Читать книгу Manila Gambit - John Zeugner - Страница 12

The coffee is strong, stabilizing, but not enough. I swill a snifter. One of the ancient émigrés says to me, “You are not used to political thinking, are you, Mr. Snell?”

“I guess not. I’m sorry.”

“Most Americans aren’t and that is a tragedy. Most Americans aren’t aware of what they have, what their blessings are.”

“I’ve noticed that,” I answer swilling another snifter. I try looking beyond the fellow, glazing over my own eyes in an effort to peer through him, but his eyes insist on fixing on mine.

“There are great dangers,” he goes on, watching carefully to see the barest flicker of skepticism come into my face. “Grave dangers. These are not good times.”

I wonder when were the good times? When was it safe? “My fiancé,” I interrupt him. Why bring up Pam here? “My fiancé,” I repeat again as if on a trampoline, “feels exactly as you do.” For some reason in the slow turn of the gin and Drambuie and wine and now the coffee and brandy, the sound fee on say is fascinating. “My fee on say feels just as you do. She knows the world immediately around her is full of danger.”

“Your fiancé,” he repeats apparently equally enchanted by the sounds.

“Yes. Yes, she’s hospitalized but coming along well. But she knows rather better than I do just what is wrong out there.” I gesture toward the front door.

“Hospitalized?” he says, eyeing me very warily.

“Yes, in Tampa. Acute depression, I think, or something else. Anyway, they have been using electroshock therapy on her. It’s helping, I think. She likes waking up afterwards, she says, likes being able to open eyes and wonder where she is and who she is and what is going on. I don’t think she’s ever wondered what language to speak. Have you had that problem?”

“What?” the fellow says.

“Wondering if you should speak English or some other language.”

“I always speak English here.”

“Yes. Here. She wonders about here sometimes too. Where is here? All that kind of stuff. Where is here? Has here been here long? You know that kind of crazy questioning.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Well, I don’t suppose I do either. None of us can, I suppose. But it’s good we don’t have to worry about what language to talk it, isn’t it? That could be difficult, couldn’t it? My fiancé,” I repeat but trail off, looking at the fellow intently now, watching his grey-green eyes as they go back and forth in and around me, trying to guess what sort of flim-flam this is. In reality, of course, it is nothing like charades. I need to know why, all of a sudden, I should have begun referring to Pam in such a fashion. The fellow doesn’t seem to be able to answer why I did it.

When I mention it to Waldo later, he is all ears.

“Take it as a sign—the sign that it is, Snelly, and run with it.”

“Jesus, Waldo, why put me on the griddle over the chess column?”

“Well, I thought you should have the fun,” Waldo says expansively. “I told ‘em later that we’re going to take on fluoridation. That excited ‘em plenty. More than enough to keep your column safe in religious bounds.”

“Flouridation? Jesus, Waldo, why do you get mixed up with these nuts?”

“These nuts run this town,” Waldo says, apparently convinced. “And they’re onto something.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say after a while. The bay is deliciously dark looking, as Waldo takes me back to the Tribune building, past the little land-filled island studded now with pinkish five bedroom houses that suddenly in the darkness seem natural, yet in symmetrical order with imported cabbage palms in very regular rows.

“Agreed,” Waldo returns. “But I admire these people. I admire them. They know what they want. They see things clearly enough to find what they want and they go after it, and after it, and after it. They’re the real inheritors of this earth. Something you can’t quite understand yet, Snelly. We can’t. We aren’t the inheritors. We’re the savorers, isn’t that it? I like to think so. It’s not that they’re running the town, the county, the whole damn state. It’s that they perhaps ought to. They’d know what to do. Regular planners. Committed people. Very committed people and good company when you can get them off fluoridation. Those Russian fellows were a fund of information. One of them was a U-boat commander in Japan at the time of the Revolution. He never went back home. Three years later his family came out through Czechoslovakia on a food train. Think of it. Think of the experience of it. Think of the things they know.”

“I don’t think they know anything.”

“Probably don’t. But that doesn’t matter. They are on to something. You have to give them that. They don’t laze about in the morning. They know why and when the day begins.”

I think, but don’t say, the day begins at four p.m. with the first, and for that reason the best, G & T.

Waldo pulls into the back parking lot of the Tribune, drives next to my old Fairlane. “You’d better deliver on those American chess whizzes. You better had, and fast,” Waldo laughs, “or you’ll become the butt of one of their phone messages.”

At this hour of the night Hane gets just the smidgeon of chill in the air and a certain dampness on the pavement that suggests more than dew by morning. A kind of clammy preparation. I sit now with the door open, waiting for Waldo to run down his exit speeches, tapping my shoes on the parking lot, trying to make a squishing sound, but not enough moisture has accumulated.

“Let me tell you about marriage,” Waldo says behind me. I imagine he is staring straight ahead. At the big revelations Waldo never looks you in the eye. He must be staring straight ahead, watching the empty cement slabs that mark the end of each vacant parking space, or, lifting a bit, watching the still hibiscus plants along the edge of the parking lot. “Let me tell you about marriage,” Waldo repeats, certain now to have my attention. But my mind begins to wander.

“There are lots of marriages,” Waldo says, “you can begin by trying to find the perfect mate. Is that too stilted a term? The perfect lover and wife, the perfect companion—warm, ingratiating, perceptive, sensual, reassuring. And you can believe you’ve found her. Really found her.”

I push the tips of my shoes deeper into the still, packed dirt. No squishiness.

“But what happens after you’ve found her? I’ll tell you. You discover that what you responded to was a kind of mirage image of what you wanted, having very little to do with the actuality of the woman you’re now living with, now committed to. A double disaster. Your fantasy explodes and you have a binding commitment. Not the legal one, but the dream of finding the perfect woman and failing. Enough to cement things for almost a decade, I figure in a case like yours.”

“Mine?”

“Guilt makes you go round, Snelly. And not a bad thing. As good as some other motivation, I suppose.”

“Horsefeathers.”

Waldo laughs. My shoes push harder into the dirt. “You aren’t paying attention. I’m talking about making a huge psychic investment and discovering it won’t work, and then learning it shouldn’t work, and accepting it can’t work and then summoning the energy and the fear and the whatever to say, ‘okay, now what?’ What indeed! The problem is in the beginning.”

But the beginning I can think about settles on Pam befuddled look as she asks, softly, sweetly, what day of the week it is.

“Suppose,” Waldo goes on, slapping at the steering wheel, “suppose you start with a fundamentally different assumption. Forget calculations of the heart and think about your needs and someone else’s. Cost and benefit. Simple optimization, isn’t that what they call it. Suppose you start from those premises and evaluate the proposition, as you might any other career move. Suppose you think about what you can and can’t live with, and what the rewards and punishments might or might not be. Suppose you get a firm, unclouded look at the future of a partnership. Is that too silly a term? Rich people have been doing it for centuries. Certain cultures do it automatically. Think about the Japanese.”

“You think about the Japanese, Waldo.”

“What it comes to is very simple, very elemental, and stunningly clear. You can acquire love, can’t you? You can acquire companionship. You can acquire whatever it is that makes your little heart go pitty pat. But you can’t acquire the other things. You’ve got to program them in. Plan for them. Scheme for them, weighing cost and benefit. Cost and benefit. Then, instead of guilt, you have a rather firm basis for continuing whatever it is that happens to the—what you kids call—the relationship.”

How long has Waldo been rehearsing this? I can see him in the empty silence of his office, making notes on the conversation with Snell. But now, miracle of miracles, it seems I can actually get a squishing sound with my shoes. Rubber soled wonders to deliver me beyond this lecture, beyond brandy, into the dopey arms of the soft Hane nighttime.

“I’m talking about avoiding double disasters. Or compounding them. I’m talking about finding a way to meet each morning with optimism, with a steady sure sense that calculation and appropriateness permeate your life.”

“Calculation and appropriateness?”

“Yes. Yes, yes!” Waldo shouts, as if to silence any sarcastic rejoinder.

“Good enough,” I say to the darkness. There is a nifty ellipse of light from the lamp twenty feet in front of my Fairlane.

“I don’t want you to think this is a private rationale,” Waldo says quietly, thoughtfully. “But I want you to pay attention to what I’m saying.”

“I do. All the time, I do,” I repeat, still watching the ellipse and thinking about nothing in particular, except that it is getting colder.

“Good. Then we have no quarrel. I trust you see the relevance of what I’ve said.”

“Of course.”

“Good,” Waldo says avuncularly, “then all that remains is for you to find some 100 percent, red-blooded, patriotic, All-American chess players to write about in the best red-white-and-blue prose money can buy.”

“Money has bought,” I say getting out of the car. It is difficult standing. I ease the door shut.

Waldo leans across the wide leather expanse of the Mercedes’ front seat. He bends down, becomes framed in the thick chrome lapping the window on the passenger side. “Paul,” he says directly, “Paul, I admire what you’re doing. I want you to know that.”

“Thank you,” I answer. What is it I’m doing?