The Contract

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The Contract Page 9

by Sheila Grinell


  Ev’s mother taught the kids the basics. She showed no favoritism, although Ev could have used extra help when his eyes couldn’t seem to locate the beginning of the next sentence in the first-grade reader. His mother said he didn’t try hard enough. So he tried harder, and still, when she taught him arithmetic, his numbers never stacked in neat columns on the page. He stopped listening to his mother’s lectures, retreated into the reaches of his mind. He was chided for daydreaming. His mother didn’t realize he had no other choice. He confessed to Jo that he had always felt different from the others and kept to himself most of the time. He played no children’s games.

  Some of the communards gave occasional lessons in whatever occupied their imaginations. A sober man named Dizzy had brought a chest of hand-made carpenter tools with him, and he showed Ev how to saw and plane and finish surfaces. Dizzy let Ev handle his tools because the kid was careful and respectful of what Dizzy called their spirits, and Ev spent long afternoons puttering in Dizzy’s corner. Ev loved Dizzy: he was gentle where Ev’s mother was harsh, patient where she was demanding. Ev’s first polished work of carpentry was a present for Dizzy, a case to hold a set of graduated wrenches. When Dizzy told him he needed to go to high school in the next valley over in order to become a superior craftsman, he got on the school bus with the others. He was twelve.

  High school began as torture, Ev being smaller than the other boys and oddly dressed. But Dizzy encouraged him, and, somehow, he caught the attention of Mr. Irving and Miss Allen. Mr. Irving taught math and was amused by the unorthodox ways in which Ev approached problems. The kid couldn’t do long division, but graphing came naturally. Mr. Irving did not understand how Ev visualized quadratic equations—and neither did Ev, shapes just materialized in his head—but he mentored him. And Miss Allen taught Ev to read, finally. She sat with him at lunch every day in a corner of the cafeteria and went over elementary texts syllable by syllable until he could read reliably on his own. The other students judged him a weirdo and ignored the reading lessons. Ev handed in assignments on time, and eventually the principal bent the rules—must have been at Mr. Irving’s request because Ev’s parents paid no attention—and Ev managed to graduate. So his mother decided to send him to a community college in a nearby city that had a dorm for boarders. She did not give him a choice.

  Years later, Ev had told Jo, he realized he owed a debt to Mr. Irving and Miss Allen. He went back to the school to give each of them a magical rainbow periscope, like the one that had caught Jo’s eye, but Mr. Irving had died. Miss Allen accepted the gift graciously, although she appeared confused by it. She thanked him for being her student, saying every remedial reading teacher deserved a pupil like him. Ev realized their gratitude was mutual.

  At the community college, Ev found he could not take notes quickly enough. Miss Allen had taught him to read but not to write. When he wanted to capture a thought, the sentences seemed to fly up and down the page outside his volition. So, he stopped taking notes and flunked out. He did not tell his parents because he wanted to stay on campus, where he had made a new friend. The head of the physical sciences department had discovered that Ev could do anything with his hands and hired him as a lab technician. Ev maintained the equipment in all the labs and fashioned apparatus for faculty when asked. He lived in the dorm, auditing classes the physical science professors taught, having the occasional meal with his patron, who taught him to savor a good wine. After a while, his patron supplanted Dizzy in Ev’s affections, so when the man suggested he branch out into biological science, he did. The theory of evolution captivated him, and he became curious about its genesis. So he read some history of science, which led him to European history. He haunted the library, developed a passion for reading. His technician’s salary covered the little he needed to stay clothed and healthy. He was not unhappy. He felt he was seeing the world for the first time; he had transcended the grip of the commune.

  And then he met Jessica. He was nineteen.

  Before Jo and Ev married, she had asked him how many other women he had slept with. He blushed and said, “Do you want quantity or quality?” She said, “Both.” He said, “A few, one,” and told her about Jessica. He did not look at her whenever he spoke the girl’s name.

  Ev said he had noticed a girl in the library, sitting bent over her books, studying intensely. She had thick, dark hair that spilled down her back and a prominent nose. He watched her for weeks without approaching lest he interrupt, but in his fantasies he talked to her nightly. One spring day as he left the library he saw her sitting on the steps, eating an apple. Without thinking, he said, “Looks good.”

  She reached into her bag, pulled out another apple, and held it out to him. “I’m Jessica, who are you?”

  “Everett. Dana.”

  “Which is it? Everett or Dana?” She stared at him with large, dark eyes.

  “Dana is my last name. Friends call me Ev.”

  “Okay, Ev. Have a seat and tell me why you spend so much time in the library. You’re always there when I show up.”

  “I come here after work. I work in the labs. As a technician.” He looked for the right words, didn’t find them. “I guess I have a lot to learn.”

  Jessica laughed softly, and it pleased his ear. “So do I. My folks don’t think so. They want me to give it up and go work in their store. Actually, my uncle owns the store but he has no sons, and my female cousins are slackers, so my parents think I’ll inherit.” She tossed the remains of the apple into the bushes and stood, gathering her belongings. “I have no idea why I told you all that. Maybe because you always look so forlorn.”

  Ev stood quickly. “May I walk you home?”

  “That would be a long walk. You can walk me to the bus stop.”

  He did so. And every subsequent afternoon that spring he waited at the library, no longer able to concentrate on the Krebs cycle, for a chance to walk her to the bus. Jessica, he soon learned, was the daughter of Lebanese immigrants who had come to West Virginia to work for their wealthy relatives. She mocked her family’s aspirations but seemed tied to them. Her uncle wanted Jessica to major in business at the university, but she wanted to study art. They had compromised, allowing her to take studio classes at the community college in exchange for a promise to “get serious” in a year’s time. She told Ev she had no intention of keeping her side of the bargain.

  Jessica had a lively mind; her sophistication dazzled him. She liked learning different things and prided herself on her ability to discriminate. Comfortable in her skin, she welcomed his questions and, up to a point, his naïve demonstrations of affection. He could be patient because she smiled so nicely when she rebuffed his inquiring hands. One day she insisted Ev take her to his workplace. When she saw the oversize barometer he was building out of glass tubing for a botany teacher, she said it was beautiful. So he built her one, telling the faculty member he needed to make a second apparatus to perfect the design. When he gave the barometer to her, she seemed to have forgotten her earlier comment. He stifled his disappointment and vowed to find another way into her heart.

  Over the summer Jessica worked evenings in the studio in the art building. He waited outside for her, brought her a share of his dinner. And one very late night she went home with him to save herself the commute. He had become manager of the dorm and lived in a ground floor suite. They sneaked in, found it thrilling, and she let him pass the usual point. By the end of the summer, she was sleeping with him regularly. He never forgot to use a condom and was ready to marry. Jessica didn’t want to commit; she had big things to do and places to go in pursuit of her dream.

  At the end of the summer, she took him to see her final project, a mixed media piece, bright acrylic colors on a canvas from which the glass tubing he had given her protruded in arcs. He didn’t know what to make of it or say, so he showed her a better way to affix the tubing. She got mad, told him he needed schooling in aesthetics. He promised to take an art class with her in the fall. And he did. He liked it well e
nough, and the teacher encouraged him. But Jessica hadn’t liked his sculptures and picked fights. She said his pieces were boring compared to hers. When he received the higher grade, she wouldn’t talk to him for weeks.

  Jo asked Ev what he’d learned in that art class that led him to design. He replied he hadn’t learned all that much, that most things slipped in and out of his head, except for structures. She asked what happened with Jessica. Ev said she went back to her family at the end of the semester, and there was nothing more to say.

  But there was, and Jo got it out of him.

  He had been inconsolable, missing Jessica in the library, the cafeteria, in his bed. He couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong. She’d said he’d done nothing wrong; it was just that she’d realized her uncle was right after all. She didn’t want to slave away in obscurity for decades before being able to live in comfort—sneaking in and out of Ev’s suite had lost its charm—so she needed a dependable degree. He offered to follow her to the university. She chided him about not being able to afford it. She left and didn’t write.

  In the spring, he stopped auditing the art class because her vacant chair made him blue. He stopped visiting the library because he still saw her in shadowy corners here and there. Then one day he saw a notice pinned to the cafeteria bulletin board that said the teacher who had commented positively on his clumsy pieces was giving a design seminar off campus. He went to the first meeting, joining three other students, none of them from the college, all of them older. The teacher started off saying that his only rule was they must produce. Ev resonated with his off-the-grid attitude. He went to the next meeting, and the next. He began to dig in to the work. He began going for a beer with the other students, and soon they pressed him to confess his troubles. They told him that Jessica had made a mistake and that he had a talent for design. He believed them because he believed in them. Gradually he let go of his grief.

  She found him in the kitchen, misting his cacti. She handed him the infinity box.

  “I love you, too, and I give up.”

  Ev’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “Did you play with it?”

  “Yup. So?”

  He lowered the mister. “Humans are the only thing in nature that reverses the arrow of time. We can see into the past and the future.” He grinned his best down-home, West Virginia grin. “I wanted to give you the gift of time. To work out the Saudi deal. Or drop it. I could go either way.”

  “Thanks,” she said, patting his arm. “I accept.”

  STRATEGY

  11

  Outside the open bedroom window: blue skies, dark green hillsides, a pleasant sixty-one degrees. So much more hospitable than Dubai. Jo sat in her reading chair, nursing a headache, smelling eucalyptus and sun-warmed wood. Her gaze drifted from the window to the drawing on the opposite wall, an abstract Ev had done years before: gray, black, and white lines of different thickness and orientation, like some mad architect’s doodle. She’d liked it when he first showed it to her and had had it framed. Since Ev no longer drew, too busy working in three dimensions, she’d had no call to replace it. Nothing had changed in this room for a long time, which didn’t particularly bother her. Her mind dwelled on the floor below.

  She heard a truck pull up in front of the house. Glancing outside, she saw Diane greet a FedEx driver at the door. Now she had better get in gear. As she descended the stairs, Diane carried a parcel into the office. She stripped open the box, bouncing on her heels in excitement. As Jo approached, Diane pulled something black out of bubble wrap and held it aloft. An abaya. She measured it against Becca’s shoulders. It was long enough to reach the floor and wide enough for two Beccas.

  “Now we know you’re an extra-long,” Diane said.

  Becca threaded her arms through the abaya’s voluminous sleeves and flapped them, like a six-foot sting ray. Diane clapped her hands. Jo faced her.

  “Why did you buy an abaya? You know I have one.”

  Diane looked surprised. “We’ll need it to prototype the exhibits. Becca is so tall.”

  “If we prototype exhibits.” Jo turned away, annoyed at Diane’s rashness.

  Becca followed Jo to her desk. She said, “I asked Diane to order this so I could see how it feels. Whether it gets in the way when a mother handles an exhibit or manipulatives. I figured you needed yours. I’ll pay for it.”

  “No, don’t pay. You can wear it on Halloween.”

  “Aren’t we developing exhibits for the Saudis? Ev’s working in the shop.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We haven’t settled on a subcontract with Owen Associates. Ev can’t help himself. You can.”

  “I was trying to think ahead. I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “I know. Diane should have known better.”

  “Jo, it was my idea.”

  Jo waved her away.

  Becca returned to Diane’s desk and took off the filmy gown. Diane folded it and repacked it. She placed the package in her bottom drawer, mumbling about checking the return policy. Becca mumbled an inaudible answer.

  Jo went to her desk and woke up her computer. A bond had developed between Diane and Becca that Jo would never have predicted, Becca being so strong-minded and Diane so vague. It had started a year or so ago when Diane brought her son and old dog to the office one day, leaving the dog behind to take Joey to his doctor’s appointment. Becca babysat the dog, saying it reminded her of home. Over the ensuing months, Joey thrived but the dog sickened. Becca tended to it whenever Diane brought it round. One day the poor creature lay under Diane’s desk, evidently in pain. At closing time, Diane didn’t want to move it. Becca improvised a stretcher and transported the dog to the vet in her truck. Neither woman showed up during the two days it took the dog to die. When they returned, you could see a new feeling between them, expressed in frequent smiles and gentle comments and acts of consideration. Jo didn’t question the bond because the work was going well. But she got annoyed when Becca came to Diane’s defense. Jo was grooming Becca for the great things the girl had talent enough to do. Diane was no role model.

  Diane approached, saying “They’ll take the abaya back, we’ll only have to pay the shipping. Surface mail.”

  “Never mind. Call it a souvenir.” Jo felt her button being pushed again and turned her head away. It was the little stuff that bugged her. She could handle the big things: Diane’s having had a baby too young, and out of wedlock; having arrived in Oakland in desperate need of a job. Big things could be managed. But little things made anger well up inside her before she could control it. She knew she should be nicer to Diane. Perhaps in another life.

  She grasped her mouse and clicked on email. A batch of notices came up on the screen: there, in the middle of the column, a message from Owen Associates. She held her breath while she read. She forwarded the email to her lawyer and went out to the studio to tell Ev. He had resumed working on his whirligig, and plastic blades in different shapes and sizes lay scattered on the workbench. She stood in the doorway, watching him stoop over his work. A jazzy trumpet emanated from the radio.

  “Owen sent his demands. He wants to pay us sixty days after he gets paid, and he wants editorial control. He’s a bully. I forwarded the email to Helen.”

  Ev lay down the tin snips. “Is there light at the end of this tunnel?”

  “What do you think?” She meant to ask a question but it came out shrill.

  Ev turned down the music and leaned against the drill press. He looked up at the ceiling. He thought for a beat. “Do you think he would stiff us? I mean, if the Saudis paid him, wouldn’t he pay us? We know a lot of the same people.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So ask to be paid simultaneously.”

  She thought about it. “You’re saying share the risk?”

  “That would be fair.”

  She felt her hackles lower. “But we can’t give him the final word on design.”

  Ev came over and took her by the shoulders. “Work on it, woman.”

  �
��I’m dead serious.”

  “So am I.” He slid one hand down her back and squeezed a butt cheek.

  “You are impossible!” She pushed him away. “Go play with your toys.” She blew him an exasperated kiss and turned to leave.

  He called after her, “I have faith …”

  Faith in her tenacity as a negotiator, as he had said before when deals looked dicey. And she had delivered. But you have to know your line in the sand before you negotiate. She might agree to share the risk of being stiffed by the Saudis, but she would never give Owen control of their product. Invention was their hallmark; she would not let Owen attach his name to their work or force them to adapt to his chrome-plated style. She would guard their reputation at all costs.

  The office was quiet. Carlos was on assignment at another client’s place of business, Andy was at school, and Becca sat engaged with her computer, occasionally hitting the keys. Jo went to the kitchen and put on the kettle, hoping for inspiration while the water heated. She could smell the ramps Ev had cooked for dinner the night before, foul things he had developed a taste for in his West Virginia youth. Diane appeared at her elbow.

  “I can drop off the abaya on my way home tonight.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “I thought you’d want me to encourage Becca.” Diane held palms together in front of her chest, as if praying. Or begging, even more irritating.

  “Forget it. Can I see the revised budget?”

  Diane bustled to her desk, returning with a pad and a spread sheet. “I adjusted the contingency and profit a little lower, but we can’t pay international shipping and keep it under a hundred grand. Can we deliver in the US? It’s a small load. Carlos could handle it.”

  “Maybe.” Jo inspected the page. She felt Diane hovering, begging for an “attagirl” for simply doing her job. “I can work with this.” She turned off the kettle and returned to her desk, leaving Diane empty-handed in the kitchen.

 

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