by Don Gillmor
They sat in that lull. Press stared at his hand some more, then looked up. “Hell of a golfer, Dale. Had that swing. Loose as a Vegas hooker.”
August Sampson finally entered, his stooped walk. “Harry,” he said. August’s mournful face had been undone by gravity, his tuberous nose and surplus cheeks pulled south. A mask. His parts were shrinking at variable rates, giving him a mismatched look. His ears had expanded brilliantly. His suit was a sober two-button flannel in a British cut, the shoulder lines drooping, the sleeves an inch too long. August might remember the twelve-year-old Harry, if he remembered anything. Maybe he’d seen Harry a few times when he was college age, parties at the house. And then as a grey, middle-aged man, reading a eulogy. August’s own decay was nothing compared to Harry’s: from shiny-faced youngster to this.
“Harry has some worries about Dale’s estate. He left thirteen grand, which I’m sure you’ll agree … Anyway, I thought you might be able to help, August.”
“Anything I can do,” August said.
“Do you know anything about Pathos?” Harry asked.
Press and August glanced at each other, and August’s face had a sudden interrogative cast, silently asking a question of Press.
“Oil sands,” August finally said. “Flavour of the month. Not this month. But it had an interesting ride.”
“Was Pathos something you bought for your clients?”
August shook his head. “People called me about it. It was one of those stocks that had a lot of play. So investors would hear about it. It was going for, I forget, I think something around a buck, then it moved to four pretty fast. People called and said they wanted in. They’d hear the name at a cocktail party, someone would tell them it’s going to explode, the Chinese are going to pick it up and move ten thousand peasants up to Fort McMurray, pay them five bucks a day, profit’s going to go through the roof. But the fundamentals were never rosy. They hadn’t set up the operation; they weren’t producing any actual oil. They still haven’t turned out a single barrel. So no, I didn’t buy it. For those people I couldn’t talk out of it, I picked up a few shares. That was it.”
“My father bought some.”
“For himself,” Press said. It wasn’t clear if this was a question.
“I think so.”
“Well, you can play with this stuff. You know it’s going to collapse, but you bid it up with the rest and hope you’re first out. Dale was a complicated man.”
“Complicated,” August affirmed. “Was he under some kind of pressure?”
“I wasn’t aware of anything,” Harry said. “I mean, there were the health issues, but I can’t see that … Unless he felt he needed to make a lot of money in a short time and suddenly got reckless. But it would be out of character. Wouldn’t it?”
“Completely out of character,” August said.
“Dale was all about character,” Press said. “Have you spoken to anyone else here, Harry?”
“No,” he said.
Press glanced at August.
“Is there anyone you could suggest I speak to? Someone who might know something?”
“We’ll ask the troops,” Press said.
The carpet in Press’s office was massive and worn. A ray of sun sliced through the room and lit the wood of his desk in comforting amber tones.
“How many clients was he dealing with?” Harry asked.
“Well,” Press said, “most of his workload had gone to others. Natural scheme of things. He still did the Thorncliffes, Teddy and Ella. By the end, most of the larger accounts had been moved over. Dale was half-time, not even. As you know.”
Harry didn’t know. He didn’t know how much time his father had been spending at the office. He didn’t know how Dale spent his days. Or his nights.
Harry smiled. “I wonder if I can get some help with those boxes.”
“Boxes,” Press repeated.
“My father’s effects.”
“We’ll get someone to carry them out for you.”
Press and August held their expressions of sympathy for a longish moment more. Harry was curious to see what they would be replaced by. He met August’s mournful gaze. How far had his cancer advanced? His face was an ancient rune, and Harry imagined that if he could decipher his expression it would tell him something revelatory. Harry looked over at Press, who glanced quickly at August, his eyes the only thing that moved. Harry finally stood up, shook hands and left them both.
When he got home, he went through his father’s files. He followed numbers through prescribed mazes, hoping to see Dale taking shape, like the faint outline of the Virgin Mary on the wall of a Mexican restaurant that got half a page in the paper: a sign, a miracle.
SIX
HARRY MET ERIN FOR LUNCH AT ARANCIA. She was wearing a vaguely Japanese collection of expensive knitwear, autumn tones that blended and flowed. Her dark hair was short. She was forty-eight years old. She carried the killing gene, handed down from Felicia, that gift of verbal dissection, a few deft lines that left lasting wounds. Her two daughters had it too, a trait that followed the feminine bloodline. Erin’s face also held traces of their mother, the bright eyes that photographed so well. She surveyed the restaurant and waved to a woman who looked, more or less, like herself.
When Harry told her about his meeting with Dick Ebbetts and the possibility that their father had been swindled, she just shrugged.
“They’re a bunch of thugs,” she said. “I’m not surprised.” She stared at the woman she’d waved to as if she wasn’t sure she actually knew her.
“But someone may have that money,” Harry said.
“Maybe. Maybe Dick was wrong and Dad just didn’t get out in time. Maybe money didn’t look the same to him anymore, Harry. You’re near the end, you can let loose a bit. He’s old, feeling impotent, he takes a flyer. Anyway, how the hell would Dick Ebbetts know what Dad was trading on his personal account? It seems odd.”
“You don’t think it’s odd that Dad’s estate was worth less than $20,000?”
“Remember Charlie Evans?”
“The Jaguar.” When they were kids, a neighbour had gone into the garage with a bottle of bourbon, closed the door and sat in his Jag with the engine running. The rumour was he’d lost all his money on the market.
“God, I wonder whatever happened to that family.” His sister picked up her wineglass by the stem. “Why did you go to Dick Ebbetts? He’s such an awful man. Twyla Spence told me he spends half his income on prostitutes. No one pays a hundred grand for the missionary position.”
His sister’s witch-like intuition and eerie store of information unnerved Harry. “How would Twyla Spence know—”
“Why didn’t you go to Prescott, or August?”
“I did. But I went to Dick first to get the lay of the land.”
“So what does Dick think?”
“Who knows. These guys make their living being opaque. I don’t really trust Dick, but I don’t trust Press or August either.”
“It would be a stretch for Prescott to steal Dad’s money. I wonder if he’s smart enough. And August is probably too ethical.”
“August has cancer. He must be eighty. He’s on his way out.”
“Which isn’t exactly a motive.”
Left unspoken was the fact that Erin didn’t really need the money. She was still venomously angry that Dixie had gotten all of their father’s furniture, but Erin could easily afford to buy whatever she wanted, and wouldn’t have had room for any of it, anyway. Whatever her husband, Ty, did, whatever dark corner of the banking world he inhabited these days, it was clearly profitable.
“Erin, I think we have to make an attempt to find out what happened.”
“What, you mean hire someone, a detective? Don’t you think the money is long gone, Harry? If there even was any. He wouldn’t be the first person who lived beyond his means.”
Harry absorbed this subtle assault. “What if there is money, Erin? There might be $8 million floating around out there. Even i
f it’s just $2 million …”
“You could afford a divorce, Harry.”
If there really was no money, it occurred to Harry, they might need to sell the house. It had been the first of his investments to disappoint. Real estate was supposed to be the bedrock, but his house had proved to be the foundation of his debt. Every detail of the house’s inflated price, ongoing disappointments and lawsuit-threatening renovations was etched in his mind. Harry had stayed awake and brooded over it for years, off and on, replaying his decisions. The first problem was that he and Gladys had bought at the top of the market. Perhaps it was the day the market peaked. They had paid $522,000 back in 1989, far more than they could afford, but the reasoning was that, at the time, the housing market was going up between six and nine percent annually. “Your house is your savings account,” the real estate agent had said. A trim, petite woman, Del drove a BMW and wore flared dress pants and heels. “This is land. They’re not making any more of it,” she said. “In history, historically, land goes up. A dip, maybe, but up, always. Harry, I pride myself on knowing what my clients are not saying. And what you’re not saying is, I love this place!” This was partly true. Harry loved the southern exposure, the light it spread through the house. He was nervous about the electrical system and the ancient furnace. And he was fearful of the bidding war that would surely take place. He had already lost six bidding wars, and it was emasculating, and Del had a real talent for subtly reinforcing this idea and suggesting—without actually saying anything—that Harry was wasting her time with his small-dick offers.
The house was listed at $458,000. There were five bidders. Because of the interest, there would be no house inspection report, no handsome binder that told you whether the house had termites or corroded lead pipes that leaked dangerous chemicals into your drinking water, causing irreparable brain damage. They had to take their chances. Del gave him The Talk. “Harry, you have to understand what this house means to you. I don’t mean bricks, parking pad, breakfast nook, whatever. I’m talking about its meaning. Because that is what you’re buying. You try and put a dollar figure on that meaning. What it is. And that dollar figure is based on what, Harry? People think it’s based on what they can afford. And they live with that regret every day of their lives. Twenty-five years ago, this house sold for $27,000, and some poor immigrant and his wife, they looked at each other and said, ‘Jesus, we can’t do this.’ And now its listed at $458,000, and it’ll go for more than $500,000. There are four other people out there, Harry. And some of them have already lost. They haven’t even put in their offer and they’re gone. They think, Well, why not go a few thousand over asking? It’s worth a try. Not in a field of five. They’ll go two, five, maybe ten. They don’t deserve this house. You know what an extra fifty grand is over the life of a mortgage, Harry? Two grand a year, six bucks a day. A cup of coffee. But one of those bidders, maybe two, they don’t mind a little blood. We only get one shot at it, Harry. Do you deserve this house?”
As it turned out, he didn’t get just the one shot. He and Gladys stayed up most of the night, discussing it without really coming to a decision either of them was comfortable with. So they bid high because they had come this far and the thought of dragging themselves through this again was too dispiriting. That initial blood-chilling bid of $511,500 was close to another bid, Del said. So close the agents felt the only fair way was to have the two competing parties go back and put in a second, higher offer—a process, Harry dimly noted, that would benefit both agents.
“This is poker, Harry.” Del said. “This is you sitting on your new deck eight years from now, telling your friends how you couldn’t afford to buy it if was listed now. The way to stop bidding is to close. You go in hard and send that bastard home, Harry. Or next week, you are going to be going through this same shit again.”
They went with $522,000. It seemed excruciatingly high. It meant a load of debt he hadn’t remotely anticipated. But they had their house.
The first headline arrived a month later: “Cracks in the Foundation?” Within a week, a second: “Unreal Estate.” Then they were a fixture: “The Last Bidding War?”; “The Bubble Has Burst!”; “A Pox on All Your Houses.”
Within a year Harry’s house was worth approximately $360,000. The furnace that was manufactured by the J. Grantham Co. in 1951 chose a December evening to quietly expire. The pipes were, indeed, lead. The electrical system, a knob and tube network of fire hazards placed cunningly in the uninsulated walls, had to be replaced in order for them to get insurance. In their second summer, the basement flooded, 18 inches of act-of-god water that ruined the contents of their storage room. They lived with his mother for a tension-filled week while termite poison was drilled into the foundation by a gap-toothed teenager.
Later, they took out a second mortgage to renovate the second-floor bathroom. Then, five years ago, they hired an architect to redesign the kitchen. Gladys had found him, a German named Fassblut, with dramatic glasses and close-cropped silver hair, who sprawled on their couch, ignoring the coffee Gladys set in front of him, pretending to listen to their needs.
“One of the things we desperately need is more storage space,” Gladys said. “I know there’s too much … junk, and I’ll be getting rid of some of it, but now, as you can see—”
“Cooking is the desire for salvation,” Fassblut said in his slight Germanic accent. “An attempt to fill the empty space with sacrifice.”
“And a larger counter. I think I’d like the counter to be a focus.”
“You must have confidence in the negative space. The void left by God is a gift that settles into convention. And we must reject this.”
“Mary Oglethorpe had glass panels on her cabinets,” Gladys said, talking to both Fassblut and Harry now. “A hint of green in the glass. It was very clean-looking.”
“The deconstructing of the boundary,” Fassblut said, getting up and approaching their kitchen—its eighties-era peeling maple veneer and off-brand appliances, “is only a temporary refuge. Look here,” he said, his hand cutting the air near the drying rack. “Here we have an exodus from the mythology of appetite. The emphasis, always, is on the materiality of truth, which comes, of course, in many guises. Is this an impression, or is this the fabric? Every kitchen is an argument with itself, yes?”
The oddest thing about Fassblut was his hold over Gladys. A pragmatist in most things, she held on to the notion of his genius for a surprising stretch. She had looked at hundreds of kitchens, both in magazines and in people’s homes, and this immersion had set something in motion: she deconstructed them into their myriad components—black-coral quartz countertops, Philippe Starck brushed nickel faucets, Next Generation refrigerators, ironic plywood, AGA stoves, Brazilian rosewood cabinets—and then into an almost Foucaultian exploration of their meaning, a maze of signifiers and collapsing semiotics. And it was into this particular and somewhat European moment that Fassblut appeared. She had gotten his name from a woman in her book club who swore he was a genius, and said he had reinvented not just the kitchen but the idea of the kitchen.
“I think we’d like pot lights,” Gladys said. “Something subtle that disappears, almost.”
Fassblut nodded and looked up at the track lighting that had looked modern only sixteen years earlier and now looked like shag carpet. He took two short steps and stood in front of the refrigerator, a wheezing nineteen-year-old Troublefree Frosty.
“The refrigerator, of course, will go,” Gladys said.
“Stand here,” Fassblut said, gently guiding Gladys to a spot at the centre of the room, the place she wanted a butcher’s block island.
“Here?”
“A bit this way.” Nudging her slightly.
Gladys stood as if waiting for a photograph to be taken.
“The spacing of the geometry so often ignores the human.”
This seemed to comfort Gladys. She wanted something singular and arresting, yet ultimately functional. And she didn’t want it to be too cold. She
wanted hints of Mediterranean warmth. Maybe a playful colour in the backsplash. Their orange Le Creuset cookware on display.
“There’s something in a magazine I’d like to show you,” Gladys said. “It’s not what I want this kitchen to be, but I think it caught something that I’m trying to do.” She fetched the magazine and Fassblut ignored it.
Fassblut stared at their erratic DesignerStyle dishwasher. “There is the unspoken aesthetic that haunts,” he said. “The animals that are unmourned on our plates. Of course, blood is the ritual, but not the result. You need transcendence. Look at Formica. It took the American kitchen into gleaming servitude. It constituted a mystery of ignorance that fed the masses.”
“We had Formica in our kitchen when I was young,” Gladys said hopefully.
Fassblut said, “Every kitchen is filled with death.”
A week later a courier dropped off Fassblut’s drawings. The epic counter was, in fact, Formica, a classic white with tiny squares of black and beige sprinkled on it. In the centre of the kitchen, where Gladys had wanted her island, there was a single block of wood, a piece of redwood that was seven feet long, three feet high and three feet wide (and cost $11,600). It was symbolic, an altar. Untreated, the exposed wood would absorb blood and juices, and it would be “a testament to both life and death [and bacteria] under this roof and a living portrait of all that sustained the Salt [sic] family.” This was in the short essay attached to Fassblut’s $83,000 estimate.
In the end, he settled for a $4,000 kill fee.
Harry later discovered that Fassblut’s entire career was built on unconstructed kitchens, bathrooms, houses and buildings. None of his designs were built: not his windowless corrugated-tin farmhouse that was a rejection of the pastoral myth; nor his stainless steel bathroom that was a witty take on the hygienic fallacy; nor his suburban sod huts made of living grass (“the breath of conformity transposes content into history”). And especially not the synagogue that was to be built entirely below grade, the only evidence of its existence a massive twenty-foot periscope sitting on a spacious, otherwise empty gravel site (“a stone witness that weeps for all antinomies”). The name of the synagogue was to be spray-painted onto the gravel and remain subject to wind, rain and snow. And for all this, Fassblut was well paid.