER,
Gordon, Marcus, Crosbie, Bart, and I met with Mrs. Thorpe and her lawyer. We signed the papers; they signed the papers. Salt Key Farm became the property of Salt Key Corporation, which was owned by Gordon (40 percent), Marcus (35 percent), and me (25 percent). I had agreed to put my two small farms on the market as a token of my interest. I thought they might bring about a hundred and fifty thousand together, but in fact we spent nothing; principal, interest for one year, and fees for the loan were covered by the loan itself. After Mrs. Thorpe and Calvin Visser had left, Marcus said to Crosbie, “Now, of course, we’ll need another loan for preliminary development costs. Gordon and I were thinking that two-fifty ought to cover it for six months, maybe a year.”
Crosbie nodded without turning a hair, and Bart said, “I’ll see to the paperwork.”
When we were walking to our cars, I kept glancing at Marcus and Crosbie chatting. As far as I knew, Marcus had nothing except a heavily mortgaged house and a job that paid on commission, but he carried himself importantly, and Crosbie nodded and laughed and made a big deal of him and stood there and waved him off when he drove away. I didn’t know what to attribute this to, and in the end I decided it was genius. After all, everything he had told me had been right, hadn’t it?
Marcus and I went looking for office space. This was Gordon’s idea, Marcus told me, because he wanted the Salt Key Corporation to start out in an organized way. Marcus himself was keeping the books. The county was deep into autumn; every road ran through a golden tunnel of color that blazed up to a brilliant dome of blue. Autumn rains had returned the pastures and roadsides temporarily to thick green splashed with late flowers, and Marcus was in a good mood. I said, “I thought you had a job.”
“I do.”
“I mean with a firm: you know, the sort of job where you go to the office and talk on the phone.”
“I do. But this I like better. You know, you can invest in anything now. It’s like everything in the world all of a sudden turned into money, and whatever it is you just pass it back and forth and it’s all the same. That’s the secret.”
We got to the outskirts of Deacon, and I pulled into the parking lot of a modest strip mall, built in the sixties. “No,” said Marcus.
“Well, let’s at least go in—”
“Why?”
I started the car again and backed out of my parking place. As we drove down Main Street, he turned his head back and forth. Part of the charm of Deacon was that it had gotten very ferny in the seventies—flower beds in front of every house, big old houses turned into professional offices rather than being torn down. Marcus said, “I’ve been thinking about Deacon. I’m not sure Deacon is the place. Too funky.”
“Look at the foot traffic. Deacon is the most desirable commercial location in the county.”
He turned to me. “Mercedes traffic is our kind of traffic.” I laughed. “Mercedes traffic likes to park in a covered garage facility and enter a carpeted elevator to be lifted in silence to the top floor,” he said.
“I’ve got to tell you that Gordon’s projects generally work out of trailers or modular buildings.”
We passed out of Deacon and drove along the river. Here it was quieter. The river was low and off in the distance, the crowns of the hills dark where the trees had dropped their leaves.
At Cookborough, I crossed the river and turned south on the interstate. We drove in silence until Marcus said, “Here’s the deal. See that farm there?” He pointed to the right as we passed some red cattle with white faces grazing the side of the interstate.
“That’s Gordon’s farm,” I said. “He’s had that place for years, but the town never came out here.”
“Not so far. But it will come out here if you make something for it to come to. You know how they settled the West?”
“The West?”
“Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota. All the places that no one in their right minds would think of living in. Colorado.”
“How?”
“I bet you think that enterprising farmers got land from the government at a dollar twenty-five an acre and built themselves modest homesteads, like
Little House on the Prairie
. Did you ever read
Little House on the Prairie
?”
“No.”
“Well, when I was in third grade, we sat there for half an hour after lunch every day while Mrs. Judson read us
Little House on the Prairie,
and if you think a classroom of eight-year-old wops and micks and yids from Brooklyn could imagine what in the world she was talking about, you should have been there.” He laughed. “Let’s say she had difficulty maintaining order. Anyway, people don’t go out and take a liking to a piece of raw land unless they’re crazy. What happened all along was, the developers got the government to pay for the land being developed, and they got the banks to pay for the development, and then they got the farmers to buy in, once the farmers had a place to go where they could feel comfortable. Gordon’s crazy to wait for the town to come to him. He has to build a place for the town to want to come to.”
“It’s at least six miles to the outskirts of Portsmouth from here. There’s hardly even any housing developments out this way, just some trucking companies and that sort of thing.”
“How old are you?”
I got a little defensive. I said, “Forty, actually.”
“Here’s a riddle. You know what was more important than the Cuban Missile Crisis?”
“The Kennedy assassination?”
“The Beatles.”
“I was around for the Beatles.”
“The day the Beatles got to the States, I skipped school with a couple of other guys and took the train uptown. We got off at the wrong stop and just walked around, looking for the Beatles. You can’t believe all the kids that were there. It was like—oh, I don’t know, water pooling around a storm drain, deep water, water from the whole neighborhood, enough water to sweep you away into the drain and down to the river. Anyway, by following the stream of kids, we got sort of to where the Beatles were. We never saw them, but we saw so many kids. I just never got over that.”
“Never got over what?” We had passed the light industrial section and were driving through a part of Portsmouth that was seedy and run-down.
“Record buyers. Burger buyers. Blue jeans buyers.
Hmm mmm
. Customers. I mean, in this last election, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Finally the sixties were over and the revolution had ended and something bad had happened to all those kids—they, or we, got our just deserts. We disappeared or grew up or something. The Carter years taught us the long-awaited lesson.”
I had heard something like this from my parents, not specifically directed toward me, because I was, of course, a basically good boy with a steady employment history who was more sinned against than sinning, but nevertheless the date when a due sense of responsibility would begin to impose itself upon “young people” had been a long time coming. I nodded. I said, “That life is hard and success doesn’t come easy.”
“That’s the lesson.” He laughed. “But it does for some people. Oh, yes, it does. And here’s the key. More people mean scarcer resources, scarcer resources mean inflation, and inflation means property and interest-bearing capital have a higher value and work has a lower value. It’s as simple as that. Gordon is an interesting guy. He lives by simple principles—buy it if you can, drive a hard bargain, have fun, don’t make enemies. He has a lot of personality that helps him ooze here and ooze there and in general keep himself spreading across the landscape, but on the other hand, he really doesn’t know what he has. What’s wrong with the other son, what’s his name?”
“Norton?”
“Yeah.”
I said, “Oh, he’s a hothead. His problem is that he’s already acted on his natural mean streak before he remembers that alienating people doesn’t do him any good. He’s always wanted to be rich, but he wants to inflict pain just a little bit more.”
“That’s not very cool.”
“You know,” I said, “Gordon is a warm and generous man and he’s helped me and worked with me every day of my adult life, but he would take a poke in the eye before getting the short end of a deal, and Norton is like that. He just doesn’t know where the deals end and life begins; he always thinks he is getting shafted, and Gordon has never let him think otherwise. I once saw Gordon beat Norton sixty-two times in a row at gin. And every time he rubbed it in, just a little. The tournament lasted—oh, three weeks or so. Norton never won a game.”
We pulled up in front of the old Acorn State Bank building. I could tell that Marcus appreciated the grandeur of it, and in fact the building was more ornate than large. We peeked in the etched glass windows set into the large double doors and got a glimpse of the triangular lobby with all the old tellers’ windows stretched along the base of the triangle. I took out my key and opened the lockbox. I said, “I don’t think anyone’s been in here in three years or more. Acorn moved out in ’seventy-two, I think. Then the Portsmouth County Credit Union was in here, but when the price of heating oil went up, they moved. I mean, look at those windows!” The lobby, where I had come so often with my mother when she brought me on the streetcar to deposit the week’s receipts, reminded me powerfully of being a preschool child with nothing to do but say my prayers, obey my parents, and love God.
Marcus went behind the bank of tellers’ booths and wandered around, a smile on his face. He rocked back on his heels and looked up at the ceiling. I looked up too. There was a faded scene depicted there—some men in a boat and a dim line of trees in the distance. He said, “That’s Washington crossing the Delaware, I bet.”
“I bet it is. It has that WPA look about it, doesn’t it?”
He nodded and went through a door into the vault room. The big heavy vault door had been removed, as well as all the safe-deposit boxes and whatever else would have been there. I said, “This was our bank. We came here every Monday morning on the streetcar. My mother handed over her money and her passbook, and the same teller stamped her book and wrote something with a fountain pen. People stayed close to their money in those days.”
“It sounds like an orderly existence.”
“Order is my father’s middle name.”
“I would like to meet your parents sometime.” He seemed sincere, though casual too.
“You would? No one ever says that. They’re well known for expressing strong religious opinions without being asked, though always in the kindest of terms. My father and Gordon have agreed to maintain a cordial but extremely distant friendship.”
He sighed. “Well, this is grand, but it wasn’t what I had in mind.”
We got back in the car and I pulled onto Essex Street. I said, “South Portsmouth might be more the ticket, but it’s a little far from the farm.”
“The farm is only the beginning. We don’t want the corporation to be too linked in people’s minds with the farm.”
We drove for a while in silence, and then Marcus began humming a little tune that I couldn’t identify. Maybe I’d been supposed to answer something, because suddenly he said, “What’s the matter with you, Joe? How did you let yourself get roped into this?”
“What?”
“This development.”
“I didn’t get roped in. I mean, I’ve worked with Gordon for years, and then you came along.”
“Crosbie is the real villain, you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because a big loan is an asset. All those deposits he’s got, those are the liabilities, and those loans are assets. Crosbie’s new. He came in to transform the savings and loan from money loser to moneymaker, and he’s got to make the books look good, so he’s making big loans, which go on the asset side and cover old loans that aren’t making any profit. Was this whole thing his idea?”
“No, it was Thorpe’s idea, remember? He didn’t know Thorpe. And I don’t think Portsmouth Savings has ever been a money loser. They’re the biggest S and L around here. They got the first charter in the state way back when. They actually opened two branches a couple of years ago, when all the others were—”
“You know what I hate the most?”
“What?”
“I hate paying taxes.”
“You do?”
“Sure.”
“Well, everyone hates paying taxes.”
“You know the simplest way to avoid paying taxes?”
“Obviously not.”
“The simplest legal way that takes no cheating and no creative bookkeeping and passes every audit?”
“No.”
“You live on borrowed money. You sell the property piece by piece to pay the interest and you keep borrowing more. Gordon’s got collateral up the wazoo. That’s how you got roped in.”
“That’s assuming that—”
“That the value of the property keeps rising. And it does.”
“I don’t know, what with interest rates so high—”
“It does. That’s the lesson of the Beatles. More and more people who like things nice, who are educated and have good taste, are just starting to come into some real money. Families with two ambitious adults in the workforce instead of one. Gay couples. You know what?”
“What?”
“I’m hungry.”
I laughed out loud. Just then we passed Cheltenham Park, an office complex that looked more like a private school: Colonial-style red-brick three-story buildings with white trim and fanlights above the two entrances. Marcus said, “What’s that? Is that on your list?”
“That’s incredibly expensive office space.” But I didn’t have to be told to stop. I turned into the parking lot.
He opened his door and got out of the car. His clothes fit in perfectly here. I saw with a sinking feeling that this was the place. I said, “Maybe they won’t have any space, they’re usually—”
But as we walked past the management office, a small elegantly printed sign in the window read:
LIMITED SPACE STILL AVAILABLE
. We went in. The management office was carpeted in pale Berber with a wheat-colored Persian on top of that. The manager, a blond woman with her hair pinned up, was very well dressed. I cast Marcus a sidelong glance. I could tell he felt comfortable here, and she could tell the same. I said, “I’m Joe Stratford of Stratford Realty. This is my client, Marcus Burns. Mr. Burns is looking for office space.”