by Jane Smiley
“Joe. I don’t think you get the point. Here’s another accounting tip. It’s important always for a business to grow, especially a business like the phone company, where they already have the whole market. So they focus a lot of corporate attention on growth. Collection isn’t as important, because they always have a certain amount of bad debt; it’s written off or sold and is, at any rate, a part of doing business. But they don’t want to look like they’re not growing. So you pay enough of your debt so they’ll turn the phone back on and then place an order. They have more to gain by accepting your business than by turning it away, especially if you talk to a supervisor about the number of phone lines you expect that we’re going to install in our development, with the clubhouse and all, and you ask a few questions about state-of-the-art and what’s coming.”
“Collections isn’t the same department as new service. It might not even be in the same building.”
“If you go far enough up the chain of command, the branches will cross, and some guy will make a deal with you. Why not? It works with other businesses. Try it with the phone company.” He shrugged.
“I take it that you’ve never tried this with the phone company.”
“Not around here. Worked like a charm on Long Island. If you can’t get a peon to turn it on, keep going up the chain of command and talking about what you need, and eventually someone will do it. If you want my help, let me know.” He went out.
I remembered how my mother used to carry her payments around on the streetcar, always careful to pay up on time, as if electrical service and telephone service and everything else were a privilege. Maybe she felt that they were.
Even though I was perfectly willing to pay my bill, I decided to try Marcus’s idea, just to see how far I could go—and, I admit, to see if I could show Marcus up for once. Long Island wasn’t the same as Marlborough County. I pretended I was Marcus and took on his smooth, friendly tone. I chatted up everyone I could reach. Martin Cranston, the supervisor I ended up working with, was only too happy to oblige. I almost offered to pay my phone bill at the last minute, but in the end I played it out. It was interestingly different from a real estate negotiation in that there was no tension. I was indeed trying to put something over on him, and he knew it, but he didn’t seem to care. Real estate negotiations were more often than not edgy because even though the property in question was there for everyone to see, and quite often the buyers and their representatives had seen it over and over and found nothing really wrong with it, buyers were often worried that something was missing, or something would be taken away, or something would be left behind (toxic waste, for example). Sellers, on the other hand, didn’t like to feel that their honesty—or even worse, their taste—was being denigrated. But for Martin Cranston and me, the problem was only money, and not even his money at that. We parted very warmly, and I promised to call him as soon as we were ready to install phone service for Salt Key Farm, and he promised to keep me posted about the latest developments in telecommunications, which were about to change in unprecedented ways, Martin confided in me, and, frankly, I felt very executive when I had hung up the phone.
Once the phone was turned on again, I started calling Susan Webster. I would tell myself that I wasn’t going to, and I would plan to be doing something else before going to bed, but then I would call her anyway, in spite of my anxiety that I was being a pest. The problem was her melodious voice with just that hint of an accent. She often paused while talking, which she told me was because she was trying to think of English words when she could only think of Spanish ones. One time she said, “You know, I was terribly shy in English, but I was never shy in Spanish. My in-laws thought I was a tremendously forward young woman. It didn’t even have to do with fluency, I was just a completely different person in Spanish. I thought it was unusual until I met a woman who had been married to a South African man. In English he was very harsh and hard to get along with, but he could be very affectionate and kind in Zulu, because that was the language his nurse spoke when he was a child.” This seemed marvelously exotic to me. But maybe I called her because I could. All those times I had thought of Felicity and known not to call her, and the only time I had called her Hank had answered. Now I could just pick up the phone and she would answer and say, “Oh! Hi! Is it you?” It was a luxury I tried out over and over.
We went out again a couple of times. She came to my place. I went to hers. No towels or T-shirts were hanging over railings. Her house (a small rental in Roaring Falls) was bright and idiosyncratic. It didn’t look blank and even empty, like mine, or uncared for, like Felicity’s and Hank’s place. It looked like only she could have made it the way it was and that she paid attention to it. Without saying so, I decided that must be what was termed artistic. That was exciting too. I compared her favorably to Felicity, and in my comparison I discovered a hidden and heretofore unrealized resentment. I had thought Felicity was perfect, that our arrangement was perfect, that I had let our arrangement go because I had known all along it was temporary. But now I was glad, even to the point of getting a repetitive little thrill every time I thought of it, that Susan Webster had so much more to offer than Felicity. Felicity, you might say—I came to think—had been lucky to find me, since I went along with whatever she wanted, but it was me who was lucky to find Susan Webster, who was, as Marcus had told me all along, a superior model.
And I was in no hurry to sleep with her, contrary to my usual MO. What I really wanted to do more than anything was to call her on the phone late in the evening and hear her talk. Given the inevitability of our future together, I thought, I was happy to prolong the preliminary stages as much as possible.
I paid more attention to Marcus and Mary King. I was waiting for two things from Marcus. One of them was a single undeniable sign that he knew that I knew that he and Mary King were having an affair, and the other was news about the eight hundred thousand dollars that was winging its way toward us.
Instead, he came into my office every day and lamented the ineptitude of Jim Crosbie and his attempts to get his savings-and-loan sold to some big buyer or other.
“The problem,” he would say, “is so obvious. It makes me crazy. I could walk right in there and make it go. I mean, I know what it sounds like to say that, but Jim Crosbie is the wrong person for this job. He’s basically a sad sack combined with a tough guy. He doesn’t know how to give them what they want when they want it. That’s a timing thing and a personality thing. You have to be able to read the other guy and know what’s going to turn him on. But Jim is a turf protector. He has no instincts. I mean, I know they installed him as an administrator because the joint was falling apart, but you know what kind of guy this is at heart? He’s the kind of guy who goes out to lunch and then divides up the bill down to the penny, and then all the way out of the restaurant, he’s saying, ‘Now, Fred, you owe another ninety-seven cents on the tip, and George, I think you owe extra because you had a side of fries.’ Makes me want to wring his neck. But another thing about those kinds of guys is they’re very sensitive to slights and they have radar. If you disapprove of something they’re doing, they just back off.”
I said, “They’ve got plenty of money from something. I told you I ran into Bart in August, and he was waving his tickets to France around and saying they were making a killing in T-bill futures.”
“Very iffy. And Crosbie doesn’t have the mind of a real investment genius. I mean, I’m sure things are running his way right now, but—”
He went out. He came back in.
“Bart is better. You know, Bart could do this merger, but he’s so impressed with Crosbie that he doesn’t do a thing. Crosbie makes him stupid. I can see it going through his mind. ‘I don’t agree with this guy, but he’s a big shot and I’m not, so he must be right; we’ll do it his way.’ That’s so local. That’s how local guys just fail to break out, you know?”
He went out. He came back in.
“So what if this big S and L from out West looks
like it’s expanded too fast? Looks are deceiving. If they’d just ask me, I could tell you in an hour or two what was up with the books. But it’s like empresses meeting, or the negotiations at the end of the Vietnam War. It’s all about the shape of the table and who’s going to sit where. If they would put that through, I wouldn’t have to spend all my time beating the bushes for investors with ten thousand dollars to spend.”
I decided to bring up the eight hundred thousand dollars, which I hadn’t heard a single word about in weeks, not since Marcus’s letter came to me.
“Oh, that! That’s another thing. Where is that money? Is it just incompetence over there? I mean, you saw how they sent the letter to the wrong person. Or don’t they really want to give it to us? You know what? You should call Bart, or even go to lunch with him, and feel him out about all of this. I thought I was in Crosbie’s complete confidence, and maybe I am, but the closer I get to him, the more I think his mind works like some sort of labyrinth. I think he spends more time thinking about rugs and paintings than actual business.”
“I didn’t know Jane had that kind of property out West.”
“Jane?”
“The thousand-acre ranch?”
“Oh, that.” He laughed and looked at me for a moment, then said, “Well, it would be a tragedy if she’d been out in the godforsaken plains all those years and had nothing to show for it.”
“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. Bette
r 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.”