The Dream Merchant

by Fred Waitzkin

  Many nights there were phone calls from Israel. When Mara spoke in Hebrew her voice turned harsh and even ruthless. Shimon, her ex-husband, continued stopping by at least twice each week. The children were gleeful with their dad in the house. Jim tried to be cordial or matter-of-fact around the younger man, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because Mara’s ex treated Jim like furniture. She made it clear she didn’t want Jim around for these visits. After Shimon left she seemed satisfied or resolved. Jim was afflicted by movements and plans beyond his reach. A few times he asked her, What’s happening? She shrugged or changed the subject. But soon she smiled at him and became very sexy. If anything, she was even hungrier for Jim. He told himself that it was his stories, his grandeur, that roused her appetite.

  * * *

  After they were married, time had seemed to tighten and become more jerky. Her gentle moments quickly gave way to rebuke or more often indifference. Whenever he displeased her (if he happened to speak to Phyllis on the phone, if his brother was late sending the check, if Mara became frustrated by his stories) she withheld. She pushed back with emptiness. With her glance or no glance at all Jim was enfeebled, wanting, reaching, pitiful. He felt old and oddly sapped of the vigor and youth she had bestowed only the night before or two nights before, the power she had given to him. Then for no apparent reason Mara smiled and well-being and gladness filled him like a beaker.

  But they danced in ever smaller stretches of shared space. It occurred to him that they had stopped listening to music together and holding hands. When he turned on Sinatra she stood up and left the room.

  Sometimes he implored her pitifully. Mara, I love you. I need you. She nodded his way but with an expression so coarse that she might have been a junkie or a whore. He shivered.

  He pushed back in the only way he knew. He tried to close the deal. He was sure that he could win her back with money, with glistening mahogany speedboats from forty years earlier. I sat in the tattered chair with my notebook while he gave her imported furniture from the Canada house, piece by piece. He watched her become more frustrated by what she could not have. He saw it, but he couldn’t stop talking money.

  22.

  Something about the building business focused Marvin Gesler’s restless mind, and he dug deep and found the gold. Perhaps it was the squat Quonset buildings themselves and Marvin was like a man who fell in love with a dog that looked like him, or maybe it was the skillful way Jim played Marvin, kept him satisfied and aimed at their astonishing enterprise that kept growing every which way and made them both very wealthy.

  Marvin’s petulance and his insufferable childlike neediness gradually became more muted. Jim noticed other smatterings of civility. Marvin stopped spitting into his hands and lost a little weight. Maybe it was just that he was becoming more streamlined for success, Jim thought. During their wacky brainstorming dinners Marvin came up with so many angles, large ones that made millions and clever side deals.

  Jim did hire several lovely executive assistants for Marvin. What was the harm? The girls seemed to tolerate him like an hour of inclement weather, nothing worse, from what Jim could tell. The first of these hopeful, needy girls sat with Marvin in his large swivel chair and allowed him to kiss and touch her. She was new to business and wanted to make her way. In the morning he brought flowers for her and little presents. Marvin discovered his heart and he quickly gave it away. He dreamed about the girl. He had never known such feelings. After three months the twenty-year-old felt guilty about her boyfriend and she quit the job. Marvin was disconsolate and distracted until Jim introduced him to another assistant and feelings began to stir again as if he had taken a potion.

  Jim glimpsed his partner’s evolving person, an unexpected romantic bent, his absorption in books, but this was not a reflective time for Jim, who was doing the work of many men.

  * * *

  I didn’t have time for Marvin, he said, looking up with exasperation.

  I noticed Mara’s expression at that moment, red in the face, impatient, exasperated herself, as Jim had been while trying to manage his partner’s love life over the phone from London or the plant in Caledon. Jim and Mara were drowning in his torpor and introspection about a storied life that had been defined at every turn by remarkable energy, moneymaking, an unquenchable drive for success, big balls. Jim had sold more sheds than all the other salesmen combined—he’d been a tidal wave. One great salesman can do the work of a thousand. I’ve seen it firsthand. (My own father was such a salesman for nearly ten years until he became sick.) But now Jim was trying to make sense of the whole picture. He had made so much and lost it all. How had he gotten to this point in life where he was sitting around on torn furniture with this impatient, secretive girl who was everything to him?

  Mara was made for the younger Jim—it was all over her face. She wanted the energy, his scams, money, charisma, power without apology. Mara wasn’t Ava. Perhaps Ava might have accepted this more reflective slower Jim.

  * * *

  In 1976, Gesler Sheds had nearly three hundred salesmen working mostly in the eastern half of Canada, placing ads in local papers and farm journals, responding in person to leads, mainly from farmers. The sales force, trained by Jim, brought in almost a hundred million in business that year. Their growth was so spectacular the company had difficulty keeping up on the manufacturing end. Jim had the energy of six men, traveled the country hiring and coaching new men, worked with contractors to build additional factory space, and every year he made hundreds of calls on farmers because he loved selling door-to-door. Meanwhile, Marvin was scheming for every dollar, reconfiguring the operation, and whittling at the edges as if it were a deepening conceit. He rarely left the Toronto plant. That was the year he implemented his franchising idea. No one else in the Canadian building business was leasing territories to salesmen, but Marvin was convinced that a man would work a whole lot harder if he owed money on his own business.

  Most days Jim was crisscrossing the country. He spent one week each month in the Toronto factory that was only a forty-minute drive from his house on Lake Ontario. Each morning the partners had breakfast and caught up. Jim spent much of the day meeting with farmers who regularly stopped by the factory to get brochures and price lists.

  In 1976, a basic Gesler fifty-by-one-hundred-foot retailed for fifteen thousand dollars, which was a large expenditure for a poor man. Most farmers worried whether they could afford a shed or should make do without. Jim understood that the lives of his customers were filled with toil and unattended needs—they could barely imagine another way of living. With such men it was a mistake to ladle on the easy life. Shared pain was Jim’s foot in the door. He recalled his own mom’s sixteen-hour workdays on his grandfather’s farm. She never took a single holiday. Hard work was the only way the family survived. With the farmers Jim was patient and respectful. Soon a conversation was trickling back and forth.

  Jim asked about the application for the steel shed, because it was a big move and he didn’t want to steer a workingman the wrong way. If it was potato or onion storage they would need special access ports. If it was machine storage Jim suggested adding a small partition for a little heated workshop. Maybe the farmer could put in a radio. It would make a comfortable little workplace during the frigid months, a simple retreat that even a stoic farmer might envision. Sure, it was an awful expense, but his machines wouldn’t rust in the rain and snow. He’d get more life out of them.

  Finally, reluctantly—because Jim preferred the talk of planting and tending animals—he agreed that he could save the farmer some money. This was always a serendipitous and emotionally charged moment. Jim happened to have a shed already fabricated; it had been on order for someone else, but it hadn’t been picked up. It was five thousand square feet, just what the farmer needed. If he could use this one and move quickly, Jim could save him four thousand dollars. Now, the farmer couldn’t believe his luck because his neighbor had just bought the same shed for fifteen thousand dollars. Four thousa
nd dollars was a fortune. Jim would throw in the partition for the workshop because he and the farmer had talked about it. He’d let the shed go for eleven thousand in a private cash deal, a handshake, no contract. But it was an arrangement just between the two of them, a onetime favor.

  Marvin choreographed these cash-and-carry deals that made the partners a fortune. There was no expense, as steel suppliers were always “gifting” rolls of steel to Marvin as inducements for future orders. Besides him, no one knew exactly how much raw steel was coming in, and with tens of thousands of finished sheds rolling through the factories each year they could always sell off six or seven in a week and pocket the money tax free. “Tax free” became an inside joke between Jim and Marvin, who knew every loophole and created his own. He could have written a book. Jim’s insider deals with farmers were where he got the cash to bring home to Ava.

  Three or four days a week there were boxes and packages arriving at Jim and Ava’s house on the lake, knickknacks mixed in with Jim’s pricier acquisitions from wherever he had traveled for Marvin. Some mornings Ava tore open a few, but mostly she stashed them in closets or carried them down to the basement.

  Ava could buy virtually anything she wanted, but their newest surge of wealth made her exhausted. She was the caretaker of a massive junk heap of finery. That had become her primary career, a bitter insight for Ava, who felt like an ornament herself. She couldn’t explain this to Jim, who was either selling or spending, buying more appliances and gadgets, shipping home cases of French wine, buying a new Mercedes, pressing Ava to spend thousands in tax-free cash.

  Jim was mostly away, but just having Ava within his orbit kept him balanced and gave him energy to succeed—that’s what he told her during his few days home, along with runs of goopy adoration and praise of her beauty that she tried to ward off, please. Increasingly, Ava was afflicted by doubts. What was she doing on the lake? She brooded that Lenny Bruce was right; she was eye candy, hardly more than a vehicle for a man to love himself. She was mortified by the idea. She began wearing simple clothes and eyeglasses. She studied lists of words, gave up her charming Southern accent, as if the real Ava would finally emerge.

  Mostly she wanted to be with Michael. She listened for the sound of the boy playing downstairs. He sat in his room for hours looking at books about dinosaurs, learned their habits and names. He liked walks by the water’s edge, skipping rocks or stepping on small crustaceans, or he wandered through the meadow behind the huge house imagining a triceratops or stegosaurus lumbering down from the hills. She liked to think that she and Michael were both studying and becoming wise. She began looking at fine art and photography in books and reading the papers, particularly political columns, so she could teach him.

  Ava felt so powerfully connected to the boy that it unnerved her. She wanted to kiss and smother him with mother hugs; he was irresistible to her and she worried it might be wrong, particularly after reading in a magazine that a mother’s excessive physical affection could be harmful to a boy. She wanted to be a good mother. She tried to gauge how much time together was too much. Ava turned her face to the side when Michael tried to kiss her, but sometimes the little fellow burrowed in and kissed her neck. She allowed it for a moment, giggling, and then pushed him away as though a line had been crossed. Ava worried about the urges that appealed to her most, How much is too much? Lenny had preached that there are no lines worth the price of banality. After she spent an hour or two in the studio, tinkering, ordering something from a catalog, it felt more acceptable to go to the boy’s room, invite him to walk on the beach or, better yet, to ride in the new convertible. Michael came alive when she stepped on the gas and gravel shot out from behind the Rolls, the big engine roared. The skinny boy grinned broadly at his mother’s wild ways, people staring from the street as the gorgeous creamy convertible burst past screaming, MONEY! Ava drove fast for him, her scarf blowing, and the boy reached up and felt the wind with his hand. He must have thought he was manufacturing all of this commotion and high life.

  After an hour of riding, the boy became sleepy. She loved him so it made her teary. Ava stopped in front of a roadside tavern she knew and wiped her eyes. There were four or five bars she visited; the closest was a safe half-hour drive from their house. Every few days the urge would build to come to one of these places. She wasn’t sure if her visits were a renegade form of expression, legitimate in Lenny’s terms, or a slow self-immolation. In a minute or two she would walk through the door into the room, blinded by the dark, but she would feel every man in the bar turn to look at her. With a soft smile and a few lingering words she could change the direction of a man’s life. She raised the convertible roof of the car and closed the windows, leaving a crack. She touched the boy’s forehead and placed a book in Michael’s lap. If he woke up, Michael wouldn’t be afraid. She double-checked that the car doors were locked. When she returned she would find him reading or looking out the window.

  * * *

  When he was a baby Michael had scrambled after Jim, but as a young boy he gradually lost interest and then he began to look at his father critically, as if Jim’s selling manner, his manipulations and glad-handing, were ugly. Michael didn’t warm to Jim’s salesman cigar-smoking buddies who came by for all-night gin rummy sessions and football talk in the game house on the beach. The boy made damning judgments and wanted to find every answer for himself. Jim loved Michael and kept trying to discover the right door inside, as if the boy were a wily customer, but Michael was something else entirely. Curiously, when the boy addressed Jim it was in dry, careful sentences without any name reference, neither “Jim” nor “Daddy,” as if Michael were talking to a stranger.

  Unless the kid warms up to people, how will he ever be good in sales? Jim once commented.

  I don’t want him to be a salesman, Ava responded acidly. The problem is you, Jim, not Michael. Why don’t you try being honest with him for a change?

  Ava was intent on cultivating her son by herself and would not tolerate Jim’s values and critiques mucking up the works. In the afternoon, she read Michael poems by Robert Louis Stevenson and she played the West Coast jazz she had come to love. Ava sang to Michael the Joe Williams classic “Going’ to Chicago, sorry but I can’t take you.” The boy became teary at this bittersweet homage to leaving the nest. I don’t want you to go, Mommy—Michael read to the heart of her longing. She laughed and hugged him close.

  Ava educated herself with an eye toward teaching the boy. Jim was impressed and he backed off and accepted her primacy in this area of their lives. Jim adored Ava, rebukes and all. From the first day he was attracted to her surprising choices and canny intuitions. He seemed to rediscover Ava each time she was tempted to leave him. He wanted to fill her with love, and her dark excursions, or what he knew of them, inspired his own conviction about their lives. He held her in his arms and kissed her. When Jim discovered that his wife had had a brief affair with a young salesman of his, he desired her more than ever.

  Their rapprochement was sweet and passionate. She was touched by him, maybe she loved him, and Jim, well, he was ecstatic. He was inspired by Ava but also by his own depth of caring. During their raw times, she allowed him to love himself. After remorse, tears, much coupling and hugging, she said to him, Jim, it meant nothing, NOTHING. She released him to embrace his work with even greater fervor. Jim rushed back to work at the top of his game. Ava’s elusiveness was surely a part of her astonishing appeal. She was a Cracker Jack salesman’s top prize, and that Jim could find her, bring her back home again and again, was proof of his greatness. He felt as though she bestowed his life back to him, hurled him back out for a new run at the stars.

  There were layers of insult and Jim knew only the surface. Ava allowed Jim to think her sins were manageable, but she was gravely wounded and mostly covering up. She led him to believe that the boy was his flesh and blood. Jim didn’t know about the bars and bathrooms, cheap motels. She was desperate to touch herself. For Ava debasement and catharsis h
ad become one and the same.

  23.

  One day when Jim was visiting the new plant in Toronto, he noticed boxes on the floor of Marvin’s office. Jim was intrigued and pulled out a dozen old books. They were literary classics. Fitzgerald, Mann, Poe, Balzac, Baudelaire, Milton, Tolstoy. Jim hadn’t heard of these writers and was surprised Marvin was doing so much reading. He mentioned the books to his partner, who shrugged and turned the conversation to business.

  In 1977, Marvin was focused on foreign markets. His desk was crowded with brochures, periodicals, and financial data about third-world countries, along with novels. He was always studying, making remarks to Jim about crop yields, water tables, foreign tariffs. This was the year that Marvin established two shadow companies in England that saved the partners millions in taxes.

  Marvin worked at his desk coming up with unusual applications for his shed and designing add-on features such as a forced-air cooling system for desert applications. Often he called for his secretary, Pat, PAT, PAT, like the house was burning down, though all he wanted was a cup of coffee or an envelope. His face grew flushed from shouting and you could hear him all the way down the hall. But Jim also observed moments when Marvin seemed to lift out of himself and became cordial or concerned. He asked his secretary about her husband or listened when a salesman complained about his home life.