by Jane Smiley
“Four-ten.”
“Oh, that’s good,” said Marcus. “That’s good. That means, Joe”—he turned to look at me—“that you earned about thirteen hundred bucks today.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. You know that check you gave me?”
“The bill-paying check?”
“Yeah. Well, Jane hasn’t seen it yet, but now she has eleven-three to pay bills rather than ten. She’s going to be very happy.”
“I gave you that check Sunday.”
“Well, Monday and Tuesday weren’t really very good days to play. I didn’t get a good feeling, so I held on to our stake. But that’s enough. Time to pay some people.” He pushed back the chair and stood up. I stepped out of his way. He said, “You going upstairs?”
“I was going out.”
“Well, I’ll walk you to your car.”
We didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what to say, and Marcus didn’t seem to think anything needed to be said. Finally, though, I said, “So, why are we developing property when we could be bankrolling your golden touch?”
“Because I never trade commodities on margin. You can do real estate on margin and no one ever says boo. The banks are happy, you’re happy, and the buyers are happy. It’s a system that’s in place and that more or less works. If I put ten thousand dollars into a property and get a ninety-thousand-dollar mortgage and rent the place out so the interest is covered, and the place appreciates at ten percent a year, which isn’t unusual in these times, then my ten thousand is appreciating at a hundred percent the first year alone. In seven years, when the place is worth two hundred thousand, and I sell it and pay off the mortgage, I’ll get—what, say a hundred and twenty thousand? My ten thousand will have grown much faster than it would have in the stock market, without all that watching and worrying. I mean, I want a life. I don’t want to watch a stock ticker all the time. Day trading is for people who don’t have any other interests.” I nodded. He put me into my car with a grin and waved me away.
I knew perfectly well not to mention Marcus’s speculating, and my temptations, to Jane, but all the time I was driving around, taking my parents Christmas shopping, helping them get their lights up and their tree and then shoveling their driveway and front walk after the first heavy snowfall, I thought only about Marcus and George. Or rather, I had lots of thoughts about Christmas and Susan and houses and a future with children and cozy prosperity and comfort of a not entirely material sort, but they all spiraled back to the thought of Marcus staring at the trading screen and then picking just the exact moment when the price began to drop, and George calling the broker and telling him to sell.
Not long before Christmas, in fact, I found myself in the neighborhood where, the year before, I had sold the Sloans the house they finally bought, and I detoured off the main road and drove past it. It was one of Gordon’s nicer houses, the Mendocino, I think, and when they bought it, it had been much like it was when it was first built, except the trees and shrubs were grown up. Now, in the late afternoon twilight of mid-December, I drove toward it. The street was slippery and I drove slowly. All the houses looked good: maybe four inches of snow on the roofs and porch railings, white caps on bushes, tree limbs a filigree of black and white. Not many people were out; it was a little early for the men to be coming home and a little cold for children to be playing. The Sloan place had been repainted—once brown, now cream—and it looked like they had added on to the deck and built an elaborate playhouse in the back; I couldn’t see very well as I passed. And then all of a sudden the whole place lit up—lines of Christmas lights along the eaves and spidering up into leafless tree branches. The front porch was outlined in white, and a Christmas tree suddenly appeared in the front window. Obviously, Mrs. Sloan had happened to turn on the lights as I was going past, but it seemed less mundane than that, more as though I had witnessed a sign. I felt good all evening.
The next day, I stopped in and saw George again. He was doing some trades but was happy to talk to me while keeping his eye on the screen. I said, “George, I just want to ask you one question.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know, that house you bought last Christmas. It’s rather a modest house for your present circumstances.”
“Oh, yeah,” said George. “But we like it. Marcus has been talking to me about your new places, though.”
“Good.”
“But I don’t know. We like that neighborhood. The kids have lots of friends there. There’s enough room. I just don’t know. Personally, I don’t like this idea that as you get more and more money, you’ve got to get yourself a more and more luxurious house. Why bother? A house is a house. What you could do, and I think would be fun, would be to live at home just like you always did, but then go to France, say, and have a château there. It would be like a joke, sort of.”
“What kind of a joke?” A joke on Realtors, I thought.
“Oh, you know. An I’m-not-who-you-think-I-am sort of joke. What we think is that we’ll just enjoy our freedom these days. If we commit ourselves to any particular course of action, we won’t have this kind of freedom again.”
“That seems smart, George.”
He shrugged. He said, “Got to get back to work!”
The first of Gottfried’s houses closed. He was mild-mannered at the closing and hardly made any fuss at all. Maybe that was because we held it at the end of the day and he had already finished his day’s work at the farm. The only thing he said to me was, “You got a check for me? I was supposed to be paid Thursday. Thursday was the fifteenth.”
“I don’t have it. I’ll find out when I get back to the office tomorrow. I thought they were paying everyone at the end of last week.”
That night I went to the movies with Susan. She wore silk, and I spent the night at her place. The next day I looked at the check I had gotten for my commission in Gottfried’s house. Seventy-eight hundred dollars. I sat and looked at it for a long time, sitting in my office with the door closed. I could hear Jane and Marcus outside, chatting about what Marcus was getting Justin for Christmas. Their voices were pleasant; it sounded like they were getting along. After a while, their voices quieted and a door closed. The phone rang. I looked at my phone, but it did not light up. Not for me. I looked at the check again. I didn’t know exactly why I was looking at the check. I had gotten nice commissions in the past, and I certainly expected to get plenty more of them in the future, but this check had some significance that I wanted to fix on, something like those pictures you would see in delis or antiques shops, of the first dollar the shop ever took in. I set the check down on my desk, then put it back into my wallet. A few minutes later, I got up and went down to the gold traders and walked in. Dawn was sitting at her desk. She was wearing a brilliant purple blouse. I said, “George in?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Stratford. He went home early. He had a terrible sore throat. I told him strep.”
“Oh.”
“My bet is, he won’t be in now till after Christmas. You just can’t fool around with strep.”
“No, you can’t.”
When I left the traders, I didn’t know if I was disappointed or relieved.
CHAPTER
29
ON CHRISTMAS EVE, early in the day, I went to the dry cleaners to pick up my mother’s tablecloth, which had been there since Thanksgiving and which I had been promising to pick up for three weeks. I felt harried and pressed all of a sudden, because the night before, Jane and Marcus had left two Christmas presents on my desk, which I had opened at home that morning—a red cashmere scarf from Marcus and Linda and a bottle of Grand Marnier from Jane. I had nothing for them and no ideas. My plan after the dry cleaners was to go to Deacon and walk around until something presented itself. For my parents, I had bought and installed a new exterior lighting fixture with a vague coaching theme that cast more light on the steps. For Susan, I had agonized and finally decided on a purple bathrobe that had both a sensuous feel and a sensuous loo
k, but I had also looked at pearl earrings and copper pots and a polar bear rug with a head (I hadn’t looked at that very long).
While I was standing at the counter of the dry cleaners, waiting for the tablecloth, turning gift ideas over in my mind and worrying about the purple robe, arms came around my waist from the back and a head pressed itself between my shoulder blades. I didn’t have to be told it was Felicity. I didn’t have to look down, even, and see her hands and the sleeves of her coat. I didn’t even have to think that it could only be Felicity. I sensed her presence as readily as I ever had. I turned around. Her face was flushed and her eyes were bright. She said, “Let’s have some coffee. There’s a place two doors down.”
I received my tablecloth, paid for it, and followed her out the door. She waited for me and took my available hand in her gloved one. As we entered the coffee shop, she kissed me on the cheek. She seemed happy, normal, the way she had always seemed. “I’ll buy,” she said. “You look very handsome and good. Whose tablecloth is that?”
“My mother’s.”
“How innocent!” She laughed.
“Well, sort of. She’s been asking me to pick it up for three weeks.”
“Oh, I’m so happy to see you!”
“Me, too. You look good. Your hair is bigger than ever.”
“I know. I thought I might cut it all off. My head has a very nice shape, you know.”
“I know. You look good, Felicity. David Pollock said that you—uh, had a look of desperation.”
“Did he?” Her face fell. “It’s them who are in a bad way. And the dog! That was so sad I cried and cried. But I’m perfectly all right. Better than ever, darling.” She made a kiss and winked at me. It turned me on. I had forgotten she was like this, so free and so bright. Susan was not like this.
She grabbed my hand, then sought my face with hers. She said, “Well, I should have come over. Things would be different now if I had, I think. But after you closed your office, I knew there wouldn’t be any privacy, and going to your new place seemed like too big a deal, so time just kept passing. I’m sorry you closed your office. I loved that building. It was fun there.”
“I thought so, too.” The waitress came over to us, and we ordered two cups of coffee. Felicity ordered an apple Danish. The waitress said, “You two look happy.”
Without missing a beat, Felicity said, “He just got back from the Bahamas. He’s been gone for six years.” Then she laughed.
The waitress said to me, “What did you do, stay inside the whole time? If I went to the Bahamas, I would at least come back with a tan.”
Felicity and I spoke at the same time. I said, “She’s putting you on,” and she said, “I meant the Bahamas, New York, not the Bahamas, Atlantic Ocean.” The waitress walked away. I said, “The Bahamas, New York?”
“Do you think there is one?”
“You’re very playful, miss.”
“Yes, I am. It’s Christmas Eve. And I miss you. You’re the one that got away. My whole family thinks of you as the one that got away, first from Sally, then from me.”
“Sally broke up with me.”
“Well, that’s a form of the one that got away. The one that wasn’t sufficiently appreciated.” Then, as if it weren’t a serious question at all, she said, “Do you think I should have left Hank for you last year?”
“It didn’t seem like you would.”
“Did you want me to?”
“I didn’t want to be married. I thought what we had was superior to marriage.”
“Explain that to me.”
“Well, I would overhear people in the grocery store, and I would know they were married because of the tone of their voices. Even if there was nothing really wrong with how they were speaking to each other, there was something too public about it. I enjoyed our secrecy. It was very exciting. But on the other hand, I’d known you for a long time, so it was familiar.”
“Best of both worlds.”
“I thought so.”
“So why did we let it go?”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I guess I was afraid that private things were about to become public. It gave me a feeling sort of like setting off a bomb at the family reunion.”
She looked at me thoughtfully, then said, “Well, yes. I guess I thought of it as, What am I going to say to my mother when she finds out about this?”
“So, we were agreed, I suppose.”
She nodded, then said, “I heard you were dating Susan Webster pretty heavily.”
“I guess I am.”
“So do you want to be married?”
Looking at her, I could honestly say, “I don’t know.”
“I know people look at me and Hank and say, ‘Why did they get married?’ I look at us and say, ‘Why do people get married?’ I just don’t understand it. I mean, he hasn’t changed. I haven’t changed. That’s the weird part. I just think we thought, Well, everyone is married. Our parents are married. The alternative to marriage must be death, since the only grown-ups we know who aren’t married are dead.” She laughed. I laughed with her. She went on, “That was so 1962, wasn’t it? Nobody thinks like that anymore. But, anyway, do you think I should have left Hank for you last year?”
“Well, it’s been about a minute and a half since you last asked me that question, and I still don’t know. But you are very—you were very—well, every time I saw you, it was like the sun coming out. I guess I would have to say I didn’t feel like it was possible to possess that, so it didn’t cross my mind to try.”
“That’s a very sweet thing to say. It might be my most favorite compliment that I’ve ever gotten.”
“Well, it’s true.”
The waitress brought our coffee, set it in front of us, and returned with the Danish, which Felicity picked at for a moment. Her face became calm, and she looked at me more seriously. She said, “That’s a problem you have, Joey. You forget to claim what might be yours. I don’t know why that is, but between you and me, it’s better to claim it, even if it isn’t quite right in some way, than not have any life at all, because that’s what happens. I know lots of women nowadays who are just so indecisive, and then they turn around, and really, twenty years have gone by and they don’t have anything except maybe a few well-chosen objets d’art and some nice dishes.” She scowled.
I laughed.
“It’s not a joke.” But then she laughed. She finished her Danish. “Anyway, don’t let that happen to you: just because Sally and I got away—which will always be a source of regret for Betty Baldwin, who is a great believer in marriage but only to the right person.”
“Okay.”
“Gotta go.”
She jumped up and left. When I followed a few moments later with my tablecloth, which had gotten entangled in some chairs, I saw her car pulling out of the parking lot and heading west.
Christmas went by. The whole time I thought about Marcus and George. On Christmas afternoon, I pulled out my last bank statement and had a long look at it. There was plenty of money in my savings account, even though I had given Marcus that check for ten thousand dollars and I hadn’t had much of an income for the last six months. And there was eight thousand in my wallet and another eight thousand, more or less, coming in a day or two. I added everything up and wrote down the number. It was sixty-two thousand dollars. Nothing about that sum fooled me. I knew it was a lot of money, more than a 20 percent down payment on a house that you couldn’t even buy in our area. With that sum, I could have gotten a good mortgage on an apartment in Manhattan, a place in San Francisco, maybe even London—any stratospheric city in the world. I didn’t tell myself anything about what I was going to do with that number, I just looked at it.
The morning after Christmas, I got up, put on my clothes, and drove to the office. George was right there, fit as a fiddle and ready to trade. I showed him my check from the real estate closing and he said, “Let’s call Marcus.”
Marcus came down from our office in five minutes. He sat down a
t the screen and stared at it. I saw that little sign, the A-like thing. The number after it was 434.23. I was disappointed. Marcus said, “How much do you have to play with?”
“Eight thousand.”
“More would be better.”
“More is always better,” said George.
We stared at the screen for a while, but the price stayed in the same region, 430–438, without varying very much. Marcus said, “How about silver?”
George pointed to another little symbol. The number beside it was 52. Marcus looked at it for a few moments, then said, “Oh, I don’t know. Let me think about this. You got a paper?”
“Dawn has one.”
I went and got it and handed it to Marcus. Marcus grinned at me, perhaps an acknowledgment that I had caved at last, but he didn’t say anything. For Christmas, I had given him a Waterman pen and I had given Jane a pair of black fur-lined calfskin gloves to go with a red coat she wore. I had given Linda a plant, an orchid. It was expensive and it came with detailed instructions. I had given Justin a baseball glove and Amanda an elaborate set of art materials. Right there at the last minute, probably because I’d run into Felicity and we’d talked so congenially about love, I had gotten into the Christmas spirit.
Marcus was looking at the paper, but George was looking at the screen, and just then George said, “There we go.” The price after the little symbol was now 431.76, and soon after that, 427.76. I said, “Why does it do that?”
“Ah,” said George. “If only I knew.”
“It does that because some big player decided to park his millions somewhere else,” said Marcus. “Maybe he had a good lunch and felt better about life. Maybe shares in Philip Morris went down. At any rate, he’s convinced a lot of his friends. Look at that.” The price continued to fall. Soon it was at 416 and change. The skin on my arms began to tingle, and then Marcus said, “Let’s go out and get a cup of coffee and come back.”