The Dream Merchant (23 page)

In November, he received an invitation to dine in the storied Green Palace with the Shah and his beautiful wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi. What a smart, lovely woman, Jim said to Mara, while recalling Farah's sharply sculpted face. The empress was worldly, with a broad knowledge of government, literature, and art, but also she was fun-loving, curious, and fine-tuned to the moment.

The Shah was ten minutes late arriving. He came through the door wearing a striking tuxedo and flowing blue cape. He had a fine, majestic, and deliberate manner. He sat across the table from Jim and the empress and motioned a greeting to his Canadian guest. The emperor's smile was evocative and charismatic. Farah Pahlavi was dressed in a simple sheath gown with long white gloves, in the style of Grace Kelly, except she wore a sparkling diamond necklace and broach that was worth millions, probably many millions. They were an arresting couple, eternal somehow.

The empress quickly put Jim at ease and they spoke of many things. Jim described his home beside the lake and a little about how he had arrived there from the poverty of his youth. When Jim mentioned his wife's art collection Farah Pahlavi flushed and clasped her hands. Art was her passion. Jim inquired about the dozens of richly colored miniature paintings that adorned the walls of the room. She had great knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern art and explained that the miniatures were from the Safavi style of the fifteenth century. The theme of these naturalistic works was the splendor and grandeur of the royal court. They portrayed the handsome faces of nobles in sumptuous garments at banquets, beautiful palaces, scenes of battles. Indeed, the entire opulent spectacle of the Shah's court presaged the enduring legacy of the Persian monarchy.

Even while the party played on, Jim imagined how he would bring the event to life for Ava. He would tell her of thirty-foot chandeliers reflecting an intricately carved golden ceiling and brocade curtains tailored for a regent who considered his grandeur and legacy comparable to what Cyrus the Great achieved for ancient Persia. He would mention Farah Pahlavi's adoring smile for her husband, while he gave an after-dinner talk highlighting Iran's burgeoning economy. The Shah predicted that within five years his country would have the economic and military heft to join the elite superpowers of the world.

Jim would later reflect on the tiered ironies of this night of celebration. The empress, the caring wife, had been quietly encouraging a coup against her husband. For some time—Jim read this months later—she had been co-opting left-leaning intellectuals and constructing a government in waiting. If she had been more decisive and moved more rapidly, the empress might have won the great prize. We'll never know. The resplendent Shah, who bragged to the world of the broad support of his people, was both mortally ill and politically feeble. Within eight weeks of the splendid party in the Green Palace, the Ayatollah Khomeini would drive the Shah and his beloved from their land. For the next year, until he died, the empress cared tenderly for her Shah while he suffered with cancer. Despite his megalomania and her own imperial designs, she loved him.

*   *   *

After returning from this last trip to Iran Jim couldn't pull Ava back. She had fallen too far from his fantasy. He tried to be fatherly and gentle. He lectured to her about her health and the happiness they shared. They had such a special life. He held her in his arms and described the things they would do next year. They'd go to Paris, wherever she wanted. Ava reeked of booze and had stopped brushing her hair. He'd been away too long. She wanted him to drink with her. She begged him and then she became sarcastic when he refused. She slurred her words. You're a salesman, she said as though this were contemptible. What are you? You're a salesman. He didn't know what to do with her. Her smell made him nauseous. She doesn't know what she says. She'll come around.

One night Ava was standing nude in the upstairs bathroom when he walked in on her. Without saying a word she undid his pants and made him hard with her hand. She turned her back to Jim and pulled him inside her as if he were a stranger in a hallway. Ava was leaning on her elbows on the bathroom sink with her head down. Her ass and thighs had grown heavy and she had a belly that Jim held on to like a handle. They fucked savagely. When she rose up her hair was stringy and her face had become coarse and a little puffy. She looked into the mirror at his straining face staring back at her. Jim, look how ugly we've become.

He didn't know this woman. He shouldn't have stayed away so long. He told himself this a thousand times. In Iran Jim was a hero. He'd wanted her to know. He never got to tell her about the palace. He couldn't bring her back. She drank vodka like water. She couldn't stand up. When she wasn't numb with alcohol, she knew she had to get out. She must leave this gated home, this ugliness. But where could she go? The beautiful people are so ugly, Jim. He didn't understand such talk, and this frustrated her even more. The waterside estate had become her jail. Their strange boy had become afraid to sleep in his bed. Michael had gathered all of his clothes into tall piles. He slept on the floor amidst columns of neatly folded clothes as though they were icons to protect him in the night. Michael's room felt like a burial ground.

One night when Jim came back from the factory, Ava and Michael weren't home. He read the newspaper and paced around. It was almost eight o'clock when the phone rang. The police had found her Rolls-Royce convertible parked in a dark alley. There was a frightened boy in the backseat. Michael had been sitting there for four or five hours. He was okay. They were keeping him at the station house.

Jim took a taxi to the police to retrieve Michael and the car. When Jim returned to the house, Ava was sprawled on the sofa holding a bottle of whiskey, her skirt hitched up on her white thighs. He could see her underwear and it disgusted him. Ava couldn't stand up or pronounce her words. She'd gone to a bar and then home with someone. She couldn't remember his name. Just some guy, Jim, doesn't matter about him. Michael was listening to every word, but she was too far gone to notice or care. When I left his place I couldn't remember where I'd left the car. No idea. She described it all reasonably. She had called a cab, fallen asleep in the backseat. It was humiliating in front of the boy, but she wouldn't shut up.

She reached out, wanted to touch Michael's face, but she couldn't stand. She drank more from the bottle. It didn't mean anything, Jim. Never means anything. She glanced at the boy, and Jim shivered. We're both so ugly, Jim, she said, choking on her drink. Her chin was wet. We're awful. She drank some more.

Jim walked into the bedroom and returned holding his .38 revolver. He pointed it at her face and she shrugged as though she'd been preparing for this. Jim had always loved her face.

Michael was pleading, Daddy, don't kill her. Daddy, please. Don't do it. Please, Daddy, don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Michael was kneeling beside him, pulling the crease of Jim's pants, begging, Daddy, don't, Daddy.

Finally, Daddy, Daddy. Jim had waited years to hear this. That's what saved her. Daddy, please. Jim caressed the boy's wet face and he put the gun down.

Okay, Michael.

Jim left them in the house and spent the night in a hotel in Toronto. The following morning, when he returned, they were gone. He didn't care. Or the next day. Then he cared. He wanted to see her and talk it over. He imagined the perfect arguments he'd make, rehearsed his lines. He sighed over and over again. He wanted her back, even now. It didn't matter where she'd slept. It didn't matter if there had been thirty guys. He didn't know where to look. He burned for her. Every day he believed she'd come home. She didn't. He began to search. Walking down streets in Toronto, he looked at each shapely woman. He chased after women to see their faces. She was gone. Wholly gone and yet wholly within him. He had no phone number to call. He no longer cared what she'd become. He'd take her back. He'd throw everything out of the house. Give up the house of his dreams. They'd live a little life together in some dive. If that's what she wanted. They'd live together in squalor. Fine.

He didn't care about the business. Marvin was off on his own, chiseling the government out of taxes, flying to Paris with his secretary. Then one of the salesmen told Jim that Ava had moved in with the seventy-year-old father of her first husband. Jim took this as good news. She was broke and desperate to do such a thing. He had hope all over again. Surely she would listen to his arguments. He tracked down the phone number. He was greedy for her all over again. Ava hung up at the sound of his voice. He left pitiful messages. I want to see you. I want to talk. I need you. He left this message ten times, more. She wouldn't return his calls. He went to her apartment and watched the front door from across the street like a stalker. Jim couldn't accept that she wasn't feeling the same as him.

The last of that winter was raw and miserable. Jim no longer traveled or went into the factory. He wandered through the rooms of his estate, lost and homeless.

*   *   *

Mara looked unsettled by this tale of ruined people. It felt too close to her own life of squalor with Jim in Florida. Mara was not a patient girl. She didn't know about the developing arc of a good story.

Why do you tell me this, Jim? she asked with exasperation. She looked as though she were about to bolt for the door. She had been drawn to the powerhouse Jim from earlier in his life. She might have stayed with that Jim.

Wait, he said, grabbing her wrist and forearm with two hands. There's more.

Mara was taken aback by Jim's wry grin. She sat back on the torn sofa.

 

PART IV

 

26.

The Brazilian city of Manaus is surrounded on all sides by the Amazon jungle, although on its eastern border the forest is kept at bay some miles by the Negro and Amazon rivers that sideswipe each other, creating a broad stretch of unique waterway traversing the continent from northeastern Brazil to the western coast of Peru. In the summer months when the water is low, standing on a massive granite wall looking thirty feet down one sees an expanse of bog covered with filthy sewage, pop bottles, old tires, junk of all sorts. A gangplank leads across this smelly muck to the brown water and a ragtag fleet of passenger, fishing, and cargo boats headed off to places like Tabatinga and Leticia.

Day and night, there is a bustle of commerce here: heavy sacks of strange-looking fish, some of them huge, pulled from the river to feed the swelling city; other sacks are loaded with pineapples or a coarse flour called
fainha,
a staple in Brazil; also filthy bags of charcoal are coming ashore from the rickety boats. The wild jungle nurtures this city, which is an island. It also gives Manaus an urgency you can feel, particularly in the sultry night air.

Coming off the boats, mixed in with the produce, there is a stream of exhausted men, small, wiry men, for the most part, some suffering with malaria, who are back from the gold mines in the south. There is also a sprinkling of beautiful women, strikingly beautiful. A stranger could wonder what they had been doing in the jungle. Although the girls had been traveling for a week or longer, sleeping outside on deck in the slow-moving riverboats, beset with mosquitoes, torrential rain, and sick workers seeking favors, they look lovely coming ashore and they smile at the men sitting on the granite wall.

*   *   *

In 1980, when Jim returned to Manaus from his first visit to the putrid mining camp half-buried in the rain forest, he discovered in himself unlimited energy for a new way of life. Of course, it was the excitement of first experiencing the jungle, dining on anteater and maggots while dreaming of gold, but also, Manaus itself was exotic and deeply inviting. Anything was possible in this city. Fortunes were won and lost here in a month or a violent day. It was a perfect place for a gambling man who was trying to come back from ruin and heartbreak.

Like Jim himself, his new city had a gaudy history of glory and calamitous defeat. In the early part of the last century, the rubber trade was born in the Amazon and Manaus quickly became the hub of the industry. The city's downtown area was lavishly fashioned after Paris and Lisbon; even a world-class opera house came to the Amazon. Rubber barons made kingly fortunes at the expense of thousands of poor workers who died in the jungle from disease and animals. But soon the rubber business in Brazil was outmoded, as agricultural farming techniques and better soil brought the trade to Malaysia. Manaus went into a lengthy depression; the palatial residences of new millionaires became chalky and cracked from the sun. Some rubber barons committed suicide while others lived hand to mouth as peasants.

By 1980, Manaus was back on top due in part to the government's decision to make the city a free-trade zone. This encouraged multinational industries to come to the city as well as shoppers from all over Brazil, who could save as much as 40 percent buying appliances. But probably the most intoxicating inducement to travel to the Amazon was gold. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, if a man dreamed of striking it rich prospecting for gold Manaus was the place to come. It was where you set up your operation, did your shopping, hired the people you needed, and came back from the jungle to rest and party.

Nothing was a sure bet in Manaus. The artifacts of victory and ruin were everywhere. Driving north through the downtown area, you saw fancy new hotels and skyscrapers going up, business burgeoning in each shop and spilling out onto broad, new well-lit streets. But when you crossed one of many small bridges and looked to the right or left there were impoverished towns of rotting shacks on the muddy banks of creeks that reeked of human waste. Prosperity in Manaus was running perpendicular to heartbreak and misery. People in the city were inflamed by chance. They lived fast and did whatever was necessary to slide through before the door slammed shut.