Up, Down and Sideways

by Patton, Robert;

  “Hair gel,” the navy guy said. “My grandson’s tip.”

  “He works for the company?”

  “He’s a hairdresser. Did her.”

  The woman shrugged: “Let’s hope he’s better at stocks.”

  “What, Thelma, you don’t like it?” He fished out his wallet and withdrew a twenty. “What’d he charge you? I feel bad.”

  “Keep your money, Charlie,” she said. “Perrin goes up, he can make me bald.”

  Charlie touched his own hair, a crewcut with a waxed-up front like something bulletproof, and said to the black guy at the end of the bench, “He cuts me twice a month. I love what he does, don’t you?”

  “It’s very attractive,” the black guy said.

  “This Perrin,” I asked the woman. “You’re all in it?”

  “Oh, for a lark I am. I was going to go to Atlantic City, but I did this instead. Charlie’s got some, and Mr. Wilson here. It’s a takeover target supposedly. Mr. Epps at the end, he never bites. He knows better.”

  Just then Mr. Wilson pointed, his vision if not his hearing intact: “IBM!” I turned to see letters scoot across the ticker, off another eighth. “She’s a hummer!”

  I looked at the old man. “You do realize the stock is down?”

  “For now. She’ll roar by the close.”

  “What about Perrin? Like it?”

  “Money down a toilet.”

  “It’s up today on heavy volume,” Charlie said defensively.

  “And down tomorrow,” Mr. Wilson snapped.

  “If it’s so bad, why do you own it?” I asked him.

  “For sport, boy. A walk on the wild side. I should buy utilities and stare at them dead in the water like Epps there does all day?”

  “Mr. Epps’s current favorite is Avon,” Thelma said of the black guy.

  “For the dividend,” Mr. Epps explained. He gripped a folded scrap of paper on which he’d scrawled some company names. When he saw me looking he hid it away. Stocks were real money to him, something I’ve never quite believed.

  I stayed until the market closed. IBM teased me with a small rebound, but the specialist gave nothing back on his bid. I took it okay. Bad news to me has always held the silver lining of affirming hopelessness. My companions seemed similarly inured, for at quarter to four when Perrin Products stopped trading pending announcement, they reacted with suspicion; perhaps seeing the Depression or your children grow makes you slow to think the best. After a moment Thelma checked the news wire. “A bid’s been made at nine-and-a-half.” Then she smiled a little.

  Charlie went “Hah!” though I think it was more for his grandson’s vindication than for the money made. Thelma was thinking of Mr. Epps, who hadn’t bought into the deal. “We were lucky,” she apologized.

  He saluted her. “You deserve it, Thelma.”

  Mr. Wilson looked very old. “Well, goddamn me.”

  “What’s wrong?” Thelma asked.

  “I sold yesterday.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did.”

  “But why?” Charlie said. “I told you—”

  “You told me squat! Your bizarre little grandson hears a rumor and for this I risk two month’s rent? I sold, all right?”

  There was a long silence. Thelma said, “You took a loss?”

  “Commission and a point.”

  Charlie slumped on the bench. “I feel bad.”

  More silence. “Cheer up,” I said. “I have to make a phone call that’s gonna cost me twenty grand.” Normally you don’t name dollar amounts. Talk points or volume but never points and volume, because there’s always someone poorer who will hate you or someone richer who will sneer. I played gauche for Mr. Wilson’s sake, figuring him for a man who’d appreciate another man’s misfortune.

  “Your IBM?” he asked.

  I nodded. “She’s a hummer.”

  They watched me walk to the receptionist’s desk where I asked to use her phone. She was reluctant but I assured her it was toll free. Three minutes to four I put in my sell order at the market. In the time I signed off, thanked the receptionist and ambled back to the bench, my options were snapped up. I tapped out the code and saw the volume change an even hundred. Twenty thousand and change, by far my biggest loss to date. It was a rite of passage I’d repeat too often in the future, yet never quite as magically.

  “That much for real?” Charlie asked me.

  “A hundred calls. Gone.”

  “Gosh.”

  After an awkward pause they stood to leave. Mr. Wilson asked me if I needed bus fare home. I had to laugh. The others laughed, too. They were gamblers in their way, and like all gamblers they loved a loser. “I’m okay,” I told him. “But thanks.”

  7

  Behind me, “Sir?” rang in my ear like “Boy!” A young executive in a power tie and wide suspenders scolded me for using the office telephone. “These facilities,” he said, indicating the upholstered bench where sat my elderly pals, “are for our clients’ use.”

  “Is that so?” I’m not a total snob. Laborers and craftsmen move me to awe that is only partly condescending, but pretenders like this young V.P. compel me to regal poses. I fixed him with a fancy stare, my nose up, my voice deepening, my temperate blood suddenly combustible with its secret Semitic infusion. “Well, if you want my money, son, you will have to be much nicer.”

  He gave a dry smile. “We welcome new customers, of course.”

  “I’d want a break on commissions. A preferred account.”

  “That would require a substantial investment minimum.”

  “Fine. Who do I talk to?”

  “Mr. Donley is very good,” Thelma broke in.

  The young executive said, “Mr. Donley is rather new—”

  I turned to Thelma. “Take me to this wizard.” She led me through the lobby to a vast back room where the brokers were kept. Their desks were paired in plexiglass booths with a rotating Quotron between them. A rumpled young man glanced up. “Hi, Ma,” he said to Thelma glumly. Then he smiled and I smiled back as we recognized each other.

  Timmy Donley had been three years ahead of me at college. I first met him freshman week when my roommate and I ventured giddy and scared to his room to purchase dope. He didn’t deal hard drugs. His style was purely pastoral, his ambition simply to keep himself forever in pot and stereo components. I’d always regarded him as the last of a breed, like priests and family farmers. It was probably un-American of me to feel sadness seeing him now, in this condition, but if ever there was someone who should have died with his headphones on, it was Timmy Donley.

  He was on the telephone as I sat down. Thelma hovered until his glance dismissed her. Timmy was soothing an irate client. “I don’t think we got in too high even counting those earnings revisons.” He listened, nodding frantically.

  “What stock?” I whispered.

  “Dow,” he mouthed. He held the receiver away from his face and stuck out his tongue at it.

  “Tell him chemicals are cyclical.”

  “Chemicals are cyclical, Mr. D’Leo.”

  “Fertilizer, pesticide—for farmers in the spring.”

  This Timmy repeated.

  “The stock will rise by March,” I said.

  “The stock will rise by March.”

  “Guaranteed.”

  “Guaranteed, Mr. D’Leo. Guaranteed.” Timmy grinned and gave me thumbs up. My sunk heart stirred a little in the breeze of his incompetence.

  I’d already decided to throw some business Timmy’s way. I wanted the company—if not Timmy Donley’s, then that crew’s out in the lobby. I thought some friendships might inspire me to bathe more and think better of mankind, for in my solitude I’d let things slip regarding hygiene and personal outlook.

  Later, he and I had a drink at a bar. There, my marijuana Mr. Greenjeans, though fiscally retarded, proved sharp in matters of love; or shall I say love’s demolition, for over our beers he came on all confessional, fully intending, I do believe now,
his spilled guts to attract me like a fly. He was in love with a bank teller and wanted out of his marriage. He said, “I wish my wife would have an affair.”

  “To ease your guilt?”

  “And possible alimony.”

  I told him, “Divorce these days is mostly no-fault.”

  “But if she had an affair she’d feel bad and grant it uncontested. I’m thinking of her, too. An affair would be good for Carrie’s self-esteem. Our sex life—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “My point is, she deserves better. I’d give it my blessing.” He drained his beer. “So. Philip. What’s up with you?”

  8

  I had not had sex in more than two years. None. That I turned monkish in the randiest period of a man’s life is today a point of pride with me. I view it as my exile in the wilderness, though my celibacy was less a bitter bout with temptation than the deliberate picking of a fight I could win. A late-bloomer, I was not highly sexed; abstinence was an undemanding path to moral superiority over my fellow citizens. Getting down with Carrie Donley made me one of the regular damned again. Still, I retain a special fondness for my period of sainthood.

  As for sex with Carrie, though a pushover in her life and marriage, in bed, in mine at least, she made the rules and triumphed every time: compare fig leaves with birch rods, a veil with a push-up bra, and you will understand the two Carries that I knew. Her ideal opposite was Susan Epstein-Graulig, the woman I met later and whom I concurrently slept with. Unlike Carrie, Susan was shrewder than her husband, made more money, and had gumption enough to throw him out when her life needed improving.

  But what should have been big fun (for me, the man with two girlfriends) proved unexpectedly crippling. Adapting back and forth between the two women conditioned me into perfect spinelessness. Even my fetishes and favorite perversions, which in most men are anchoring balls and chains, became in me as pliant as butter. My eventual drift into criminality was but another expression of the docility cultivated in my sexual relationships, a slippery, painless, water-soluble slide into doing what came easy.

  Shortly after my chat with Timmy, his wife Carrie phoned me. He’d mentioned that he’d seen me, she said, and recalling how nice I’d been in college (when, through druggie fogs, I was fun to be around), she wanted my opinion. “Does Timmy love this bank teller?”

  “He believes he does. Which counts for a lot.”

  “We’re separated, he told you?”

  “He did.”

  “Separated but still living together. Weird, huh?” But who am I to tell people how to part? As with sex and love, is there any real right way? She changed the subject. “Timmy says you look like a hippie.”

  “He looks neat and trim, and that’s not a criticism.”

  “I look the same as ever.”

  As Timmy’s spacy college girlfriend, Carrie was always doing needlepoint scenes from J. R. R. Tolkien on the couch in his off-campus apartment. Cocaine groupies are coiled and uppity but she was warm earth, baking hallucinogenic bread in a peasant skirt and Chinese slippers. I remembered her as curvy with heft—fine in my book, for though it sounds sexist and degrading of women, the fact is I like ‘em meaty. I told her, “Timmy wants us to have an affair.”

  “He said that?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “He thinks like an eighth grader. He wants me to make it easy for him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And the sad part is I would, if I did.” She swore. “Why do I love this bum?”

  “One of life’s beautiful mysteries, I’m sure.”

  “Listen,” she said. “After what you’ve just said, this’ll sound really awful—but do you wanna have a drink sometime?”

  The question seemed to bode a future of moral implication. “Why not,” I said.

  “You’re not an eighth grader too, are you?”

  “All men are eighth graders.”

  “Then think of me as teacher, okay? Out of bounds.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  We had our drink; and other drinks on other days, martinis in the afternoon and burgundy at night, grown-up drinks for grown-up assignations. Yet in three months we laid not a hand on each other, though technically we were free to. Timmy had proposed an open marriage. Problem was, as long as his affair went well, Carrie’s retaliation would be unyielding devotion to her husband. Me she cast in the girlfriend role, the sympathetic eunuch, a demeaning misconstruction I blamed on her Catholicism, a religion that more explicitly than most claims virtue by default.

  Everything changed when Timmy’s bank teller dropped him. He got weepy about it with me at the brokerage and I gather was worse with Carrie. She felt contempt for him and for herself as well, knowing that ultimately she’d do the nice thing and forgive him. More of her private equation I won’t postulate, but it added up to Carrie shedding angel wings for a frolic in the slime.

  Inadvertently, we’d prepared for this turn of events, for even when it was allowed, when Timmy might have approved, Carrie and I had kept our friendship secret, tacitly holding our pristine trysts where Timmy wouldn’t discover them. After his affair collapsed I felt something fresh afoot. When I picked her up one afternoon she glanced guiltily about her before climbing in my car—this was new, as was the rakish sweep of her hair and the way her several dangling earrings shone like stars you’d wish upon. “Where to?” I asked as always, but got a question back:

  “Are you gay, Philip? Timmy says you’re gay.”

  “Because I haven’t slept with his wife?”

  “Because in school he never saw you with a girlfriend—”

  “Nothing steady, no.”

  “—and you don’t seem to have one now. So?”

  “Am I gay? Gee …”

  “It’s okay if you are. Well, not totally. It’s a sickness I really do believe, but who’s not a little sick, right?” Her laugh was forced and unbecoming; it made me dislike her and want to fuck her. I turned off the radio lest our particular version drown in other people’s love songs.

  “In fact I’m not gay. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I don’t wanna be disappointed.”

  “Ah. Okay.” My heart jumped annoyingly. “Do you like pizza, Carrie?”

  “Once in a while, sure. You hungry?”

  “I could eat.”

  “You live over a place, right?”

  “By coincidence.”

  “Good. So drive.”

  “Righto.”

  She indulged me on the way, let me circle our imminent moment with juvenile innuendo. I was never a womanizer. My sexual strategies were formed in prep school and based on guerrilla codes, meaning girls must be laid in such a way they will not know it’s happened. So as I drove I cracked jokes about oyster pizzas and the possible proclivities of my Greek landlords (two brothers owned my building, a Mediterranean Mutt and Jeff) all the while fretting secretly about which side I’d end up lying on—with Carrie in foreplay, to be absolutely clinical. Because I’m righthanded, and to keep my right hand free I must lie on my left side, my left hand being clumsy as a hambone, barely able to open a car door much less anything as complicated as a woman’s jeans or labia. I needn’t have worried, though. Rather than on my right or left side, I spent most of that evening on my back. Carrie was looking to conquer something, and I was game to go down.

  Inside my door she asked if I had herpes. I explained that I’d been safely out of circulation, and she rewarded me with a kiss. She stepped back and took off her clothes, then she stepped forward and hugged me. “Now lick my teeth.” I didn’t hesitate. Her teeth were smooth and mostly white and their flavor kind of grew on me.

  Streetlights ignited outside. Below my bedside window a red neon pizza sign cast an ember glow across the ceiling and across Carrie’s shoulders and breasts. Gazing up at her, at her fiery skin, I remember thinking the city is burning and I don’t even care. My apartment had that insular feel of maybe the world could end in flames and I wou
ldn’t know for months; it compared to a beauty salon or a monastic cell, places where time stands still, where all energy and thought are focused past the everyday toward some ultimate future: a cocktail party, God’s face, or, in my case, my emergence as a multimillionaire after years of heroic exile. A recurrent daydream of mine is to survive some sort of hideous trial, a kidnapping, a mugging, a terrorist assault, that afterward would imbue my soul and blankest stare with automatic depth. But if I fancied life alone to be that trial, here I was with Carrie, flunking. Because I was definitely enjoying her company. Her ripply round weight rose and collapsed around my pelvis like a balloon filled with warm soft cement. She’d given me her thumb to suck with instructions to say please. This embarrassed and stimulated me, as the Victorian pornographers used to say, unto the point of crisis. My hands were upraised like somebody surrendering or signalling touchdown. As she ground her hips into orgasm, I tugged her nipples and bit her thumb so that her feelings too would be mixed.

  Later I asked where things stood with Timmy now that his mistress had dumped him. “He wants to be my hubby again. I wanna stay separated. For a while.” Forever is always scary. For a while should be fun—but as spoken by Carrie it sounded like prison time, a sentence served as punishment. I resented, after what had been the best sex of my life, being so unappreciated.

  “I’m separated too, you know.”

  “From your family, you mean?”

  “Yes,” I said, voice whiney with hurt that I didn’t imagine was genuine, “from my family.” Omitting the Jewish part, I’d told her how my father, over money, had cut my family connections like an angry playmate taking home his toys.

  “So we’re both alone,” she whispered. “No one knows we’re here.”

  “That’s right. This hole in the wall, this bed, this moment in time—no one alive knows we’re here. I like it, actually.”

  “I hate it.”

  “Why? We know we’re here. You and me—”

  “And God.”

  “Him, too.” A mistake. Carrie’s body tensed. “Come on. I thought women were better at this.”

  “Better at what?”