by Jane Smiley
Marcus told me he had it all in his head. “I keep telling you that my mind works like an adding machine.”
“All right,” I said. If he wanted to take care of it, so be it. Just organizing the paperwork for the township was plenty of work for me.
Gordon called me early in May. “You know that farm on the interstate north of Portsmouth? You got to go over there.”
“Why?”
“You got to see it, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“What are you doing right now?”
“Some paperwork. Then I’m showing a house in Farmington.”
“Forget the paperwork. You meet me there.” He hung up. I put on my coat.
Gordon had owned the Portsmouth farm for years, ever since he bought it from a farmer whose house had been separated from the rest of the farm when they rerouted the interstate in the early fifties. He had sold the lot with the house on it back to the farmer. Then he had leased the rest of the property to another farmer, who kept some of his own cows and some of Gordon’s cows there. I wasn’t too knowledgeable about that business, except that the cows had started out black-and-white and then become all black and now they had disappeared.
The farm had two pieces, a front piece of some twenty acres and a back piece of some forty-five acres, joined at a narrow waist where a grove of trees crossed the property and hid the back part from the road. The forty-five acres was a hilly pasture that was too steep ever to be cropped. You could just see the barn from the highway, I had thought, but on the day I met Gordon there, I couldn’t see it anymore.
“Tore it down!” exclaimed Gordon. “Sold the cows, too, but that isn’t the brilliant part. Follow me!”
I followed him to the back part of the property, where I saw ten large dump trucks idling in a line, maybe four hundred yards from the old house, and a large earthmoving machine and a large backhoe picking up topsoil and pouring it into the first truck bed. I got out of the car. “Look at that!” said Gordon. “You know that crazy intersection up by Fox Mountain where they used to have that three-lane highway and they made it four-lane with the median, but regular intersections? Terrible stretch of highway. People killed there all the time. Well, the state highway department called me and said they’re finally building a regular interchange, but it’s all clay soils up there and they want all this alluvial soil I’ve got here, so there it goes. They’ve been carting it away for two weeks.”
And they had made something of a dent in the hill, which now looked like a cliff, with the machines working away at its face. It was nice loose soil, full of tiny pebbles, not great loam or anything like that, but perfect for draining the highway. I said, “The township is letting you remove part of itself and send it to Fox Mountain?”
“The value of the whole property will be enhanced when it’s leveled off, and it will. And the state, you know, they want what they want. Otherwise, they’d have to go another hundred miles for the right gravel. I love it. Look at it! Those cows hardly even paid the taxes, but finally this place is coming into its own. It’s going to be flat as a pancake in another month or two.”
“Free money,” I said.
“Free money,” said Gordon.
A few days later, Marcus called me up and asked me to come over to the office. He wanted to have a meeting with all the partners.
“Who are all the partners? You mean me and Gordon?”
“And Jane.”
But when I got there, there was quite a crowd. Not only Gordon and me, but Bobby and someone I vaguely recognized but didn’t know from where. Marcus introduced me. “Hey. Joe. This is Mike Lovell. You know, Mike’s garage?”
I nodded. At that point, all I remembered about the February meeting (which had been succeeded by two more) was that it had been really cold. Marcus said, “We took out and replaced that tank at Mike’s garage last week.”
“I will never understand that bitch,” said Mike.
Marcus grinned at me and said soothingly to Mike, “Well, it’s done now.”
“Thanks to you,” said Mike. He sat down in Jane’s office and picked up a magazine. As we went into the conference room, Marcus whispered, “That guy is going to come in handy. He knows the township like the back of his hand.”
Marcus sat at the head of the table and motioned me to the foot. Gordon and Bobby sat to my right and Jane sat across from them. She was smiling as if something amused her. Marcus was in a good mood. He shut the door and said, “All right.”
It was a nice table, cherry or maybe a dark-stained hickory with a handsome grain in the wood, and stylish comfortable chairs. The carpet was a deep green plush with a white fleck in it. They had painted the walls cream above the chair rail and green below it, not unlike the hallways in the rest of the building. There were pictures. Jane looked rich, and Marcus did too. I wasn’t quite sure why Bobby was there—whether at the invitation of Gordon or of Marcus, or whether he had just barged in—but he ran his hand over the surface of the table and smiled appreciatively.
Marcus said, “Well, thanks for coming over. Jane and I were talking the other day, and we thought that since things are beginning to roll, we should stop doing things by rumor and gossip and start holding meetings and agreeing on things as a group. I had a moment of—oh, I don’t know, fear or just maybe anxiety the other day—when Bart over at the savings and loan told me he heard the golf course designer had designed a course up in Buffalo, New York, and I knew that wasn’t true. I’m sure he’s never been to Buffalo, and it wouldn’t matter if he had, but talk is talk.”
“Oh, that was me,” said Bobby. “Gordon said the guy had worked somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where, so when Bart asked me I said Buffalo because that was the first city that popped into my head.” He continued to smile.
Marcus’s smile flickered, but only for a moment. He said, “You know, this is something I was thinking about. We don’t really want a lot of extraneous information floating around. We need to all know the same things, but even more important than that, we need to all agree on what is to be divulged and what isn’t. With a development like this, especially with the sort of financing Jane and I are working on, even the tiniest thing can put off a potential investor or lender. Let’s say I wine-and-dine some guy until I’m full to the back teeth, and he hears the golf course designer is in the habit of designing courses in Buffalo and West Nowheresville. Then in comparison to someone whose designer is designing courses in Houston or Palm Springs, we don’t look serious. So I think the best thing is, if one of us doesn’t know the true answer to a question, he just refers that questioner to me, and I will answer.”
We all nodded. Seemed reasonable to me.
“Now,” said Marcus, with a look at Jane. “Joe can correct me, but it’s my understanding that the permit procedures are proceeding fairly deliberately, or even glacially, so this puts us in something of a bind.”
“No more slowly than I expected all along,” I said.
“I was more optimistic,” said Marcus. “I really was. I really thought we would be building by now, and we aren’t, so I think that it would be wise, Joe, if you closed up your business and came over here to work and just devoted all of your time to getting these things through. Potential investors have to know there’s a full-court press here.”
The group became very quiet. I wasn’t sure why. It was as if Marcus had said something embarrassing, but it didn’t embarrass me. I just laughed. I thought he was joking. “I can’t afford to do that, Marcus.”
“You can if I pay your bills. You just change all their addresses, send them to me, and I’ll pay them.”
“What bills?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Lights, heat, car payment, gas for the car. The partnership will just pay them, and then you can devote your time to getting all of this going. You’ve got some savings. You can pay your beer bill out of those.” He grinned. Maybe because this was such an unexpected idea, inserted into my brain without any preparation on my part, it rather b
lossomed there for a moment. I saw myself driving around the countryside, everything paid for, in some sense, everything free. No more getting and spending, which suddenly seemed tedious and repetitive to contemplate. I knew how to get projects moving, at least small projects, and there would be none of that conflict between doing my own business and doing Salt Key business that had come up from time to time—several times I had had to choose between showing a house and making appointments with one engineer or the other. If I did this, I would have no one to please but Marcus, and, as I knew, Marcus was easily pleased.
And, of course, no taxes to pay.
Jane said, “That’s ridiculous, Marcus. I told you you can’t ask that.” She looked at me. “Marcus was always terribly spoiled, you know. He would sit down at the table, and there would be eight pork chops for the dad and the mom and the six kids, and Marcus would look right at our mother and say, ‘Can I have two?’ and more often than not she’d say yes and give him hers! The rest of us considered him such a brat.”
I said, “Actually, it makes some sense. Not complete sense, but some sense.”
“This project isn’t a part-time job,” said Marcus. “You know, there’s always a point with every big project where the people doing the work have to make the commitment or not. This is what I do all day every day. It’s not like you’re going to do this, make millions of bucks—”
“Billions,” I said.
“And go back to being Joe Stratford Realty. I mean, is this a part-time job for everyone but me?”
I looked at Gordon. For Gordon, everything was a part-time job. Not putting all your eggs of any kind—financial eggs, job eggs, recreational eggs—in one basket was a life principle with him. And Gordon was looking at Marcus with a Gordonish look on his face, irritable but not resistant. It meant that he didn’t like the discussion, but he did agree with the point. I did too. I thought Jane was implying that we couldn’t really do this, couldn’t really do what it took to make this go. I thought this was a relic of Jane’s former corporate life, where the size of the company did a lot to carry you forward, so you could pay attention to the difference between your life and its life. But when you were starting something, you had to accept, and even to embrace, the fact that there was no difference between your life and it. That was the way it had been when I started out as a real estate broker. What about all the times I had gotten up from dinner with Sherry, or left a party, or even gotten out of bed to go show someone a house? All those times I had said, “If I want to get this going, I have to do what it takes.” Now I said, “I’ll think about it.” But I didn’t really mean that. What I meant was that I would exit my little company as gracefully as I could and do what had to be done. Marcus cocked his head and cleared his throat. He was satisfied. I knew he knew exactly what I meant.
Bobby, who had been quiet, said, “What about me? Are you going to pay my bills too?”
Marcus turned to him. “How much did you clear last year after taxes?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know.”
“I could figure it out.”
“Why don’t you? You’re almost thirty years old, Bobby. It’s time you got it together and grew up, and the first step in that direction is sorting out your financial situation instead of coasting along hoping your dad will give you a new car and find you something to do and talk your girlfriend into marrying you. You could start by calling yourself Bob.”
Bobby said, in a deep voice, “Hey, Bob!”
“I’m not kidding. You talk too much. You don’t take responsibility for yourself in any way. You act like a baby. You don’t take care of anything, and you require lots of care. You’re a hindrance rather than a help. You don’t have to break this and sprain that and come down with the other thing. You don’t have to live like you do.”
Jane said, “Good Lord, Marcus!”
“If no one else is going to do you a favor and furnish you with a good swift kick in the ass, I will. The others care about you, but not enough to show you how to be a man. I care about the partnership and the project, and I care about it enough to care about what you’re doing. You can’t be fired, so you’ve got to be fixed. So get your financial stuff together and bring it over here tomorrow and we’ll start there.” He spoke energetically, even indignantly, but it was more like he had to do it than that he really felt something. Bobby looked startled but, let’s say, invigorated. He nodded.
Jane said to Marcus, “May I speak with you out in the hall, just for a moment?”
He replied, in a congenial tone of voice, I thought, “Not right now.” Then he took a deep breath and looked around the table. “It isn’t comfortable for me to talk like this. You know”—he looked at Gordon—“maybe I rely more than I should on charm and indirection and I suppose what you, Gordon, would call a good line of bullshit. But I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little scared right now because I’ve quit my other job, the one that brought me here in the first place, and my wife doesn’t have a job other than the house and the kids, and I’m a little overextended.” He looked at me. “I didn’t tell you that a branch came down on the roof a couple of weeks ago and made a hole and guess what? We can’t afford to have it fixed.”
“Homeowners’ insurance,” I said.
“Deductible,” he said. “Anyway, we’ll get it fixed. I think I’m just afraid of the idea that Gottfried would find out that something has been damaged and take the house away from me. But I didn’t mean to get off on that track. What I’m saying is, indirection and all of that has led to a little meandering here. That’s what I feel. We aren’t progressing. We can’t let things develop because we can’t afford to let things develop. We have to develop them. This brings me to a touchy point.” He glanced at Gordon. Gordon met his gaze, and Marcus looked back at the pad in front of him, on which he had written a couple of things, and then he looked at Gordon again. This time their gaze held. He said, “The fact is, we need more funds to tide us over, and I know there is a source of income, and I know it is producing right now, and I would like to tap that source of income for some of the funds we need.”
Bobby said, “You mean the gravel?”
Gordon winced and said, “It’s not that much money.” Then there was silence.
Finally, Marcus turned to Bobby and said, in a mild, instructive voice, “Now, see, that’s just what I mean. Do you realize that it was indiscreet of you to blurt that out? You should have learned years ago just to keep quiet and wait to see what I was getting at. What if that isn’t what I meant? What if that were a secret?” He glanced at me with a grin and said, “Though it’s a pretty noisy secret. But why should you reveal what you know before the other guy reveals what he knows? Right, Gordon? Gordon knows how to bluff, how to keep quiet. Your mom, too. I’ve watched her. She never lets out any information that she doesn’t want to let out.”
At last Bobby looked abashed.
“I mean, it’s a kindness to lay this stuff on the line for you. You can’t go on for your whole life playing the fool.”
Jane was really squirming by now. She muttered, “Marcus—” and suddenly he turned right toward her. “Jane, what? Do you disagree with anything I’ve said? In twenty years of banking, haven’t you learned the same lessons? Why should everyone know how to grow up except Bob here?”
Jane nodded.
Bobby said, in a guilty voice, “I know you’re right. Fern says the same thing. She says I never should have talked to you in that bar in the first place.”
“Well”—Marcus leaned across the table—“she’s right.”
“It seemed like an opportunity at the time.”
“It did to me too. But I’m sure everyone in the entire world would tell you to be more cautious, don’t you think, Gordon?”
Gordon nodded, but he didn’t say that he’d been telling Bobby to pay more attention for thirty years without effect.
Marcus went on. “I guess that’s really the point of this whole meeting. We have to keep
our mouths shut. Joe, I trust. Gordon, I trust for a different reason, just because Gordon always keeps his mouth shut. Jane knows what there is to be gained and lost from information management. I trust myself most of all. But you, Bobby, you I don’t trust, because you are not trustworthy. And I don’t think your dad trusts you, either, do you, Gordon?”
Gordon said, “Depends.” I considered that reply pretty loyal, actually.
“Okay,” said Marcus. “Enough of that. Here’s what we all know, here’s what we all can talk about.” He named the names of the architects and designers and where they were from. Further information about their credentials was to be had from him. Several firms were interested in bidding on the waste plant. Those names were confidential until we had decided on one. I didn’t point out that we hadn’t decided on the architects and designers as a group. Certain bills had priority. We would all have input on which those would be, especially me, since I would be at the office and working with him on a daily basis as of—? He looked at me.
I shrugged and said, “June first?” This was two and a half weeks away. He nodded. After that, I didn’t remember the rest. I didn’t plan to talk about anything anyway. I was musing about how quickly I had come around to the idea of closing my business and devoting myself to this project, when I had always thought I would keep my business as my ace in the hole. I had planned every day to be cautious, to make sure I knew what I was doing, to reserve something, to be smart. . . .
