by Craig Smith
Walt cupped his hands in front of his chest. ‘ Talent!’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know you.’
Walt laughed. ‘You can’t say tits anymore, David, so we call it talent!’
‘I suppose bodacious ta-tas is still frowned upon by the powers that be?’ Walt had picked up this unfortunate expression a few years ago. For a season it was all he talked about. It was my understanding he had been investigated for using the word in the classroom, but I could be wrong about that. The investigation I’m recalling might have been the joke about the perfect girl. Between rumours and the actual investigations launched against him no one could keep track of Walt Beery’s troubles, and I had long ago quit asking for the particulars.
I recall, as I look back on that afternoon, that after I spoke I happened to look around. It was something I usually did before I started talking to Walt, but I was out of practice. One table away, Norma Olson, Jane Trimble, and Marlene Moss were sitting in rigid silence.
The mention of bodacious ta-tas will do that, I’m told.
Walt answered me without noticing them or caring that they were there: ‘That’s real talent, David. You want real talent you have to see Johnna Masterson.
Johnna’s got more talent than I’ve got hands!’ Walt held up both hands for me to consider the propor-tions.
‘She’s in my creative writing class,’ I answered sullenly, hoping he would see that he was being monitored.
‘Winston dated her last year. Well, I guess it’s more like he cornered her at a party. All natural is the report.’
I glanced at the women again. They maintained a petrified silence.
‘Winston made a pass at Molly at the party,’ I said, hoping to divert Walt from any further discussion of talent by the handful.
‘Randy’s a son of a bitch.’
‘Of course, so did you and Buddy Elder, and probably half a dozen other men I don’t even know about.’
Walt’s grin flickered. ‘We’re all sons of bitches, David.’
Chapter 4
AS WE HEADED BACK to our respective offices, Walt started laughing. I looked around to make sure no one was within earshot and asked what was so funny.
‘Randy Winston was telling me you and Molly bought the farm with Chrysler stock your old man got in the late seventies.’
I smiled with supreme satisfaction. ‘I wonder where he heard that.’
‘He said Buddy Elder got it straight from you!’
‘I knew a great liar once,’ I said. ‘I sold cars with him for a couple summers. Larry the Liar. I don’t think I ever even knew his last name. I remember one time seeing Larry standing by this big-chested Baptist girl at the back bumper of a two-year-old LeSabre. Larry was slinging his arms around and dancing a little, and she had her arms locked around herself, shaking her head at everything Larry told her. Tubs was managing the floor that afternoon and walked over to me and said, “Twenty bucks if you get that lady on a demo drive.’’ Me? I could get her in the car. I could get the devil himself on a demo drive, but I sure didn’t think she was going to buy it! But twenty bucks is twenty bucks, so I walked out, started the car, pulled it back and opened the passenger door.’
‘That easy?’ Walt asked me dubiously.
‘For a demo drive, you don’t ask. You pull the car out and open the door. As that particular technique didn’t involve lying, Larry wasn’t very good at it. Now the minute that Baptist girl and her family got into the car, I stepped out and let Larry drive them off.
Larry did great demo drives. Tubs had the twenty in hand for me when I got back to the showroom.
‘About fifteen minutes later they all came back laughing. Everybody loved Larry. Tubs told me to manage the deal because they were going to buy, and he was right. The thing went perfectly. Larry shut up like he was trained to do. I got their signature. The easiest sale I ever made. They loved the car. They loved us. Everything was perfect. Then right at the end, the family all tucked away in their brand new two-year-old Buick LeSabre, Larry leaned into the car and said in his squeaky little Southern drawl, ‘Oh! And I forgot to tell y’all! When y’all bring this in for service, we got a limousine out back with a driver that wears white gloves, and he’ll take you anywhere you want to go.’
Walt laughed. ‘White gloves?’
‘That’s exactly what he said. The lady goes, “Hey, that’s wonderful, Larry! Why don’t the other dealerships do that?” And Larry goes, “I told you, darling, we’re special!”’
‘The minute they drove off, I asked Larry why he had to go and tell a lie when it didn’t even matter! I said it was just asking for trouble down the line. You know what he said? He said, “A little lie just makes ’em feel good, Davey. That’s all!”’
Walt considered this for a moment. ‘That’s why you lied to Buddy? To make him feel good?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I lied because I don’t like the son of a bitch.’
SOMETIME THE FOLLOWING WEEK one of my students in Introduction to Literature came up to me after class. She said she wanted to make an appointment to talk with me. I was heading back to my office just then and said I could talk to her right away, if that was good for her. That would be okay, she said.
Did she want to walk along with me or meet over there? She said we might as well walk together.
At that point, I had already asked her name. Denise Conway. So as we started across campus I inquired about where she came from. Different places. Was she a freshman? Did it show? She looked like a senior, I said, but most of the advisers encouraged their people to get the one-hundred level courses out of the way early. That seemed to satisfy her and we walked in a comfortable silence for a while. She was a nice enough young woman, I thought, lacking confidence maybe, and, except for a trim, perky build, not especially interested in her appearance. To be fair, a lot of the kids dressed down for class: raggedy sweatshirts, loose jeans, no makeup, hair unwashed and pulled back sloppily.
Nothing unusual in this, nor in the fact that a student wanted to connect with me. It was a large class, and older students sometimes needed to feel as though they had some kind of feel for the prof’s humanity, such as it was.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
I had no idea what she was talking about and told her as much.
‘We met at Caleb’s last spring.’
The moment she said this, I locked in on the brown eyes. Buddy Elder’s pale, plain stripper girlfriend who had not said a word. ‘You’re Buddy Elder’s friend,’ I said.
‘You won’t hold that against me, will you?’ It was a quick, sweet remark, and I laughed. She did as well, and as she did, I decided I liked her. At least she didn’t seem like the anaemic little dolt I had imagined. With a smile, she was actually a good deal prettier than The Slipper’s usual offerings. At just this point Norma Olson and Marlene Moss came walking toward us. Norma and Marlene were both graduate students. Both of them had been out to the farm for the party. I greeted them casually and noticed them checking out Denise.
‘Usually, when men don’t recognize me it’s because I have my clothes on.’
Not wanting to touch this one, I said, ‘You’ve changed your hair, haven’t you?’
She was in fact a peroxide blonde. ‘You know what they say. Blondes have more fun. What do you think?
Do you like it?’
‘It looks good.’
‘Buddy says it makes me look like a total prostitute.’ I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment in the lexicon of Buddy Elder or not, so I let that go and just looked at her for a moment. ‘My tips are up forty percent since I did my hair. Can you believe it?’
‘You’re still working at The Slipper?’
‘I have to pay rent.’ I had nothing to say to this.
‘I’m dreading the day someone from school walks in.’
‘You mean besides Walt?’
She smiled as if I had mentioned somebody’s old sheepdog. ‘I don’t really think of Walty as university.<
br />
He’s one of my regulars. With you it would be different.
I think if you came in to watch me I’d be embarrassed.
You’re my professor!’
‘I expect we’d both be embarrassed.’
‘We’re not total nude, but there’s not much left to the imagination.’
I started to ruminate on the imagination and decided that wasn’t a good idea, so I nodded thoughtfully, praying we got off the subject of nude dancing, or semi-nude dancing, as soon as possible.
In my office, Denise got right down to business. She was having a problem with the sexuality in the material. Since we were reading Oedipus the King, I was a bit confused. In fact, I had a difficult time not laughing. ‘Sexuality?’
‘The incest. I just want to throw up when I think about him married to his mother. Like, they had sex, didn’t they? And kids?’ I had had complaints before about the Oedipus, but never expressed with such conviction. My only answer was to say we were almost done with it.
‘But I have to write about it on the test, and I don’t think I can. Is there something else I can study?’
I decided not to try selling Oedipus to her. The standard line would be to tell her it wasn’t really about incest. It was about ignorance, all the things we think we know about our lives but actually just take on faith. I decided instead to extricate myself from the problem with humour. The exam would be fairly general and cover a great deal of material. If the subject of incest bothered her for some reason, she could always choose to write about adultery and murder.
Denise locked on the word adultery. ‘I don’t need to read some story about adultery! I get that every night at work. Most all of the guys who come into The Slipper are married.’
I wasn’t quite sure what I should say, so I tried to relate the material to something in her own experience. I said any number of movies dealt with the same themes. ‘You go to movies, don’t you?’ Sometimes, she said, when she had time. ‘But I don’t like violent movies.’
‘What do you like to see?’
‘Love stories.’
‘That’s it?’
She thought about it. Pretty much.
I made a pitch for a diversity of experience. Besides, it was possible to dislike something and still understand it. She didn’t have to like everything she read.
Denise left my office that day promising she would try to be more open-minded. It was a fine moment for me, I decided, teaching open-mindedness to an employee of the sex industry.
Chapter 5
I TOLD MOLLY I was having trouble getting back into the routine. I had been away from it too long, I said. Molly hadn’t much sympathy. She wanted to know how many other professions offered a nine-hour work-week, counting an hour as fifty minutes and a year as nine months. Put that way, the whole thing seemed less awful, and I reconciled myself to my fate.
It was not a bad fate actually. I was working on some new short stories, rising before dawn to write for an hour or so. Around six-thirty I would usually feed the dogs and horses, then let them out before I drove to town. In my office by nine o’clock most mornings, I had an enviable schedule, flexible in the extreme.
I usually finished up around three o’clock, though on Wednesday nights I regularly taught a night class.
That fall there were no emergencies at school, no grants to write, not even an excessive number of committee meetings. Molly and I owned sixteen properties, a total of forty rental units. At any given time, we might be required to clean a place or give it a facelift. We might shop a new property or unload something for the right price. Once a week or so, I could count on meeting her in town for some kind of business: leaky faucets, replacing furnaces, laying tile, meeting with bankers or our lawyer. That fall was no different. There was always something. Afterwards we would have dinner and once even took in a movie.
Weekends we stayed close to the farm or went with Lucy to her races. In September we began roughing out an apartment for Lucy on the third floor. She was looking at a couple different schools, one in Texas, the other in Oklahoma, both offering rodeo as part of their intercollegiate athletic competition, but there would be summer vacations, and, ultimately, Lucy planned to come back and live on the farm, for a while at least. She was even toying with the idea of going professional once she had completed an undergraduate degree in equestrian studies. The other option, the one I had gently put forward, was an advanced degree in veterinary science. We had a good school only a couple of hours away, so the apartment would get plenty of use for quite a few years.
We were in no hurry though. We wanted Lucy downstairs until she turned eighteen. Besides, we had spent five years getting the house in shape. This was the last step, and we took it almost with a sense of leisure.
Sometimes Molly and I would reflect on the inevitable feeling of getting old, even though she had not turned thirty-four and I was still three winters from the dreaded forty. We made a joke of it, but I think it bothered both of us. Lucy was almost gone. We had raised her.
We had built our lives from the ground up, and though we were not in the financial league of Walt and Barbara Beery, we had accomplished everything we had set out to achieve. While that created a sense of satisfaction, we both also felt, I think, a nagging sense of what now?
Our success had come with a great deal of planning and careful risk assessment. As with most fortunes, however, the bulk of it arrived unexpectedly. In our case it came as a result of the death of Molly’s aunt.
After years of refusing Doc’s attempts to get her to sell Bernard Place, Doc’s sister left her share of the farm not to her brother but to Molly. Doc, realizing Molly would be no more cooperative than his sister, deeded his share of the farm over to Molly. At the time Molly and I were scrambling to acquire property, wrangling contracts from distressed sellers and juggling rental income against a formidable array of mortgage and contract payments. Rather than sell off part of the two hundred acres, tantamount to a mortal sin among the landed gentry, Molly used the property value to leverage more favourable bank loans. With the increased cash flow, she then began to work a series of trade-offs and sales until we found ourselves the proud owners of three small apartment buildings and several very decent old homes in town, Victorian treasures we rented out with extreme discretion.
Over the next five years Molly was certainly active, but her greatest energy she devoted to the old mansion Doc McBride had wanted to raze ever since he moved his family off the farm. Now, with even that almost finished, Molly found herself at loose ends. My fate was no better. Though I had been a part of Molly’s professional ambitions, the extra hand a good carpenter needs on any given project, my real passion had always been writing. With Jinx published I was not certain what I wanted to do next and so was marking time.
If someone had told me that September my world was about to turn upside down within the next couple of weeks, that my job, my marriage, my freedom, and finally even my life were all about to come into jeopardy, I probably would have laughed. My fate, as I understood it, was set in stone. I was going to get old with Molly. Molly might take the leap she longed for and start building houses instead of renovating them, but essentially neither of us expected or planned on much excitement.
The irony is that even then our world had begun to break apart. We just didn’t know it.
‘IT’S A BIG ONE,’ Walt Beery told me one morning not long after I had agreed to look at his son’s novel.
The size of the box he set down on my desk told me I had made a mistake. Seeing my expression, Walt laughed cheerfully. ‘ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was about this length before it was edited, David!’
I thought about complaining. I didn’t have time to read two or three thousand s, but all I did was smile. The minute he was gone I set the box on my file cabinet and tried to forget it. I was not even tempted to look inside.
It soon became invisible. I knew it was there, of course, just waiting for me, but I learned to avoid looking at
it, my good deed to do, my debt of friendship.
Sometimes, when I sat alone in the office, my back to it, I tried to convince myself that I could skim the entire opus in fifteen minutes and be done with it.
Then I would look at the tape holding the box together and decide it would take fifteen minutes just to get the thing unpacked. Methodical man that I am, I told myself to open the box and then have a go at actually reading it later. It wasn’t a bad idea, but I could never quite summon the energy to cut the tape.
What finally moved me to read it was a run-in with Buddy Elder. He and Johnna Masterson had presented copies of their short stories at the end of the third full meeting of my night class. The following week they were each treated to a sixty-five minute critique from the class. Johnna Masterson went first. She had written a story about a teenage girl’s sexual awakening called
‘Sexual Positions.’ It was the sort of thing that should have come out badly but was, in fact, one of the funniest things I had ever read.
The technique she employed was reminiscence, the older and wiser woman recalling earlier times, whether real or imagined I could only guess. The encounters showed men and boys in a painfully comic light as they came forward to test young ‘Joan’s’ virtue.
It was difficult for the class to evaluate the piece because it was, like Johnna Masterson herself, perfectly put together, and it was the first story we had evalu-ated, so they had no idea what kind of stuff they were going to see later. A few people blundered into it, as people will, suggesting changes that would either kill or spoil the humour. Others wanted extraneous details explained, like about how the kid who had started necking with Joan got his feet stuck in the sunroof of his father’s Lincoln. That was, like, practically impossible! Shouldn’t she explain that a little? There was a bit of incredulity at an aborted attempt (ending with CPR) to perform cunnilingus in the deep end of a public pool. There were those who wondered if Johnna might be taking the wrong approach, making fun of some very serious stuff, those who wanted more, those who wanted less.
