by Jane Smiley
“Well, Marcus, I don’t have a lot of friends either.”
“Here’s what I learned about having a friend. The fact is, I actually care about your welfare. And you aren’t a member of my family. I mean, you can tell that, can’t you? That I care about your welfare?”
“I can tell that. I mean, all that talk about marriage and everything. And the advice you give. I can see that.”
“So, let’s not talk about it anymore.”
“That’s probably good.”
“Yeah.”
So we sat back in our chairs and didn’t talk about it anymore. We were silent. He looked at his watch. He said, “I guess I’d better get home. It’s almost dinnertime.” He reached for his coat, but he didn’t stand up. Finally, he said, “Look, there’s something else.”
“I hope it’s not about feelings.”
“It’s not.” He laughed. “It’s about my last adventure in the gold market.”
“When was that?”
“Eight or nine years ago. Remember I told you about a guy from my neighborhood who went to Yale?”
“I think so.”
“Well, he was a go-getter, and he had a friend there whose family owned an oil shipping company. I mean, this guy he knew was rich, and the wealth went very deep, so he always had a lot of money to play around with. And my buddy had gone to work for a Wall Street firm and was making plenty. I still had some money from before I was married, that I’d saved—not much, just a couple of thousand bucks—but I put that in, and the three of us played the gold market for four months. We put in twenty thousand to begin with—two from me, six from my friend, and twelve from the rich guy, whose name I won’t tell you right now but maybe someday. Anyway, we turned over a hundred thousand bucks. At the end of that time, we split our money and went our separate ways, and I had ten thousand, my old neighbor had thirty, and the rich guy had sixty. I think he went and bought a yacht. It was so easy, it was like finding it in the street; they decided they had a license to blow it on anything they pleased. Not me, though. This was my big chance. So, I did what they do on the racetrack—and believe me I know all about the racetrack, because next to the local bar, Belmont Park was my father’s favorite place. An Irishman always thinks of the racetrack as a steady job. Anyway, I parlayed my bets, and six months later I had four hundred thousand dollars.”
“You did?”
“Yep. I turned two thousand bucks into four hundred thousand in ten months. And then I ponied up the taxes on it. Capital gains. I mean, I worked for the IRS, right? So I filled out my tax forms, and on the fifteenth of April, 1975, I wrote a check to the Internal Revenue Service for a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. I put about fifty into my house—you know, fixing it up and everything. My mom was dead by that time, or I would have put some money down on a house for her, but anyway.” He sighed and leaned back. He looked up at the ceiling. “You want to hear what happened to the rest of it?”
“Sure.”
“I got out of the gold market because I thought my luck was changing. I’d gone to Atlantic City for the weekend and lost five hundred bucks playing blackjack, and that convinced me it was time to take the rest of my money and put it into some good investments. So I knew a guy who was starting a jazz club on the Upper West Side. He borrowed fifty thousand to do the place over, and it did look great; I advised him on how to fix it up, but he never actually got his liquor license, so that was that. I invested forty thousand in a recording studio, but the manager was more interested in shooting heroin than recording anything, so that never got off the ground. And, let’s see, a car, some clothes, ten each in college funds for the kids, which have grown nicely, I’ll admit. And, oh, yeah. I bankrolled a friend in the wilds of New Jersey who was growing marijuana, and the field got burned to the ground right before harvest. No one got arrested, though. Did you ever invest in a dope deal?”
“No.”
“I had a girlfriend in college who gave a thousand dollars to a guy who was going to import camel saddles from Morocco that were stuffed with hashish. I’ll never forget how happy she was when she came up to my apartment after giving him the money. She was sure she was going to be rich.”
“That’s quite a story.”
“Well—and I’m speaking as a bureaucrat when I say this—the only part I regretted was the check I sent to the IRS. I was very naïve. That’s why I prefer living on borrowed money. I mean, you pay the interest, that’s kind of like paying taxes in a way, but it’s not as high a rate, even these days, and when you pay it, you know it’s going to a person or at least to support the bank, and not disappearing altogether into the maw of the Pentagon.”
“I guess.”
“But the moral of the tale, Joey boy, is that I never lost a penny in the gold market or, for that matter, the real estate market, and I can do it this time too.” He looked at his watch again, and it was now very dark. I got up and went around the room, turning on some lights. He stood up. “And now I’m late for dinner, but, hey, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” He grinned at me, patted his pocket where he had my ten-thousand-dollar check, and walked toward the door. He turned. He said, “I’ll tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“If I’d had a good-sized stake in the gold market the day Reagan was shot, I wouldn’t be busting my ass with real estate right now.”
I laughed. He opened the door, and a moment later I heard him trotting down the stairs.
CHAPTER
28
IHAVE TO SAY that after that point Jane and I were a little distant. I was annoyed with her for not telling me I had to pay my own bills. I didn’t know what was up with her. But the next day, when I said, “Why don’t you give me my bills that I have to pay, and I’ll pay them?” and she got them out of the file drawer and pushed them across the desk without a word, I didn’t say, Were you just going to let these go? But I certainly thought it. It was one thing for Marcus to let payments slide because he thought some money was coming in, but it was quite another, I thought, for Jane not to tell me about it. Paying the bills was her job. I leafed through them, then looked at her and said, “I would like to talk to you, Jane, about what is going on and exactly what is required of me.”
She nodded.
“But I have an appointment and I have to pay these bills, so we can do that later this afternoon.” In fact, though, what with the discomfort between us and my sense that Marcus wanted me to stay away from her, I didn’t press for the meeting that afternoon, and I let it slide for the next few days, as well. Wasn’t she the one who had pointed out that neither of us liked conflict?
But I watched her covertly. She was far less busy than she had been in the spring and summer. On the phone much less, writing up fewer prospectuses, talking more to Mike and to Mary King, who was in and out and seemed to be openly waiting for Marcus as well as very chummy with Jane. Mary was friendly with me too, frequently taking the opportunity to touch my elbow or put her hand on my shoulder, the way, I couldn’t help thinking, that women do when they aren’t exactly flirting but have an excess of sexual energy that keeps overflowing onto those around them. She was friendly and pretty, maybe six or seven years younger than Jane and better dressed. Most of the times I overheard them, she was asking Jane for advice: What kind of car should she buy? Was she really ready for something sexy, like a BMW? Wasn’t it a good idea to move out of her house into an apartment? In her house she felt like an ex-wife but in an apartment she might feel more truly single. And the downstairs corridor in Building Two had suffered water damage, and it really did seem so dull to go with the same carpeting; would Jane look over some samples with her? And had Jane ever done needlepoint? Jane was tall, Mary was short; Jane gave advice, Mary took it. She was in and out of the office five or six times a day (always with her eye out for Marcus, I thought, though when he came in, they were very discreet). It was very much as if the two women hadn’t a thing to do in the world. If I had been on good terms with Jane, of course
, I would have pried into the Relationship a little—whether it was a live thing still or petering out—but I wasn’t and I didn’t. I knew we were in a holding pattern until Christmas, that it was Gottfried who was doing the real work, and the rest of us were more or less waiting for the permitting process to be over (I could see the end of it, I thought), and the clubhouse to be finished, and the golf course to be shaped and planted, and the first house lots to be surveyed and staked and sold, and, of course, for the money, the beginning of the billion, to come rolling in. And when it did, I would propose to Susan and my life would begin after what my parents certainly considered to be a very long preparatory period.
Even though I was in a very good mood, what I had seen of Felicity at Thanksgiving niggled at me every day. I would wake up in the night and think I had to call her, and then in the morning it wouldn’t seem that important. Or I would drive past the Davids’ house during the week, when they were in New York, and make a plan to stop when they were there over the weekend, but then not go even a block out of my way on Saturday or Sunday. I would see Gordon, but not ask about her. I began to feel very cowardly, and I wondered what I was afraid of. Just my way, Sherry would have said, to avoid any potential can of worms, but really, it was no longer my can of worms, was it? That was what I must have decided, after all. I must have had some instinctive reluctance to take on more than I could handle, and events had proved me right. But on the other hand, Felicity had called me “kind” and I wasn’t acting kind.
The compromise I made was to call the Davids, at last. David Pollock answered, and as soon as I asked whether they were having a Christmas party this year, I could tell by the sound of his voice that they weren’t. He sounded depressed. He said, “I guess we’re spending Christmas in the city. I just came down here to drain the pipes and pour antifreeze in the bottom of the dishwasher.”
“Are you guys all right?”
“Oh, I guess so. Marlin Perkins, you know. We had to put her down. She got in a tremendous fight with a pair of Australian shepherds. Her small intestine was perforated in eight places. Septicemia. Oh, it was too awful. She lingered for a week and a half. I thought it was going to kill us.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“We don’t have quite our usual joie de vivre this year.”
“I can tell.”
“I think we need to hibernate and return in the spring. Sacrifice of the sun god at the winter solstice, blood and bone meal on the garden. Resurrection of the blighted earth. All that sort of thing.”
“Oh. Say—”
“Be forthright, Joey.”
“What’s up with Felicity?”
“Something, that is for sure.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She’s got that look of desperation. And when I called her and told her about Marlin, she told me later she cried for twenty-four hours. She couldn’t stop. And I didn’t even detail the injuries, because I didn’t have the heart.” He sighed, then said, “Personally, Joe, I don’t feel that things in general are on the upswing right at the moment, so what can I say?”
So what I did was, I put Felicity out of my mind.
I saw George Sloan in the hall, and I said, “Say, Marcus said to me the other day that he sure wished he’d had money in the gold market the day Reagan was shot. What did he mean by that?”
George laughed and motioned me into his office. He greeted an old man who was just leaving, and said, “Look at him. He did have money in the market the day Reagan was shot. Now he has krugerrands stashed all over his house. He’s waiting for the world to end. I guess he thinks he’ll be the richest man in the county then.”
“Do I have to buy coins and keep them?”
“Oh, God, no. There’s funds and securities and futures and options. It’s just like any other commodity. Or you can buy one-ounce coins. I have some. It’s just a hedge.”
“Against—”
“Inflation, really. Apocalypse, too.”
“I thought your hedge against that was prayer.”
George glanced at me, then laughed again. We went into his office. He said, “God knows how long speculation in gold is going to be fun, but it’s fun now and has been for the last several years, because no one knows when inflation is going to end or how high it will go.”
“Limited supply, like oceanfront property.”
“In a way. If you don’t have to get a mortgage. And it’s portable. Fleeing dictators buy a lot of gold. The Shah of Iran had a lot of gold with him. Gold speculators like civilization to be tottering but not toppling. Oceanfront-property people like there to be plenty of services, so they’re different in that way.”
“I understand that.”
“But for your purposes, just a little inflation is fine, or some social disruption here and there. The gold market is sensitive to current events, so one thing I do is read the paper, especially the international news, and if it looks like something is about to happen somewhere, I buy a little, or if it looks like things are getting better, I sell. It’s not especially sensitive to production rates, like some of the other commodities markets are. I don’t like to listen to farm reports, so I stay out of things like pork bellies and beans. Mike likes that sort of thing. Seems boring to me.” He hummed a little tune.
I couldn’t help saying, “You’re so different, George, from the way you were last year. I would never have expected this of you. Everything about you is different. You were so cautious.”
“That house changed my life, I guess.”
“You didn’t even buy it.”
“And I’m glad I didn’t, now. Everything you said about it was exactly right. It would have been a nightmare and I wouldn’t have known where to turn about the repairs it needed. But after the cops found me and brought me home, my wife said to me, ‘George, don’t you realize you’ve had an affair? When someone has an affair it’s a sign that their old life has to change or they’re going to die.’ Oh, she went on about it for weeks, and I was too depressed to listen to her for a while, but she kept after me, about how we’d always been so careful and so worried about everything, not just me but her, too, and the kids. We never allowed the kids to do anything. No skiing, no horseback riding. If they wanted to ride their bikes, we watched them out the window to make sure they didn’t fall down. If they wanted to go over to a friend’s house, we’d take them over and get ourselves invited in, and we’d spy out the potential dangers while we were leaving them off. One time, I saw a locked gun case in the father’s study, and I made an excuse and took my little boy home. I guess you could say with that house, I had a nervous breakdown and I decided something had to change. And then, when you’re rolling up and down with the gold market, even if you are mostly doing okay, that pretty much roots out any lingering shreds of caution you might be feeling.”
“I’m amazed.”
“We do lots of things now. I even go to bed at night without going down to the basement and checking the pilot light on the furnace.” He guffawed. “But I’m good at this because I used to be that way, and so I know how these gold types think. I know in my gut when they’re nervous—that means they’re going to buy—and when they feel like they can relax a little—that means they’re going to sell.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Oh, yeah. Marcus is pretty shrewd too. I don’t know what it is. He’s not like me at all, but he’s got an instinct. Sometimes, he’ll just call me up and say up or down, and he’ll be right. And I’ll say, ‘So did you see the paper?’ and he’ll say, ‘What was in the paper?’ I don’t know where he gets it, but he’s got it.”
“He told me he has second sight.”
“Well, he’s Irish, so maybe he does, but normally that sort of thing—well.” He shrugged. “Like I said before, he’s got a lot of theories. And every single one of them could be dead wrong and he’d still have a feel for it.”
No doubt about it, I was interested. So I walked past the gold trading office sometimes
when it wasn’t actually on my way to my car or our office. But our office was dead and Jane and I weren’t getting along, and the gold office was lively. A couple of days later, I was passing the office, and one of the women I had seen in there, whom I now knew as Dawn, opened the door and called out to me. “Mr. Stratford? Are you Mr. Stratford?”
“Yes.”
“They want you to come in. Mr. Sloan saw you passing.” She stepped out of my way with a smile and I went in. George was standing in the door to his office with a grin on his face. He said, “Just in time. Come here.”
Marcus was sitting at a screen in George’s office, staring intently at some numbers. I said, “Hey, Marcus.”
Without looking away from the screen, he said, “Hey!” Then, “There! There. Okay, it’s topping out. I’m selling.” What seemed like ribbons of numbers streamed across the screen. Marcus glanced at me and pointed at one of them. A little symbol that looked rather like an A was followed by the number 464.23. George Sloan picked up a black telephone and after a moment said, “Yeah. Okay, Fred, sell at 464.23. Yeah, right. Thanks.” We continued to watch. The next time the symbol went across, it was at 464.75, then 464.90, then 464.12, then 462.43. I couldn’t have said how long it took, but maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, the phone rang and George said, “Yeah. Okay. 464.36. Great.” He turned to Marcus. “464.36.”
“Look at it now,” said Marcus, without turning away from the screen. 459.92. 458.23. 457.11. 455.20. 453.45. He said, “What time is it? About one-twenty? You know, I bet it gets below 425, anyway. Where did it open this morning, George?”