by Robert Inman
He tried to imagine Clarice as a judge. She had the kind of no-nonsense manner that would keep good order in a courtroom. She would look smashing in black.
Clarice started to say something, held back, then started gathering all of her plans and estimates and tile and paneling samples and stashing them neatly back in the cardboard box. She placed the lid on the box and looked up at him. “I’m not going to debate this with you, Wilbur. I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to sell real estate. I’m going to sell enough to pay for the addition on the house. I’m going to do it exactly the way I want. And when that’s done, I may sell enough to pay for a swimming pool.”
“Well,” he said, “you don’t have to get mad about it.”
“I’m not mad. I’m just determined.”
And, he thought, as they sat here on the deck on this lovely April Saturday evening, sipping their scotch and vodka, that she had been impressively successful at it. She had her own checking and savings accounts, into which she put everything she made from the real estate business. He insisted on that. What she did with the money was her business. And he imagined that she was well on the way toward her goal of enough money to remake the house in exactly the way she wanted. They had not talked about the project for a good while. And Will wasn’t about to tread again into that minefield, not right now. She would reveal things in her own good time. And he would be happy for her.
So instead he said, “Let’s go out.”
“Dinner?”
“Sure. We’ll celebrate.”
“What?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A successful day at Greylyn. A successful day in the yard. Your good health and ravishing beauty. My good health and…well, my health. Calvin Coolidge’s birthday.”
She sipped on her drink for a moment and looked at him over the top of the glass. “Yes,” she said finally. “I’d like that a lot.”
*****
The restaurant was in the City Market area downtown, a couple of blocks from the State Capitol -- an old farmers’ market that had been saved from demolition and brought back to life with shops and eating establishments. This particular one was a favorite watering hole for lobbyists who wanted to ply state officials, legislators and hangers-on with food and drink while they conducted business in a manner so subtle and convivial that it seemed to transpire without transpiring at all. Will spoke briefly to several he knew, introducing Clarice and pausing for just a moment as they made their way to the quiet table in the rear that the manager had reserved for them. Ah, Will. We’re pretty full up tonight, but for you…
They had another round of drinks. Will felt the warm glow of Scotch, good talk. Clarice was animated, luminous in the soft light from the small brass and mahogany lamp set to one side of the table. She told a funny story about a new agent at Sniveley and Ellis who kept setting off burglar alarms at the houses she showed. He reached for her hand across the table. “I love you,” he said. “I’m very proud of you.”
“Yo Will! What’s the weather?” It startled them both. An elderly man, leaning precariously on a cane, was bearing down on their table. He had a raspy cackling laugh. “Bet you don’t get many people asking you that, huh?” He stopped abruptly, just in the nick of time. Another step and he would have toppled onto the table. He stood there swaying back and forth, then stuck out a trembling hand. Will took it.
“Will Baggett,” Will said.
“Oh hell yeah, I know who you are.”
“And you are…”
“Gordon Flxmstrmmblz…” the last name collapsed into mush.
“My wife. Clarice.”
Gordon Flxmstrmmblz never even looked at her. Instead, he reached behind him and grabbed a chair from another table and, with surprising agility, scooted it up next to Will and Clarice’s table and collapsed into it. “Got this problem,” he said.
“Mister, ah…”
“Just call me Gordon. Last name’s a booger to pronounce. Anyhow, I got slugs in the garden. Nasty things. Hundred of ’em.”
“Well,” Will said with a smile, “that’s kinda out of my realm of expertise, Gordon. I can give you chapter and verse on cold fronts, but I’m not much on slugs.”
The old man leaned across the table toward Will, tapping a bony finger on the linen. “The point is, the weather affects ’em. Or maybe it’s the slugs affecting the weather.”
From the corner of his eye, Will could tell they were attracting the attention of the other diners. Their waiter scurried over. “Ah, um…sir, I believe Mister and Mizzus Baggett…”
The old man waved him off and Will gave the waiter a wink. Just give me a minute and I’ll humor the old geezer.
“You see, Baggett, when it’s about to rain, these little bastards start appearing in droves. Like they knew it was gonna rain. Eat every damn thing in sight, then the rain comes and they wash down what they ate with rain water. Cucumber vines, parsley, flowering plants, you name it. Then they,” he gave a flip of his hand, “just disappear.”
Will laughed. “Stealth slugs, huh?”
“I’m retired, you know.”
“That’s nice, Gordon. Enjoying your retirement?”
“Thirty-seven years at the bank. Got a helluva retirement package – cash, stock, pension – and a little pissant party where all the young guys I taught the banking business to got up and lied about how much they’d miss me.” He cackled, enjoying his joke on the younger guys. “Bought Mama,” he turned and pointed across the room to a table where a tiny white-haired woman gave them a little finger roll wave, “bought Mama a house at Linville Falls. Spend about half our time up there, except when the snow’s up to your ass. I like to have run Mama nuts the first few months until she got me to gardening. You see?”
Will put a conspiratorial hand on Gordon’s arm. “I enjoy a day in the yard myself, Gordon.”
“Then these goddamn slugs showed up.”
Clarice stood abruptly, rising above them to her full five-eight. Will looked up at her. She was staring at him with a look of disbelief and horror. Not at Gordon, at him. She dropped her napkin on the table. “I want to go home, Will,” she said. And she walked away.
Will caught up with her across the street where the car was parked. She was pulling furiously on the door handle. It was locked, but she kept pulling on it. She was crying.
“Clarice, I’m sorry.”
He really was sorry. She looked so terribly wretched. He wanted to put his arms around her, but she was a world apart from him, shoulders hunched, pulling again and again on the door handle. He had tried hard over the years to shelter Clarice and Palmer from the limelight, to protect them from the curious, from the downside of celebrity status, so that they could lead normal lives, even if he couldn’t. He hadn’t been altogether successful in his sheltering, but he had tried. And now, just when they were having a great evening and things seemed to be as comfortable between them as they had been in a good while…
She turned on him. She looked gaunt in the harsh whiteness of the street lamps -- much older, weary and despairing. Her mascara was running. Will reached for the handkerchief in his back pocket, offered it to her. She ignored it.
“Look, come on back in, honey. Our dinner will be there in a minute.”
“You know,” she sobbed, “I thought I was marrying Will Baggett. Instead, I got the Weather Wizard. Do you ever just tell anybody to go fuck off?”
“Clarice, honey, don’t you think you’re over-reacting?”
“You should see yourself, Will. You get this look like an over-eager child trying to please. Or like you’re hungry for something you can’t ever get enough of.”
“I just try to be nice to people,” he said defensively.
“And what about me? When I’m with you, I’m just an appendage.”
“No you’re not.”
“Unlock the car. I’m going home. You can stay here and talk about slugs all night if you want to.”
He took her straightaway home in deadly silence. He stayed downstair
s for a long time, letting her have the bedroom to herself. He called the restaurant and offered to pay the tab. The manager wouldn’t hear of it. So sorry we let that guy disrupt your dinner, Will. Come back as our guest. When he finally went upstairs and slipped into bed beside her and put a gentle hand on her shoulder, she was like concrete. “I’m sorry,” he said again. She shivered. But that was all.
THREE
He was puttering about the house at mid-morning on Monday when the phone rang. Gretchen, Old Man Simpson’s secretary. Could he come in early? Mr. Simpson wanted to see him. Will volunteered that he was available for lunch. No, Mr. Simpson already had lunch plans. Would one o’clock be okay? Fine.
It would be about his contract, of course. He thought about it as he showered and dressed. Old Man Simpson had been away from Channel Seven for two months. Back surgery to correct an old disc problem, he had told the staff before he left, and then some time in the Bahamas to recuperate. In the meantime, Will’s contract had run out.
It was no big deal. It had been a fairly casual matter between them from the beginning. Old Man Simpson would call Will to his office, say kind things about his work and his value to Channel Seven and offer him a contract for another three years with a nice boost in his salary. Will would occasionally propose a perk or two – a clothing allowance, an increase in the weather center budget for a new piece of equipment – and Old Man Simpson would usually agree. The contract would be drawn up and they would go to lunch and Will would sign it. He never even had Morris deLesseps, his lawyer, look over the documents. Old Man Simpson treated him splendidly, and there was no sense in getting lawyers involved in what was a relationship of mutual respect and trust. Channel Seven needed Will Baggett. Will Baggett loved his work. What was there to quibble about? He damn sure wasn’t going anywhere else.
Old Man Simpson occupied a corner of the second floor of the Channel Seven studio building. There was an outer office and reception area where Gretchen presided, one wall of which was occupied by a huge glass-enclosed case filled with plaques, citations and other memorabilia attesting to Channel Seven’s service to the community and its civic causes, ranging from the Telephone Pioneers to the Association of Fishing Lure Collectors. Will could take credit for a good number of them, including a trophy he had been awarded after being selected -- for ten years in a row -- as “Favorite TV Weathercaster” by Best of Raleigh Magazine.
Will waited in the outer office, trying to make small talk with Gretchen and not having much success. She was normally chatty, but today she seemed distracted and out of sorts. She spilled paper clips, mumbled darkly to her computer, and failed to make the usual offer of a cup of coffee. So Will sat comfortably in a leather armchair, thumbing through the latest issue of Broadcasting. Gretchen’s phone rang. She answered it, listened for a moment, hung up. “They’re running a little late,” she said. “Mister Simpson said you could wait in his office if you don’t mind.”
Simpson’s inner sanctum was both spacious and intimate, paneled in dark walnut, furnished with burgundy leather and mahogany, the walls adorned with specially-commissioned oil paintings: the state capitol building, the Channel Seven headquarters nestled in acres of azaleas and dogwoods in full blossom, the chapel on the Duke campus, the eighteenth hole at Pinehurst Number Two, and a portrait of Confederate-era governor Zebulon Baird Vance, a remotely-connected ancestor of Old Man Simpson’s wife. Simpson’s immense antique desk was at one end of the room, a cozy sitting area at the other, and in the middle, a sweeping oval conference table. The painting of the studio building was the only hint that the room belonged to a television executive. There was no TV set in sight, though Will knew that one was hidden away in one of the cabinets that flanked the tall windows on the exterior wall. Instead, the room brought to mind what Will thought might be the atmosphere of a London gentleman’s club, or at least the office of a college president. A room where gentlemen did business.
Will took a seat on the sofa. He smiled, remembering the time he had sat in this very spot twelve years before and made the decision to become a permanent fixture in Raleigh.
It had been triggered by a job offer at another station, the only one he ever seriously considered. The manager of a station in Buffalo, New York called the weather office one evening and asked Will to send a videotape of his weathercast. A week later, the Buffalo man was back on the phone offering Will a job at a considerably higher salary than he was making in Raleigh. Will was both flattered and intrigued. Buffalo, New York -- a much larger TV market with weather that was spectacular in its extremes.
Will put off the Buffalo station manager for a few days while he thought about it. He kept it to himself, beginning to imagine himself on the air in Buffalo, shepherding the city through the grip of a blizzard in the way he guided Raleigh through its infrequent but paralyzing snows and occasional tornadoes and hurricane-induced floods. Until now, he had never aspired to anything beyond Raleigh. But now, Buffalo. Not the big-time, but close to it. And what beyond? Chicago or Los Angeles. CNN or the Weather Channel. And maybe more. “Jeopardy?”
He mulled it over for several days, leaning more and more toward taking the Buffalo job. Finally, he went to see Old Man Simpson, who listened intently while Will explained his situation. Then Old Man Simpson got up from his desk and sat down beside Will on the sofa. He put his hand on Will’s knee in fatherly fashion.
“Will,” he said, “there are three reasons why you’re not going to Buffalo. Firstly, North Carolina is your home and you are not the kind of person who would do well in exile, even if it is self-imposed. Secondly, you are beholden to this city, and it to you. Raleigh folks decide right off the bat whether they like someone who appears on TV. If they don’t like you right off, they won’t ever like you. But if they do like you right off, they like you more the longer you stay. And they like you a good bit already. You are not the handsomest or wittiest weatherman on American TV, but you have a quality that transcends beauty and wit. People trust you because you are trustworthy. They depend on you because you are dependable. You have earned that, and it makes no sense to chuck it and run off to Buffalo.”
Old Man Simpson sat back on the sofa and hiked one long leg over the other.
“And what’s the third reason?” Will asked.
“I’m gonna double your pay.”
He told Clarice the next morning as they drank coffee on the deck. “I got a job offer from Buffalo, New York.”
Clarice stared at him for a good little while. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking. Finally she said, “I thought you had a girl friend.”
“What?”
“You’ve been acting strange. All week.”
“I’ve been struggling with this thing.”
“You’ve known for a week and you haven’t said a word to me about Buffalo, New York?”
“Well, I turned them down,” Will said. “We’re not going to Buffalo.”
“But what if I wanted to go to Buffalo.”
“Do you?” He doubted that. Clarice’s family, the Greensboro Palmers, were a notoriously thick lot, three generations living perilously close to each other, all of them up to their eyeballs in each other’s business. He thought they had never quite forgiven him for keeping Clarice in New Bern -- 190 miles to the east of Greensboro -- for four years before he brought her to Raleigh, which was only 80 miles away.
“It doesn’t matter,” Clarice said. “The point is, you didn’t tell me. You didn’t ask me. You decided without me.”
Will reached for her hand, but she wouldn’t give it over. “Clarice, I’m sorry. I just didn’t want to worry you with it. I didn’t decide anything without you. It…well, it was kind of decided for me.”
Then he told her about his salary.
“That’s nice,” she said, and got up and went in the house.
Will heard voices in the outer office and started toward the door as it opened. Then he stopped in his tracks as Old Man Simpson appeared in the doorway. He leaned on a
cane, bent and frail, face creased with lines that Will had never seen there before. Two months ago, he had been a robust specimen -- lean, erect, immaculately groomed, a scratch golfer who played at least thirty-six holes every week regardless of the season. Now, he was aged and fragile. His clothes hung loosely on his shrunken frame. He looked unkempt -- badly shaven, hair akimbo. Will stared, unable to speak. Old Man Simpson held out a hand and Will took it gingerly, afraid of breaking something. “Will, good to see you,” he rasped. Will stepped back and gave him room to shuffle in. Simpson and the man just behind him.
Will closed the door and managed to say, “Good to have you back.”
Old Man Simpson barked a short, mirthless laugh. Then he cut a quick glance at the other man, who had brushed past them and was striding toward the far side the conference table. “Will, this is Arthur Krupp.”
He was short and stocky, dressed in a dark blue pinstripe suit, white shirt and muted red tie, matching hankie peeking out of the suit pocket. Tanned, almost swarthy features -- narrow brow and jutting chin, longish, wavy hair. He was carrying an expensive leather briefcase, which he opened on the table, giving as he did so a flash of Rolex watch and diamond ring.
“Pleased to meet you,” Will said. They shook hands across the table. Krupp nodded but didn’t speak. There was an awkward moment and then Old Man Simpson gestured Will into a chair and eased himself into another at the end of the table, hooking the cane over the chair arm. Krupp busied himself for a moment in the briefcase. He was out of place here -- a bit too slick, too smooth, too obvious with his Rolex and diamond. He might be a manufacturer’s representative, come to sell Channel Seven the state-of-the-art doppler weather radar Will coveted. Or a lawyer for the mob. But the kind of fellow who might feel at home in this gentleman’s sanctuary, sitting now beneath the painting of the eighteenth hole at Pinehurst Number Two? No.
Will glanced at Old Man Simpson for a clue, but Simpson was intently studying a large brown age spot on the back of his hand. Finally he looked up and said, “Mr. Krupp is with Spectrum Broadcasting, Will.”