The Dream Merchant (20 page)

Trying to find work seemed pointless. Who would want to hire an old man? Also, the history he was narrating trivialized the sorts of jobs that might be possible. Jim had once tamed the jungle. How could he take a job in a shoe store? Even the Wow Card seemed pitiful. Jim endeavored to please her with yachts, trophy homes, new offices, business finesses, even Marvin's sordid love life; he served the past up to this petite woman he did not understand very well.

Of course anyone could see that she was drawn to her ex-husband. There was unfinished business between them, also something raw that Jim could not compete against. Some afternoons when she went off with her kids she didn't answer her cell phone for hours. Jim felt desperate and weak; his heart fluttered. But later that night, or the next day, she leaned back his way, peeled away her fierceness. She said to him, I like to make you happy, Jim, and he smiled like a grateful boy. Mara touched his face and he shivered. Perhaps at such moments she saw her own father, whom she had adored. She'd lost him less than a year before she came from Israel to live with Jim. He could accept this. A salesman worms his way in from any angle.

And their passion was a magical potion. It left him feeling alive and young, absurdly young, and giddy with hope. He didn't wash himself afterwards so he'd remember their smell when she drifted away again. He liked to think about her little sounds, most of all her urgency. No one could pretend like this, he said to me a dozen times when she was out of the house and he didn't want to think where. Maybe he could still beat it back, whatever was taking her.

Making love and fleecing each other—that
was
the deal, but Jim didn't understand or couldn't accept it. He pressed for a longer, bigger contract. He rolled out his best of times like my dad's aging salesmen friends who had squeezed out the last drops of glory in shabby Jewish delis and cheap hotels in Miami Beach. He regaled her with opulent stories (as he had once filled Ava's life with every gift under the sun), although it occurred to him that someday Mara would know all of them and they'd be looking at each other in these terrible rooms with the two kids pestering them in Hebrew like hungry chickens. Not yet.

*   *   *

Jim's voice was a little reedy. He wasn't feeling energetic, but he wanted to capture her attention. Mara, dear, I lived like a king. Jim sometimes forgot the names of his children, but he could envision every detail of the magnificent house he had built on the lake. Mara, he repeated gently, until she looked up. He paid $5 million for the property alone, forty-eight acres of rolling land that narrowed to a peninsula with stretches of sandy beach. That's where he and Ava built the main house for an additional $2 million and more. What did it matter?

Jim had insisted on ten-foot ceilings with broad antique beams, and Ava nervously turned through a dozen magazines and eventually settled on custom knotty alder cabinetry to go with limestone flooring and Brazilian granite counters. A barge hauled in huge rectangular stones to make a picturesque seawall. But the main house was angled out over the seawall so that you could not see it from the rooms.

Every Friday, unless he was traveling, Jim brought home a large brown paper bag with their spending money, fifteen thousand, some weeks thirty thousand in cash, play money. Jim urged Ava to buy things for herself, for the house or for their son, Michael (the strange boy was her secret whom she tended like a precious garden), but she couldn't keep up the pace. She tried but found it exhausting to spend all the cash Jim brought home. Whatever they couldn't use immediately he stashed in a safe.

Winter nights, the lake raged like the stormy Atlantic. They ate caviar and sipped Merlot pretending they were on the bridge of a liner. In July and August, it was mostly calm and the water lapped against the retractable dock, with Jim's two Chris-Craft speedboats at rest in the shade of the house. In the evening light the property was exquisitely restful, like a Wordsworth memory. On the hill behind the house, a small herd of Irish sheep grazed. He could still smell the bloom of Ava's cut flowers in the summer. He could almost place all of it in Mara's arms, almost.

Mara was more attentive when he described things she could imagine, the beauty creams and perfumes, cooking aids, exercise equipment, cashmere sweaters, hunting jackets, and despite the sweltering heat of August in Florida, Ava's lustrous fur coat appealed to Mara, as well. But as Jim grew increasingly more wealthy and flagrant in his buying for Ava, Mara lost her focus. He had lived so far beyond her petit bourgeois dreams. Mara could barely imagine Jim's wealthy past and it made her feel agitated and angry she was missing her only big chance in life. Her youth would be gone in a minute while she was living with an old man in a house wreck.

Why should she care about Ava's third-floor penthouse studio that Jim had built lavishly for her new arty life with a marble fireplace and a golden travertine floor to match their alder kitchen cabinetry, or the twin greenhouses, and why the hell did he need Irish sheep? Now, while Jim was waiting around for things to break his way, the four of them were eating chicken wings unless they splurged for burgers at McDonald's. Jim was sweating each nickel. You promised me gymnastic lessons for the boy, she repeated bitterly every few days. You promised me, Jim.

Nineteen-seventy was a banner year. Grain prices were up and farmers had capital to buy machinery and they needed storage. Jim and Marvin were planning a fourth plant to service the western provinces. Mara, please look at me when I'm talking. He could still taste success. He wanted to surprise her with the little white BMW she dreamed about. The best had been effortless for Jim; just drive to the dealership and write a check. Jim believed that money could buy love or at least something close enough. The money washed back and forth through time; it was confusing for him. Every week they could have thrown thousands off their balcony into the waves and it wouldn't have mattered. If only he could shower Mara with toys, she wouldn't leave him.

No good. Desperation is pathetic in a salesman. Jim had seen the play in New York in 1975 with George C. Scott playing Willie Loman. He cried throughout the last act. Walk away from the deal, but never plead: he taught this rule to every one of his men. Except he was in a terrible position now, boxed in by old age and poverty with no redress. Did she care about him anymore? This question raged within him. Since their marriage, something had changed, that's for sure. Probably had to do with her ex-husband living nearby. Jim could feel her disgust as if he'd suddenly turned old, with varicose legs and a hanging belly. He shuddered, piled on the high life. More and more cash had accumulated in the safe in Jim's study. He started betting on football games; fifty thousand each weekend, soon it was a hundred thousand. Ava was so beautiful while she tried to save herself, no more makeup and sexy dresses, peeling down to find the truth, and men yearned for her all the more; she was the dream of every man. Jim's brown bags of money only deepened her confusion and sorrow. She began to collect fine art. She was slow, painfully slow, making her choices, and this irritated Jim.

Many nights there were phone calls from Israel. When Mara spoke in Hebrew her voice turned harsh and even ruthless. Shimon, her ex-husband, continued stopping by at least twice each week. The children were gleeful with their dad in the house. Jim tried to be cordial or matter-of-fact around the younger man, but it wouldn't have mattered, because Mara's ex treated Jim like furniture. She made it clear she didn't want Jim around for these visits. After Shimon left she seemed satisfied or resolved. Jim was afflicted by movements and plans beyond his reach. A few times he asked her, What's happening? She shrugged or changed the subject. But soon she smiled at him and became very sexy. If anything, she was even hungrier for Jim. He told himself that it was his stories, his grandeur, that roused her appetite.

*   *   *

After they were married, time had seemed to tighten and become more jerky. Her gentle moments quickly gave way to rebuke or more often indifference. Whenever he displeased her (if he happened to speak to Phyllis on the phone, if his brother was late sending the check, if Mara became frustrated by his stories) she withheld. She pushed back with emptiness. With her glance or no glance at all Jim was enfeebled, wanting, reaching, pitiful. He felt old and oddly sapped of the vigor and youth she had bestowed only the night before or two nights before, the power she had given to him. Then for no apparent reason Mara smiled and well-being and gladness filled him like a beaker.

But they danced in ever smaller stretches of shared space. It occurred to him that they had stopped listening to music together and holding hands. When he turned on Sinatra she stood up and left the room.

Sometimes he implored her pitifully. Mara, I love you. I need you. She nodded his way but with an expression so coarse that she might have been a junkie or a whore. He shivered.

He pushed back in the only way he knew. He tried to close the deal. He was sure that he could win her back with money, with glistening mahogany speedboats from forty years earlier. I sat in the tattered chair with my notebook while he gave her imported furniture from the Canada house, piece by piece. He watched her become more frustrated by what she could not have. He saw it, but he couldn't stop talking money.

 

22.

Something about the building business focused Marvin Gesler's restless mind, and he dug deep and found the gold. Perhaps it was the squat Quonset buildings themselves and Marvin was like a man who fell in love with a dog that looked like him, or maybe it was the skillful way Jim played Marvin, kept him satisfied and aimed at their astonishing enterprise that kept growing every which way and made them both very wealthy.

Marvin's petulance and his insufferable childlike neediness gradually became more muted. Jim noticed other smatterings of civility. Marvin stopped spitting into his hands and lost a little weight. Maybe it was just that he was becoming more streamlined for success, Jim thought. During their wacky brainstorming dinners Marvin came up with so many angles, large ones that made millions and clever side deals.

Jim did hire several lovely executive assistants for Marvin. What was the harm? The girls seemed to tolerate him like an hour of inclement weather, nothing worse, from what Jim could tell. The first of these hopeful, needy girls sat with Marvin in his large swivel chair and allowed him to kiss and touch her. She was new to business and wanted to make her way. In the morning he brought flowers for her and little presents. Marvin discovered his heart and he quickly gave it away. He dreamed about the girl. He had never known such feelings. After three months the twenty-year-old felt guilty about her boyfriend and she quit the job. Marvin was disconsolate and distracted until Jim introduced him to another assistant and feelings began to stir again as if he had taken a potion.

Jim glimpsed his partner's evolving person, an unexpected romantic bent, his absorption in books, but this was not a reflective time for Jim, who was doing the work of many men.

*   *   *

I didn't have time for Marvin, he said, looking up with exasperation.

I noticed Mara's expression at that moment, red in the face, impatient, exasperated herself, as Jim had been while trying to manage his partner's love life over the phone from London or the plant in Caledon. Jim and Mara were drowning in his torpor and introspection about a storied life that had been defined at every turn by remarkable energy, moneymaking, an unquenchable drive for success, big balls. Jim had sold more sheds than all the other salesmen combined—he'd been a tidal wave. One great salesman can do the work of a thousand. I've seen it firsthand. (My own father was such a salesman for nearly ten years until he became sick.) But now Jim was trying to make sense of the whole picture. He had made so much and lost it all. How had he gotten to this point in life where he was sitting around on torn furniture with this impatient, secretive girl who was everything to him?

Mara was made for the younger Jim—it was all over her face. She wanted the energy, his scams, money, charisma, power without apology. Mara wasn't Ava. Perhaps Ava might have accepted this more reflective slower Jim.

*   *   *

In 1976, Gesler Sheds had nearly three hundred salesmen working mostly in the eastern half of Canada, placing ads in local papers and farm journals, responding in person to leads, mainly from farmers. The sales force, trained by Jim, brought in almost a hundred million in business that year. Their growth was so spectacular the company had difficulty keeping up on the manufacturing end. Jim had the energy of six men, traveled the country hiring and coaching new men, worked with contractors to build additional factory space, and every year he made hundreds of calls on farmers because he loved selling door-to-door. Meanwhile, Marvin was scheming for every dollar, reconfiguring the operation, and whittling at the edges as if it were a deepening conceit. He rarely left the Toronto plant. That was the year he implemented his franchising idea. No one else in the Canadian building business was leasing territories to salesmen, but Marvin was convinced that a man would work a whole lot harder if he owed money on his own business.

Most days Jim was crisscrossing the country. He spent one week each month in the Toronto factory that was only a forty-minute drive from his house on Lake Ontario. Each morning the partners had breakfast and caught up. Jim spent much of the day meeting with farmers who regularly stopped by the factory to get brochures and price lists.

In 1976, a basic Gesler fifty-by-one-hundred-foot retailed for fifteen thousand dollars, which was a large expenditure for a poor man. Most farmers worried whether they could afford a shed or should make do without. Jim understood that the lives of his customers were filled with toil and unattended needs—they could barely imagine another way of living. With such men it was a mistake to ladle on the easy life. Shared pain was Jim's foot in the door. He recalled his own mom's sixteen-hour workdays on his grandfather's farm. She never took a single holiday. Hard work was the only way the family survived. With the farmers Jim was patient and respectful. Soon a conversation was trickling back and forth.