The Dream Merchant

by Fred Waitzkin

  In the shade of a narrow stretch of tall pines Jim found some hoofprints in the dirt. This would help. He walked along the trees for a half hour and wondered how the cows would look and how many he would find. There was no question of finding them. In fact, he wanted to draw the game out; more hours in the country meant time away from their house that was cold even in the spring, their rooms permanently imprinted with chill and a mother’s sorrow. He came to another stretch of meadow and lost the tracks in a confusion of trampled grass and brush. He found tracks again approaching the river and walked along the bank for a mile.

  Sure enough, the small herd was drinking at the river’s edge. Jim approached casually, as if he didn’t have a care, and then he started talking softly to himself, and when the cows looked up he turned away as if he weren’t really interested. Talking to cows was just a trick. Jim kept up his prattle to some trees rustling on the bank, to the swollen river, soothing words to go with a spring afternoon. He yawned. By the time he began calling the cows he’d become a part of their place. They swished their tails and looked up at him, licked water off their faces. They didn’t come to him. Not yet. He knew they wouldn’t. They didn’t know him. But they weren’t afraid. He kept speaking to them while he walked to the riverbank and scooped a couple of handfuls of gravel into his bucket. Then Jim called to them again, this time in a louder voice, and he shook the bucket as if it were filled with grain. The cows began to walk to him as they had many times before when he carried the chop bucket on Grandpa’s farm. Jim knew they would come.

  It was easy to fool cows, although the farmer could hardly have been more surprised when Jim came back leading a procession of twenty Herefords ready for milking. He gave Jim two quarters and was true to his word about the job. Each afternoon after school Jim found the cows and then did some chores for the farmer. Most evenings Jim gave the quarters to his mom. It was enough to pay the rent and put a little food on the table.

  * * *

  Young Jim was tireless and seemed endowed with a precocious sense of responsibility and limitless goodwill. By the hour he listened to the woes of his abandoned mother. He soothed her. He rubbed her blistered feet. At first light he was delivering newspapers in the snow before school, and afterwards he worked for the farmer. When there was an hour Jim gathered wildflowers in the field for his mom to sell in the church. If there was a job to be done Jim never had to be asked twice. Before the age of nine Jim was the breadwinner and patriarch of his home, adored and fully relied upon by his faithful mom. But this hardworking, better-than-good boy had a secret passion that burned stronger with the years. He lusted for his father.

  6.

  In his daydreams Jim reaches for Mara while he drives their creaky Volvo for the morning paper or takes her children to school. He burns for her. When they walk together on the street she puts her hand inside the pocket of his tight jeans and smiles tenderly. She touches him a little. He feels empowered by their rebellion, this fevered, improbable chapter even in a long life of fresh starts. Imagine a seventy-five-year-old man turned on while walking across the intersection headed to the supermarket. He is with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. Her two young kids trail behind calling him Daddy. He hasn’t worn such tight-fitting pants for twenty years or more—she chooses his clothes. Mara kisses him deeply, defiantly, in front of the Wynn-Dixie. She will show everyone their love. Old ladies turn and shake their heads. She is wearing sexy white shorts on a hot fall afternoon, presses her shapely tanned leg against him, kisses his ear. She is amused, but it is more. She is incited by the spectacle of her and Jim. It is their desire that presages everything good down the road, belittles the stares of ladies in front of the Wynn-Dixie and the bitchy arguments against their chances from Jim’s friends like me, and Phyllis, his abandoned wife.

  The girl smiles. They don’t have our happiness, baby, she says.

  When they are alone in their shabby rooms, Mara seems oblivious to his age. She talks exuberantly about their lives in twenty years, in thirty years: their homes, cars, long-term mortgages. The best colleges for her kids, who will soon be their kids. She is a careful planner. In the mornings they sip coffee and use the sunny palaver of young couples just starting out. She usually calls him baby.

  One afternoon I ask Mara, What will you do when he is sick, when he can no longer go places with you? She seems completely confounded by this question. What about when he is too old to fool around? I ask.

  He is not old, she says simply. But her face has turned crimson from surprise or perhaps the cruelty of my question. I’m not sure what to make of it. I wonder whom she sees when they are making love. Or when his bunions are hurting and he can barely make it from the car into the pizzeria. Is it that she is imbued with a child’s transforming optimism that I can barely recall?

  Jim keeps placing me in front of them so that I will record all of this for “the book.” He envisions his magical effect upon her as a part of his legacy. Although there are moments when a shadow passes and Jim asks me, What do you think?

  The question cuts too many ways.

  * * *

  Before Jim met Mara he had been marketing a line of appliances—mattresses, blankets, pillows, back and ankle braces—purported to alleviate pain and foster healing utilizing magnetic therapy. After a half-dozen years of considerable success and high living the business had fallen into decline. Prior to his leaving for Israel, things had become so bad financially that Jim and Phyllis had been forced to leave their spacious condominium for a one-bedroom apartment that was also on the Intracoastal. Jim was humiliated about this move. He traveled to Tel Aviv, where network marketing was still in its infancy, hoping to revitalize his business by signing on new recruits (down lines), but more fundamentally trying to revitalize himself.

  During his three-month stay in Israel we spoke on the phone every couple of weeks. Jim described his new life in considerable detail and especially his courting of an attractive young woman whom he met at one of his introductory recruiting meetings. He spoke about their unlikely romance and his own sexual rebirth at considerable length, and he described their sex with details and candor that embarrassed me and frankly put me on edge.

  I tried to reel him back. Hey, Jim, it’s time to come home, I said. You realize, it’s the football season. Come on. Enough.

  If I could just get him on the plane back to Florida the old life would take hold. I’d come down to Miami and we’d be back talking in the Blue Moon, betting the games and plotting the next moves. The girl would soon become another old story, some laughs in a bar.

  Not yet, buddy, he answered firmly.

  When I got off the line with Jim I felt unnerved.

  * * *

  The evening Jim met Mara, he had been standing at a lectern in the meeting room of a small hotel in Tel Aviv, looking a little tired, but natty as always in one of his custom-tailored Florida suits and sleek Italian leather shoes. He was looking at his notes and trying to summon the old pep for his bread-and-butter talk about the ease of building a residual income for life. It was one thing to give this talk when you are flying high in a palace on Brickell Avenue above the Intracoastal and another when you are depressed and alone in a foreign country, worried about the next month’s rent. Jim was looking around the audience—mostly middle-aged men, dressed badly, fidgeting and sweating as if they’d soon be asked to perform up front like Jim—when he noticed a young woman, lovely auburn hair to the shoulders, lipstick, a slight girlish figure. Their eyes met. She was staring at him, which was disconcerting but also pleasurable. His energy for the presentation came from her.

  She came up to him after the talk, wanted to know more about the business. They went out for a cup of coffee. She and her husband had fallen into a financial rut. They weren’t getting anywhere. The husband, Shimon, had no motivation to do anything. When he came home from his job, he plopped in front of the television, barely acknowledged the children. She touched Jim’s hand to make her point. She was interested in
magnetic therapy; could he tell her something more about it? And what is this thing you call network? Her accent was intoxicating and alive. No, network marketing, he corrected with a smile. She listened earnestly. But he wasn’t up to this. The business trip had been going poorly. Hardly any sales of his products, and few recruits were signing up. Apparently it hadn’t been such a good idea to sell his magnetic healing aids to a population preoccupied with war. When he wandered the streets of the city, young men and women rushed past him, fearful or quickened by the violence; older folk were just weary. Jim wasn’t noticed, Jim who had always been the center of the party, but this girl hung on every word. She asked if he would meet with her husband, talk to him about the business. Shimon was sleepwalking through his life. Maybe Jim could wake him up. You are so convincing, she insisted. It was very hot in the room. She had dark hair under her arms, thick lipstick. She wore a short skirt, and when she slowly crossed her legs Jim shivered like an old horse. What if she noticed? She was so young and fresh. He tried to shake off this far-fetched desire. But he knew that he must get free of his loser mentality. Jim began to explain what the business could do for them, the many riches it had given to him and Phyllis. He talked past the ache in his gut, the sadness of recent failures, and described the palatial condo where he had once lived with Phyllis in Miami, the great parties they had held overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, the smell of the sea air in the evening when storms blew in from the east. He didn’t mention that his business had nearly gone broke and they had been forced to move into a modest apartment.

  Jim and Mara walked back to his small rented room so he could give her material to study. When she took his hand he began to tremble as if the temperature had plummeted. Jim couldn’t stop shaking. He didn’t know if he could still make love. He felt so diminished, pared right down to old age. It was humiliating to be shaking on the street. The girl wasn’t nervous at all. She wanted to stop for a moment and then she kissed him deeply. He almost said, Thank you, as though she’d given an old man a gift to remember, but her face was flushed with desire. Once they arrived at Jim’s small room she took the lead. Mara nursed him back to life with passion served up with innocent eyes and much laughter. She could not get enough of her older lover, kissed his aging chest and legs with irrepressible relish. For Jim this was flattery that felt like redemption.

  * * *

  Jim didn’t want to leave Israel, but he wasn’t making a dollar. He called me in New York and asked to loan him the money for the flight home. It was jarring to think of my high-roller friend without the funds to buy a ticket. But I think he would have stayed in Israel and lived on nothing except the girl agreed to join him in Florida.

  When Jim returned to Phyllis, he spent his days sitting in a chair looking out the bay window facing the canal, waiting for Mara to call. For the first two days he didn’t tell Phyllis about the girl and she tried to regale him with the latest gossip about their aging friends along with a big dose of the optimism she had learned from him, except she had never been able to pull off his pep talks. Jim couldn’t pay attention to his wife for more than a minute or two. The enormity of what he had done, what he was going to do, paralyzed him. He couldn’t think of how to explain the end of their long marriage.

  But mostly, he didn’t think about Phyllis at all, though she rarely left the room. She watched him sitting by the window and figured out the general drift before he said a word about the girl. He was afraid Mara would change her mind, wouldn’t travel here to begin their new life. He shook his head like a victim. Jim was trying to keep their dialogue alive inside. Sitting in his chair, he tried to summon her smell, her taste. He didn’t want to be interrupted. He couldn’t bear the violation of Phyllis’s voice or her long stretches of crying once she fully understood his intention.

  Jim had no energy for his marketing business. Of course he needed money, but he was obsessed with Mara (it would take her nearly two months to settle her affairs and join him in Florida), and he couldn’t bear the grind of travel and attending meetings, listening to endless sad-sack stories that were at the heart of signing new recruits. Suddenly these group sessions seemed to mirror an inner deadness. Their inflated promises and coarseness were inconsistent with the new feelings that stirred his being.

  His former best buddies, the top guys in his organization, were bewildered by Jim’s reticence to soldier on. They offered him a new product line with a guaranteed income and still Jim didn’t return their calls. Top executives, distributors, casual friends, his grown daughter, his wife, the lot of them had been swept aside by improbable love.

  * * *

  When Jim and Mara are window-shopping the glamour stores in downtown Miami and happen to run into one of his salesmen or good buddies from the old days, and there have been many, he usually greets the man as “bub.” It is hard to imagine the surfeit of dreams and shared aspirations that have suddenly and tragically drained into this tiny dismissive noun. Whenever I hear him use it I feel embarrassed for the friend, though at the same time I feel pleased to retain a place in Jim’s much-diminished circle. It has become a circle of three, but only because I cling to him like a pilot fish. I feel like calling back to the spurned stranger, Wait, just wait! I still believe (or want to believe) Jim’s infatuation will pass and he’ll return to the old days with Phyllis.

  She would take him back, even now.

  7.

  Why does he want to be with her? Phyllis asked me. She’s a terrorist.

  One night I was with Jim and Mara, and the next I visited Phyllis in the dimly lit one bedroom where she had waited for Jim when he was in Israel.

  She has him hypnotized, hypnotized. Phyllis repeated this word slowly while looking at my face to see if she’d gotten it right. Phyllis has often annoyed me with her choice of words, not exactly wrong but not right either. I was tempted to say to her, Captivated, enthralled, fascinated. But I didn’t. I was barely listening.

  While Jim was in Israel for months loving Mara, it never once occurred to Phyllis that he wouldn’t stand by her. They had been married nearly three decades and Jim was her lion. Like many of us, Phyllis resisted the image in the mirror. She didn’t notice her dappled, bulging thighs, her spreading hips and pudgy face; she still lovingly patted on her morning makeup, slipped into a short skirt, and showed a plunging neckline. It was the way he had coached her to dress. Then she walked to the supermarket in the dreamy style of Jim’s young lover, in Toronto, twenty years his junior, when she still had a tiny waist, thrilling hips, and a rolling Marilyn Monroe walk through paradise.

  They met one night in a club in Toronto. She had been sitting at a table with a few friends and he sent over a bottle of champagne. Jim introduced himself and they chatted a little. He was a charming guy, but she had a boyfriend. Before the end of the night he’d coaxed her phone number. Jim called three or four times before Phyllis agreed to meet him for lunch. He stopped by for her in his new Mercedes convertible. Their second date was a two-hour ride that ended at a gated estate on Lake Ontario with tennis courts, two speedboats, servants’ quarters, a gorgeous water view. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was his place.

  That night he asked her to move in with him. She laughed at his audacity, but he wouldn’t let it go. He asked her again and again, triangulated all of her incredulity and doubts with enthusiasm and a stream of promises. Jim promised to take her on his private jet to Vegas. He would show her things she couldn’t imagine. It was very hard to say no to him.

  * * *

  I was resolved to be honorable to both Jim and Phyllis, but it wasn’t easy. I left Jim’s place the night before feeling lusty and troubled, as though my youth was seeping away. Mara’s aura was all over me, her heat and a vague invitation I couldn’t pin down. Was I losing out? Surely I was losing out. I was growing old with my wife. Mara gestured with her hand, pulled me into another room to tell a secret. For an instant, her beautiful leg brushed against mine. Jim wanted me to feel what she brings. He encouraged it. He wa
s selling her to me, selling wildly.

  Now I was seated in Phyllis’s apartment of grief. She and Jim had been forced to move here after Jim could no longer come up with the mortgage payments on their condominium. Phyllis had quickly found this modest place, not far from the water. Jim would be able to take walks in the afternoon, looking at passing boats. They didn’t have money for the security deposit, but she had convinced the doddering manager of the old apartment complex to let them move in with their boxes, the big projection TV, and their stainless refrigerator. The bedroom had termites, and Jim needed to rip the framing off the door and kill the bugs or at least slow them down. He tore off the wooden frames with an old man’s fury. We will be out of here in a few months, she said to calm him down. Jim sat by the bay window, looking out, hardly speaking. The view of the canal reminded him of the boat he had been forced to give up. Seventy-five years old and he had lost nearly everything.

  Phyllis had preserved Jim’s dark mood of a half year earlier, before he met the girl, or even deepened it. She wanted to tell me secrets about Jim’s girlfriend, terrible things. What could Phyllis tell me that would be convincing? I was reeling from Mara’s seductiveness, her undertow; we can’t swim against it. In this dark place, his lover’s leap made perfect sense. Mara is youth that we can only barely remember. Young girls live every night. Every night is the night. Jim’s wife was speaking, but I could barely hear her.

  I was angry with Phyllis. She had always been so fast to defend him, said whatever it took to get him off the hook. It wasn’t Jim’s fault. Never Jim’s fault, no matter how many promises he broke, how many thousands were lost, how many innocents lost their savings in one of his marketing schemes or phony investments. It was the accountant’s fault. Jim was misled.

  Cardboard boxes littered this apartment, which she would have made picture-perfect if he were here, if he would only come home. Everything had stopped in place. He had taken the big TV two months before so he could watch sports—she had wanted him to take it for the games—and there was a gaping hole between two cabinets where it had sat against the wall, an unseemly tangle of antennae and speaker wires left where they had fallen. On the glass dining room table, where she had carefully laid out splendid table settings for dinner parties in the big condo, there were piles of discount coupons ripped from magazines, hundreds of coupons. She used them during the final months in the condominium, so he could entertain, to buy cheap cheese and crackers. She no longer bothered with them, but throwing them away felt reckless.