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Authors: Fred Waitzkin

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BOOK: The Dream Merchant
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She started to weep. Now, I was crying as well. I embraced her. We were both sobbing, our faces wet and gummy from her makeup. We laughed. Maybe I loved her for the first time that night. We were just people getting older.

I held Jim in that chair, she continued, after he said to me he felt like blowing his brains out. He was so depressed, he didn't know what to do. I love you, Phyllis. He said that. And then she called, at that instant. She was pulling him away from me. I love you, baby. I love you, baby. Phone sex. She had him. She had him. And he would speak to her in the corner, over there, clutching the phone for his life. They did baby talk. An old man speaking baby talk. If he went out for a few minutes, I picked up the phone and when she heard my voice she hung up. It would have been so human if she had said, Phyllis, it is Mara, could I please speak to Jim? But she heard my voice and hung up. She terrorized me. I was trying to get Jim together. He was so down and confused. What kind of person does such a thing?

Once I knew she was coming, there was no changing it; I found the house for him myself. I knew he couldn't manage. He was just sitting over there by the window. Each day was passing and he was sitting there. She was coming in four weeks. She was coming in seventeen days. He was paralyzed. I was afraid for him. I always did things for Jim. I drove him around until I found a little house that would work. It wasn't much, not his style, but it was in a safe neighborhood with a good school system. That was important to her. Once the husband, Shimon, decided she could bring the kids to the States, she became fierce about her children. She wanted the best for them. The boy needed gymnastic classes, whatever they cost. He must have gymnastic classes. Believe me, there was never any question about whether she would bring her children. That was just talk for Jim, part of her act.

I picked out their furniture, the silverware, the matching glasses, the children's swings for the backyard. There wasn't much money, but I tried to imagine what she would like. I can't explain why I did it except he wanted me to. I wanted him to be happy.

Did he tell you about her sister? Probably not. Mara's sister came here four years ago and married an older man and then she dumped him. The sister is living in Miami. She has a young boyfriend with a flashy sports car and a house on Key Biscayne. So what do you think is going to happen to Jim after he marries her and she gets the green card? Haven't you noticed the change in him? He's worn out by her. He's become an acquiescive person.

Phyllis caught my eye, and I nodded to her; “acquiescive” was the right word for Jim. His top guys from the company sometimes talk to me, she continued. Jim doesn't make business calls anymore. He doesn't return their calls. He sits and waits for her. He dreams. What does she want with an old man who dreams about the past? Just the green card. Then she'll walk out or she'll kill him with all her love. What could anyone say about it?

 

8.

After a month in New York doing rewrites for an article, I was back in Florida visiting again. On the first night the girl made us barbecued chicken and a delicious Israeli salad, a welcome departure from pizza, which almost always gives me heartburn. She laughed and served us red wine. She was definitely settling in, no longer a visitor. During the gap of time since my last visit, little secrets had taken hold like seedlings, modest changes in their home (a new red-and-white-checkered tablecloth with a Walmart tag still fixed to a corner), suggesting plans and movements that I didn't know about.

My God, didn't she ever notice that Jim was old? This question had begun to obsess me.

Jim was dressed in sporty Bermudas and a tight T-shirt to show off his strong tattooed arms, but he looked tired and gray. Too much Mara. Too much sex, and no more lounging on his outdoor patio selling optimism. He had taken on the pallor of their drab walls and filthy venetian blinds like a sea creature blending with the bottom. Also, the creases in my friend's face had deepened, and I flashed on my own dad's face during his last months, thinner than Jim's, but Dad's creases were so deep that they could have been knife wounds—they frightened me. Meanwhile, the girl had stopped wearing so much makeup, which made her look even younger, more adorable and fresh.

*   *   *

The following day I was driving from my motel back out to Jim's, musing about stories he'd been telling us, trying to connect the boy to the old man. As a kid Jim had called the shots in his house. There was no parent instilling the meaning of “no.” When he was ten, Jim went to the best department store in Edmonton and bought a flashy expensive suit to imitate his dad. The family was still very poor, without a lot of basics, but Jim's mother didn't say a word. He told us that when he was twelve he fell in love with a friend of his mother's who had been renting a bedroom in their little house while her husband was away in the army. Jim thought about her incessantly and began bringing the woman wildflowers and then little presents from town. He couldn't get her out of his mind. Some days Sally would ask her son to take out the dirty clothes and wash them. Jim would hunt for the woman's underwear, put it to his face and inhale her. At the time Jim had still been sleeping on the floor with his two brothers. It was Sally who asked her friend if Jim could sleep on one side of her big bed—he was working so hard to support the family. The thirty-year-old had been amused and perhaps also intrigued to share her bed with the child master of their house. One night she allowed the boy to touch her ample body, more than allowed. Jim's mother had been complicit. She was so grateful to her hardworking son whom she depended on for everything. But if the thoughtful clever boy never learns the meaning of “no,” what happens later on when doors begin to close in his face?

It occurred to me that Jim's sexual exploits with younger women, much younger as he's grown older, was perhaps born in the tabooed indulgence of the child with a shapely woman nearly three times his age, this sublime incongruity. Over the years, Jim's young lovers have given him confidence and vitality but most essentially the license to shed his skin and move on from static and occasionally dangerous circumstances—to stay alive as he saw it. Moving on for Jim, starting over, was staying alive.

I was thinking about Jim's younger women and had lost count of the lights and turns to his place. Fuck! I was completely lost. Again. It was humiliating. Each visit I have to call him on the cell and Jim gives me detailed directions: past the Catholic church, past a large empty lot, take a left, then the next right.

But it wasn't just my distracted driving. There was a desolate sameness to this neighborhood that played havoc with my sense of direction. The baking asphalt streets were interchangeable; each numbing house had exactly the same penumbra of sadness.

Eventually Jim hustled out onto Nowhere Street waving his arms so that I would stop circling. He was grinning as if I'd pulled into the number-one spot for happiness in the state of Florida. He never seemed to notice the rusty barbecues, jalopies, and broken bikes, the heat rising from driveways, or one of his neighbors carrying out the garbage with an alarming torpor.

For my dear friend, life's tawdry surface had been transformed by this young woman's allure and artful coaxing, by the public theater of their foreplay (her thick maroon lipstick and brazen invitations astonish me while they incite him), by the daily routine they had worked out: when the kids were at school she guided him to the bedroom for a quickie; and after their abundant evening meal with wine, when he was indolent with food and alcohol, his lips a little greasy from chicken thighs or liver, she led him into the bedroom. She was always moist and hungry for him. But if Jim happened to be reluctant, which was rare, she turned her back to him and lifted herself a little. She reached around and slowly opened herself with her fingers. The sight of her young wet pussy hit him with a reckless surge, her needy smell and little sounds. He stiffened and threw himself against her back and ass while she laughed and he reached for her little breasts. Baby, she said, pushing him inside, taking hold of his old hanging balls and caressing them like dice. Jim fucked for nearly an hour, thrusting into her with his still powerful thighs. My friend reported all of this while giggling and shaking his head to say, Can you believe this kid?

I'm getting younger, he said to me, sucking in his belly and looking at himself in the narrow mirror on his closet door.

But if Jim happened to wake in the middle of night wracked with dread (lost somewhere between lives; or, much worse, when he heard the call of his waiting wife, Phyllis)—and this had been happening two or three times a week—the girl put her hand on his shoulder. It's all right, baby, she murmured in her beguiling accent, pardoned his sins with a hand on his shoulder. He adored her voice and the smell of her after sex, her legs spread like a wild animal cooling down. Just a word or two and she flipped him from guilt back to rapture.

*   *   *

The August heat was blistering on the driveway outside their bungalow. Jim had walked inside ahead of me while I opened the trunk to get a six-pack. When I came through the front door I could hear them talking in the kitchen. I heard my name and something defiant from her. I couldn't make it out, but it made me sweat. There was rebuke lingering in the air and I felt betrayed.

After two or three minutes he came back into the front room. He looked distracted and I couldn't contain myself. Jim, aren't we buddies, man? I actually asked him this pitiful question. Then I remembered many years earlier I'd asked this very question to my dad when he was sick and I was afraid I would soon lose him.

Jim smiled at me. Sure we're buddies. You are my best friend, he said slowly and meaningfully. He took my hand.

*   *   *

At times I felt as though Jim were living anew and dying in the same moment. He would run off the names of his top salesmen to Mara and me, so we would know who he was or maybe just to jog his own memory—decades of salesmen strung out like a banner, men Jim had made wealthy. I wondered how many of them were now dead. Jim wouldn't know. He'd keep thinking they were all still making deals and living rich. Two or three times he told me about going to a fancy dealership in the late seventies with several of the guys to help pick out a Rolls-Royce for Todd Kelso, his top man. Just two years before, Todd had answered a newspaper ad, he was a young man sitting around without a clue, bowling on Friday nights, and Jim made him a millionaire. That's something.

I noticed the girl smirk. She all but blurted out, Baby, why do we need to hear so much about old salesmen? Mara was young and without much patience for nostalgia and intimations of demise. She wanted to move on with her life, with her suburban aspirations.

Jim smiled at her sadly. He was slumped back against the frayed pillows of the sofa. He was worn out, his ankles swollen from too much pizza and canned soup.

I also dreamed of aging salesmen, of my father and his buddies who sat ringside at the fights in Philadelphia showing off their tricked-out young women while Julio Mederos pounded the shit out of Harold Johnson, Jr. The portly balding men grinned whenever smatterings of gladiator blood or sweat fell onto their girls' white scarves or gloves or their enchanting faces. Some of my dad's friends bought country homes they couldn't afford and played at being barons in New Jersey for years, until that battering winter when favorite receptionists inexplicably turned them away and telephone calls weren't returned. None of the guys understood that the newest generation of handsome young selling lions had crowded them out; it was the way of life.

The girl decided that I was a saboteur, always dragging Jim back to old times. She complained to him that I stepped all over their newly planted garden. It's true, I never accepted their shared illusion about his eternal youth. Their pretense seemed ugly and made me wonder if they were gaming each other. I was moved by my friend's old age, which was a real thing. But the girl was unsettling. She made me doubt myself. Maybe she was right—I was stepping on their garden.

*   *   *

Then after dinner, it was time for more stories. But first, Mara slid closer on the sofa, touched the creases on his face until he smiled, smoothed his shirt, made him a little more presentable for the narrative.

I don't know why their intimacies pulled the air out of the room, made it hard for me to breathe.

*   *   *

Jim was twelve years old when his father finally returned home. Nathan was nothing like the fantasy Jim had entertained of a hero dad arriving with riches and tales of success. There was no new Cadillac with a shiny bicycle in the trunk for Jim. His dad had come home poor as he'd left and was now suffering from tuberculosis and depression. Sally had taken him back with tenderness and concern—she always took him back regardless of his sins. Nathan was a broken man. Jim tried to buoy his wasting father with plans for hunting trips and far-fetched business ideas that would make the family rich. Now and then the boy was able to elicit a small smile. Jim still had his dreams.

Until the afternoon he came home from school and the pitiable house was filled with dread and clues that he did not understand or did not want to. There was cold soup sitting on the stove, as if Nathan had put it there and then changed his mind. He hadn't turned on the range. Jim would have heated it for himself, but he decided to make his dad come and eat with him. Nathan had to eat to build back his strength. Jim sometimes felt impatient with Nathan.

Jim went out back to the workshop. More and more he had to tell his dad what not to do, when to do what, as if Jim were the father. But really, Jim felt flattered his dad listened to his suggestions.

Dad, Jim called. He had ideas for their afternoon projects. The workshop door was closed. Jim turned the handle and pushed against the door. It didn't give. He pushed harder, managed to open it a few inches and smelled something sweet and familiar. Dad, will you listen to me. Jim pushed a little harder, and now he could see the dark pool on the concrete floor, some of it reaching the wall where it had thickened. He began to gag. Jim was afraid to push any more. His eyes went to the workbench, and he saw the stock of his .22 clamped into the old vise. It was a hot afternoon, and Jim swatted at flies that were buzzing around his face.

BOOK: The Dream Merchant
8.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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