Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

  Joe carried his own bag to his room, walking down a hallway hung with crew pictures and ambulance-service citations from the First World War. Three Filipino maids chatted in the open doorway of a linen closet, greeting him as he passed. His room was really good, like a room in an old home, though he had to sidle around the bed to clear the dresser, the radiator, and the writing desk. The room had a wooden smell. Joe remembered staying here when he was in school, riding down from New Haven on the train along the seaboard of battered buildings and grassless lots; sometimes he caught glimpses of the exhausted ocean or the odd things that had been thrown out, old window frames, a child’s toy bugle, wired bundles of newspapers, cars parked so long their tires were flat, all of which used to stir Joe. Sometimes it seemed superior to the space and quiet of the West.

  Leaving his bag unopened on the bed, he went downstairs, back through the lobby and across to Grand Central Station. He walked down into the vast hall of railroading to buy a newspaper. He stared at the schedule boards overhead and noted that it was still unbelievably possible to go to White Plains.

  He decided he would walk for a while. Still amazed at the unreturned glances of the crowd, he felt himself swept against the windows of the shops. He felt a growing desire to be better dressed. He sympathized with the men selling stolen and counterfeit goods from the curb; he thought it must take an exceptional individual to wrest himself from the anomie and become a customer. When cars were stopped in the intersections by traffic signals, he trusted the pattern of his fellow humans in pouring through the narrow gaps between bumpers. Yet it was hard to forget that with a slip of the clutch one was legless. Part of his sense of liberation in New York was the impression of human volume and the consequent trivialization of his problems. If an individual ran out into the crowd from a doctor’s office to shout, “I’ve just found out I have cancer!” it wouldn’t have much effect. New York really took the pressure off the basics and Joe felt this liberation in his buoyant stride, his desire to be better dressed, and his inclination to try the cuisines of all peoples. His single year of life in the city taught him that fun at sex, there for the asking, was the steady undertone. Its utilitarian savor ran the risk of all pleasantries.

  “The trouble is,” said his then roommate, Ivan Slater, after a year of this, “you end up buying them a fifty-dollar dinner. And the more indistinguishable they get, the more it’s like having some show dog in your pants that can’t live on ordinary kibble.”

  “Stop!” Joe said. “Stop!”

  His room was on the ninth floor but he mistakenly took the elevator to the seventh, got off, and had to press the call button and wait once again. A woman in her early thirties came along and pressed the down button.

  “Hi,” said Joe. She had a sunny, outdoors look and wore a green-checked dress that suited her pretty figure.

  “How are you?”

  “I pressed the wrong button.”

  “You mean you’re going down?”

  “No, I mean in the lobby. I meant to get off at nine.”

  “Your face is red,” she said.

  He said, “I’m lonely.”

  They had leapt through layers of intimacy with this exchange. He could have said anything. He could have asked her to have sex with him and gotten an uncomplicated yes or no response. But an elevator arrived, and she stepped aboard, saying, “Ta-ta.” Presently, his own elevator came and he was on his way to his room. His message light was on. How had she gotten his room number? But it was only Ivan confirming their dinner hour. He stretched out and watched television for a while. His bones ached. He let his mind follow the sirens from the street below. He imagined living here and the thought was a happy one. He could go upstairs to the library or take squash lessons. He could breakfast here every morning before venturing into the street. Finally, a kind of sight which lay buried inside him, stunned to blindness not only by open country but by the sea, would awaken to something he never could have predicted. And he would choose to depict it. Out would come the brushes and paint. Dab, dab, dab.

  Joe put on a clean shirt and a blue-and-green-striped silk tie. His suit jacket was rumpled but it was of such acceptable tailoring that he thought it made him look either hard-working or scholarly. He rather liked the figure he cut. When he got to the foyer of the dining room on the twenty-second floor a few minutes before eight, the girl from the seventh floor was there waiting for a table by herself.

  “So, we meet again,” he said, a remark so deplorable to him that he immediately understood why she furrowed her brow and smiled formulaically. The intimacy of a short time ago was withdrawn. “So sorry.” The smile changed and became genuine. She turned her wonderful almost Mediterranean face to one side and regarded him. She is about to ask me something, and something big, he thought. She may ask me if I’d like a loan. I don’t know yet but soon I will.

  The silver doors of the elevator opened and Ivan Slater stepped out, wearing the latest Italian fashions, wide shoulders, a kind of one-button roll, really an old-fashioned hoodlum suit but made in the bright shades of a discount carpet barn. The shirt was green and the tie was red. He wore great spatulate suede shoes and his pants were held up by what appeared to be a pajama string. His proximity to the fashion centers entitled him to spend a fortune to look like a fool.

  Ivan’s round, pumpkinlike head and piercing black eyes seemed to say “Stop the music!” while he regarded his illustrator. Joe remembered when he and Astrid used to stay in New York at Ivan’s apartment, making love by the second-floor glow of streetlights, mantis shadows climbing the walls.

  “Hold it right there,” said Joe, turning to the young woman. “You were saying?”

  “I was saying?”

  “Weren’t you about to say something?”

  “I wasn’t but I will if you like. I can see you’d like me to.”

  Ivan, watching close, pounded Joe on the back with a sharp laugh. “I see you haven’t lost any of your speed,” he said in a voice that swung the headwaiter around from the middle of the dining room. “Not you,” Ivan called to the headwaiter, jabbing a finger up and down in midair over Joe’s head. “Him.”

  When the headwaiter came, Joe deferred to the lady. She said she was waiting for someone. Joe and Ivan took a table near the middle of the room and Ivan ordered a margarita and buried his face in the menu. Joe asked for a bourbon and water, thinking it seemed like a vaguely out-of-town drink.

  “I can’t wait to hear about what you’ve done for Miss X,” said Ivan from behind the menu. Joe was baffled: he thought Miss X was dead in the water.

  Right after the drinks arrived, the young lady came to her table, the next one over, by herself. “I’ve been stood up,” she said and grinned. She pulled the corners of her mouth down in a sad-face. Joe shook his head sympathetically and insincerely. Then her embarrassment looked real, the sort of vulnerability one galloped into like a hussar.

  While they drank and waited for the waiter to take their dinner order, Ivan brought Joe up to date on the manufacturing problems he had hurdled since they last met. Some of them were quite considerable, having to do with separate manufacturers using different quality-control procedures for each of the components, so that holy terrors existed at the assembly end. With Ivan, personnel matters tended to be “love feasts” while manufacturing matters were “blood baths.” Ivan had been through this before on simpler things and with purely industrial products involving robotics in the garment industry, which had made him unpopular but had made him money while putting others out of work. But this time it was different. This time it was a blood bath disguised as a love feast. To offset its effect, he said, “What made you want to go back to Montana?”

  “Nothing else seems to be home.”

  “Is that important?”

  “It is to me.”

  “At this point, right?”

  “I think it’s generally important,” said Joe.

  “Aw, bullshit,” said Ivan. “ ‘Home’ is a concept whose importanc
e rises when people are down in the mouth. Healthy minds don’t give a big rat’s ass whose country they’re even in. How’s my friend Astrid?”

  “She hasn’t seen fit to join me as yet.”

  Ivan and Astrid frequently spoke on the telephone and even wrote letters. They would have made an ideal elderly couple. Joe sometimes wondered whether it was only sarcastic brutes like Astrid and Ivan who could rise to uncomplicated fondness.

  The soup came, saffron chicken. Joe dipped his spoon in it. Ivan looked quite crumpled in his fashions of the hour. By sitting in his slumped position he caused the shoulders of his jacket to stand straight out beneath his ears. Industrial leadership from this man seemed out of the question. The well-bred diners all around them paused to look twice at Ivan, though as he himself would be quick to point out he could easily buy and sell any one of them. Their vague curiosity was felt by Joe as a pressure. He had seen Ivan burst into a chorus of “I’ll-buy-you’s” before and it wasn’t pretty.

  Joe had ordered a piece of scrod and a dinner salad. Ivan had ordered a steak, after inquiring which one was the biggest. Their meals came and this seemed to cheer him. In fact, after a brief moment’s thought, Ivan seemed to be emotionally restored. Ivan was a hearty, life-loving man, and it wasn’t long before he was greedily passing hunks of steak into his mouth. He had to raise and lower his eyebrows with every mouthful to show how good it tasted. A shadow crossed his features while he thought about death, or so Joe assumed.

  “The key to me,” Ivan said, “is solitude. I have no family. If I had children, all would be different. I’ve always known that. Alas, my personal miniseries is somewhat different. I continue my wolfish roaming in the capitalist forest. Indeed, right now, I’m having a big love feast with the Chinese. They’re our kind of guys. No malarkey about work being their only natural resource, as per the Japanese. In their plant management practices, they do not live in romantic illusions about inventory control. I greatly prefer them to Japs. Japs are racists. Japs like to set you up in business so they can later steal whatever business you capture. But now the Japs are growing hubristic. Their society is changing. Their kids are narcissistic pukes like ours are. They think they can kick back and take it easy but they don’t have the resource cushion that permits Americans to take dope, watch TV, and get out of shape. As soon as they lose a couple of steps of that big speed, their former allies are going to call in their marks. Meanwhile, the Chinks are in the passing lane with their balanced attitude, their cultural depth, their emerging talents, the scum of communism just beginning to be rinsed from their eyes”—the sedate dining room was quite concentrated on Ivan now—“and they’re looking across the Sea of Japan at their ancestral enemies and crying out, ‘ALL RIGHT YOU FUCKIN’ SLANTS, STAND BACK FROM YOUR TELEVISION SETS! WE CHINKS ARE GOING TO WHIP YOUR FUCKIN’ ASSES!’ ” People stopped eating.

  Ivan put a huge piece of steak in his mouth and all at once turned blue. Joe gazed at him a long time before noticing the color change, so great was his relief at the pause in his speech. The girl at the next table stared at Ivan.

  “Is he all right?” she asked. “He’s blue.”

  At that point, Ivan struggled to his feet and holding his throat, began making a sound like a seagull. Joe understood then that a piece of steak had lodged in his throat. Ivan started to stagger through the tables of diners before Joe could catch up to him. Joe knew the Heimlich maneuver and got behind Ivan, taking him around the waist below the rib cage and giving him as powerful a squeeze as his considerable strength would allow. Joe saw he had been successful even from this vantage point by the way the old Yalies jumped back from their tables. The thick bolus of beef, trailed by a yellow wing of vomit, flew across a couple of tables, and that was that. A dozen diners who had been seated were now standing, holding their napkins.

  “Good as new!” crowed Ivan, returning to their table. But Joe could tell that he was deeply embarrassed. Suddenly, his thick frame in the latest fashions seemed less bold than sad. Ivan peered around from under his brows and saw that they were all still discussing him. He finally sat silent, smoldering, looking straight out at the diners now.

  “That can kill you, y’know. Maybe those goddamn blue-blooded geeks don’t know that. Maybe coupon clipping has kept them from learning that,” he said in a piercing voice. Turning to Joe, he said, “Let’s get a drink and the check.” The waiter danced over at the first signal. He was able to make a minor modification of the bill and leave it immediately. Joe signed it and slipped it under his water glass.

  “Ivan, the reason I came to town was to tell you, face to face, that I’m not going to do the project. I’m not going to work with you anymore.”

  “I know, Joe.”

  “Oh.”

  “You told me a long time ago,” said Ivan, “that you were getting out of real art so that you could come to feel as replaceable as the next guy.”

  “Yeah …?”

  “Well, you were right.” Ivan got to his feet. “You’re replaceable. All the luck in the world to you, Joe.” Ivan was probably the closest thing to a real friend Joe had ever had. These words stung. Ivan stood up and went straight out, shedding his discomfort with every step. Joe rested his head in his hands, staring at a few square inches of tablecloth. When he lifted his head, he felt dizzy for just a moment. But when his eyes cleared, there was the girl at the next table.

  “Join me for a drink?” she said. He looked at her clearly. She was beautiful.

  “I’m sorry,” said Joe, “but I’m afraid I don’t know you.”

  She looked at him and smiled. She said, “What a relief!”

  16

  Joe and Ellen sat in the park, across from the drinking fountains, under a great blue Norway spruce.

  “What’s the problem?” Joe asked, brow furrowed in concern like some state-funded psychologist on autopilot. Ellen scrutinized him dubiously for a moment.

  “I don’t honestly know,” she said. “But we’ve darn sure hit a fork in the road. Billy’s had a tremendous amount of problems. After you left, he went in the Marines. He just seems to want to ranch, period, out in the hills doing his thing. And me, I’m about as quick to show sympathy over this Vietnam business as anybody. But it’s not real cheerful, the way he goes about it. And like I say, he was in the Marine Corps and it seems to have started there. Being called maggots and stuff when they’re just kids.”

  “Was he in some kind of combat?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you still see him regularly?”

  “We confine it strictly to matters concerning Clara. I don’t encourage him. I finally put one of those little observation holes in my door, like an apartment. I had to put it in there because of Billy. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. My mother is seventy years old. She drives all the way in from the ranch to see me. I find myself looking at her through the little eyehole while she stands there with something she baked for me in her arms.”

  “What about when you want to see Clara?”

  “Are you asking why she doesn’t stay here with me in the apartment?”

  “No, not at all,” said Joe. He could see she was getting angry.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little small? Don’t you think I work hard enough?”

  “No, I—”

  “Have you ever heard of latchkey kids?”

  “Yes, and that’s not at all what I was talking about,” Joe said. “I just thought this was a place I could see her. The ranch, with Billy and everything, isn’t ideal.”

  “You’re just going to have to be patient,” Ellen said, then after a moment added, “I’ve still got an hour.”

  They dropped Ellen’s books in the return slot at the library and went on with their stroll. Joe felt a strange tension in his stomach, the kind of thing that is communicated. They walked perhaps a block and the lack of a plan was creating enormous pressure.

  “Let’s go to my place,” said Ellen quietly. It nearly paralyzed Joe. Her house was about three b
locks away. Since he couldn’t quite speak, he tried subtly changing his course. He could see the shiny auburn top of Ellen’s head, the tan, freckled bands on the tops of her cheekbones. His agony lasted only the half a block of progress it took to confirm that that indeed was where they were headed.

  A nerve-shattering cocker spaniel jolted toward them on four stiff legs attempting to turn itself inside out with a paroxysm of barking. They tried to ignore it, but the dog stole up from behind to bite. Joe turned around and kicked at it as the owner in a V-necked white T-shirt came out in the yard. “You want a cop?” yelled the owner. “Kick the dog and I get you a cop.” The dog yelped back to the owner as though injured. Joe kept moving, though he felt his posture had rather collapsed. “Go on,” bellowed the owner, “make my day!” But the next block took them into a quieter place where clothes billowed on a line and radios played merrily on windowsills.

  The house Ellen lived in could be seen over neighboring rooftops a full block away. As they approached, it seemed to rise and enlarge.

  “Come on up, it’s unlocked,” said Ellen. As she went up ahead of him, he was relieved to detect a lascivious thought at the angular motions of her hips under the cotton dress. What if I didn’t have a lascivious thought? he wondered. What if I only thought of that character I met in Miami who burst into an Irish brogue at the moment of penetration? What a relief I’m not thinking of her! The “character” he was thinking about had been fascinated by her own Irish heritage and, during lovemaking, had cried, “Joe me lad, give it yer all!” He had never really gotten over it.

  All he could think of was the character with the Irish brogue. He clutched the handrail as Ellen disappeared into her doorway. Good Christ. If I blow this one, I’ll hang myself. I must turn into a wolf this minute or I’m lost; crude groping is the only thing that can get me beyond this impasse.