Authors: Jane Smiley
“I guess.”
“But on the other hand, there’s real estate and then there’s unreal estate, as they say.” He walked out. My phone rang. I spent fifteen minutes talking to my mother about where my father might be, and by the time my father walked in and relieved her fears, Marcus was gone.
In the course of the day, Marcus called me four times. First to urge me to have lunch with Bart, and then to coach me on what I was going to say to him. Finally I said, “You have a lot of trouble delegating, don’t you, Marcus?”
He replied, “You know God? How God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent?”
“Sure.”
“Which one would you like if you could just have one?”
“With my upbringing, if I think a thought like that, I will die.”
He laughed, then said, “Omnipresent for me. My greatest frustration is that I can only be in one place at a time.” He hung up.
I bullied Bart into having breakfast with me the next morning, and he didn’t seem happy about it. He was willing to meet me at a Denny’s near Portsmouth Savings’ new offices, but when I got there I saw he was much different from the way he had been before his trip. He ordered melon and Special K with skim milk, black coffee, and grapefruit juice. I ordered eggs, bacon, and home fries. He stared at my meal and shook his head, but all he said was, “You ought to come over and look at the plans for our new building. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
“You sound glum about it.”
“Do I? I don’t mean to. It’s nice.”
Marcus had told me not to seem curious but just let him talk. If the conversation failed, so much the better, because then he would say more when he started up again. “Order a big meal, and then if you can’t resist opening your mouth, just put something in it.” I thought maybe the new offices were a safe topic, though. “I bet they’re pretty posh.”
“I’m telling you, the home owner isn’t who we’re aiming at anymore. When the home owners come in, they’ll be intimidated.” Bart spooned up his melon until it was just a thin bowl-shaped skin. He took a sip of his coffee. “You’ve got to be thankful, though, that things aren’t the way they were a couple of years ago. Now we’ve got a chance, anyway.”
“A chance?”
“Two years ago, you know, I was looking for another job. I thought the place was going to go under. My daughter Ginger and I were all set to go into the physical training business. We had the plans, and we were going to build a gym. Well, not that grand, but a fitness center. Fitness, weight training, aerobics classes. That Jane Fonda thing.”
“That sounds like a good idea. But I always thought you guys were doing fine over there.”
He said, “Ha!” and shrugged, then, “Good thing interest rates went down and the S and L picture changed. I said to Ginger, ‘I don’t want to get out at the bottom.’ And we could still do the fitness center. She’s taking some classes over at the junior college in the recreation department, just in case. How to keep old people going is what she’s taking this fall. That should come in handy, no matter what.” He laughed, suddenly a little brighter.
Now was when the conversation died. I was tempted to push about two years ago, but in accordance with Marcus’s instructions, I kept eating and eating. He sighed. I ate. He sighed again and put his napkin in his lap, then motioned to the waitress for another cup of coffee. She came over, gave him a smile, and said, “So, how’s tricks in the money business?”
“Tricky,” he said. She left and he took a sip of coffee. He said, “So, what’s up?”
“Not much. It looks like we’re going to have the preliminary building permits by the first of the year. Marcus is looking at builders now.” I leaned forward. “Not to hire them, but to raid their crews. Gottfried keeps telling me he’s about to finish those houses he started in the spring, but he doesn’t ask me to market them. I think he’s using them as bargaining chips.”
“Gottfried isn’t your man.” We looked at each other for a long moment.
I said, “I know that. We could hire him to refurbish the clubhouse, though. I suggested that to Marcus. He could do that through the winter. It’s not going to take much that I can see, though I’m sure the wiring and the plumbing have to be brought up to code.”
“Can’t cut any corners with this place, that’s for sure. Crosbie was saying just yesterday that—well, frankly, that Gordon Baldwin is the wrong name to have on this project. His name is not a byword for quality, Joe.”
I shrugged. “Too bad, because he’s in it up to his hairline.”
“Tell me about it. Every property he’s got is cross-collateralized. Even the house.”
“Even the house?”
“All the farms, the store, everything. The weekly poker game is cross-collateralized.” Bart chuckled at his own joke. Then he said, “Even so, I think he’s going to be a PR problem.”
“We’ll see. Anyway, so no fitness center?”
“Not here, at any rate.”
“Somewhere else?”
He shrugged. “Look around. Do you see any joggers? Most of the times I go to the gym, there’s me and three guys I’ve known since college. But it’s big business in other places.”
“What places?”
I listened closely. He said, “Well, Denver. Colorado’s the fittest state in the union. Minneapolis. Lots of outdoor sports there too. Seattle. Run on the treadmill and read a book at the same time. That’s what they do in Seattle. No sunshine, of course.”
“Hmm.” I thought about the eight hundred thousand, but I didn’t have the gumption to ask about it.
That was all I got out of him. When I reported this conversation back to Marcus, he said, “Big, big S and Ls in Denver, Minneapolis, and Seattle. They could merge now, since deregulation, but who’s doing it? Who’s making it happen? That’s what’s driving me crazy, because I don’t trust Crosbie to make it happen. Business is about relationships. Marriage is about contracts and business is about relationships. Remember that talk we had about marriage? Well, this is the other side, the other paradox. Business is much more exacting in terms of the demands made on your relationship skills than marriage. And Crosbie has no relationship skills at all that I can see. It drives me crazy.”
No one said anything to me about the payments we now owed every month on the farm. I would wake up in the night sometimes and think about them, think about my name on the note, and the next day I would call around that much more industriously to keep the permitting process going forward. When the permits were granted, then the great sell-off of lots would begin, and we would all be okay. Better than okay. I told myself this wasn’t that different from anything else. There was always a touchy middle period to any project, where you’d sunk a lot into it, too much to walk away, and you had to keep sinking more into it, more than you’d planned, in order to get to the place where the returns would begin. That was almost a rule of projects, I knew, whether the project was adding a room onto your house or, let’s say, building a space program or making a movie. Cost overruns. Thoroughly routine. Nothing to get excited about.
Mike Lovell, who was in and out of the office all the time, viewed me with suspicion. At first I didn’t wonder why, since I viewed him with suspicion and it seemed natural that he would reciprocate my feelings. I especially viewed him with suspicion when he began dressing in suits rather than work clothes. This happened as the fall got colder—jeans and T-shirts gave way to khakis and jackets which, sometime after Halloween, gave way to a gray suit, with a green shirt and a dark red tie. He sat in the office sometimes for hours at a time, reading magazines that he brought with him. Those changed too, from
Field and Stream
and
Popular Mechanics
to
Money
and
Consumer Reports
. Sometimes he would go into Marcus’s office and be in there for an hour or more. Finally, I said to Jane, “What is Mike’s job?”
“That’s an interesting question.”
“Do you know the answer?”
“Well, his job used to be general lackey. I mean, he said to me last spring that he wanted to make something of himself, and now was the time, and he was going to sit around the office and wait until Marcus would take him on, and I said why, and he said that he’d been to a self-help seminar and the guy who ran it said everyone should find a mentor and more or less wear the guy out until the guy agreed to teach him three different things.”
“So that was what he was doing around here after we switched the tanks? Waiting for Marcus to teach him three different things?”
“More or less.”
“And now.”
“He’s very helpful.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Helpful to Marcus. He hasn’t yet generalized his interest to the rest of us.”
“I still don’t know what he does.”
“He gathers information.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, it started last spring, when he was first coming in. Marcus would get him to gossip about everyone out in Plymouth Township. He knew a lot of gossip. Marcus wanted to know everything: who was sleeping with whom, who was paying their bills and who wasn’t, what properties might come on the market, who was related to whom, all that sort of thing.”
“Why?”
“Just to know. Just because he’s interested. Some fact might turn up. For example, you know the bottled water idea?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he kind of dropped that with regard to the farm, but it stayed in his mind. You know the place out there; it’s farther back in the county, almost to the state park, what’s the name—oh, the Underwood Farm on May Hill Road.”
“Yeah. I’ve been by there, years ago. My dad knew Frank Underwood.”
“Tremendous spring on that farm. It was famous a hundred years ago. It was called Saint Lucy’s Spring, or something like that. Anyway, Mike knew all about it. Marcus has been out there three or four times. I can’t say the Underwoods are interested in selling it to him, but they don’t mind him coming out there. That was one thing he learned from Mike. And there’s a quarry somewhere out there too, an old slate quarry. Slate roofs all over that area.”
“The clubhouse has a slate roof.”
“Bingo. And the ownership of that quarry is very complex. Lots of heirs who didn’t even know they owned a quarry, things like that. I think Marcus is negotiating with someone in Alaska who’s never even been to this part of the country. But it would be great to have a source of slate just like the slate on the roof of the clubhouse. Not for every house, mind you, but a few.”
“A few expensive ones.” I smiled. Once again, Marcus impressed me. He just didn’t think like everyone else. Once again, I felt lucky he’d come along. “What three things did Marcus teach Mike?”
“So far?” She rolled her eyes discreetly toward the ceiling. “Let’s see. How to dress.” She paused. “Almost. How to read what rich people read rather than what garage mechanics read. It’s kind of a
My Fair Lady
thing, really. And how to play the commodities market.”
“How to do what?”
“Oh, you know. Pork bellies. Wheat. Soybeans. Mike went out to Chicago a couple of months ago. Didn’t you notice?”
“I noticed he wasn’t around at one point.”
“That’s where he was. He was having a field trip.”
“What do you think about this, Jane?”
“I don’t agree with it. But you know how Marcus takes people up. He gets infatuated. You must have noticed that he fancies himself a great teacher. He told Linda, who told me, that Mike was the perfect sow’s ear. He goes over there all the time. Linda can’t stand him.” Jane shrugged.
“Marcus told me that after the billion comes in, he’s going to quit business and write books.”
“Or endow a business school. Did he mention that?”
“Why doesn’t he teach the guy some manners?”
“Why indeed?” said Jane.
I was on my way out of the office, and what she had said started me ruminating. I wondered how I fit in with Marcus’s idea of himself. Had he just taken me up in order to show me something? Our friendship did have that side. Wasn’t that a side I was grateful for? And hadn’t I agreed when he showed Bobby how to get himself together? Bobby had had a little more on the ball, at least around the office, ever since his dressing-down by Marcus. He looked better, he seemed to be less goofy, and he hadn’t injured himself in months. And he was an even bigger fan of Marcus, though at the same time he more or less stayed out of his way. At the Baldwins’ Labor Day picnic, I’d asked him if he’d ever sorted out his books, and he grinned a big wide grin. He said, “God! Marcus sent in a twenty-five- or thirty-page tax return! You couldn’t understand a thing on it. He said those IRS guys get paid by the unit, so if there’s lots of pages and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be a big payoff, they just ignore it. My personal opinion, Joe, is that this guy is the best thing that ever happened to us, but I’m not saying he isn’t irritable. I’m not saying that at all.” And then I passed Mary King’s office. She wasn’t there, but the light was on. Her office had changed too, in the last year. It was decorated with more taste and comfort. The whole building was full now, no unleased space. Was that owing to Marcus too?
My mother had always said to think about something nice before going to sleep, so that night, on the phone, I told Susan Webster about the old slate quarry. She said, rather sleepily, “Where is that, out past Plymouth Village? Not far from the state park?”
“I’m not sure exactly, but somewhere around there.”
“Who owns that is the Burmeister family. There was this kid in my class in high school, Mickey Burmeister.” She went on. “So, have you and Marcus Burns been friends for a long time?”
“Friends, maybe a year. He only moved into the area about a year and a half ago. I sold him his house.”
“I can’t figure him out.”
“How so?”
“Well, it has to do with that kid of his, Justin. He’s such a fearful kid. If you come up behind him and make a noise, he jumps. I’ve had that happen twice, both times when I thought he knew I was right there. I mean, I wasn’t sneaking up or anything. I thought the kid was going to shriek.”
“What would that have to do with Marcus? Maybe he’s just a fearful kid.”
“Maybe.”
“Or he could take after Linda. She strikes me as kind of on the fearful side.”