Good Faith

by Jane Smiley

  “Yes, but—”

  “But you were told by your boss to get more for the suite, weren’t you?”

  “My boss doesn’t actually have all that much to do with it. That’s the rent.”

  Marcus stayed with her. Now he had his hand on her elbow again, and he drew her gently toward him. I was not even sure she realized he was touching her. He was beaming and twinkling. He said, “It’s not rented.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “And you don’t have a prospect, do you?”

  “Not right now—”

  “Let my company fly standby.”

  “What?”

  “You know how they fill up planes when they’ve got seats to spare. You don’t want to fly this place with empty seats, do you? One more firm moves out and you begin to look a little empty, right, Joe?”

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “Joe’s been in the real estate business for twenty-five years.” And me only forty! “There’s a moment when something elaborate begins to look white elephantish, isn’t there, Joe? When people stay away because everyone else is staying away?”

  “I don’t think we’ve—” said Mary.

  “This is a classy place, Mary, and that’s an asset, but it’s also a hidden danger, because it’s intimidating and a little—well, sterile. Right, Joe?”

  “That’s a good word,” I said. “Sterile is a good word.”

  “Class is an asset until it becomes uncomfortable. You want to have class, but you want it to be welcoming. It isn’t welcoming if it isn’t busy.”

  “I understand—”

  “Do you? How about you yourself? Do you like to come to work in the morning?”

  “Yes, I do, but—”

  “But sometimes it seems a little lonely.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.” She smiled. “But now that you—” He had her.

  “Believe me. When Salt Key Corporation has been here a month, this place will never be lonely again. It’s not just buyers who’ll be parading in and out, it’s investors too. And they’ll be dropping in at the retail establishments just automatically. I’ll tell you what. Rent it to us by the month. As soon as you’ve got a better deal with a lease, we’ll move. No one loses with that deal, right?”

  “No, but—”

  He turned suddenly to me. “Joe, these offices are fine for now, don’t you think?”

  “I think—”

  And back to Mary. “How about lunch? I’m starving.”

  Over lunch, he was delicately attentive, and she got happily self-conscious. I was amused but also impressed. He was a genius. I kept saying that to myself as if there were an argument about it.

  On the way home, he said, “I like women.”

  A few minutes later, I said, “So that office space is the one you want?”

  “Don’t let her raise the rent. If I were you, I’d go back there tomorrow first thing, while the deal is fresh in her mind.”

  “What is the rent?”

  “I’ll worry about it.”

  “We don’t have any plans to show her.”

  “Aw, take something of Gottfried’s. Not mine, maybe, but that new one you’ve got listed. That’s pretty fancy.”

  “Cheltenham Park is a long way from the farm. An hour at least.”

  “I’ll be here, you’ll be at your place, Gordon’ll be at the farm. That should work out. Those properties that are around here, those need oversight too. Actually, this is perfect.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  THE LEAVES FELL off the trees and Hank went to the University of Arizona for a land-use conference. Jason went to Virginia to visit Clark in college, and I was feeling flush. The townhouses in Phase Four were closing one after another like slamming doors, and another friend of the Davids had bought two places in Deacon, a large house and an even larger warehouse. He was a costumer in New York, and rental space for keeping the costumes had gotten too expensive in his West Side location. I had found him an old cold-storage facility that would be easy to convert to the perfect temperature and humidity for silks, brocades, satins, and chiffons, not to mention veils, crowns, scepters, swords, scabbards, and golden goblets. The collection, according to the Davids, was worth millions. Anyway, it was the Friday before Thanksgiving. I picked Felicity up at her place, and she threw her bag into the backseat and got into the car with the happy air of someone whose tracks are covered.

  My car had a bench seat, so she scooted right over next to me and we began kissing at once, secure in the knowledge that no one ever came down her road. I have to say she was as uninhibitedly ardent right in front of her own dwelling, with the garden hose hanging over the railing of the front porch and a light on in a second-floor window, as she was in the most anonymous empty house. As we drove away, Felicity locked under my right arm, I said, “Why doesn’t it get old?”

  “The sex?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because I never get tired of it.”

  The weather was damp and overcast—umber and ochre November. The hillsides were dark with the tangled net of bare tree branches; closer to the road, we could see their trunks rooted in a thick bed of wet leaves. Felicity leaned against me and gazed out the window. From time to time, she kissed me on the shoulder or the cheek. At one point, she took my right hand off the steering wheel, turned my palm upward, kissed it, and then put it back.

  The snow began about an hour outside of New York. It wasn’t an unusual snow at all, at first. Each flake landed on the windshield with a tiny splat and was swept away by the wipers. The road was wet but not slippery. The roadside turf turned gray and then white, but the snow was fluffy and appealing. Felicity said, “I looked at the weather last night. It didn’t say anything about snow.”

  “Very attractive snow, if you ask me,” I said.

  “I wonder if it’s snowing at home. I suppose it will look very suspicious if the driveway is unshoveled by Monday.”

  “Don’t you have friends in New York?”

  “That woman from college I was out with the night I picked you up.”

  “Yeah. Just the sort of person to talk you into a trip to the city at the last moment.”

  “Absolutely. But I’ll have to remember her name between now and then.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “I’m sure it’s not snowing at home.”

  “No, you’re right.”

  The car was so warm and the company was so comfortable and I was so happy that it took a very long time for me to comprehend that the snow cover on the cars coming toward us in the southbound lanes had anything to do with us. Every time we came to a dead stop, we kissed until the car in front of us started moving again. At one point, for some undefined length of time, she spread her skirt across my lap and then flung her leg over mine underneath it. Then she hiked up the back of her skirt and pressed herself against my pant leg. She sighed and closed her eyes, rocking against me. After a moment, she murmured, “Have you ever gotten a blow job in a moving vehicle?”

  “Not in a traffic jam.”

  “But on the highway?”

  “Well, we pulled over.”

  “We didn’t.”

  “That was very daring of you.”

  “It was daring of him.”

  “Hank?”

  “Oh my God, no. My college cheating boyfriend. Driving around having oral sex was about all we did. He was a good driver, but he didn’t have much to say otherwise . . .mmm.” She continued to move against me while she was talking; it was very exciting. We approached the tunnel. Traffic intensified, with honking and jostling for position, but still I floated along on a sea of patience and only once thought of what this trip would have been like with Sherry, a prolonged exercise, for me, in calming her rotating pattern of annoyance, anxiety, fear, and boredom. Felicity removed her leg, turned around, and lay down on the seat with her head in my lap. Her deep-set and very dark eyes were peaceful, even sleepy. I felt a little discomfort—self-consciousness, I suppose—rise, take
hold, and then subside. After that, her regard got to be a fact, a function of our situation together in the car. I looked down at her when I could, looked up at the traffic when I had to, stroked her face lightly with my thumb and the tips of my fingers.

  The Hilton was bustling with happy conversation about the snow. In the lobby, though it wasn’t especially cold outside, people were bundling or unbundling into or out of brightly colored down-filled coats and knitted hats and mittens and boots, as if they were just going out into, or just coming back from, long treks down snowy roads to crossroads grocery stores where the only remaining provisions were wholesome items like bread and milk and oranges. We got to the desk. The clerk acted delighted to see us, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Stratford, who had made it at last. Adding to the festive atmosphere were the early Christmas decorations in the lobby—a tall tree decked out in silver and gold ornaments and clusters of poinsettia and holly. I kept my arm around Felicity, who yawned from time to time. “Long trip?” asked the clerk.

  “Longest ever in my whole life,” said Felicity.

  Our room was small but comfortable, and while I was in the bathroom Felicity turned down the bedspread, took off her clothes, and climbed between the sheets. When I came back into the room, she was nestled into the pillows, yawning and stretching. She said, “This time yesterday I was busy with laundry and making veal broth for my mother and talking to Leslie on the phone and in general doing three things at once, and now I can’t imagine doing one thing at once. Oh, your skin is cold. It’s very refreshing.” Her skin was warm and peachy-looking and I got as close to it as I could, putting my arms and legs around her and nestling my face into her neck and the curtain of her hair. “Oh,” she murmured, “this is very nice. It’s like being tossed around in the surf. I might as well give up and go under.” She stretched against me for a few moments and then softened all over. I felt her sleepiness seep into me like the slow swirling of a drop of ink into clear water, and then, even though I had been planning in the bathroom to make love to her, I fell asleep.

  It was twilight when I woke up. As I rose to awareness, I noticed that the window light was pearly and bright as well as bluish, and I lay there for a long moment, warmed by Felicity’s embrace and simply appreciative of the unusual color of the light. It would be wrong to say that this was a fleeting moment, since everything about it impressed itself upon me—the color and the brightness of the window, the way the pinkness of the room’s décor took on a kind of silvery sheen, Felicity’s fragrance and quietness, the softness of her breathing, my own molasses heaviness.

  Just then she turned away from me, and I got up and looked out the window. The glass was cool against my cheek, and there it was, 54th Street, at least three feet deep in snow, lit by streetlamps that were just beginning to come on and completely deserted. The snow was still falling—very thickly—in patterned gusts around the lamps and in a rich cold particulate fog everywhere else. As best I could, I looked upward. The undersides of the clouds were pinked by the reflection of the city lights, and the snow poured out of them in a deadening cascade that was very reassuring. I went back to bed.

  Felicity turned toward me and, without waking up, I thought, put her hand on my cock, which instantly hardened. She smiled, though she didn’t open her eyes, and rolled over and presented her beautiful round buttocks to me, and I entered her at once, and her hand went immediately between her legs and she stroked herself while I grasped her hipbones and pulled myself more deeply inside of her. In the twilight, I could see her buttocks press against me and then taper gracefully into the contours of her back muscles, which fanned into her shoulders. That was what I looked at while I felt her vaginal muscles pulsating around my cock, which was moving into and out of her. Here’s what it was: The perfect relaxation of our whole bodies had concentrated at this one amazing spot and come together, and the effect then reversed itself, and the electricity of that spot gathered and spread out through the rest in hot waves and finally emerged in sound—the sound of Felicity singing out and me groaning, and then Felicity laughing and saying, “Oh, Joey, feel my hair. This is so amazing that my hair is getting hot.” We sighed simultaneously. She said, “It’s dark.”

  “Look out the window.”

  “Snowy?”

  “Look.”

  She got up naked and walked across the room—that was what I’d been aiming for—and pressed her forehead against the windowpane. She said, “Thank God we’re stranded. Let’s order room service before they run out of food.”

  And so we did. Two steaks, two baked potatoes with chives, sour cream, and butter, two Caesar salads, two shrimp cocktails, one Lindy’s cheesecake, one crème brûlée, two glasses of wine, and a bottle of champagne and a fruit-and-cheese basket for later in case we needed to survive for the entire weekend on this one meal. It was a Baldwin sort of meal if ever there was one—no nuts and berries, as Gordon would say, and a side order of hot sauce in case anything was too bland for Felicity’s palate.

  We ate and showered and made love several more times and then turned on the eleven o’clock news. The subway was halted, trains were stuck between New Haven and Boston, the municipal buses weren’t running, electricity was out upstate and in New Jersey, the tunnels were closed, Manhattan was deserted, people were urged to stay in their homes, surf on Long Island was licking the pylons of beach houses, trees were down, cars and trucks had slid off the highways, and estimates of damage ran into the millions. On the other hand, snowmen had mushroomed in front yards, children were sliding on cardboard boxes down hills, and the news team had a hard time maintaining their usual gravity. We turned off the TV, temporarily spent. She lay against me, my arm supporting her head. I gave her a squeeze and said, “It’s nearly midnight, and I’m not at all tired.”

  “Me neither, but I always stay up till one-thirty or two.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Reading. Darning.”

  “Darning?” Her face was so close. I gazed at the contour of her eye socket.

  “Yes. Isn’t that silly? I darn socks. That’s my art. Daddy made us learn, because he always had cashmere socks, and he thought—”

  “Your father wears cashmere socks?”

  “That’s his one indulgence.”

  “His one?” I kissed her.

  “Well, you’re right. Daddy has many indulgences. But he wears cashmere socks. He gets them from one of his cousins in England.”

  “Your dad has cousins in England?”

  “Second or third cousins. We’ve never met them.” This time she kissed me.

  “That’s funny.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, you know my father. He likes your dad, but he always thought Baldwin was short for Baldassare, or something like that.”

  “Bolechinsky.” She lifted her hand again and pushed back my hair, then sat up.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, the mysterious Baldwins. You should see Hank’s parents, who are from Minnesota, trying to get a straight story out of Daddy. They’ve been trying for twenty years. ‘So,’ says Grandpa Ornquist. ‘What grammar school did you go to, Gordon? We met this man, must be about your age, he went to Governor’s Leasehold Boys Preparatory, and he said he remembered a boy in his class, Gordon Baldwin.’ He’s made it up, of course. And then Grandma Ornquist, who was a Harstad and don’t you forget it—her mother and father were cousins, both named Harstad; what a relief that is for her to think about—she always inquires after Daddy’s traditional family recipes: anything like, say, kumla, which are potato dumplings, or the sort of singed lamb’s head she remembers her mother making for the family when she was a girl. But Mother just says, ‘Oh, Gordon knows I wouldn’t cook anything like that,’ thus scandalizing Grandma Ornquist in two ways at the same time.” She kept looking at me, her head on her hand. “Anyway, Daddy has cousins in England, but they aren’t English, or at least the respectable ones aren’t. There’s a branch of Baldwins over there who’ve been doing things like touting cockfights and bra
wling with other members of the permanently unemployed classes for generations. Soldiers in the standing army, as Daddy likes to say. Our hardworking English relatives are from the Middle East. They’re Lebanese Christians from Beirut. They have a tailor shop off Savile Row. They were very troubled when Aunt Delilah rustled up Jeremy Baldwin and threw herself away upon him. When Daddy’s brother Simon was eighteen and Daddy was fourteen, the family sent them to America to give them a fresh start.”

  “I always wondered.”

  “Don’t let on I told you.” She flopped onto her back again. “I would hate for any information to get back to the Ornquists.”

  “Why do they keep it a secret?”

  “Because people want to know. Daddy doesn’t like people to know anything.”

  “Who do you think knows this stuff?”

  “Me. My mother. The other kids. None of his cronies.”

  “Marcus?”

  She glanced at me. “That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure. Daddy has a really strange relationship with Marcus.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  “Do we?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t trust him, do you, Joey?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, in some ways. I guess I trust him not to blame me if I fuck up.”

  “But you wouldn’t confide in him, would you?”

  “I haven’t told a soul about you, Felicity. I hardly ever say your name out loud. Do you trust Linda?”

  “Do you ever trust an unhappy woman?”

  “I don’t know, do you?”

  “No.” She pulled the covers up to her chin, then went on, “But I’m like Daddy. I don’t trust anyone.” She looked at me and then at the ceiling. “No, not even you, Joey dear. Though you are the most utterly transparent person I’ve ever met and also the most well-meaning. But I especially don’t trust women.”

  “Betty?”

  “My mother is not a woman, she’s a saint, but no, I don’t trust her because her standards of behavior are different from mine, and she means them and she would use them against me if she thought she had to.”