by Larry Crane
“Two hundred fifty Kentuckys, and 5000 T under fifty-eight.”
“I want you to get up there in that cool night air, Lou. Hear?”
“It sure sounds good.”
“I’ll be talking to you.”
“You too. Barry, listen, stay off that sore spot.”
Lou stared at the driving rain through the glass doors of the office. It had been coming down steadily all day. It was five o’clock and already nearly dark outside. He didn’t dislike the reflection of himself that he saw in the glass, and that was amazing, considering the shape he’d been in, in the Trinity Churchyard, not so long ago. He’d wait a little bit for the rain to subside.
All the offices around the perimeter of the bullpen were dark now as he slumped into his seat and put his feet up on the desk. He reached over and took the sheaf of order tickets he’d entered that day. There were eight, and five of those were from Westover. He grabbed the phone.
“Mag, I’m hiding out in the office until it lets up a little. Can I get you something on the way home?”
“I have everything I need,” she said.
“Don’t gloat,” he chuckled.
“Forget the rain. Come on home. I’ll dry you off.” Her voice seemed to curl around the receiver and he smiled.
“Mag, I was thinking. We ought to take a little time off by ourselves. Barry was telling me about a ride he and his bride took up to Connecticut.”
Chapter Six
Over the Tappan Zee Bridge, they grabbed the Merritt Parkway for a couple of miles until they hit Route 7 going north. Jeans, shirts, and underwear. At the last minute and completely out of the blue, Lou had called his old friend from the Vietnam days, Sherm Wellington, and invited him and his wife, Virg, to join them up at the inn on Candlewood Lake. The audacity of it—the idea that you could just get up from whatever you were doing at the moment and go—produced a snort from Sherm and a coughing fit from Lou.
“Count me in,” Sherm chortled.
And with that, Lou entered the impulsive world that previously was Sherm’s exclusive province.
Mag brought sandwich makings and wine. When Lou saw her packing a tape recording of the unabridged Pride and Prejudice for the trip, he winced. Silence was deadly. Two consecutive minutes of it were enough to get the tape spinning.
Except for stone walls everywhere, the rolling countryside along the highway was something like Bavaria, at least the part near Augsburg. Weekends, while he was stationed there, they’d roar out the driveway just as soon as he could escape from Saturday morning barracks inspection, pile into the Beetle, and drive through cobbled streets out into the country on a twisting, two-lane road.
South, past Landsberg, they’d pulled off at any point along the way that seemed right for the moment—often just a gravel track that took them out through clover fields and into the cool, coniferous forest. There they’d find a place to sit on a blanket in the pine needles and enjoy a bottle of wine, fresh cheese, and hard bread.
They’d never been short of conversation then. They’d still had a lot they didn’t know about each other and a passion to learn it. In those first few months thirty years ago, they’d told each other everything that came into their minds, regardless of how ridiculous it was or how difficult it would be to back down from later.
In the beginning of his tour of duty, they’d lived in a tiny German apartment—three rooms off a central hallway: a living room, bare save a micro-couch, a chair, and a coal stove; a miniature kitchen with a refrigerator the size of an oven, an oven the size of a bread box, and water made hot at the spigot; and a bedroom that was essentially a large closet, furnished with a high oak bed and its billowing, goose down quilt.
In bed then, they were all the things they were not now: greedy for pleasure, strong, and creative. That first night in Germany, he’d shivered with anticipation until she’d stepped into the room from the frigid hallway in nothing but a blue Navy watch cap, high-heeled slippers, and a pair of woolen mittens. Starting at her toes, he had warmed her up.
They’d collected beer glasses with colorful distinctive decals. The idea was to escape the city on the smallest road they could find and motor on until they found a gasthaus in the middle of some burg—where the smells of spring mud and honey wagons mixed with that of the strong, warm beer—and where it was sure no one spoke English.
Mag passed easily for German: blonde and flushed across the cheekbones. Only Lou’s crew cut and tennis shoes gave them away. Out there in the country, the people knew no English, so it would have to be German or nothing. “Zwei glas bier,” is all it took, as long as he stuck up the two fingers. Sometimes they had cheese and bread with their beer; always they asked to keep their glasses; and almost always they cost a mark each. The liter glasses held maybe an Urbanus Bier, with a burgermeister picture in red and yellow; or a Hasenbrau, with a blue rabbit; or a Fortunabrau, with a hunting horn. His favorite, though, was the Reichsadler-Brau they picked up in Steppach, with its black, double-headed eagle and coat of arms.
* * *
The Connecticut highway seemed to drop away below them. They’d started out after noon. Now they were beyond Danbury, heading north toward Candlewood Lake. They left the highway for a side road and found a spot among the trees where they could look out at the water.
“I’ve been thinking about Germany,” she said.
“The drives? Yeah, I remember.”
“It’s still fun. I’m really enjoying this,” Mag said.
“What? We haven’t done anything yet.”
“Who said we had to do anything?”
“Nobody.”
“No worries. No schedules. We can do anything we want.”
“Anything we want.”
The tops of the pine trees across the lake sliced through the lower half of the sun, robbing their spot of just enough warmth to raise goose bumps on her arm. She pulled a sweater from her oversized tote bag and he helped her with the sleeves.
“I don’t know what’s happening with this Westover account. I don’t know what to do. We did nothing either right or wrong. It just transpired,” he said, twisting against the stiffness in his neck.
“Let’s be careful with it, darling,” she said, softly kneading the base of his skull. “I want to have fun, but I don’t want to get in over our heads. Okay?”
“It’s all probably going to vanish at some point, but we don’t have to trash enjoyment before we even have any.”
“I don’t want to think about it. About too much luck, too much happiness.”
“When it goes, it goes. Meanwhile...Okay, I know there’s some mistake. I could track it down, but I don’t want to find out that I’m right,” he said, moving back onto the highway.
“Did you do anything so bad that you couldn’t tell me about it? Screw someone to get it?”
“I didn’t do anything, period.”
“Any chance you’re going to have to pay it back?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but we have two choices, and I say we spend it.”
“Pack up all your cares and woes,” Maggie sang softly, watching the road and Lou out the corner of her eye.
Chapter Seven
“We’d better find the place,” Maggie said, as the shadows of the forest deepened.
“It’s bound to be right here,” he said.
They saw the sign first, LAKESIDE INN, and then they spotted it through the trees: a low building with screened verandas all across the front and a circular driveway.
“You take care of the room,” Mag said, “and I’ll just mosey over here across the road. There’s an antique place stuck back in there somewhere. I saw the sign.”
Theirs was a single unit on the corner facing the lake. He brought their suitcase in and looked out the window at the orange planks of sunlight glancing low through the pines across the water. He plunked the suitcase onto the bed and hurried to catch up with Mag.
He stepped off the veranda and walked quickly toward the parking lot.
At the near end, across the lot from the Subaru, he saw a dark Audi parked in the shadows. Someone was sitting in the front seat, hidden behind a newspaper. As Lou approached, the paper came down and he locked eyes with a sharp-faced young man who quickly dropped his eyes and ducked behind the funnies again.
Lou went on, but at the end of the lot, where the narrow path led out to the road, he suddenly stopped and turned to look at the Audi and caught the man’s eye again.
He found the antique shop easily enough, just a couple of hundred feet down the road. As he approached, he could see Mag and an old man out front with a Windsor chair, Mag walking round and round it, elbow in one hand, chin in the other.
“He says he brought it out of his own house after keeping it for fifteen years.”
“Uh huh,” Lou said.
“It’s good. The chair, not the story,” she said.
“How much?”
“How old do you think it is, Mr. Herman? Oh, forgive me. This is my husband, Lou.” The old man shook two heavy jerks on Lou’s hand.
“This is an oldie. I’d keep it myself but I can’t keep everything. Look at all those spindles! And see the stretchers down there? Run your fingers over ’em, feel how they’re worn. Some kid a long time ago hooked his heels on ’em.”
“Tell him about the patina,” Mag said.
“Tell me about the bad news,” Lou countered.
“He’s asking seven hundred.”
“What does your book say?”
“There have been a bunch of good, bow-back armchairs listed for over that.”
“Then we’ll get it. In fact, we’ll take two of them. Why do I think you might have another one of these back there somewhere that you’ve been agonizing over, Mr...?”
“Herman,” Mag said. “No, no. One’s enough.”
“Do you like the chair or don’t you?” Lou asked.
“You know I like it. That doesn’t mean...”
“Then we’ll get it and we’ll get another just like it. Fact is, we’ll take four of them. I presume they match.”
“We’ll take this one, Mr. Herman. I hope you’ll take a credit card.”
“I want to see what else Mr. Herman has,” Lou said. “C’mon, loosen up.”
“Hold it for us, Mr. Herman. We’ll be back for it after dinner,” Mag said, pulling Lou’s arm until he relented and they tripped over the sandy soil back toward the inn. At the front desk, the clerk handed Lou a message from Sherm:
Dear L & M,
I spoke much too soon on your invite. Sorry, we can’t come. We already had something else going. Have a great weekend. Love ya.
Sherm & Virg.
The sun was down and lights were popping up across the lake. In the dining room, Lou and Mag sat next to a window where they could see the lights reflecting off the water. The summer tourist season was ahead of them. The hotel was coming back alive after a long winter season, and city dwellers with cabin fever were beginning to arrive to savor the open space and first crocus buds.
Lou had met Sherm during his second tour in Vietnam, when they’d shared a room in the MACV compound in Plieku. Sherm got his BA at Columbia and then went on to Harvard law. Having exhausted all opportunities to avoid military service, he’d found himself in the Army with the Psychological Warfare Unit, dropping surrender leaflets into the jungle from a push-pull Cessna. More often than not, he also dropped his cookies through the chute on the floor of the tiny craft as it bounced above the endless, green canopy.
Lou and Sherm had soon discovered they were both from New Jersey and both their wives were there now, each with two kids. They’d bonded immediately, despite their vastly different backgrounds and educations, and spent hours talking whenever Lou wasn’t out traipsing around the Central Highlands with his battalion.
Mag and Virg met before the two returned, so it was natural they would continue the friendship as couples. Sherm Wellington became a portfolio manager at Moore, Crawford, and Bender at the same time Lou was stationed at Fort Dix. Sunday dinners led to family picnics and reciprocal babysitting. They had no secrets. They worked at keeping in touch no matter how far Lou’s Army career took him from Glen Rock. And when they’d returned to the area after Lou was released, they’d immediately found each other again.
Sherm was a large man whose personality was defined by the force of his imagination and his willingness to lower all barriers to new experiences. He was a man capable of completely surrendering control just to find out what would happen without it. Such spontaneity couldn’t be farther from Lou’s ability to do these same things.
Sherm was a practical joker of massive dimensions. He was always at the center of some gargantuan plot—in which at least ten or twelve other friends played a part—to lead another of his many friends into a web of complexities. Like the time he printed up and delivered invitations, ostensibly from Mayor Ed Koch, to all his friends, inviting them to join the mayor and other prominent politicos at the West Side Cafe on Forty-second Street to celebrate the emergence of the city from financial bankruptcy. With everyone there properly bedecked and tuxedoed, Sherm led them all in a conga dance rendition of I Ain’t Got Nobody behind a Koch-like midget in a jumpsuit.
While Lou was at Dix—a temporary captive of the Army, minuscule paychecks, and a straitjacket of rules and regulations—he remained an integral part of Sherm’s circle and was included in all of these crazy shenanigans.
“Your time will come, Lou, when you decide to start living,” Sherm roared. “Friends are friends.”
But when Lou joined Pierson Browne, the relationship changed; not because Sherm had changed, but because the pauper’s veil that was so easy for Lou to wear while he was in the Army was impossible to wear as a stockbroker. It was his turn, but he couldn’t take his turn. Embarrassed, he’d slid further and further away; but now, he grabbed at the chance to make up for lost time. He was back.
Lou ordered a bottle of Schwartze Katz Liebfraumilch, a name from out of the past. It was the only name he could think of, but the Inn didn’t have it. For a moment, he began to hector the college-kid waiter.
Okay. Order something else, then. What was it again? Something French. Chateau...? Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Yeah. “ “Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Uh… dix neuf cent soixante quatre.” Oh, boy. Where did that come from? But the waiter kid just blushed, and Lou saw that Maggie was smiling tolerantly from across the table, so he gave in and let the kid deliver an unnamed, white table wine.
“I think it was a great buy,” Mag said.
“It’s plain white wine, Mag. Just kidding. It’s a nice chair. We should have a bunch of them,” Lou said.
“They should’ve left the paint on, but people want natural wood,” she said.
“I kind of like the bare wood, myself.”
“I love the way the legs flare out from the seat,” she said.
“We could’ve gotten some more.”
“Lou, I didn’t mean that I thought we should go crazy.”
“Who’s going crazy? If they’re a good buy, let’s go for it.”
“Shush.”
“Don’t shush me. I’m feeling good. I’m feeling very good.”
“Relax.”
“I’m relaxed. I’m very relaxed.”
“Lou, can we salvage something lasting out of this? Can we save some part of it for the future and not suck every last ounce of honey from it just as fast as we can?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s just our approach to things. I get something good and immediately begin to fret about when it will be taken away. Don’t ever surrender completely to happiness, lest some arbiter in the sky come down to even things up again with something bad.”
“So, what’s the bad part?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”
“Mag, I’m a mover again. Can’t you see? It kills me to have no shot at...”
“At what? Glory?”
“Now, that’s nasty.”
�
��Power?”
“Chances don’t come very often. When they do, you have to move. Fast.”
“I suppose.”
“I have to be a player, Mag. Now, I don’t know if I am one; but as they say, ‘if it looks like a duck...’ You know, I’m glad they couldn’t make it, Sherm and Virg.”