by Larry Crane
“Glad?”
“Yeah. This place...you know, isn’t all I thought it was going to be.”
“What? It’s perfect.”
“I still made some points.”
“Now, what are you talking about?”
“To just get up from whatever you’re doing and go; that’s the perfect thing.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s freedom, Mag… That’s power.”
They each stared into the other’s eyes for nearly a minute. Then, Lou raised his glass to drink and heard Mag singing softly to herself:
“Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars...”
They lingered a long while over dinner, and then went back to the room to get sweaters. Arm in arm, they stepped out of the screened veranda in front of the inn.. Lou noticed that the Audi was gone. He and Mag took a long walk, consciously matching strides and spontaneously tightening their hold whenever they felt the others’ eyes on their cheek. The chill air and the sandy ground beneath their feet recalled a time when their flesh was hard to the others’ touch and their stride was strong and purposeful. Coming back to the inn, they stopped just beyond the range of the front light and kissed long and full.
The bed in their room was high. Mag’s face held the chill of the night air, but the room was warm and the coolness across her cheeks was soon replaced with a ruddy glow. They didn’t speak as they peeled off each other’s clothes, slowly and with care. Lou led Mag to the shower where they soaped, rinsed, and dried each other. Then he went back to the bed and waited until Mag came out of the bathroom, snapped off the light, and walked to him in the moonlight, covered in two squirts of Redi-Whip and an oversized Chocolate Chiparoo on a string.
In the morning, Lou woke with the sun coming through the chintz curtains. The room was warm and bright. He rolled to his side. Mag was bent over the Windsor. She had placed it bottom up on a table and was running her fingers over the gently sculpted stretchers. With the sunlight behind her, the outline of her hip showed dark against the shimmering white of her robe.
“I can feel the difference in these turnings, Lou. Some old craftsman did them by hand.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Some old craftsman. Come on back to bed. I’ll see to your turnings.”
Chapter Eight
Euphoria filled Lou on the ride back from Candlewood Lake, something like the feeling induced in him five years before on the banks of the Donau River in Germany, when he saw brigadier general stars coming his way. Nothing could deflate him, and all the constants in his life became subject to review.
Start with the car. Halfway home, the mileage on the odometer rolled to zeros all the way across. Imagine: 100,000 miles and only three exhaust pipe replacements, two new water pumps, and a rebuilt alternator. It was a noisy car, the Subaru; not only the tires on the road, but also the rubbing sound from the left front that had begun about two years before. He wasn’t sure, but it seemed that at some point during the trip, a new sound, a ticka-tick-tick, began scolding like an angry squirrel beneath the floorboards on the right front.
* * *
This one was like all their springs. At the first hint of warmer days, Mag was at him to go to the garden center. Only this year, somewhere between the sphagnum moss and the wood chips, he met Donald Klink and hatched what he called “Klink’s Amazing Pink day lily experiment.”
Klink ran the greenhouse, raising everything from cactus to orchids, but day lilies were his specialty.
“I learned hybridizing at my father’s knee,” he told Lou, lovingly aspirating a flowering orchid hanging at head height from a piece of bark in Row B. “Dad actually bred several new flowers, but the crowning glory is Klink’s Amazing Pink.”
“A thoroughbred,” Lou said.
“Yes, a cultivar, actually. You know, day lilies are one of your lowest-maintenance, most drought tolerant perennials, and they offer a long season of bloom.”
“Really?” Lou said.
“They’re nothing but a bulb at this time of the year. You plant them about this time and forget about them, and through the summer months they sprout a nice green stem that stands up about two feet. Then the bud starts developing, and before you know it, a flower appears. It only stays open for a day, maybe two at most, then it’s gone for another year and another bud blooms. It’s extraordinary.”
“A lot of trouble for one day.”
“What you do is plant yourself a dozen bulbs of different lilies, and all the way to October, you have another flower coming to bloom. The Amazing Pink is a late season bloomer. You might prefer a round flower with pleated ruffles, such as Lachman’s Golden Cameo over here, or the simple, graceful Hanna Jane by Barth, here.
“I just pop the bulb in the ground?”
“Just pop it in the ground, and sometime late September, for the Amazing Pink, you’ll have your first bloom.”
“What if I got two and raced them; planted them side by side; one gets Vigaro, the other fends for itself?”
“Dunno,” Klink said. “Never tried racing bulbs. It’s an interesting experiment.”
* * *
He began thinking of ways to help out Pete and Oliver beyond their tuition bills. He was drawn to the ads in the last few pages of the New Yorker; the ones pitching summer camps. In Monroe, just across the border in New York, there was a traditional camping, canoeing, exploring kind of deal. Jory would get a kick out of it, and it would undoubtedly yield some very cute letters home. But then Lou spotted the ad for Chewonki, up in Maine.
“Never mind. I’ll pay for it. You’re only a kid once,” he told Peter, after a long, involved discussion.
“Dad, we appreciate it. We do. But... well, maybe in a couple of years. Jory is only five.”
* * *
“If you ask me, darling, you need to get busy on something,” Mag said. “You’re thinking too much.”
Leonard Motors advertised a Lexus for $450 a month on lease; and after a very rigorous test drive along Route Eighty all the way to Sparta and back, Lou was itchy. Mag preferred a more cautious approach: a thorough analysis of safety, reliability, and economy statistics from the latest Consumer Reports New Car Issue which recommended a Camry station wagon.
Lou walked all around the Camry, even tried out the keyless entry system, but his Lexus fever never cooled. Mag backed off and only insisted that they at least hang on to the old car. That night, the Lexus occupied the garage.
* * *
In the third week of July, first thing in the morning, Calvin Swisher met Lou at his desk in the bullpen and personally escorted him into the third glass office from the left.
“It’s yours,” Swish said. “I’m sorry it couldn’t have been sooner. You deserve it. You’ll need the extra privacy for your duties as planner of this year’s Big Tuna Bash. Have fun, rookie.”
Every year, the firm treated the ten top producers in the office to a sumptuous beach party in Mantoloking.
Patricia Buck called around Labor Day.
“Louis, I wonder if you could free yourself up to take my place with a couple of clients out at Westchester Country Club this weekend. Bring Barry Westover along.”
Pierson Browne, in a piggyback deal with Manufacturers Hanover, used the Westchester Golf Classic as a drawing card for many of their biggest institutional clients. The drill was to meet them at the first tee, supply them with some goodies—maybe a T-shirt, a sleeve of golf balls, and an umbrella—and then follow some of the pros around the holes nearest the clubhouse and cap it all off by sauntering over to a big yellow and white striped tent for lunch.
Barry Westover couldn’t care less about golf, so they wound up wandering with the crowd between holes, catching a glimpse of Johnny Miller driving into the rough on thirteen, then lounging under the tent drinking Bloody Marys.
Dolly, the party facilitator from Executive Privilege, the hospitality outfit Pierson Browne used for all its “schmooz-fests”, was a middle-aged woman doing her best not to look it. Th
e morning after Patricia’s call, she was already in Lou’s office to talk Mantoloking when he arrived.
“How do you do?” Lou said to her. “Please, have a seat, and I’ll be off the phone in a minute.” He draped his jacket over the back of his chair, punched the squawk box, and stood looking out through the wall of glass.
“Darren, how are you? Listen, let me cut straight to the chase with you on this one, okay? We’re positive out to the end of the year on rates. You won’t regret parking in intermediate term treasuries ’til then. Last week in December, we’ll have a clearer picture. Meanwhile, you sit on six percent. My bond man’s never wrong, Darren. Okay, leave it to me.”
He walked to the door of the office.
“Mutch! Stick Darren Golden in the bonds. Yeah, intermediates.”
“Tell me about the beach house,” he said to Dolly, leaning well back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head.
“We’ve reserved a nearly brand new cedar and glass, five-suite house, right on the beach.”
“There are going to be ten couples,” Lou said.
“Our history with these parties is that at least half, and probably more, of the attendees will elect not to stay the night,” Dolly said.
“How many times have you done this?”
“This is the eighth year for me.”
“Well, I want it to be the biggest and best goddamned...”
“Open bar, party gifts, hors ’d’oeuvres, choice of lobster or filet mignon, four female facilitators, taped music?”
“A band. We have to have a band.”
“We’ve never had a live band, Mr. Christopher. It’s really more a stand up, drinking and mixing kind of evening. The invitees have traditionally considered it a command performance and would never let their hair down enough to actually dance. Taped music is better. How about sixties soft rock, seventies romance, and a little country?”
“We’ll have a band. A loud, live band,” Lou said.
* * *
On the second Saturday in September, Lou and Mag celebrated Oliver and his wife Stacey’s fifth wedding anniversary with dinner at the Beau Rivage overlooking the Hudson. When they arrived back in Glen Rock late in the day, Lou spotted his two “Amazing Pinks” in full bloom, and they all gathered to admire them.
“I knew they’d come in together, Vigaro be damned,” Lou said, caressing a blossom. “You have it or you don’t. The genuine article will deliver as advertised. Period.”
“Darling, what in heaven’s name are you talking about?” Mag asked.
He was comfortable in this skin of his. He had moved right into the Westover account, the Westchester Country Club golf outing, and a glass office in the Paramus branch as if they were his birthright. He was born to wear a Brooks Brothers suit, a blue shirt with a white collar, and a wide, red tie.
Lou, you old son of a bitch, it was just a matter of bloom time.
That night, he hatched the Mantoloking Plan. He’d been steadily working on Sherm Wellington; arm wrestling him for the check every time they went out together as couples for dinner and the movies; surprising him with an invitation to go hit baseballs at the new batting cage in Milford with ten minutes’ notice. Now, he was ready for the coup de grace. Spontaneity topped everything, in Sherm’s book. But nothing really worthwhile could be pulled together on the fly. Executive Privilege was working like the devil on the details of the Big Tuna. Now, the frosting on the cake was to make Sherm’s invitation seem like a wild thought that had hatched overnight; like a passing fancy that had materialized with a snap of the fingers into a truly smashing surprise bash.
As Lou pulled the Lexus into the driveway after work on Big Tuna D-Day minus one, October twentieth, still cooking up the exact quirky details of Sherm’s “spur of the moment” invitation, the voice on the radio said: “Hurricane Fiona is tracking only seventeen miles off Cape Hatteras, and with a low sitting over Newark, there’s an eighty percent chance that it will roll up the coast toward Atlantic City.”
“Sherm, listen. I want you and Virg to join a bunch of us for a hurricane party. Come on. It’s going to be good. Tomorrow, right after work. And Sherm, put the dog in the kennel. Yeah, I mean it. Put her in the kennel.”
Fact is, Mag had to sign off on putting Trude in the kennel, too.
Executive Privilege contracted for three silver stretch limos to fetch the Big Tuna bashers at their homes across Bergen County; to get them started at the inboard bars; and to whisk them fifty miles down the Garden State Parkway to the Jersey Shore. The limos flashed through the sodden night, the air crackling with their lispy car-phone banter. As the limos arrived at the beach house, one after another, the couples literally fell out of the cars to the sandy driveway and filed across the wooden bridge leading to the front door, the wind-driven rain plastering their clothes to their bodies.
When they walked in the door, an Executive Privilege hostess handed each guest a kit: a complete toiletries case, a giant beach towel, and a bright, yellow slicker and Gloucester fisherman’s hat combo. Young women with trays maneuvered through couples offering a canapé here, a double scotch on the rocks there. The floor-to-ceiling cathedral windows facing the ocean were soon awash in light, reflecting couples dancing to the frenetic combo of electric guitar, keyboard, drums, and bass thundering through a decent imitation of the Doors’ Light My Fire.
The roar of the surf pulled the rain-gear-clad guests outside onto a huge deck situated high above the flat stretch of beach, where eight- and ten-foot breakers spent themselves at the pilings below. It was in the pandemonium of Hurricane Fiona, with rain beating against their faces, that Sherman Wellington grabbed Lou by the shoulders and screamed drunkenly:
“Lou, you old sonofabitch, this tops ’em all! It’s the greatest goddamned spur-of-the-moment crash bash I ever saw in my whole goddamn life.”
* * *
At five in the morning, with everyone snoring and the storm outside gone north, Maggie slipped on a heavy sweater and boots, slid out onto the deck, and down to the sandy beach. A quarter moon hung in the cloudless gray sky. She picked her way through clumps of seaweed, pieces of lumber, and pools of seawater on the shore. She bent to pick up a Frisbee and sent it skimming into the exhausted waves.
The expanse of sand was smooth, wet, and hard. Her boots barely dented it. The water swelled and retreated soundlessly beneath air that was pregnant with the salty aroma of kelp. Mag turned to look at the towering beach house and saw the moon gazing back at her from above the half-circle window at the roof line. Then she saw someone descending the deck stairs, but couldn’t make out who it was until the figure was within five feet of her. It was Virg.
“I thought it was you,” Virg said, her wild red hair swirling in all directions. “Could you use a little company?”
“Of course. Couldn’t sleep. Too much gin. Too much to think about,” Maggie said, as they both ambled along the water’s edge.
“Lou’s feeling good.”
“No kidding. This is the craziest thing he’s ever done, Virg, bar none.”
“It’s unlike him, Mag, but it doesn’t hurt anything.”
“I guess not. I’ve never seen this kind of...desperation in him before, though. Oh, sure, he lets go sometimes. You have to go along with it when he blows off steam from time to time. But this. This was in outer space somewhere.”
“Wilder than most of Sherm’s schemes.”
“He’s not Sherm, and he shouldn’t try to be.”
“You can’t fix everything, Mag. You’re a marvelous organizer. A fantastic, get-it-done girl. But some things you just have to stand by and watch. They’re phenomena that are just going to be, no matter what you do. You just climb aboard and enjoy the ride, the best you can.”
“Is that experience talking?”
“You know it.”
“I don’t know if you’ve been clued in on what’s been happening with Lou at work, Virg. He’s probably confided it all to Sherm.”
“I know he’
s getting his due, finally, Maggie. And I know how good that can make a man feel. I’m doing my little thing with the newspaper, no real competition for Sherm. So, it’s win-win. But you, you’re out there in the world, leading the charge on everything, it seems: the Y fund-raising campaign, the Arbor Committee… Nothing really sets you back for long. Just like your father, from what you’ve told me about him. Lou’s seen that. It’s affected him. Challenged him. Now that he has something coming his way at last, let him slosh around in it for a while. Life is short.”
“You’re a good friend.”
“Are you scared, Mag? Sometimes good things come calling in gorilla suits.”
“I am scared. Scared that there was nothing he did to get this.”