The Dream Merchant

by Fred Waitzkin

  The Shah was ten minutes late arriving. He came through the door wearing a striking tuxedo and flowing blue cape. He had a fine, majestic, and deliberate manner. He sat across the table from Jim and the empress and motioned a greeting to his Canadian guest. The emperor’s smile was evocative and charismatic. Farah Pahlavi was dressed in a simple sheath gown with long white gloves, in the style of Grace Kelly, except she wore a sparkling diamond necklace and broach that was worth millions, probably many millions. They were an arresting couple, eternal somehow.

  The empress quickly put Jim at ease and they spoke of many things. Jim described his home beside the lake and a little about how he had arrived there from the poverty of his youth. When Jim mentioned his wife’s art collection Farah Pahlavi flushed and clasped her hands. Art was her passion. Jim inquired about the dozens of richly colored miniature paintings that adorned the walls of the room. She had great knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern art and explained that the miniatures were from the Safavi style of the fifteenth century. The theme of these naturalistic works was the splendor and grandeur of the royal court. They portrayed the handsome faces of nobles in sumptuous garments at banquets, beautiful palaces, scenes of battles. Indeed, the entire opulent spectacle of the Shah’s court presaged the enduring legacy of the Persian monarchy.

  Even while the party played on, Jim imagined how he would bring the event to life for Ava. He would tell her of thirty-foot chandeliers reflecting an intricately carved golden ceiling and brocade curtains tailored for a regent who considered his grandeur and legacy comparable to what Cyrus the Great achieved for ancient Persia. He would mention Farah Pahlavi’s adoring smile for her husband, while he gave an after-dinner talk highlighting Iran’s burgeoning economy. The Shah predicted that within five years his country would have the economic and military heft to join the elite superpowers of the world.

  Jim would later reflect on the tiered ironies of this night of celebration. The empress, the caring wife, had been quietly encouraging a coup against her husband. For some time—Jim read this months later—she had been co-opting left-leaning intellectuals and constructing a government in waiting. If she had been more decisive and moved more rapidly, the empress might have won the great prize. We’ll never know. The resplendent Shah, who bragged to the world of the broad support of his people, was both mortally ill and politically feeble. Within eight weeks of the splendid party in the Green Palace, the Ayatollah Khomeini would drive the Shah and his beloved from their land. For the next year, until he died, the empress cared tenderly for her Shah while he suffered with cancer. Despite his megalomania and her own imperial designs, she loved him.

  * * *

  After returning from this last trip to Iran Jim couldn’t pull Ava back. She had fallen too far from his fantasy. He tried to be fatherly and gentle. He lectured to her about her health and the happiness they shared. They had such a special life. He held her in his arms and described the things they would do next year. They’d go to Paris, wherever she wanted. Ava reeked of booze and had stopped brushing her hair. He’d been away too long. She wanted him to drink with her. She begged him and then she became sarcastic when he refused. She slurred her words. You’re a salesman, she said as though this were contemptible. What are you? You’re a salesman. He didn’t know what to do with her. Her smell made him nauseous. She doesn’t know what she says. She’ll come around.

  One night Ava was standing nude in the upstairs bathroom when he walked in on her. Without saying a word she undid his pants and made him hard with her hand. She turned her back to Jim and pulled him inside her as if he were a stranger in a hallway. Ava was leaning on her elbows on the bathroom sink with her head down. Her ass and thighs had grown heavy and she had a belly that Jim held on to like a handle. They fucked savagely. When she rose up her hair was stringy and her face had become coarse and a little puffy. She looked into the mirror at his straining face staring back at her. Jim, look how ugly we’ve become.

  He didn’t know this woman. He shouldn’t have stayed away so long. He told himself this a thousand times. In Iran Jim was a hero. He’d wanted her to know. He never got to tell her about the palace. He couldn’t bring her back. She drank vodka like water. She couldn’t stand up. When she wasn’t numb with alcohol, she knew she had to get out. She must leave this gated home, this ugliness. But where could she go? The beautiful people are so ugly, Jim. He didn’t understand such talk, and this frustrated her even more. The waterside estate had become her jail. Their strange boy had become afraid to sleep in his bed. Michael had gathered all of his clothes into tall piles. He slept on the floor amidst columns of neatly folded clothes as though they were icons to protect him in the night. Michael’s room felt like a burial ground.

  One night when Jim came back from the factory, Ava and Michael weren’t home. He read the newspaper and paced around. It was almost eight o’clock when the phone rang. The police had found her Rolls-Royce convertible parked in a dark alley. There was a frightened boy in the backseat. Michael had been sitting there for four or five hours. He was okay. They were keeping him at the station house.

  Jim took a taxi to the police to retrieve Michael and the car. When Jim returned to the house, Ava was sprawled on the sofa holding a bottle of whiskey, her skirt hitched up on her white thighs. He could see her underwear and it disgusted him. Ava couldn’t stand up or pronounce her words. She’d gone to a bar and then home with someone. She couldn’t remember his name. Just some guy, Jim, doesn’t matter about him. Michael was listening to every word, but she was too far gone to notice or care. When I left his place I couldn’t remember where I’d left the car. No idea. She described it all reasonably. She had called a cab, fallen asleep in the backseat. It was humiliating in front of the boy, but she wouldn’t shut up.

  She reached out, wanted to touch Michael’s face, but she couldn’t stand. She drank more from the bottle. It didn’t mean anything, Jim. Never means anything. She glanced at the boy, and Jim shivered. We’re both so ugly, Jim, she said, choking on her drink. Her chin was wet. We’re awful. She drank some more.

  Jim walked into the bedroom and returned holding his .38 revolver. He pointed it at her face and she shrugged as though she’d been preparing for this. Jim had always loved her face.

  Michael was pleading, Daddy, don’t kill her. Daddy, please. Don’t do it. Please, Daddy, don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Michael was kneeling beside him, pulling the crease of Jim’s pants, begging, Daddy, don’t, Daddy.

  Finally, Daddy, Daddy. Jim had waited years to hear this. That’s what saved her. Daddy, please. Jim caressed the boy’s wet face and he put the gun down.

  Okay, Michael.

  Jim left them in the house and spent the night in a hotel in Toronto. The following morning, when he returned, they were gone. He didn’t care. Or the next day. Then he cared. He wanted to see her and talk it over. He imagined the perfect arguments he’d make, rehearsed his lines. He sighed over and over again. He wanted her back, even now. It didn’t matter where she’d slept. It didn’t matter if there had been thirty guys. He didn’t know where to look. He burned for her. Every day he believed she’d come home. She didn’t. He began to search. Walking down streets in Toronto, he looked at each shapely woman. He chased after women to see their faces. She was gone. Wholly gone and yet wholly within him. He had no phone number to call. He no longer cared what she’d become. He’d take her back. He’d throw everything out of the house. Give up the house of his dreams. They’d live a little life together in some dive. If that’s what she wanted. They’d live together in squalor. Fine.

  He didn’t care about the business. Marvin was off on his own, chiseling the government out of taxes, flying to Paris with his secretary. Then one of the salesmen told Jim that Ava had moved in with the seventy-year-old father of her first husband. Jim took this as good news. She was broke and desperate to do such a thing. He had hope all over again. Surely she would listen to his arguments. He tracked down the phone number. He was greedy for
her all over again. Ava hung up at the sound of his voice. He left pitiful messages. I want to see you. I want to talk. I need you. He left this message ten times, more. She wouldn’t return his calls. He went to her apartment and watched the front door from across the street like a stalker. Jim couldn’t accept that she wasn’t feeling the same as him.

  The last of that winter was raw and miserable. Jim no longer traveled or went into the factory. He wandered through the rooms of his estate, lost and homeless.

  * * *

  Mara looked unsettled by this tale of ruined people. It felt too close to her own life of squalor with Jim in Florida. Mara was not a patient girl. She didn’t know about the developing arc of a good story.

  Why do you tell me this, Jim? she asked with exasperation. She looked as though she were about to bolt for the door. She had been drawn to the powerhouse Jim from earlier in his life. She might have stayed with that Jim.

  Wait, he said, grabbing her wrist and forearm with two hands. There’s more.

  Mara was taken aback by Jim’s wry grin. She sat back on the torn sofa.

  PART IV

  26.

  The Brazilian city of Manaus is surrounded on all sides by the Amazon jungle, although on its eastern border the forest is kept at bay some miles by the Negro and Amazon rivers that sideswipe each other, creating a broad stretch of unique waterway traversing the continent from northeastern Brazil to the western coast of Peru. In the summer months when the water is low, standing on a massive granite wall looking thirty feet down one sees an expanse of bog covered with filthy sewage, pop bottles, old tires, junk of all sorts. A gangplank leads across this smelly muck to the brown water and a ragtag fleet of passenger, fishing, and cargo boats headed off to places like Tabatinga and Leticia.

  Day and night, there is a bustle of commerce here: heavy sacks of strange-looking fish, some of them huge, pulled from the river to feed the swelling city; other sacks are loaded with pineapples or a coarse flour called fainha, a staple in Brazil; also filthy bags of charcoal are coming ashore from the rickety boats. The wild jungle nurtures this city, which is an island. It also gives Manaus an urgency you can feel, particularly in the sultry night air.

  Coming off the boats, mixed in with the produce, there is a stream of exhausted men, small, wiry men, for the most part, some suffering with malaria, who are back from the gold mines in the south. There is also a sprinkling of beautiful women, strikingly beautiful. A stranger could wonder what they had been doing in the jungle. Although the girls had been traveling for a week or longer, sleeping outside on deck in the slow-moving riverboats, beset with mosquitoes, torrential rain, and sick workers seeking favors, they look lovely coming ashore and they smile at the men sitting on the granite wall.

  * * *

  In 1980, when Jim returned to Manaus from his first visit to the putrid mining camp half-buried in the rain forest, he discovered in himself unlimited energy for a new way of life. Of course, it was the excitement of first experiencing the jungle, dining on anteater and maggots while dreaming of gold, but also, Manaus itself was exotic and deeply inviting. Anything was possible in this city. Fortunes were won and lost here in a month or a violent day. It was a perfect place for a gambling man who was trying to come back from ruin and heartbreak.

  Like Jim himself, his new city had a gaudy history of glory and calamitous defeat. In the early part of the last century, the rubber trade was born in the Amazon and Manaus quickly became the hub of the industry. The city’s downtown area was lavishly fashioned after Paris and Lisbon; even a world-class opera house came to the Amazon. Rubber barons made kingly fortunes at the expense of thousands of poor workers who died in the jungle from disease and animals. But soon the rubber business in Brazil was outmoded, as agricultural farming techniques and better soil brought the trade to Malaysia. Manaus went into a lengthy depression; the palatial residences of new millionaires became chalky and cracked from the sun. Some rubber barons committed suicide while others lived hand to mouth as peasants.

  By 1980, Manaus was back on top due in part to the government’s decision to make the city a free-trade zone. This encouraged multinational industries to come to the city as well as shoppers from all over Brazil, who could save as much as 40 percent buying appliances. But probably the most intoxicating inducement to travel to the Amazon was gold. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if a man dreamed of striking it rich prospecting for gold Manaus was the place to come. It was where you set up your operation, did your shopping, hired the people you needed, and came back from the jungle to rest and party.

  Nothing was a sure bet in Manaus. The artifacts of victory and ruin were everywhere. Driving north through the downtown area, you saw fancy new hotels and skyscrapers going up, business burgeoning in each shop and spilling out onto broad, new well-lit streets. But when you crossed one of many small bridges and looked to the right or left there were impoverished towns of rotting shacks on the muddy banks of creeks that reeked of human waste. Prosperity in Manaus was running perpendicular to heartbreak and misery. People in the city were inflamed by chance. They lived fast and did whatever was necessary to slide through before the door slammed shut.

  * * *

  When Jim told me his stories about Brazil, he often referred to Luis Carlos. Luis was a short, thin man in his late forties with a dark, Indian complexion, yet his skin had an odd transparency, particularly on his cheeks and below his eyes, where purple veins showed through, giving him the aspect of a fragile or sickly person. On a daily basis Luis worried about his blood pressure and other diseases, but it wasn’t clear to Jim if there was any real problem, as this very bright, nervous man avoided doctors and the bad news they might convey. I could have a heart attack making love, he’d say out of the blue. His anxieties arose from a dense web of musings about his several lovers, his lists of appointments to keep when he returned to Manaus from the mining camp in the jungle, a thousand phone numbers jiggling in his head because he didn’t carry a book. For all his worry, he could walk in the jungle at a brisk pace for a week.

  Luis was a man of unusual resources and he was at Jim’s side practically from his first day in Manaus. Jim hired Luis as a translator and guide, but his responsibilities quickly broadened and he became Jim’s right-hand man. Jim couldn’t have said where they met or who introduced them. Yet he knew how he’d made contact with most of his friends and business associates in Manaus—merchants, gold buyers, cardplayers, airplane pilots, mechanics, gunmen, beautiful women—because it was almost always Luis who made the introductions. Jim, I know someone, he would say. I have a man who could do this. He will be perfect. Don’t worry.

  In this city where people typically arrived late for appointments, very late, or they didn’t show up at all, Luis always seemed to know someone who could track down the phone number or street address.

  When Jim returned to Manaus, from his first visit to the campsite, he was exhausted and elated. It would be more than five weeks before the second trip and all the while he had to restrain himself from rushing back into the jungle. He wanted to touch the gold again with his fingers. He was beset with anxiety because he would never get another chance like this. Someone could steal what he had discovered. Gold would be Jim’s redemption. Even Marvin Gesler could never hope to achieve the wealth that Jim would soon dig up from the fetid mud. His fears and dreams were so compelling that it became physically painful to focus on practical details. In Manaus, Jim felt trapped in a quicksand of impediments, red tape, permits, and broken appointments.

  Luis counseled patience. There was no point tramping back into the jungle without a crew, without machinery to build a functioning camp, and without a master plan. Jim needed to find a safe house for the city part of his business, and he must hire armed guards to look after the gold in Manaus until he sold it for the best price. Luis warned Jim he must travel everywhere with several gunmen or he’d be murdered or kidnapped for ransom. He needed to learn a whole new way of life.

  * * *r />
  This one is much too large, Jim said to Luis the first afternoon they looked for a house. Jim’s yellow sun-bleached Mercedes sedan was parked outside an imposing gate. Through iron bars he could see a sprawling house set back about three hundred yards from the road. Much too large, he said.

  Probably, Luis agreed with a world-weary expression, but please have a look anyway, since we’ve come so far to get here. They had driven on the only road leading north out of Manaus for about twenty minutes to the extreme edge of the city limits, the very point at which Manaus was stymied by the rain forest. Luis got out of the car, mopped his brow in the afternoon heat. He suffered greatly from the humidity, and when Luis was in the city he liked to shower four or five times a day. He said a few words to one of the men working on the property and the heavy gate swung open.

  The main house was handsomely built with dark, aromatic native wood, Angelim rajado, that is resistant to rotting in the wet climate. This wonderful name seemed to evoke the grand house itself, which had fifteen generous-sized rooms, newly painted white shutters, and a large wood-paneled office that reminded Jim of his office in the house on Lake Ontario where Jim’s new wife, Phyllis, was now living with his cook and chauffeur. Looking out the window from the office, Jim saw tiered gardens, and beyond that there were several connected man-made lakes, strung together by waterfalls and raised walking trails; the lakes had many strange-looking Amazonian fish, and ducks swimming around, and there were a few small baby black caimans that would someday reach twenty feet but now lay harmless, sunning on the bank of the lake closest to the main house. All around the lakes there were apple, orange, coconut, and cashew trees and lovely flowering plants called inga.

  Jim stood on the back porch for a time, breathing the jungle air and considering the sharp turn his life had taken from a tremendously successful business life and from everyone he’d ever cared about. Yet he didn’t feel at all lost or lonely. He felt impatient, hungry. Jim turned back to the big house. Through the open shutters to the kitchen he noticed a young woman with dark peasant features and a lovely smile. She was Caboclo, a mixture of indigenous and European ancestry. She was cooking something and the smell made his mouth water.