by Jane Smiley
By 1988, Gottfried’s houses were selling for half a million dollars. He was using Carla King as his Realtor. The only thing he ever said to me about Marcus was, “I told you you should have listened to me about that asshole. If you’d listened to me, you would still be selling my houses.” That I wasn’t selling his houses was my one relief.
They wanted more for the former restaurant than it would have cost George Sloan when we first saw it, but not as much more as the improvements were worth, and anyway George had a lot more money now, and he could buy it without deciding, for the moment, what he wanted to do with it. What had happened at the farm, what had happened with the restaurant, perfectly illustrated his theory of value, which he expounded to me more than once—“In the end, you know, there’s a premium to be paid for starting something yourself. The deal is, tempting as it is to start it yourself, it costs more. You got to get in there after the building’s done but before they’ve got anything to show for it, and you can get yourself a deal. That’s what I think anyway. I mean, this restaurant is a case in point. It was a good idea. Who says it might not still be a good idea, but not every good idea is a profitable idea, if you know what I mean. Now, your friend Marcus, I always thought he was full of good ideas, I’ll say that for him.”
I did call Marcus my friend. I would say, “He was my best friend. I don’t understand it.” But, really, I hadn’t called him my best friend when he was still around. Calling him my best friend was a bad idea, an expensive idea, too. During the period that I was referring to him as my best friend, I had shooting pains in my knees, constant migraine headaches, and a persistent pain on the right side of my neck. I spent a lot of money at the chiropractor, who took X rays and decided that my atlas was completely out of alignment, and then I went there and had my atlas aligned six times, which cost plenty of money with all the doctors I was seeing as well, but the pains didn’t go away until I stopped referring to Marcus as my best friend and started referring to him as Marcus-Burns-Oh-I-had-a-run-in-with-him-too.
George Sloan would go over to the house on the hill and sit in a chair in the front room and gaze out over the valley and the trees and the deepening twilight until the earth was dark and the entire dome of the sky was a fountain of stars: “As good as a movie, as far as I’m concerned.” He was right. The time I went with him, it was quite spectacular. We sat in a couple of plastic chairs, with beers, and for once George was quiet and I was the one who talked. I looked out at the cosmic display, and I said, “But why did he have to take all my money too? It was like he was waiting around just to screw me. He got the bank’s money on December seventeenth, but he waited around an extra two weeks for me to clean out my bank account and give it to him. Why did he want my money? My own money? Was it revenge for me holding out on him somehow? Did he see it like that? I mean, I gave it to him of my own accord, but he acted as if he was my friend. He said he was my friend.”
“Every word Marcus Burns ever spoke was a lie,” said George, “even when it was factually correct.”
“Yes, but—”
“Think about that. Just think about it.”
We were sitting entirely in the dark. I was quiet for a moment; then I said, “But George. Listen. You could say he just decided to steal the money at the end, or you could say he looked at us right from the beginning and saw us as patsies, or you could say the plan kind of grew as things went along. I feel like it’s killing me not to know. He was my best friend.”
“He was your best friend.”
“What?”
“I mean that when he stole your money he distanced himself from you, and for all you know that’s the one thing that’s kept you out of jail. Look at that Milky Way, how it cuts across the sky. You know, I bring the kids over here, and they say, ‘Yeah, Dad, stars. They’re nice, Dad.’” He laughed affectionately. “Marcus Burns made out like he knew the ins and outs of everything. Maybe he did. So who’s to say he didn’t know what was up with Crosbie? Who’s to say he didn’t know everything that was going to happen with Portsmouth Savings and all of that? Who’s to say?” He settled comfortably in his chair. He said, “You know, that’s a nice window. I love a mullioned window.”
“He told me he had second sight.”
“He had a good instinct about the market, I’ll go that far.” He opened the cooler and offered me another beer. I showed him I wasn’t finished with the one I had. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. Finally he said, “Here’s what I thought about Nixon. It’s the same thing I thought about that guy, Lee Harvey Oswald. They were making it up as they went along. That’s what I think about Marcus. That’s all I think about Marcus.”
And that was the last time we talked about Marcus.
Felicity was divorced from Hank and both of them left the area. Hank went out West somewhere, maybe Montana, and Felicity moved to New York City after the younger boy went to college. I was working for a big national real estate firm by that time, and one of the first good sales I had was of the Davids’ house in Deacon. True to form, they tripled their investment and found a place in North Carolina. I had paid back the ten thousand dollars I’d borrowed from my parents when Marcus stole my money, and no one ever talked about Marcus Burns or Jane anymore. I no longer saw anyone who had known them.
Of course I had been a sucker. One thing about it all was how easy it went down. Day after day, driving around, thinking of this billion and that billion, the seasons rolling by. It was Marcus who made it easy, smiling, talking, persuading, telling me what to do. By contrast, everything I’d done before him and everything I did after was an effort. As much as I knew I was a sucker, though, it was almost impossible to accept the fact that I was likely never to hear anything from Marcus, never to know from his own lips what his story was. I felt like I wanted a very small thing—not my money back, not to do everything all over again differently, not to be a big American success, not even to exact revenge, after a while, but only to know what really happened. Everyone seemed to agree that Marcus was a liar, though, so what would he have told me? A lie, I suppose. Anyway, most people blamed Jane. It all changed when Jane came. It was Jane who cooked up the idea of the fake farmland in Kansas, Jane who put together the paperwork, Jane who knew that Portsmouth Savings was so awash in paperwork of all kinds and so eager to cook the books they would never check on anything as far away as Nebraska. Everyone said they had never liked Jane to begin with. Mike Lovell, who went back to running his gas station, swore that the big fight he heard between Marcus and Jane was all about that. “She had something over him, I guarantee it,” was Mike’s line. “She blackmailed him. I had her number from the first time I saw her, but you couldn’t say anything bad about her to Marcus.” Even so, I didn’t think that Jane wanted to steal my money. I thought that was Marcus’s own idea. That’s what I was really interested in.
I thought maybe Marcus and Jane would eventually come to trial and it would all come out, under oath: the truth at last. But Marcus and Jane disappeared. If there was a truth to be known, I was not, and probably would never be, in a position to know it. For a while, the thought that made me angriest was the thought of myself coming upon Marcus on a beach somewhere, of recognizing him instantly from afar and going up to him, and him not remembering who I was.
I came to feel that no one was interested in our particular events as long as I was. I came to think I was the last holdout, the one who couldn’t move on. Even my parents had a theory that reassured them—the workings of Satan in the world. They shook their heads regretfully when they discussed their theory, but it was something they understood.
In the winter of 1990, I went skiing at Hunter Mountain, north of New York City. I had been skiing a lot for about three years at that point, always by myself, sometimes every weekend for two or three months, at least for a day. I was getting pretty good. But I was fifty now, or as good as fifty, and, yes, my lawyer’s prophecy had come to pass. I was still at square one. Still living in my parents’ duplex, still selling
houses, still spending a fair amount of time at the Viceroy. This was one of those sharp, clear, very cold days. I think it was below zero. I had on some new goggles and was making my third run of the day. The first two had been fast and exhilarating and I was in a good mood, so when it happened it didn’t at all surprise me that the woman who got into the chairlift with me and pulled off her hat and mask turned out to be Felicity, laughing. Nor did it surprise me that she exclaimed, “Oh, Joey! It’s you at last!” and put her free arm around me.
The feeling of amazement grew from there, though, and most of the way up the mountain I was speechless. Her hair was long again, and her curls were edged with gray. Her face was thin. She looked beautiful. She said, “We’re all poor now. Isn’t that funny?” She laughed. Then I laughed. She said, “Don’t you ever think about that? That this is what it’s like not having to pay taxes ever again?” And then she kissed me on the lips and we got to the top of the mountain and got off the lift. We stood there for a moment, putting our hats and goggles back on, adjusting our poles and stamping our skis, left, right, and then she stepped over the edge, down the mountain, and for once I recognized something my parents had talked about all my life, and that was the operation of grace in the material world, and I followed her, as fast as she could go.
Acknowledgments
Several lawyers advised me on this project, but they preferred not to be mentioned by name. I thank them anyway.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Smiley is the author of many novels, including A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Horse Heaven. She lives in Northern California. In 2001, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Also by Jane Smiley
Horse Heaven
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Moo
A Thousand Acres
Ordinary Love and Good Will
Catskill Crafts
The Greenlanders
The Age of Grief
Duplicate Keys
At Paradise Gate
Barn Blind
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2003 by Jane Smiley
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smiley, Jane.
Good faith / Jane Smiley.
p. cm.
1. Real estate agents—Fiction. 2. Divorced men—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.M39 G66 2003
813'.54—dc21 I I I I I I2002073096
eISBN: 978-1-4000-4065-0
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