Читать книгу The Arriviste - James Wallenstein - Страница 8

chapter three

Another diabolical particular: how the timbre of a ringing phone can seem to change in a series of identical rings, how the friendly invitation of the first ring becomes a plea by the fourth and a threat by the sixth, turns brittle by the eighth and menacing by the twelfth. And at six in the morning, the change seems that much harsher.

Early one workday morning a couple of weeks later as I sat over a cup of coffee and watched the season’s first snowfall, the phone rang. I let it ring. It had been ringing a lot lately. Weissmer, Schiff, Marne was on the brink of civil war. The adversaries were hurrying to line up their ducks for the meetings that were supposed to straighten things out. These meetings had nothing to do with the suit or its outcome. They were internal political struggles, avoidable if I could avoid the entanglements leading up to them.

The phone rang on and on. I stayed at the breakfast table, watching the snow through a row of slanted windows waft from on high and fall thicker and faster as it approached the ground, veering at all angles toward the objects it would land on, like birds swooping into the trees from below.

Office politics was only half to blame for my refusal to answer the phone. I had decided in the aftermath of the party that maybe Joyce had been right to go, that we might be better off apart. This was a wise decision: the fascination with imagining where she was and what she might be doing at every instant wore off. But when my old sense of her, the one I’d developed in the course of our marriage, began to come back to me, I started to worry. I remembered her impulsiveness, her moodiness, how little it could take to make her pity herself. A cold gust or a headache or a quarrel with Jules might be enough to make her dial her old number. If she caught me in a weak moment of my own, when the sound of her voice was enough to make me think of how we ought to have gotten along, she might ask to come back—or make me want her to ask. Either way, I’d have lost ground.

I poured myself more coffee and the ringing stopped. A half minute later it started again. I was rattled, my resolve spent. I grabbed it.

“I hope I’m not getting you out of bed,” Mickey said.

“Like hell you do. You wouldn’t have rung the phone off the hook if you’d been worried about waking me up.”

“I didn’t have to worry about that. It’s obvious that you were already up.”

“And why is it obvious?”

“Because people are more decent when they’re just waking up. The first words out of the mouth of someone who’s still muzzy are never ‘like hell you do.’ Not unless he’s a hoodlum.”

A water pipe began to knock behind the baseboard. “Is there an emergency? Has Leon finally given up the ghost?”

“Are you kidding? I spoke to her last week, invited her down for the holidays. Know what she said? She said, ‘You want me to come to that fetid charnel house?’ That’s what she said.”

“Fetid. She loosed that one on the waiter the last time we ate out. There was nothing wrong with the restaurant.” I said nothing about charnel house, which didn’t strike me as inapt. Mickey’s house was one of those late Victorians built against the sun and its devils: all hallways, nooks, back stairs, closets, and pantries under crow-ridden coffee trees and black locusts. I’d driven through storms to avoid staying the night there.

“She also said that Diane was a tramp,” he continued. Diane was Mickey’s first wife. She was long gone. Not dead, just out of the picture. “You’re right on that score, I told her. She meant Jeanette, of course,”—his current wife. “But she’s no tramp—not that she hasn’t got it in her. Most of them do,” he added. “I wonder what she’d say about Joyce if she knew. I take it you haven’t told her?”

“You didn’t ring the phone off the hook at six in the morning to ruminate on women’s inconstancy, did you?”

“There are a few things, as a matter of fact. There’s Linda’s Christmas bonus.” Linda kept our books. “I thought I’d give her—”

“I leave it to you.”

“But it’s your money too.”

“Then take the figure you were thinking of and double it.”

“Well, that works out perfectly. I thought I’d give her half what you suggested. One must never be middle class about money. Right, Neil?”

“What else?”

“Bisbee’s up to his old tricks, trying to dicker with us on the lease extension for our drilling contract. I’m for siccing Monash on him.” Monash was a wolf in lawyer’s clothing whose services we’d had regular recourse to. “It’s time to lower the boom.”

“Then lower it, Mickey. But will you please leave me out of it? You know what you want to do. You ask me for my advice, and then when I give it to you, you do what you want just the same.”

“You are surly this morning. I was going to ask what you thought about your neighbor’s proposal, but I’m not sure I dare.”

“Of course you dare.”

“Well, then—” The water pipe knocked again. It was as if a mine were being worked behind the plaster. “What in hell’s going on there?”

“Just some clatter from the plumbing.”

“I thought you might be smacking the receiver against the table.”

“I’m afraid that my aggression still comes in more evolved forms. They won’t be carting me off to the bin just yet.”

“Good. Then you’ll be able to make it next week.”

“No, I won’t.” An epic sigh escaped from me. “Make what?”

“That proposal. I thought we’d all get together over a drink.” He was practically shouting. I held the receiver away from my ear. “You and I and Bud. Size him up, see if he’s for real, et cetera.”

“I’m too busy for et cetera, Mickey. You have no idea.”

“What’s that? Would you speak up, Neil?”

“I haven’t even opened the file. I don’t know the first thing about his business.”

“The usual hocus pocus, charts, graphs, tables . . .” Mickey couldn’t be bothered to read business proposals and relied on me to brief him. It was part of his pretense to being duly diligent. Though he disregarded what I told him when it wasn’t what he wanted to hear, he couldn’t or wouldn’t proceed without consulting me, as if by pointing out the risks of a venture I was diminishing them. It wasn’t short-term prospects that concerned him anyway. Our interests and those of the businesses we funded weren’t always strictly aligned. Their early struggles could be turned to our advantage.

We described ourselves as sleeping partners, declining to mention even to ourselves the more active role we might take in a business’s later stages. We were certainly aware of it, yet it went unacknowledged. I don’t know what Mickey felt about it: something less than pride, I’m sure, but also less than shame. Whatever this feeling, he didn’t let it get in the way of his appraisal of entrepreneurs. It was hopefulness he looked for in them, the hopefulness of the man who’s said to himself “If only I can find a way to get started” and who sustains himself by saying so.

This could make the entrepreneur grateful to the investor who’d help him get his start, lead him to accept unfavorable terms that boxed him in but left this investor room to maneuver. By being too accommodating when it comes to what might seem to be technicalities—redemption dates, rates of conversion, events of default—a man who thinks he is finally going to be working for himself may discover that he has traded one boss for another, whose power, if it is less overbearing from day to day, may ultimately be more insidious.

“It looks good to me. Still, I may be missing something in the numbers,” Mickey said. “I count on you to tell me.”

The snow was letting up, or had stopped. I couldn’t tell whether the flakes I saw drifting around were falling from the sky or had blown from the trees.

“There’s nothing you really want me to tell you, Mickey. You know it all already.”

“I want to know whether his assumptions are sound and his estimates hold water.”

“And what if I tell you they don’t?”

“I thought you said you hadn’t looked at them.”

“I haven’t. I’m speaking hypothetically.”

“Let’s not cross that bridge before we have to. My guess is that the man may be on to something.” What Mickey meant was that he himself might be on to something. “Which night next week are we on for?”

There was no escaping the meeting. The thought of the pleas I’d have to endure if I refused was enough to secure my capitulation. Mickey and Bud seemed to feel that their connection had to pass through me. Though a party to their dealings, I was also to serve as the witness to them. But what kind of witness? If I was neutral, it was by virtue of being biased against both sides.

Coffee cup in hand, I was headed for the door when the phone rang again. Mickey often called back a second after we had hung up—the thing he’d have forgotten to mention was usually his real reason for calling. Fearing his postscripts, I let it ring.

The scent from a patch of chrysanthemums that clung to life hit me as I went through the door. I crossed a section of the lawn and stopped beside an upside-down wheelbarrow that leaned against a tree stump. A few birds that hadn’t had the sense to fly south flitted around it. The air was surprisingly warm and still, and the horizon was the yellow of a guttering match flame. Directly overhead, a whiter light tinged the outline of a cloud, an enormous snow crystal flaking into millions like a giant sloughing its skin. Snowflakes hissed as they melted in my hair.

Frances nosed her way out the storm door and bounded through the thin blanket of snow, kicking up her back legs, and trawling her snout through the powder. I threw snowballs and she tried to fetch them. After a dozen or so, she figured out that I was putting her on and capped off her frisk by barreling straight into me. I barreled back. The bout was brief but furious. I came away with slobber-caked snow melting on my wrists and waist and under the tongues of my brogues.

I marched to the bottom of the driveway, picked up the paper, and dusted off the tube into which it had been rolled. On snowy days, Peter and I had taken this walk for the paper, playing catch on the way back. The tube and paper together made an excellent football, easy for a little boy to grip. As I went back up the path, I saw the moss beside it nearly hidden, the juniper beginning to kneel, the tool-shed ramp like a model of a glacier. The sand trucks were already out on the access road; the flagstones were rumbling.

But from upstairs, through the arched window opposite the medicine-chest mirror, the same patch of lawn looked cheerless, the light a flat gray over the meager snow cover. The tree stump and wheelbarrow were hardly distinguishable from the rocks beside them, and the birds looked smaller than the whiskers I was shaving. I had just come out of the shower and kept having to wipe steam from the glass.

I cleared the mirror once more and saw a man in it, far off in the background, on the lawn beside the stump and the barrow, where I’d been. His image was all of the length of a finger and quickly passed out of the frame. I tried to recall him as soon as he was gone: the tilt of his fedora brim, his camel hair overcoat the color of a giblet-rich gravy—a youthful, prosperous-looking, raffish figure. But how could I have gathered all this from a tiny, fleeting image in a foggy mirror? It wasn’t possible. I’d taken myself in, overlaid a daydream on a steamy reflection.

This dismissal was disappointing. The appearance had restored the exhilaration that had come to me with the snowfall. I rinsed the last of the lather from my face, unstopped the drain, wiped the mirror. And I had the sense that if I looked into it hard enough, I might see the barrow wheel spinning in the wind, the sparrows flitting, the stump casting a blue shadow.

I heard a sharp rapping on the front door as I knotted my necktie. A new housekeeper, Magda, had been coming in on weekdays, though she usually arrived after I was gone. Maybe, worrying that the snow would hold her up, she had left earlier than usual. As I trotted down to let her in, I reminded myself to set her straight on a few things. She cleaned in out-of-the-way places, worked miracles on fixtures and moldings, and turned up an old parking permit and backup sets of keys in a trophy cup she’d taken down to polish. But this meticulousness was bound up with a tendency to protest my burgeoning bachelor disorder by piling miscellaneous items in visible locations. I’d come home to cough-drop tins, eyeglass cases, bank books, cigarette packs, tie clips, pocket combs and collar stays heaped like jacks that children play with; to a mountain of books and magazines and newspapers teetering on a coffee table beneath an urn that was no paperweight. The idea that particular record albums belonged in particular record jackets also escaped her: Saint-Saëns would turn up in Mancini, who would turn up in Stravinsky, which should have left Stravinsky on the turntable but didn’t. Her method of promoting temperance also rankled. She put liquor bottles on top of the refrigerator. This was no reflex. The refrigerator was tall and Magda was not. She’d have needed the stepladder to get them up there. Sometimes she set them so far back that I needed it myself.

I was glad she’d come early. It would be easier to explain to her in person. I opened the door and felt my face fall.

“What’s the matter, fella? Expecting someone better looking?”

Bud brushed the snow off his rich-looking overcoat, stamped his feet on the doormat, and stepped inside. We were standing too near each other. The brim of his fedora nearly grazed my hair. I retreated a little, but not much. “It was you,” I muttered.

“Come again?”

“On the lawn. A couple of minutes ago.”

“Well, sure. I had to cross it to get here. Actually, I got a call when I started over. I had to go and come back again.” His gaze drifted past me as he spoke, toward the top of a credenza where I threw the mail after opening it. A bank statement lay open there, near enough for him to identify but not to read.

“So, what can I do for you?” As I was asking the question, I thought I knew the answer.

“I stopped by to see—”

“I’ve already spoken to Mickey. I know about the meeting. I’ll do my best to be there. But I won’t be prepared to discuss anything before then and would like it if you don’t ask me about it.”

“Ask you about it? Please, Neil.” He fingered the crease of his hat. “Do you think I’d come to badger you about that first thing in the morning?”

“Well, now that you put it that way.”

“Damn right I wouldn’t. I thought you might like a lift to the station. I don’t know about your Alfa, but mine doesn’t do too well in this stuff.”

“I’m all set. I’ve had another car for a while now.”

He rested his hand on my shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you there,” he said.

There were packs of schoolkids on every block. Listing under the weight of their book bags, lengthening their strides for speed, they were an occupying force whose hold over the territory lasts as long as the snow does. Some kept to the sidewalk, but others, seeing cars creep along, marched down the middle of the street and hardly gave way when I tooted the horn to inch past them. They played keep-away with snatched lunch boxes and pickup football with a rolled-up newspaper; they ganged up on fat boys and made them eat snow. I could see their vehemence in the shapes of their mouths. But as the snow muffled their cries and the rubber seals around the new car were tight, I felt that they were miles away.

They seemed to sense my remoteness and tried to breach it. They threw snowballs at me from the bus stops. From within the pandemonium of the buses themselves, they pressed their sluglike tongues against the misted rear windows. When that didn’t get much of a rise out of me, one boy hiked down his trousers and squashed his buttocks against the window.

Once again, I’d treated Bud badly. What was it about him that provoked me? My animosity was spontaneous, like an older brother’s, without the allegiance that underlies an older brother’s bullying. It wasn’t under my control, I didn’t quite mean it. But it was there. It had even struck Mickey, and a thing had to be truly conspicuous before he’d pick up on it.

Bud had insinuated himself into my affairs and found out more about me than I’d have liked him to know. But it was possible that this knowledge also bound me to him. He had become, if not a friend, a felt presence, an observer of my existence in Dunsinane. His intrusions, or the threat of them, helped keep my feet on the ground. With Joyce gone and Vicky away at school, I was spending time on my own. I didn’t mind the solitude. But there were moments adrift, spells in which I couldn’t be sure whether I was waking or dreaming.

Bud had a knack for taking me out of myself. He’d drop by or call or appear on my visual or mental periphery. His entrances were varied—varied and, the more I thought about them, not the impositions that I’d take them to be. Not always anyway.

I was thinking about them as I sat at a red light on my way to the 7:38. The new station wagon’s violet interior was suddenly oppressive, the seat belt was like a halter, the steering column a trap. My throat was dry; a suffocating heat blew from the defroster. I pressed a button to lower the glass—the whine of the motor was like the mewing of a stray cat—stuck my head out the window and drew in the fresh air. The snow had stopped. It was getting colder.

The light turned green. On the mall beside the boulevard, a French pastry shop and a macramé boutique had opened. A Jack LaLanne health spa was on the way. At the pipefitters’, a man in a mackinaw spread a tarp over a truck bed. A woman in rubber coveralls scattered melting salt around the entrance of the local animal shelter. Snow covered the prow of a boat bobbing on the inlet.

As I pulled into the station parking lot, I saw Irene on her way out. She stopped and rolled down her window. Tiny creases ran from her cheekbones to the corners of her eyes.

“I’m glad to run into you. I’ve been wanting to apologize.”

“Apologize? What for?” I asked. I knew what for.

“You’re right—how clumsy of me! Enough said.”

A car pulled up behind me. She leaned toward me, breaking the plane of the open window with the top of her shoulder and the crook of her arm.

“I’d better move along,” I said.

She stared straight at me, but there was nothing disarming or intimidating about it. “Our house mustn’t seem very warm after a housewarming like that. I hope you’ll give it another chance.”

I’d have liked to turn around and give it another chance right then. Scintillas of covetousness: our neighbors’ wives are the vestals of suburbia. “On the contrary, your house couldn’t be more inviting,” I told her as I pulled away.

The waiting room was jammed. I got a cup of coffee but had left my copy of the paper at home. The kiosk was sold out. The machines on the platform were empty as well. A faint wind rippled the surface of my coffee. The sky was still low and gray, except where it was pierced by a white light. Its reflection off the rails and lampposts and roofs was sharp, a light that affronted the eyes both with its drabness and its glare. We were all squinting under our hats and fishing in our overcoat pockets for sunglasses we’d left in our Windbreakers.

An outbound train hurtled past. I went to the edge and looked through the glare down the tracks for the inbound. There it was in the distance, the light bouncing off its silver siding. My averted gaze landed on Bud at the bottom of the stairs to the overpass. I saw him in profile, his head wagging, shoulders swaying under his coat, feet twitching inside his wingtips. He was talking to a hatless man who was shielding his eyes from the sun. The hatless man laughed, then snorted.

I was walking down the platform when the train pulled in and idled with its doors closed. A crowd gathered before them. The fog on the windows was so thick that the doors might have been metal sheets. When they slid open, the revealed passengers looked like prisoners unaccustomed to daylight.

There was no point in looking for a seat. The aisles were mobbed. I was lucky to find a free hanger and a space for my coat. I hung it up and, retreating to the small space between the rack and the partition and putting my briefcase on the floor between my knees, leaned against the Plexiglas and closed my eyes.

“You made it,” I heard a voice say but didn’t open my eyes till I felt a hand on my shoulder. “You made it,” Bud repeated. He was standing beside me, before the window with the fire extinguisher behind it.

A man on the other side of the partition kept flicking his Zippo. The flint was obviously gone, but he wouldn’t stop. I was about to lean across and give him a light when someone beat me to it.

We were quiet for a while. The car was overheated and stuffy, dampness coming off coats and umbrellas and galoshes, the fluorescent light pooling at our waists. One man breathed down my neck; the brim of another’s hat grazed my ear. Peering through the corner of a window at slate roofs and slate-colored clouds, I wondered how many other passengers I myself was irritating. None showed it, but none would. Among peasants or soldiers there’d have been jokes or songs. We kept to ourselves, more like lobsters in a tank. Where lobsters would have brandished their rubberbanded claws, we raised our elbows and flourished our newspapers.