Pot of Gold

by Judith Michael

  Claire was still looking at him with interest. "You think I don't."

  "I have no right to think one thing or another." He smiled, a broad smile that softened the sharp line of his jaw and the ridges of his cheekbones. "But I'd guess you're not hungry for it."

  Emma saw them look at each other and felt a spark of excitement. They liked each other. Her mother hadn't even looked at another man since she met Quentin. But if she liked Alex and got to know him better and liked him more, she might drop Quentin. After all, she had to find out sometime that he wasn't nice; Brix knew it and so would her mother, eventually—and then everv-thing would be so much better. Emma began to cheer up. Things always got better, if you waited.

  She looked at Hannah and saw her watching C^laire thoughtfully, almost as if she were plotting something. Hannah agrees with me, Emma thought, her excitement growing; she wants Mother to get away from Quentin, too. And she could do some-

  thing about it; Mother listens to her. "Why don't you stay for dinner?" she asked abruptly. "You could start your interview right away."

  Claire and Alex looked startled, and Claire began to frown. But Alex shook his head. "Thanks; I like the idea, but Tm on my way to New York. Another time, I'd like to take you up on it." He took a small datebook from his jacket pocket. "Would you be willing to set a time.'"' he asked Claire. "I think it could be a good story and I'd like very- much to do it. And I can promise that you won't be embarrassed by it or ashamed of anything in it."

  "How can you promise that.'^" Claire asked. "I thought journalists follow their stor^ wherever it leads."

  "I don't think this story' will lead to murky bogs or back alleys," he said, smiling at her. "If I'm wrong, you can call it off at any time."

  "That's generous," Claire said. "I think I'd like to see what you write."

  His smile broadened. "Good. Can we start tomorrow.'"'

  "Oh. Well, why not.^ I'm working, but if you want to come at three . . . no, four would be better. That gives me most of the day."

  "You're working.''"

  "We can talk about that tomorrow."

  "Four o'clock, then." He put away his datebook..

  "You didn't write it down," Emma said.

  "There's no chance I'd forget it." He handed Claire a card. "Call me if you have to change it. Otherwise, I'll be here. Emma, thank you for bringing me into your house. Hannah, I hope you and I will talk, too."

  "Oh, I'd like that," said Hannah brightly.

  Emma watched Claire walk with Alex to the door and close it behind him. "He's nice."

  "I think he's honest," Hannah said, and Emma knew that was the highest praise she had for anyone.

  "Isn't it nice that new things keep happening.''" Emma asked Claire.

  "It's only an inten'iew," Claire obser'ed. "You haven't forgotten all those others, have you, back in May.'' This one may be a little different, but they all come down to the same questions and answers."

  "This one might be a lot different," Emma said stubbornly. "How do you know?"

  "You could talk about the work you're doing," Hannah said. "And Emma's modeling. You may not want publicity, but I'll bet your friend Quentin does. And lots of it."

  The telephone rang and Emma raced to answer it. When she came back, she danced into the room. "That was Brix; a friend of his is having a party at the Hilton in New York tomorrow night. Dancing and some kind of singer. And we'll stay overnight." She looked at Claire, daring her to say something.

  "I'd rather you were home," Claire said after a moment, "but it's probably safer than driving back late." She hesitated. "Emma, are you happy with him.^"

  Do you ever just come up and say, ' 7 've got some problems, Ma, and Vd like to talk about them''?

  I can't do it, Emma thought despairingly. I can't, I can't. "Of course," she said, the words coming in a rush. "He's wonderful. I love him. And I love the modeling and I've never been so happy." She heard the quaver in her voice, and the thread of defiance, but there was nothing she could do about that. "Are we going to have dinner.^"

  "Well, it's nice to hear you ask for food for a change," Hannah said, her cheerful voice filling the spaces left by Emma's thin one. "And I want to hear all about the modeling session today, what it was like at the lab, what the photographer—what was his name.^ Tallent.'* Such an amazing name—what poses he had you do, what you wore, just everything. Maybe Alex will put it in his magazine story' and you'll be a famous model a lot sooner than you expected. And if you talk about your work, Claire, you might get jobs on your own, if you want them; you wouldn't need Quentin for anything you decide to do. And how pleasant to get to know Alex; he seems so different from those newspaper people we met." She carried the bowl of peeled and sliced apples to the counter where a pie crust waited. "My goodness, isn't it wonderful, how manv reasons there are to look forward to tomorrow."

  TEN

  A

  LEX set a tiny tape recorder on the arm of his chair. "I hope you don't mind," he said to Claire. "I like to talk to people without taking notes." He sat back and looked around. "This is a wonderful room."

  "Yes, isn't it.''" Claire said. "I just had it redone so I could work at home. It's the most perfect studio I've ever had. In fact, it's the only studio I've ever had. Would you like coffee.^ Or tea.^"

  "Coffee, thanks. How come you never had a studio.'^"

  "No one ever offered me one and I couldn't afford my own." She opened a white door and revealed a white cabinet with a small sink, a refrigerator beneath the counter, and two built-in burners. "When I worked at Danbury Graphics, I worked in a room with twenty-four other people—twenty-five drawing tables lined up edge to edge—and at home I had the dining room table or a pad of paper on my lap." She poured two cups of coffee from a silver thermos. "And now I've got an office at Eiger Labs, and it's all right, but it's not a studio and it's not my own."

  Alex watched as Claire arranged stems of wine-red grapes on a blue-and-white willowbrook plate. She wore white jeans and a dark red turtleneck sweater; a red band held back her hair, and a pencil was tucked behind her ear. Her beauty was not as soft as he remembered it from the day before, when he had seen her in the kitchen; here, in her own workspace, she seemed sharper, and Alex saw details he had missed: the prominent lines of her cheekbones, the clean curve of her jaw, her generous mouth and level brows, the quick intelligence in her eyes. A lovely woman.

  Alex thought, and he felt the same pleasure watching her as he felt when he gazed at a fine painting.

  In fact, the whole room gave him pleasure. Everything in it reflected a superb sense of color and scale. It was large and square, furnished with a white couch and two white armchairs grouped closely around a granite coffee table on a boldly patterned Azeri folklore carpet. Two drawing tables stood beside the bare windows, with white rolling cabinets of artist's supplies next to each; a wall of shelves was crammed with books and magazines, small sculptures, African baskets, ceramic vases, and silver candlesticks seemingly placed at random among the books but somehow looking as if they were in exactly the right place. Abstract paintings and framed posters were on the walls, brightly lit, as was everything in the room, by more lamps than Alex had ever seen in one place. There were lamps on every table, floor lamps, wall sconces, ceiling track lights, and flexible lamps stretched over Claire's drawing tables, and every one of them was on, filling the corners of the room against the early-November darkness beyond the windows.

  Claire saw him looking around, counting. "I don't like dark rooms," she said, then gave a small laugh. "That's pretty obvious."

  "What isn't obvious is how you've done this." With a gesture, he took in the whole room. "I haven't the faintest idea how to create anything so embracing."

  "Thank you. I like that v/ord. Where have you tried.'"' "Well, that's the problem. I live in what is called in New York a one-bedroom apartment. You'd call it a variation on a closet. In fact, it's a living room-dining room-office that's not too bad, a bedroom just big enough for a double
bed and one chair, and a galley kitchen built for one person who has no aspirations to be a chef. I tried to keep the furnishings to a minimum to get a feeling of space; it wasn't hard since they're various families' castoffs that I picked up in garage sales in New Jersey. Where did you have the dark rooms that you don't like.'"'

  "In our apartment, before we bought this house." "The one with room for a pad of paper on your lap." "Yes, but it wasn't only small; there was no light. It was on the ground floor of a duplex, one of those old houses off Main Street in Danbury that had been carved into four apartments, and then

  one of them had been divided into two, and the back one was ours. It looked onto an alley and the street along the side, but the windows were small and faced north. We never saw the sun. Were you living in New Jersey.^"

  "Yes." When Claire did not speak, but waited for him to go on, he said, "I lived there with my wife and son. My wife died and I moved to New York."

  "With your son.?"

  "I brought him to New York, but not to live with me; he lives with my sister and her husband, a few blocks from my apartment. I sold the house and everything in it; I couldn't look at any of it." He shifted in his chair and knocked the tape recorder to the floor. "Well, now." He grinned at Claire as he bent to retrieve it. "If there's a god of writing, that's him or her reminding me I'm here to work. Tell me about the dark apartment and your journey from there to this very beautiful house."

  Claire smiled. "It is a journey; what a good way to put it. But it keeps changing directions. Or the destination changes. I don't seem to know where it's going. Where I'm going." Her eyebrows rose in surprise. "I don't know why I said that. It isn't anything I'd want in a story."

  "Then we won't use it," Alex said easily. "Is working for Eiger Labs part of that.'"'

  "Probably. I'm sorry to be so vague, but so many things are happening it's hard to find a center." She paused. Alex waited, sitting back in his chair, relaxed, not hurrying her. "I think I always thought that money would help me find a center: that, if only I had enough money, I could organize my life around whatever I thought was most important; that money would buy, first of all, the time I needed to look around and put things in some sort of order of importance and then go after them. Organize and plan and then live. Really live, following my own feelings and wants. And in some ways that's what I've done. But it gets muddied by other things. It isn't simple."

  "You mean control isn't simple."

  She looked surprised again. "Yes, exactly. I thought control was the first thing money would buy, after time. And I do have more control now than I've ever had, at least over part of my life." She rose and brought the silver thermos to the table and refilled their cups. "I bought this house half an hour after I first walked

  in to look at it, and we left the apartment as soon as we could buy furniture and move in. And even now I can't always believe it's mine; I wake up in the morning and think how amazing it is that I'm here, that I've made this . . . leap, from what I was to what I am now."

  "And what you are now is different from what you were.^"

  She gazed at him thoughtfully. "I don't know. I hope not, but I think about things differently, and so does Emma; I can see it in the way we talk about what we're going to do and what we want. ... I don't know. I have to think about it."

  "Well, we'll come back to that," Alex said, though it was what interested him most in the story, and the reason he had accepted what otherwise had seemed like a frivolous assignment. "What changes have you made between the time you bought the house and now.'"'

  "This room, for one. The rest of the house was perfect, but there was no studio, and I decided to give myself the place I'd dreamed about. That was unbelievable, too: that I really could do it just the way I wanted; that as soon as I made the decision, I called a contractor and had it done. I didn't wonder whether I could afford it or scale back any of my ideas because they were too expensive; I just did it. But that has nothing to do with controlling what happens so you can build a life around the things that are most important to you; that only has to do with spending money. Which I've gotten very good at."

  "Did you have to learn how.-^"

  "Yes, but it's amazingly easy to learn."

  "Just by doing it.^"

  "Mostly. But there's an art to spending money well, getting the best of ever'thing, and I'm not sure I could have figured that out by myself. I've had help from experts, a few women I've met, who've pointed out ways to spend monev I never even thought of."

  "I hope it's fun."

  She smiled. "Lots of fun. A lot of the time it's like a game: evers time you spend money you win. And you're always winning; that's a powerful feeling. It used to be that I'd block out whatever I read about trips or concerts or the theater, and look the other way when I passed window displays in department stores,

  especially around Christmas when everything is exaggerated and everybody goes crazy with the idea that if you don't buy and buy and buy, you won't be worthy or a good parent or normal or whatever the message is. Anyway, I'd tune it all out because none of it was within my reach, so as far as my life was concerned, those things just didn't exist. But all of a sudden there they were, all of them waiting for me."

  "Very real and at your fingertips."

  "Yes. That was almost the first thing I thought: close enough to touch. It was so strange; I couldn't get enough of it."

  "Something like being hypnotized."

  Claire gazed at him. "It is hypnotic. Like a drug, I suppose."

  "You suppose. You don't know.'"'

  "No. I've never used them."

  "Haven't you been curious.^"

  "Oh, a little, and I did think about it, but I didn't know how I'd react, and I was worried about Emma. I was all she had and I didn't want to risk not being there for her all the time. And I thought if I never used them, I'd have a right to ask her not to, and she hasn't. But all my friends have, and when they talk about it, it sounds to me like money. You lose perspective; you lose precision in defining things that have no clear boundaries, like value. Everything around you changes, gets bigger and brighter and even more desirable than it was before. It's as if everything you see has arms, hands, fingers, and they're beckoning to you, urging you on, and there's no obvious reason to resist. I don't know if this makes sense; does it.^ You said at your fingertips, as if you knew. Did any of this happen to you.^"

  "Nothing like yours. There was a time when I made a lot of money from my writing and spent it happily and easily, but that's in the past. And of course—"

  "Writing for magazines.^"

  "No, there's not much money in magazine writing. Too many people are willing to work for a pittance just to get their pieces published, so the pay is outrageously low. I was at the top but it still wasn't what you'd call impressive. In those days I wrote novels."

  "Oh," Claire said abruptly. "A. N. Jarrell. Are you.^ Is that who you are.^ I should have thought of that. I've read your books;

  they're wonderful. No one writes about families as well as you do, and the way we use the past, the way we learn . . . that is who you are?"

  He nodded. "But what I was saying—"

  "I was wondering why I hadn't seen a new book from you in—oh, years."

  "Five. But what I was saying was that I never had your experiences with money, nor would most people—and that's what we're talking about—because almost no one comes even close to winning what you did."

  "I don't get it all at once," Claire said defensively.

  "It wouldn't be terrible if you did. I wasn't criticizing you. Do you always do that.'' Get your back up when somebody talks about how much money you have.''"

  "Of course I don't. Well, I don't know. I hope I don't. I'm not ashamed of it."

  "No.^ Is that honest.^"

  "I'm not ashamed of it," Claire said hotly. But then she remembered thinking that she had not earned her sixty million dollars; she had not even inherited it; she had simply bought a ticket. "I don't know," she
said again, slowly. "Would you be ashamed if you won it.'"'

  "Not for a minute."

  "Why not.?"

  "Because we should always be grateful for good luck; there's not such an abundance of it in the world, and most of us deserve some now and then. You got a lot more than some, but why shouldn't you.'' You're a good person, why shouldn't you have a stroke of great good fortune.'' Besides, you didn't snatch it from under anyone's nose; you didn't swindle old people out of their life savings or loot the pension funds of trusting workers or destroy small companies and lay off thousands of innocent employees in a leveraged buyout; you played by the rules and you won. What is there in that to make you ashamed.''"

  Claire was laughing. "Not a thing. Thank you. Til remember that. Why haven't you written a book in five years."'

  "I don't know. I just stopped. No desire, no motivation, and it takes a hell of a lot of both to turn out a book."

  "But something must have happened."

  Alex leaned forward and hilcd their cups from the thermos.

  "You were the one who talked about not having control. It happens to all of us."

  His wife died. He lost his family and his home. Five years ago? Probably.

  "But you talked about controlling what happens so you can build a life around it," Alex said before she could ask about his past. "What is it you can't control.^"

  "Oh, a lot. Too much, I think. At least, sometimes it seems that way." She reached out and broke off a small bunch of grapes and held them in her hand. The firm spheres were cold and smooth against her palm, at the height of ripeness, at the height of perfection. She never bought less than that now. But she had no control over what happened to Emma, and she was beginning to wonder how much control she had with Quentin. And none of that was Alex JarrelTs business. But the silence was lengthening and she searched for a way to change the subject.

  "I was hoping Emma would be here this afternoon," he said, and Claire shot him a sharp look.