by Mike Heppner
Julian nodded, impressed. “You sound like a philosopher.”
The other man chuckled. “I am a philosopher,” he said. The word agreed with him in a way that Julian could not understand. They both stepped onto the boulevard. The turf was wet and it squished under their feet. “I’ve lapsed somewhat,” he continued—a cheery song, notes for words. Stopping, he turned in the doorway. “But I’ll give you some advice.” Again, he laughed; his facial expression suggested that he didn’t find himself all that funny. “Number one: always keep plenty of food in the kitchen. That’s important . . .” His voice trailed off; he licked his lips, staring over the old man’s head. “Number two’s a freebie: just be careful.”
Julian smiled good-naturedly, feeling a bit put down, not by the words, but by the tone of the man’s voice.
“And number three . . . now listen.”
Julian squinted, ready for the punchline.
“Never get involved with a woman named Gloria. Oh, God!” Turning, the man headed up the stairs. “. . . worst mistake you’ll ever make . . .”
III
A Bad Marriage
Author’s Note
We were giving a conference in St. Louis, a three-day seminar. “Wealth Through Endeavor” we’d called it—lots of speakers, lots of food, no liquor of course. Three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Optional prayer on Sunday. This was 1980; we were trying to phase God out, slowly, in increments, not so you’d notice. I was the main speaker on Sunday, the prime slot. You see, I had quite a reputation in those days. I once had a woman follow me from Albuquerque all the way to the United Arab Emirates. Said she wanted to touch me.
Two in the afternoon, I take the stage. Now, back when I was young, whenever they said my name, I’d start in the back of the auditorium and run right through the crowd. That was how I made my entrance. What did this convey? This said to my audience that I was happy to be there. That I was enthusiastic about sharing their company. Here is a man in a three-piece suit. He is not stuffy. He is not afraid to show his silly side. Crowds loved it. What were they thinking? Derek Skye loves his work. He is, as they say, raring to go.
They were right. I loved my work.
So I’m out there. Donna’s sitting right up front, holding a pamphlet in her lap. The pamphlet, like the banner above my head, reads “Wealth Through Endeavor.” There’s something wrong with the name. What does it mean? Wealth. I think money. I think fat, overweight, overweight figures into it somewhere, being overweight, owning a recliner, owning a comfy chair. Through. A process. A changed state. Wind on skin, suggesting movement. Endeavor. Sounds like something a politician would say. A word you use to fill in a blank. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s hanging over my head.
It’s at this time, back in May 1980, when I think Donna was probably most proud to be my wife.
I’ve done these speeches before; filling up two hours is no problem. I talk about your innate desire to succeed. You nod. Some of you cry. Why are you crying? This is neither happy nor sad, this information I’m giving you. I talk about your inhibitions, your fears. This is why you’re here today. Why are you discontent? Because you are afraid. You nod. Your lips move as you commit my words to memory. These things I say, for some reason they ought to be memorized. They ought to be memorized and then laid out in numerical sequence. Number 8: Why are you discontent? Because you are afraid.
We engage in group activities. At one point a volunteer from the audience, a woman from St. Louis, stands next to me, holding a daffodil in one hand and a gym sock in the other. She’s trying not to laugh. Many people in the audience are laughing, particularly the woman’s friends and sponsors. I have no idea what this means. I have selected a person at random, and I have placed random objects in her hands, and she’s standing there, waiting for it to start to mean something. She trusts in me completely. I size her up with a professional’s eye. It is my job to find the lesson here.
On occasion, I add the word endeavor, slipping it into my speech whenever the sentence calls for a noun and any old noun will do. Endeavor. In this way, I keep you on your toes. The word exists. I can and will use it at any time.
At the end of my presentation, my wife joins me on stage and waves at the crowd. She will not wave unless I wave. Her waves are timed with mine. My arm goes up, her arm goes up, and she waits until I bring my arm back down again. She is most definitely The Wife. She has been my wife since 1973. At some point during the latter half of the decade, she became The Wife. Books were printed and sold in large quantities. Speaking engagements welcomed full houses, first in America and soon around the globe. Fame spread. In this fashion, and for this reason, Donna Skye has evolved from my wife to The Wife. She likes the definite article. It makes her feel something that I can’t understand.
The spiel is now over and I have several unpleasantries to look forward to. The dinner with respected community leaders. The plane back to Crane City. From behind the stage, I can hear your applause. Why are you still clapping? I’m not going back out there. I’m not doing an encore. As I move down a flight of stairs to my dressing room, my butler presses my face into a hot hand towel, and I can feel the thing shrivel to fit my shape. My wife is changing her shoes in the far corner of the dressing room. I don’t know why this is. At some point between here and the stage, we must’ve passed into a new realm. Her old shoes—perfectly good shoes, as far as I can tell—are no longer appropriate. Donna’s like that. Her life is booby-trapped by these invisible transitions. Like she’s walking down the street and suddenly orange is not her color.
“Derek, we need you for a moment.” Reggie, my agent, hands me a cup of water. The cup is just a sheet of paper curled and glued into the shape of a cone, and I can feel the water seeping out through the seam.
“Derek, Steve Carlin.”
“Steve.” I acknowledge the man with my left hand, and with my right I crush the cup.
“Hello, sir! Nice to meet you in the face.”
“Steve has something he wants to—”
“Before you go. I don’t mean to hold up your departure.”
Over the man’s shoulder, I can see Donna moving out into the hallway, holding the old shoes in her hand, just the shoes and nothing else, for I have hired someone to carry the rest of her belongings. A woman approaches from the stairs and hugs my wife, and I can tell from twenty feet away that she’s been crying. What is this about? I must’ve said something that moved her deeply.
“. . . it’s fine, but when our man from Planning called your people up north, they told us, well, okay, ‘Wealth Through Endeavor,’ that’s pretty clear.”
“You’re from a financial organization?”
“Well, it’s . . . it’s not important. The point is—”
“He feels,” my agent butts in—Reggie’s primary responsibility is to translate English into English—“that he’s entitled to a reimbursement for the misleading information, but what I’m trying to say—”
“I mean, I don’t quite get this, because if you’d requested any of the promotional material—”
“We did, but you know, we’ve got a stack this high.”
This Steve Carlin character, right away I don’t like him. Right away I’m thinking, Whatever you want, man, I’ll give it to you, just go away. Out in the hallway, a group of circus clowns are milling about, smoking cigarettes, flopping around in their huge shoes. First me, then the clowns. Perfect.
“I mean, it’s Sunday, we’ve been here for three days, and all that time you’ve been taking advantage of our resources.”
“We haven’t been taking advantage of the resources. I borderline resent that. My men and I, we’ve been out in the lobby since Friday, drinking soda, waiting for the money management team to show up.”
“Oh, Christ, Reggie.” My agent shrinks down into his suit collar when I look at him. “This is what I’m saying. With some people, you gotta spell things out, and most folks, when they read wealth, they’re gonna think wealth.”
�
��Just following orders, Derek.”
“This is part of the problem.”
“When I see wealth,” Steve says, “I think wealth. ’Stead I get this AA jive, and my men, frankly, they take it to be an insult.” Right in my face, he sticks out his chin. Fucking little rabbit. On his glasses, I see fingerprints, like someone tried to push their thumbs through the lenses and into his eyes, which is what I’d like to do. His gray slacks are spotted with piss stains, little dark dabs. His name tag reads HELLO MY NAME IS but the space is left blank. This I take to be an act of aggression. To not wear the tag at all is one thing. To wear it properly filled out, okay. But to wear it with the blank left empty, this says negative things about the wearer.
“This is something you’re gonna have to take up with Hasse Publishing.”
“Who’re they?”
“They’re the people who run this whole thing. I don’t do anything. I show up and flap my lips.”
The hugging woman has released my wife and now it seems likely that I am to be her next target. “Oh, Derek,” she says, pulling on my sleeve. “I’ve just been talking to your wife—Alexis, is that her name?”
“Donna.” Alexis. Sexy name. I’d like that.
The woman stands between Steve Carlin and I, but she is so short that we don’t need to make any special adjustments to continue our conversation.
“. . . so I talk to these people, they send me their lawyers, I send them my lawyers. Then what happens?”
“. . . what you said about ‘finding your worth,’ I could really relate to that, because my father—”
“I don’t know what happens. I’m not sure it would be appropriate for me to comment.”
“—he had a thing where for five years he was in a deep, deep depression. And as his daughter, I . . . I interpreted this as, Okay, what’s he saying to me?”
I can’t do two conversations at once. I reach down and take the woman’s hand, hoping that will get me off the hook. She keeps talking to my vest, and evidently my handhold is all she needs.
“I’m just saying for your own future reference, you might want to consider being more specific about—”
“. . . the anguish of being the daughter of a man whom I’d admired for so long—”
“. . . well, fucking la di da, I need a guy to come down here, tell me what to do . . .”
A vein starts trembling on the right side of Steve Carlin’s neck. I nod at my agent, and together he and the dissatisfied customer move off along the corridor. It’s hot down here; bare insulation hangs in wisps from the ceiling. When the two men reach the corner, Carlin takes out his wallet and parts the folds to display the bills inside. For some reason, he thinks it’s necessary to show my agent how much money he has inside his wallet. I’ll hear about it on the plane, I’m sure.
Still holding the woman’s hand, I sit down on a stool and rest my back against the dressing-room mirror. The big bulbs around the perimeter of the mirror feel hot above my head.
“My father just said one day, ‘We’re moving to Wisconsin.’ And that’s how it was in our family. There was never any joy . . .”
My wife watches me from the bottom of the stairs. The fact that I am holding this woman’s hand does not bother her, for as the veteran wife of Derek Skye, she knows that this is simply another part of my job. To comfort. Comfort sometimes means touching. I smile, first down at the woman, then up at my wife, who I can tell is anxious to be getting back to Crane City. Me too, honey. I miss it. You and me, alone in our regular bed. The predictable sounds of the house at night.
Dinner is prime rib at a Perkins near the expressway. All of us, the group of twelve or what have you, have the same thing. Here we are in a chain restaurant, real run-of-the-mill, yet no menus are brought forth, and no one asks us what we want because that information has already been communicated to the kitchen by someone on my personal staff calling from the convention center an hour ago. How this saves time, I don’t know. Why I can’t take a moment to browse the menu and make up my own mind, I just don’t know. Other people dining in the restaurant, good normal folks traveling without an entourage, sit in star patterns all around me eating clam spaghetti and breaded flounder, and when they drink, it’s not from a common pitcher of Coca-Cola that no one wants, it’s from tall glasses brimming with Mountain Dew, Orange Crush, cream soda. The glasses are bubbled red plastic, and they make whatever’s inside look like partially sucked red candy.
I manage this around bites of prime rib: “Martin, what I’m hearing you saying is that the East Coast is not excited about the audio series lined up for the fall. Is that what I’m hearing you saying? Okay then. So if that’s true, what I need to say is—and I’m not mad, I appreciate where everyone’s coming from, you’re thinking cost versus take and I understand that, but what I need to say is, this is a market we can’t ignore. Every airport I go to, it’s Billy Dee, Billy Dee’s Checklists of Personal Contentment, ninety-minute cassettes, you get a free ballpoint pen, it’s embedded in the shrink-wrap.”
As I speak, I feel light flash against the back of my neck, and I’m surprised to discover a team of tag-alongs from the seminar taking pictures out in the parking lot. Their flashbulbs make bright globes against the glass. Fearing a rough flight up ahead, I laugh and flick ice water at my face. Good God, save me from the lightning.
As it turns out, a nasty patch over the Mississippi River forces the pilot to maintain a high altitude the entire trip, and our drop into Crane City is quite literally that—a free fall, and even one of the stewardesses utters a tiny scream as a food tray clatters inside a storage closet. The taste of peanuts is strong in my throat, and the striped pattern on the seat in front of me is making my temples throb. Despite the nausea and the frantic activity, I somehow know we will land safely. That settled, I allow myself a little fantasy, a vision of a quick, unexpected death, with the plane pitching over in an unnatural spin and the lights of the earth now over our heads where they most definitely don’t belong. I turn to my wife, who is sitting first-lady-like to my right, protecting me from the fandom that has been crowding the aisle ever since St. Louis. I somehow know that in eight seconds, it will all be over. Our life together, our marriage. I have seven seconds to collect one last glimpse of my wife, my Madonna. Her knees? Not very respectful, staring at her legs at a time like this. This is the moment when the black-box device finally succumbs, and when the feds recover the tape, they will hear nothing, only a quick interruption as the engines fail and the cockpit tears apart from the rest of the plane. Donna has risen from her seat, taking her purse with her. This is how she has chosen to end our marriage. By leaving. Convinced that this disaster is somehow my fault, she now wants to flee. Her loyalty may be severed by less than eight seconds of fear.
This fantasy having come to an unsatisfying conclusion, and with the plane still looking for a runway, I pull out the in-flight magazine and flip through the pages. Under the heading MOTIVATIONAL MASTER STRIKES A NEW PATH, I notice a picture that stops me short. The man in the picture looks familiar, even though I’ve never seen him before: blond mustache, band of hair hugging the back of a bald head, deep eyes spraying coldwater blue through two chiseled cracks. I recheck the cover, and when I see the April ’99 publication date, I realize what has happened, and that my wife is no longer my wife, and I am no longer a young guru, neither young nor a guru but rather a middle-aged crank, and this is just the kind of publicity I need, x-million travelers per day and they all think they know what Derek Skye’s all about, and even the poor girl from the features department seems a bit unsure of how to phrase her questions, but I am patient with her, having already survived a year of threats and intimidations, late-night phone calls from the Gloria Corporation, and I know that quite possibly most or maybe even all of my former followers will hate me when they see what I’ve done. The reporter conducts her business as another woman takes pictures, and while I find this all a bit distracting, I have been assured that this method is in keeping with the infor
mal tone planned for the article. I’m speaking like a maniac, fast and garbled. The photographer asks me to lean forward so she can adjust the folds of my collar. Her fingernails scratch the back of my neck.
“I am tired,” I tell the reporter, and she writes it down. “That’s the theme of this book. My fatigue. My need to jump up and scream— enough with the excuses! Enough with the, ‘Well, it happened to me.’ ” The photographer pats my shoulder and I sit back up, passing gas as my belt presses into my stomach. The reporter scrunches in her seat, pretending not to notice. “As long as it happened to you, there’s nothing you can do about it. Whatever misfortune you may have encountered in your life, ultimately you brought it upon yourself.”
Having these women in my tiny apartment feels odd to me. I’ve been here by myself for so long now that I find it hard to interact with any company, no matter how polite or well-meaning. My apartment is nearly bare. White walls. I eat from the same plate every night, even though I own a set of four. I wash the plate after every use and set it back on top of the other three. Me and my habits. Well, I haven’t been entirely alone. My ex-wife has stopped by a few times. And Scarlet Blessing, the girl. But now she’s gone too.
The interviewer holds her pen against her notepad and bites her lip. She doesn’t want to ask the next question. I offer her a beer and she begins to relax. “I wonder,” she says, “if you think that others like you may have inadvertently contributed to a harmful mindset in this country?”
“Inadvertently?” I smile, toying with her.
She looks annoyed. She too has limits; my cute response strains her capacity, her professional need to care. Still, she says, “You know what I mean. The American mindset. We’re all victims. Poor little me.”
My shoulders slump as the woman takes a swig of her beer. I’m glad she’s enjoying her drink, because right now I feel like throwing up, covering the windows with chunks of gore, my gore. I set my beer down on the wooden floor and say, “Yes, dear. I do. I think about it all the time. It fills me with a terror that I can’t describe.”
