The Dream Merchant

by Fred Waitzkin

  Their jewelry and most of the paintings were gone, sold for a fraction of their value. Nearly everything of real value was gone. Her remaining share of the lengthy marriage was in the cardboard boxes. Her share of Canada, her portion of Florida waterfront homes and start-up companies with skyrocketing futures, were all in those boxes. In several of them I could see ribbons and wrapping that she used each December for her Christmas presents. Every year she would slowly accumulate gifts to send out from her and Jim.

  She had a keen feel for what his grandchildren would appreciate and on the floor were their books and art supplies wrapped in favored pastel colors with lovely ribbons. She knew much more about these two kids than he did. She knew more about his daughter as well. Phyllis and Jim had been living in separate homes now for two months, but remarkably, Jim’s fifty-year-old daughter still hadn’t been told about their separation. She loved Phyllis and he couldn’t bear to break the news. In a couple of weeks, after the New Year, she and Jim planned to travel together to the coast and talk in person to the woman. Jim would sit on the sofa looking contrite and weary, as though the world had pushed him into this unseemly affair—Jim’s daughter would be horrified by her father’s runaway lust—while Phyllis would put an upbeat spin on their separation: It was all for the good. She and Jim remained the very best of friends, Phyllis would say, easing the way for him.

  For so many years Phyllis had selected Christmas gifts for his most important clients, his up lines. It was one of her responsibilities. This year’s presents were also on the floor. She prided herself on knowing what people really liked, and selected each gift with care and conviction—many years ago she and Jim had agreed that sending the presents to his up lines was money in the bank. She had written all of this year’s cards, each of them with a personal touch from Jim and Phyllis, no mention of the breakup. She couldn’t bear to tell anyone, not yet, although all of their distributors were discussing it on the Internet. Phyllis wanted to send the Christmas gifts but didn’t have money for postage. It would come to several hundred dollars. She’d have to speak with Jim about money for the postage. The stacks of unsent presents made her desperate. What was he thinking? Without his contacts, he would be ruined. She would be ruined. They were still dancing together in Las Vegas. She couldn’t stop dancing. Phyllis was up nights fretting about Jim’s contacts. It was painful to listen.

  * * *

  She was sitting on her knees, beside me on the chesterfield, wearing red Dr. Denton pajamas, a big woman in a child’s outfit, enormous melon breasts hanging free, wide fleshy hips, her puzzled face heavily made up in the Vegas style that Jim favored. He’d taught her a lot. He’d taught her how to be the younger woman, to excite the room with novelty and risk like Ava had before her. That had been Phyllis’s job. She was still poised to do it.… She’d lost weight, to please Jim, still needed to lose another thirty pounds. But not so large as before. Maybe Jim could accept her now. She seemed to be showing herself to me with this question in mind. Phyllis was titillated by his new sex life. I could feel it. She was coming alive herself after years of repose, readying herself for him, stimulated by their sex. She was starving herself. She wanted to be a small woman, for him. Most days she went jogging on sweltering Miami streets, her face flushed from effort, dripping sweat, hoping he’d drive by and see her in sweats and the stylish ankle weights he had given to her as a Christmas present some years back. She yearned to please him. This remained her primary drive. She couldn’t turn it off.

  * * *

  She blew her nose. When he came back from Israel he spent his days looking out, she said, pointing to the curved bay window. We still might have worked it out. This woman wouldn’t allow it. She was calling every hour from Israel. She was afraid Jim would forget her, his little sex trifle, so she called him every hour. She wouldn’t give him a moment with me, didn’t want to risk it. She wouldn’t give me a chance. He raced for the phone. Otherwise he was glued there, by the window. Despite not being in contact those first few days of separation, she called fourteen, fifteen times in a day. Jim and I would begin to talk, he would tell me how he was feeling or that I was his very best friend; I cried when he said that; he remembered a moment with his son in Canada. I gave him a hug and the phone rang. As if she had a camera in the room. This terrorist. And he would cradle the phone in a corner so I wouldn’t hear, but I heard everything. He called her baby. His baby. He was calling her these love pet words in the corner. Sometimes I couldn’t help myself and I raced into the bedroom and picked up the phone. I needed to hear it all, to wash myself in their stupid endearments. Oh, Jim, I’m so depressed, she would say with her little hot voice. Jerking him off. Oh, Jim, I can’t sleep. I miss you so much. I’m so afraid. I’m laying on the floor, Jim. What will I do? I have a stomachache, Jim. I miss you so bad, baby. These phone calls came at all hours in the night, so I couldn’t get my balance. I couldn’t sleep. She never thought about me, not for a minute.

  Sometimes after he got off with her he was very dark. He wouldn’t say a word until she rang again or he’d say terrible things. Phyllis, I can’t make love to a woman with big breasts. I always had big breasts and he loved them. I even made them bigger for him. She took a deep breath. He told me that he loves her feet. He always loved my feet for being so small, but now he loves her feet. She has feet like a man. Every night I rubbed his back, I walked across his back and he called me his darling. But after this woman, he said to me, Who could love you, Phyllis? Who could love you, Phyllis? He said that. Look at yourself. You’re a fat woman.

  She started to weep. Now, I was crying as well. I embraced her. We were both sobbing, our faces wet and gummy from her makeup. We laughed. Maybe I loved her for the first time that night. We were just people getting older.

  I held Jim in that chair, she continued, after he said to me he felt like blowing his brains out. He was so depressed, he didn’t know what to do. I love you, Phyllis. He said that. And then she called, at that instant. She was pulling him away from me. I love you, baby. I love you, baby. Phone sex. She had him. She had him. And he would speak to her in the corner, over there, clutching the phone for his life. They did baby talk. An old man speaking baby talk. If he went out for a few minutes, I picked up the phone and when she heard my voice she hung up. It would have been so human if she had said, Phyllis, it is Mara, could I please speak to Jim? But she heard my voice and hung up. She terrorized me. I was trying to get Jim together. He was so down and confused. What kind of person does such a thing?

  Once I knew she was coming, there was no changing it; I found the house for him myself. I knew he couldn’t manage. He was just sitting over there by the window. Each day was passing and he was sitting there. She was coming in four weeks. She was coming in seventeen days. He was paralyzed. I was afraid for him. I always did things for Jim. I drove him around until I found a little house that would work. It wasn’t much, not his style, but it was in a safe neighborhood with a good school system. That was important to her. Once the husband, Shimon, decided she could bring the kids to the States, she became fierce about her children. She wanted the best for them. The boy needed gymnastic classes, whatever they cost. He must have gymnastic classes. Believe me, there was never any question about whether she would bring her children. That was just talk for Jim, part of her act.

  I picked out their furniture, the silverware, the matching glasses, the children’s swings for the backyard. There wasn’t much money, but I tried to imagine what she would like. I can’t explain why I did it except he wanted me to. I wanted him to be happy.

  Did he tell you about her sister? Probably not. Mara’s sister came here four years ago and married an older man and then she dumped him. The sister is living in Miami. She has a young boyfriend with a flashy sports car and a house on Key Biscayne. So what do you think is going to happen to Jim after he marries her and she gets the green card? Haven’t you noticed the change in him? He’s worn out by her. He’s become an acquiescive person.

  Phy
llis caught my eye, and I nodded to her; “acquiescive” was the right word for Jim. His top guys from the company sometimes talk to me, she continued. Jim doesn’t make business calls anymore. He doesn’t return their calls. He sits and waits for her. He dreams. What does she want with an old man who dreams about the past? Just the green card. Then she’ll walk out or she’ll kill him with all her love. What could anyone say about it?

  8.

  After a month in New York doing rewrites for an article, I was back in Florida visiting again. On the first night the girl made us barbecued chicken and a delicious Israeli salad, a welcome departure from pizza, which almost always gives me heartburn. She laughed and served us red wine. She was definitely settling in, no longer a visitor. During the gap of time since my last visit, little secrets had taken hold like seedlings, modest changes in their home (a new red-and-white-checkered tablecloth with a Walmart tag still fixed to a corner), suggesting plans and movements that I didn’t know about.

  My God, didn’t she ever notice that Jim was old? This question had begun to obsess me.

  Jim was dressed in sporty Bermudas and a tight T-shirt to show off his strong tattooed arms, but he looked tired and gray. Too much Mara. Too much sex, and no more lounging on his outdoor patio selling optimism. He had taken on the pallor of their drab walls and filthy venetian blinds like a sea creature blending with the bottom. Also, the creases in my friend’s face had deepened, and I flashed on my own dad’s face during his last months, thinner than Jim’s, but Dad’s creases were so deep that they could have been knife wounds—they frightened me. Meanwhile, the girl had stopped wearing so much makeup, which made her look even younger, more adorable and fresh.

  * * *

  The following day I was driving from my motel back out to Jim’s, musing about stories he’d been telling us, trying to connect the boy to the old man. As a kid Jim had called the shots in his house. There was no parent instilling the meaning of “no.” When he was ten, Jim went to the best department store in Edmonton and bought a flashy expensive suit to imitate his dad. The family was still very poor, without a lot of basics, but Jim’s mother didn’t say a word. He told us that when he was twelve he fell in love with a friend of his mother’s who had been renting a bedroom in their little house while her husband was away in the army. Jim thought about her incessantly and began bringing the woman wildflowers and then little presents from town. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. Some days Sally would ask her son to take out the dirty clothes and wash them. Jim would hunt for the woman’s underwear, put it to his face and inhale her. At the time Jim had still been sleeping on the floor with his two brothers. It was Sally who asked her friend if Jim could sleep on one side of her big bed—he was working so hard to support the family. The thirty-year-old had been amused and perhaps also intrigued to share her bed with the child master of their house. One night she allowed the boy to touch her ample body, more than allowed. Jim’s mother had been complicit. She was so grateful to her hardworking son whom she depended on for everything. But if the thoughtful clever boy never learns the meaning of “no,” what happens later on when doors begin to close in his face?

  It occurred to me that Jim’s sexual exploits with younger women, much younger as he’s grown older, was perhaps born in the tabooed indulgence of the child with a shapely woman nearly three times his age, this sublime incongruity. Over the years, Jim’s young lovers have given him confidence and vitality but most essentially the license to shed his skin and move on from static and occasionally dangerous circumstances—to stay alive as he saw it. Moving on for Jim, starting over, was staying alive.

  I was thinking about Jim’s younger women and had lost count of the lights and turns to his place. Fuck! I was completely lost. Again. It was humiliating. Each visit I have to call him on the cell and Jim gives me detailed directions: past the Catholic church, past a large empty lot, take a left, then the next right.

  But it wasn’t just my distracted driving. There was a desolate sameness to this neighborhood that played havoc with my sense of direction. The baking asphalt streets were interchangeable; each numbing house had exactly the same penumbra of sadness.

  Eventually Jim hustled out onto Nowhere Street waving his arms so that I would stop circling. He was grinning as if I’d pulled into the number-one spot for happiness in the state of Florida. He never seemed to notice the rusty barbecues, jalopies, and broken bikes, the heat rising from driveways, or one of his neighbors carrying out the garbage with an alarming torpor.

  For my dear friend, life’s tawdry surface had been transformed by this young woman’s allure and artful coaxing, by the public theater of their foreplay (her thick maroon lipstick and brazen invitations astonish me while they incite him), by the daily routine they had worked out: when the kids were at school she guided him to the bedroom for a quickie; and after their abundant evening meal with wine, when he was indolent with food and alcohol, his lips a little greasy from chicken thighs or liver, she led him into the bedroom. She was always moist and hungry for him. But if Jim happened to be reluctant, which was rare, she turned her back to him and lifted herself a little. She reached around and slowly opened herself with her fingers. The sight of her young wet pussy hit him with a reckless surge, her needy smell and little sounds. He stiffened and threw himself against her back and ass while she laughed and he reached for her little breasts. Baby, she said, pushing him inside, taking hold of his old hanging balls and caressing them like dice. Jim fucked for nearly an hour, thrusting into her with his still powerful thighs. My friend reported all of this while giggling and shaking his head to say, Can you believe this kid?

  I’m getting younger, he said to me, sucking in his belly and looking at himself in the narrow mirror on his closet door.

  But if Jim happened to wake in the middle of night wracked with dread (lost somewhere between lives; or, much worse, when he heard the call of his waiting wife, Phyllis)—and this had been happening two or three times a week—the girl put her hand on his shoulder. It’s all right, baby, she murmured in her beguiling accent, pardoned his sins with a hand on his shoulder. He adored her voice and the smell of her after sex, her legs spread like a wild animal cooling down. Just a word or two and she flipped him from guilt back to rapture.

  * * *

  The August heat was blistering on the driveway outside their bungalow. Jim had walked inside ahead of me while I opened the trunk to get a six-pack. When I came through the front door I could hear them talking in the kitchen. I heard my name and something defiant from her. I couldn’t make it out, but it made me sweat. There was rebuke lingering in the air and I felt betrayed.

  After two or three minutes he came back into the front room. He looked distracted and I couldn’t contain myself. Jim, aren’t we buddies, man? I actually asked him this pitiful question. Then I remembered many years earlier I’d asked this very question to my dad when he was sick and I was afraid I would soon lose him.

  Jim smiled at me. Sure we’re buddies. You are my best friend, he said slowly and meaningfully. He took my hand.

  * * *

  At times I felt as though Jim were living anew and dying in the same moment. He would run off the names of his top salesmen to Mara and me, so we would know who he was or maybe just to jog his own memory—decades of salesmen strung out like a banner, men Jim had made wealthy. I wondered how many of them were now dead. Jim wouldn’t know. He’d keep thinking they were all still making deals and living rich. Two or three times he told me about going to a fancy dealership in the late seventies with several of the guys to help pick out a Rolls-Royce for Todd Kelso, his top man. Just two years before, Todd had answered a newspaper ad, he was a young man sitting around without a clue, bowling on Friday nights, and Jim made him a millionaire. That’s something.

  I noticed the girl smirk. She all but blurted out, Baby, why do we need to hear so much about old salesmen? Mara was young and without much patience for nostalgia and intimations of demise. She wanted to move on with her
life, with her suburban aspirations.

  Jim smiled at her sadly. He was slumped back against the frayed pillows of the sofa. He was worn out, his ankles swollen from too much pizza and canned soup.

  I also dreamed of aging salesmen, of my father and his buddies who sat ringside at the fights in Philadelphia showing off their tricked-out young women while Julio Mederos pounded the shit out of Harold Johnson, Jr. The portly balding men grinned whenever smatterings of gladiator blood or sweat fell onto their girls’ white scarves or gloves or their enchanting faces. Some of my dad’s friends bought country homes they couldn’t afford and played at being barons in New Jersey for years, until that battering winter when favorite receptionists inexplicably turned them away and telephone calls weren’t returned. None of the guys understood that the newest generation of handsome young selling lions had crowded them out; it was the way of life.

  The girl decided that I was a saboteur, always dragging Jim back to old times. She complained to him that I stepped all over their newly planted garden. It’s true, I never accepted their shared illusion about his eternal youth. Their pretense seemed ugly and made me wonder if they were gaming each other. I was moved by my friend’s old age, which was a real thing. But the girl was unsettling. She made me doubt myself. Maybe she was right—I was stepping on their garden.