by Jane Smiley
I didn’t know what to do and didn’t have the fluency to ask. I went back to our hotel and got the concierge to call the police and a hospital or two, but of course there was nothing to learn; everything was still happening. I went to our room, but that made me nervous, so I hung around the hotel lobby for a while, and then I made the mistake that was fatal to our marriage. I went into the bar and ordered a drink. Sherry appeared in the doorway at exactly the moment I was raising the glass to my lips. I admit there was something about it that looked excessively casual, especially since my clothes weren’t disarranged or anything. Our marriage went on for nine years after that, but to the last day she would append to every argument, “And for another thing, when there was all that shooting in Barcelona and people were being killed, you were in the hotel bar ordering a stinger! Why weren’t you out looking for me? That’s something I’ll never understand!” That was always the last word.
Sherry was still around. She had taken the money she got from our marriage settlement and opened a restaurant across the Nut, in Melton Township, called L’Auberge Normande. It was not the sort of restaurant Gordon took everyone out to late at night, so I never saw her or heard about her, but around Christmas she had gotten a three-and-a-half-star review in the Nut County Reporter, complimenting her especially on her crème brûlée and her pork medallions in Calvados.
Sherry had spent the years of our marriage complaining about local cuisine, devising ideas of her own, trying to persuade me to find her a location and make an investment in her cooking skill and business acumen. I resisted. Anyway, now she was gone, and we had nothing to do with each other. We’d had no kids, no dog. It seemed to me as I drove away from the arguing Sloans that there hadn’t even been a marriage—only, perhaps, this woman I knew who didn’t quite fit in with the Baldwins, my real family.
On the way back to the office, I passed Bobby and Marcus Burns in the red BMW. They were turning right out of Maple Glen Road, which I thought was interesting. Maple Glen Road had a couple of lots being developed by one of my builders, Gottfried Nuelle. Gottfried Nuelle built in the mid two-hundreds, and all his houses, two at that time, had been my listings. Marcus Burns saw me and looked at me, even in that brief moment when I passed. Bobby did not.
When I ran into Bobby at the Viceroy that night, he was both secretive and self-satisfied. I plied him with beer, always an easy thing to do, and he revealed that Marcus Burns had very much tried to conceal his interest in Gottfried’s most imposing production, a four-bedroom Queen Anne that had been on the market for seven months. This house was Gottfried’s pride and joy. At first he’d considered moving into it himself, though that contravened his dearest commercial principle, which was that the workers can’t afford to purchase the products of their labor. The lot was a beautiful acre that swept down from the house to a small stream, over which Gottfried had built a bridge. It had a wraparound veranda; Gottfried had sited and designed the house to preserve three of the old maples that Maple Glen was named for. But the greatest pleasure of the house was a subtler one. About a year before, Gottfried had found a guy who did wood moldings, the sort of decorative relief designs that they used to do in plaster. He was a young kid, not more than thirty, and his last job had been repairing and replacing decorative woodwork at a state capitol somewhere out beyond Chicago. How he got to our neck of the woods and how Gottfried got hold of him I never knew, but he put him to work in this house for four months. The kid lived there; he got up every morning and made and installed crown moldings in every room. He was a scholar, too. He didn’t just do what Gottfried liked. He decided what period the house “referred to” and then carved moldings from that period. He was a quiet guy, like a lot of carpenters and joiners, and that just made it all the easier for him to ignore Gottfried. The result was elaborate, elegant, and expensive, and Gottfried had been complaining for months that our local clientele didn’t have the class to appreciate the house. Nevertheless, the kid was now at work on another of Gottfried’s houses, because Gottfried just couldn’t let him go.
“You know,” said Bobby, “I set it up perfectly. It was the fifth house of the day, and we went from there over to the place on King’s Creek, where that woman has junk all over the place, and she sits there while you’re going through the house and watches you to make sure you don’t steal anything from her ‘collection.’ He wants to see Gottfried’s place again tomorrow with the wife.”
“A wife is a good sign.”
“He didn’t even blink at the price.”
“Did you tell him how long it’s been on the market?”
“He didn’t ask.”
“He will.” After all, asking how long something’s been on the market is the buyer’s first obligation.
I should say about Gordon, whom I had known almost all my life and worked for forever, that his idea of a good deal was unvarnished and old world; he wanted to make sure he took unfair advantage of everyone he negotiated with. In bridge, he trumped you; in poker, he bluffed you; in Scrabble, he used every tile. He haggled at all times and in every situation. When he took everyone out to dinner, he haggled with the waiter about the bill, not just about the tip. In fact, if the waiter took ten percent off the bill, Gordon would sometimes add something to the tip, but not always. When he saw a sum of money that he owed, he discounted it by 20 percent automatically and paid that. If the clerk pointed out to him that he owed more than the sum he had laid on the counter, the haggling began. Beyond that, he didn’t mind giving away far more than he ever saved by bargaining—he was not a miser by any means—he just viewed every price as a starting point, and his greatest regrets had to do with having been suckered, as he thought, from time to time over the years. In years of doing business for and with Gordon, I had been had more times than I could count and then received the difference, or more than the difference, at some later date, in another form. You could say what Sherry had said, that Gordon Baldwin lived to swindle others, but most people around the area, like me, didn’t take offense, just hit him up later for a loan or a donation.
In a more timid and less successful form, Bobby adhered to the same principle. It didn’t matter to him how much money he made on a deal, just as long as he made one percent, or one tenth of one percent, more than the other guy. I knew Gottfried would sell for ten or more percent off the asking price (not without ranting and complaining—Gottfried liked an energetic face-to-face negotiation of exactly the sort that Bobby, who had also been had by his father over and over, detested). Not too long before, Gottfried had gotten a buyer in a corner at a closing and threatened to grab him by the jacket and push him out a (ground-floor) window. As long as Marcus Burns didn’t force it, I knew Bobby would do the easiest thing and make a full-price offer, but I was curious to see whether Marcus Burns was going to force it. “So,” I said. “What’s this guy do?”
“I guess he was an IRS agent. Can you believe that? Anyway, now he’s an investment counselor at that new office in Cashel Heights, that Merrill Lynch office. He knows the tax code cold.”
“How did you find that out?”
“Well—” Bobby shrugged. “I guess he told me.”
And that was all we had to say about Marcus Burns for several weeks.
CHAPTER
2
IWOULD PROBABLY STILL have been married if Sherry hadn’t acted to unmarry me. All through our last year together, she would say, “Are you happy, Joe? What do you want?” and I would say “Well, yes,” and “I don’t know. This is fine.” And it was. My mental life was pretty clear. I would say, “Are you happy?” and she would say no, but then she had never been happy, in the sense of being satisfied or generally pleased. Not being happy was one of her good points. Not being happy led her to try things, like gourmet cooking. When I met her, she didn’t know how to bake a potato. Every year of our marriage the food was different and better—roast chickens with onions and lemons stuffed inside and herbs crushed all over the skin were followed by roast chickens with herbs and
onions and lemon peel ground up and pushed between the skin and the meat. Mashed potatoes were followed by roasted potatoes with olive oil and rosemary, and then she discovered how to boil the potatoes a little and then roast them so that they were crunchy and buttery on the outside and melting and soft in the middle. I always called our house “Hog Heaven.” I was the hog. She liked sex, too, and keeping the house neat, not to mention having it look just right. One year I painted the living room five times, and only Sherry and I could tell the difference, but we could tell and we thought it was worth it. Another time, she bought an antique chandelier for the dining room, and I spent days and days gold-leafing it. It was frustrating and painstaking work. The gold leaf was like sheets of ash, that delicate. But when I was done, the chandelier looked graceful and expensive, as if she had paid a thousand bucks for it, rather than forty-two. When my mother said, afterward, “You know your father and I don’t care for divorce, Joey, but between you and me I never thought she treated you like you deserved,” I was surprised. She had just been Sherry, that’s all, someone who rubbed some people the wrong way. But my analysis hadn’t worked in the end, since we were no longer married. And of course, Sherry had angrily predicted I was going to miss her (why angrily I don’t know, because I predicted it too—it wasn’t something we disagreed on), but the way I missed her no one had predicted. I didn’t miss the food or even the sex and I didn’t miss the house, which she got, and all the things in it that I had built or fixed or done up; I missed the attention I had paid her, the time and effort that took, and the pleasant and happy feeling I used to have of being sure that everything with her was okay for the time being.
The divorce lasted a long time and cost a lot of money because I had made a lot of money all through the seventies. Every time the lawyers settled on some numbers, Sherry would agree too and then come back a few days later with revised figures. She had a lot of confidence in me, I have to say. She thought my relationship with Gordon Baldwin was going to turn into a windfall that the simple act of divorce would exclude her from. I spent several years trying to demonstrate how small-time I was and would always be, while my estranged wife spent the same period of time trying to prove what fabulous business acumen and wonderful connections I had, connections she alleged she had cultivated for me, that I couldn’t have made the most of on my own. But maybe my business acumen wasn’t so bad after all, because I’d done pretty well in the year since the divorce. Even with the uncertainty about interest rates, I’d sold a lot of properties, and I had also bought two acreages for development—a forty-acre farm near one of Gordon’s farms and a thirty-four-acre piece with a nice old house on it that I could easily imagine living in myself, subdividing the acreage into five-acre parcels to pay for the renovation the place needed.
But it was not with these things in mind that I went out to the Viceroy a couple of weeks later. It was with nothing in mind, as usual. When I got there, I looked around for Bobby. The Baldwin I saw, though, was Felicity, laughing with a group of people I didn’t know over in the corner. Felicity was a year younger than Sally, which made her a year younger than I. She was married to Hank Ornquist, who worked for the State Parks Commission. They had two teenage sons, maybe seventeen and eighteen. I saw them two or three times a year, here and there. Felicity always did what she now did when I caught her eye, she got up and came over and put her arms around me and gave me a sisterly kiss. Then she put her head on my shoulder in a friendly way and pinched my cheek. She looked more like Gordon than Betty. She had long curly dark hair and a cheery smile combined with a sharp-eyed gaze. I kissed her back and put my arm around her waist. But our friendliness wasn’t backed up by a close acquaintance. More than Sally or the other three, Felicity had always set herself a little apart from the family, marrying someone entirely unlike Gordon, for one thing—Hank Ornquist was about as untalkative as a guy could be. For another, Felicity kept her holidays mostly at her own house—they would show up Christmas morning after breakfast, or leave Thanksgiving dinner to go to Hank’s parents before the pie was served, when Sherry and I, not even related, would have to be sent home after midnight. So when Felicity, with her head on my shoulder, whispered “Oh, Joey” in my ear, I spun my head to look at her in amazement. She laughed. “Oh, Joey!” she said aloud.
“Oh, Joey, what?”
“Oh, Joey, I saw you come in, and you were so wrapped up in business you didn’t even look around and see that four women were watching you.”
“Which four?” I must say I was doubtful of this, but on the other hand she didn’t have any reason that I could see to be flirting with me. “You’re teasing me.”
“That blonde at the end of the bar.”
“That’s Carla King. She’s a Realtor, trying to figure out whether I’m doing any business tonight. So she doesn’t count.”
“Okay. Let’s see. Oh, there she is. That other blonde coming back from the bathroom.”
Laurie. I said, “That’s Laurie. We had an unfortunate experience about a month and a half ago. I’m sure she was watching me to see if my manners have improved.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I was a little drunk.”
“And?”
“I believe she made the case that I had been discovered by her dog-walking neighbor at six A.M. peeing on her—that is, Laurie’s—flower beds. And that might have been true, because I did leave Laurie’s house before daybreak that day, and it may be that I was trying to avoid awakening her prematurely by not using the bathroom, but I thought that dog was just an excuse for the guy to be out patrolling the neighborhood when he should have been home in bed. Anyway, Laurie doesn’t count either.”
“Okay. That girl over there.”
Someone I had never seen before, pretty, but who looked about eighteen. “She’s a kid. Doesn’t count for at least a couple of years, and only then if she’s interested in me because she mistakes me for someone close in age to herself and does not see me as a father figure.”
“Do I count?”
“Were you watching me, Felicity?”
“Always do.”
I looked around the bar.
“Hank’s away on business.”
I turned the barstool so that we were face-to-face. I said, “Who are those people you’re with?” but I meant, What exactly is going on here?
She said, “The woman in the red sweater is someone I went to college with. She came down from the city for the weekend. Those are her friends who came with her.” I think she meant that there was more going on than met the eye.
“Are they staying with you?”
“They’re at the Blackbird Inn, that new B and B out on Route Five.” And then she licked her lips. I continued to be astounded. I put my hands on her shoulders and eased her off a step, then looked at her again. She looked steadily back at me, smiling slightly, her eyes alive and her cheeks flushed. I said, “Always do?”
“Always do.”
“Is my jaw dropping?”
“Oh, Joey, you are such a dim bulb. I’ve been flirting with you for a long time. Don’t you have any instincts?”
“Not according to Laurie.” We looked across the room at Laurie. Then I said, “Felicity, do you think my condo is burning down?”
And Felicity said, “I don’t know. Let’s go check.” She laughed again and put her hands together in a gesture of excitement that I knew well. It was perfect in a way—she was utterly familiar to me and yet completely mysterious. She said, “You go out to the parking lot. I’ll sit down with my friends for another ten minutes, and then come out. You keep an eye out for me, and then when I get into my car—it’s the silver BMW?—you drive out of the parking lot and I’ll follow you.”
I knew exactly what she was getting at. I said, “You know, Fern might be out there. Did you see her? I think she’s still lying in wait for her cat.”
“That’s okay. You speak to her; then, ten minutes later, I’ll speak to her. Fern doesn’t put two and two together until yo
u tell her to.” She went back to her friends. I watched her for a moment and then finished my beer and left.
Twenty minutes later I was heading down Hardy Well Road, and in my rearview mirror I could see the headlights of the last person on earth I had expected ever to make love to, and I knew we were going to make love, and I had no doubts, as if I had been simply waiting for it to happen.
Those moments, when we were parking our cars and getting out and fumbling with keys and I was directing her to the door of my condo at one in the morning, were maybe the time in my life when I felt the most purely young. There was none of that grinding sense of getting through the various stages of an acquisition project that I often felt when I was flirting. No strategy, no trying to figure anything out. I didn’t even touch her or take her elbow—no first moves that would lead to a goal. Rather, the air was damp and fresh-smelling, the grass was growing a few feet away in the darkness, trees rustled their new leaves all around us. The stars pressed down on us so we didn’t have to look up to sense them. My condo intended to take us in; all I had to do was find the key. It was Felicity who touched me. She slipped her arms around my waist and pressed her head briefly against my chest in a manner I recognized intuitively as ecstasy and at once shared.