The Glass Factory (16 page)

“He gambled, he lost. That’s business. He also started this adhesive plant here with his last hundred grand and
now
look at it. Every car in America’s got Morse adhesives holding all the rubber and vinyl in place. You use diaper pins on your kid? No—you got disposables with adhesive tape. Convenient, huh? You can thank Morse Techtonics for that.”

“Right. Just think what they can do for your lungs.”

“Listen, if it weren’t for people like him we’d’ve fallen to the Japs years ago. Is that what you want?”

“Okay, okay, forget it. I promised to take Antonia to the parade.”

“Wait. I’ll go with you.”

Just what I need.

We watch the Cub Scouts, the Boy Scouts (three troops), Brownies and Girl Scouts (two each), three elementary schools, the junior high and the high school bands, then the volunteer firemen. Which reminds me—

“And there’s that bastard Vitelli,” says Einhorn.

“Who?”

“Mike Vitelli: Head of the town zoning board. Morse is offering to develop ten thousand acres near the South Fork. Do you know how many jobs that would provide?
Honest
jobs? And that bastard Vitelli is blocking it.”

“Why?”

“The Pine Barrens lobby. They’re all afraid that two-acre zoning’ll ruin the groundwater or some tree-hugging bull-crap like that. So what are they gonna do? Five-, ten-acre zoning at a million bucks a throw? And where are the working people supposed to live, huh? But these politicians don’t give a crap about us. No, they just show up on parade day and then—”

He stops dead. I duck down and spin around as if some stalker’s about to strike. But I don’t see anything unusual. As I’m straightening up, Einhorn takes his cap off and holds it over his heart.

“What are you—?” I ask.

“Shhh!”

It’s the flag.

He grips the cap tighter over his chest as the colors go by. There’s a dark, reddish splotch above his right temple that was covered by the cap. After the honor guard passes he puts his cap back on and says, “You know, this is the way it’s supposed to be. We should remember Memorial Day for what it is, not just a day to go to the beach.”

“Fine, then ask your boss to give people more vacation time.”

He laughs at me.

“Whaddaya want?” I say. “We’re strapped! We get
ten
paid vacation days a year. That’s the seventeenth lowest in the industrial world!”

He stops and turns to me: “America is Number One. Do you hear that, young lady? Number One.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Damn straight. I’ll see you later. I gotta go buy a buddy a beer.”

I spend my lunchtime being shot full of tumor-inhibiting chemicals, then try to go learn something about how Shore Oaks burned down from the town fire marshall. Well, the fire report must have gone with Amelia Earhart on that last flight, because
I
can’t find it.
Nada. Desaparecido.
You Americans may not have roving death squads, but you sure know how to make information disappear.

My trip to the Town Office of Records is rewarded with access to a box full of papers that I can’t do anything with. That is, I’d be able to do something with them if I weren’t shivering with cold sweat and dashing off to the women’s room every ten minutes for a full session of the dry heaves.

The chemotherapy also seems to have made me a bit dyslexic. Word orders seem reversed, even the spelling of individual words is jumbled in my feverish brain. After twenty minutes of trying to read the same three paragraphs and all I’m getting is:

“Ew mstu sd nlki, yjrtr ytjyjdf yo nr drkg rbufwnt”

I figure it’s time to quit.

Damn.

I lose an hour of precious lifetime lying in the back seat with my legs curled up until it passes. Then I drive home.

I need to get back on Morse’s site.

Jim Stella takes me for a drive, the long way, past some of the primo old-money North Shore property.

“Look at the
size
of those houses!” he says. “Nothing like that in Ecuador, huh?”

“Sure, there are plenty, they’d just never make the mistake of letting us get this close.”

“What do you mean?”

“In Ecuador, the superwealthy live within fortified enclosures patrolled by armed guards.”

“Oh.”

“Look at that: They’ve even got stables for their horses.”

“Great, let’s go for a roll in the hay.”

“Oh, is this where I ask you about your taste in horse racing?”

“Huh?”

“You know, ‘Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But a lot depends on who’s in the saddle.’“

“What?”

“Never mind. Let’s go eat.”

“So
‘porque’
means both ‘why’
and
‘because’?”

“Yes.”

“Stupid language.”

I start to tell him it’s two different terms, “por
qué
“ and
“porque,”
but he’s not listening, he’s looking around.

“Boy, the clientele sure are slipping around here, ever since that takeover was done in by Congress,” says Jim.

“I don’t see anybody going through my jacket pockets, if that’s what you mean. What takeover was that?”

“Can’t you stop talking shop for one minute?”

“Just making conversation.”

“Well, converse about something else.”

“Like the obscene, criminally gotten wealth we just drove by?”

“There you go again, Filomena, talking like a Third World guerrilla warrior. Don’t you know Communism’s dead?”

The sudden sound of breaking glass startles him. Then he stares at me. I look down and see that the water goblet has fallen from my hand and shattered on the floor. The waiter dispatches a busboy to clean it up. I listen to the sharp fragments being swept together as Jim’s empty stare probes deep into my eyes. Seeing nothing.

Nothing.

But.

Glass.

“Filomena? Are you all right?

“Let’s just order.”

I fulfill my minimum daily nutritional requirements, but it costs me two and a half hours of listening to why the Mets suck but the Yankees suck even worse, why there couldn’t possibly be a third political party, how the state should either abolish or else triple local property tax, and why condoms should be made thinner because one time he asked out a new secretary, let the cash and the drinks flow, and, while driving back from the city, just as they were entering the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, she bent down and started giving him head right there on the front seat (a very dangerous thing to do).

After this he invites me back to his car.

He doesn’t notice that I’m holding back pale waves of nausea.

“Have you ever made it to Tchaikovsky’s
Festival Overture?”
he asks me, inserting it in the car’s CD player.

I listen. “It’s nice,” I say, “Very characteristic of him: Throbbing with barely suppressed phallic desire.”

He grins. “Isn’t that the idea?”

Suppression? Not around here.

To those of you who ask, Are there really guys like this? Yes, there really are guys like this. I tell him, “I think women approach the idea of sex differently from men.”

“Oh, you wanna hear something else?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you wanna hear?”

“I want to hear you say yes to something.”

“Ooh, I’m all a-quiver. What? What?”

“Get me some invoices from Morse’s Billing Office.”

“Whoa, whoa!” he says, braking for an unanticipated stop sign. He punches the
STOP
button on the CD player. He looks at me. I smile at him. “You’re kidding, right? That’s it,” he begins chuckling. “Boy, you really are something else, Buscarsela. You really keep me guessing. But no more.”

He lunges over and presses his lips against mine, hand behind my head pulling me towards him, hard. I stiffen, but let him do it. For now. When he stops, all I say is, “The road’s clear.”

He throws the car in gear and pulls out. “What are you, obsessed with this fucking Morse guy or something? What’s with you?”

“I’m just trying to help you.”

“You help me? Oh, that’s a good one. Get serious, will you?”

“You’re suing him, aren’t you? For environmental damages?”

“Yeah.”

“So I can help you dig up some dirt on Morse Techtonics.”

“We’re not interested in Morse Techtonics.”

“You’re not?”

“No.”

“Then—what are you interested in?”

“Ever hear of a company called Prosystems?”

“I wasn’t born knowing the name, no.”

“You wouldn’t be. It was just a letterhead company. Morse dissolved it twelve years ago when it was cited for forty-three federal toxic waste hauling violations. That’s when he formed Union Carting. When that racked up too many violations he formed Morse Techtonics. Anyway, when Kim Tungsten Steel and Glass bought the old Prosystems site they didn’t know the place was knee-deep in toxic waste. Gonna cost about twelve, thirteen million dollars to clean up, and Kim wants Morse to pay his share.”