Good Faith (35 page)

Of course I noticed a difference between after the snort and before, but it wasn’t like any difference I had ever noticed in the past. It wasn’t like getting drunk; it wasn’t like smoking marijuana; I don’t think it was like taking a psychedelic drug, but I had never done that, so I didn’t know. It was just like having more. It was like having reached the limits of your capacity for enjoying something or eating something or engaging in any good thing, and suddenly finding your appetite expand. We kissed and kissed. If she hadn’t said “Breathe” from time to time, I might have forgotten to. And then it wore off, and she did another line, and then it wore off for me, and I did another line, and after that line we had sex. In the course of that, I noticed that my cock was huge and hard, and then I became somehow tremendously absorbed in my cock. It astonished and delighted me. Just as, when I was looking at her face or kissing her or stroking her body, that got to be the only thing in the world I was thinking about or doing, so when I saw my cock and put my hand around it, that got to be the only thing in the world, just the perfection of my own member, rigid and silky, beautiful and enormous. I started to laugh; it was so wonderful that it was mine. I saw that Susan was looking at it, too, and I watched her stare at it, then I looked back at it and forgot that she was looking at it, too. It did not seem to be possible that my hard-on would go away.

Susan whispered in my ear, “Let’s do it.”

“Do what?”

“Make love.”

“Oh, yes. Let’s.” And then we did. I had to consciously close my eyes, though, so that I could stop looking at my cock. It was a good thing I did, because the inner life was at least as involving as the outer life. I became lost in the sensations of penetration, accompanied by the secondary feeling in the palms of my hands where I was gripping Susan around the hips. I could feel her skin against my palms and her vagina around my dick and I could feel my own thrusts and it went on and on, no shifting of position or change of any kind. Change seemed irrelevant and impossible until our balance shifted and the old way was completely gone and a new way was installed. It was entirely strange and involving and then the sensations began to fade and I opened my eyes. She said, “You’re coming down from the high.”

“I suppose.”

“There’s more.”

“Can I ask a stupid question?”

“There are no stupid questions. There are only stupid assumptions.”

“Oh. Well, am I going to come?”

“Nothing is going to stop you from doing that, though it could be awhile.”

“Well, judging by this, am I going to live through it?”

“Maybe not in this form.” She laughed.

“I can believe that.”

“This is nice, isn’t it?” She removed herself from me. I was still hard, as hard as I had been however long ago that was. It was wonderful but it wasn’t quite as riveting as it had been. I was noticing that, as she lay down beside me on the bed and snuggled against me. She said, “Let’s have a little rest. What is it? Oh, about three. Three-o-nine. That’s not all that late.”

“What time did we get here?”

“Twelve-fifteen, maybe. Coke kind of makes the hours disappear. It is nice. Very nice. Sherlock Holmes was a coke addict.”

“I thought Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character.”

“Well, Sigmund Freud, then. He was too. My boyfriend used to say it was the drug of intellectuals and artists.”

“Really?”

“I would think, Then why are you taking it, Billy?”

“He was not an intellectual or an artist?”

“He was a coke dealer. That was as close as he came. A purveyor to the stars, as it were. I met him on the plane home from Spain. He lives in New York. They prayed that we would break up.”

“They?”

“Mother and the aunts.”

“Oh, them.”

“Their prayers are often answered, I have to say.” She snuggled closer. I felt the texture of the room slowly return to something I recognized. “The danger is that you’ll just get worn out, but if you are organized and careful, it’s not at all like the addictive drugs.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. I’ve had lots of experience, no problems.” She hoisted herself on her elbows and looked at me. She went on, “It’s just a thing, you know. It’s nice but it’s not great. It’s fun, but it’s not art or religion or a baby.”

I looked at her. She smiled prettily and self-confidently. It was all the same thing, I thought, the pictures and the tiles and the décor and the neatness and the hair and the clothes and the general savoir faire and grace. It was all the same thing as the cocaine. She was the first woman I had ever met who was universally competent. I saw that my hard-on was subsiding. I pulled a sheet, a very delightful sheet, smooth and cool, up over us. She said, “I don’t think I’ve known anyone quite like you, Joe.” The fact was that sometime later we fell asleep, and in the end, I didn’t come. But afterward, I was kind of glad of it, because it seemed like that would have been almost too much, almost too dramatic. It was a pleasure to be saved for later.

CHAPTER

25

A
ND SO GOTTFRIED FINISHED
the two houses he was building and I put them on the market, and the money I used for the advertising was my own, because I didn’t want to involve Marcus and Gordon. The day the ads came out in the paper, I was actually a little nervous, as if I had done something and now I was going to be found out, especially since they were good-sized display ads with several views of each house.
HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
was the title of the ad, and both properties looked terrific. I planned to run the ads through Christmas, which was expensive, but they were perfect houses to show during the holidays, and I managed to get Dale and Gottfried’s wife to trim them out a bit with some wreaths and some lights. One early snow and they would look like Hallmark cards, I thought.

Marcus stayed mum.

Gottfried moved his trucks and tools and crew (two other guys named Jim and Jack) out to the farm, and Marcus went out there at least every other day. When he told me he was going out the first time, I stopped him before he walked out the door. I said, “You know Gottfried can’t stand you, right?”

“I knew he was miffed about the fence, but—”

“And the color of your new roof. Don’t try to win him over. Don’t make suggestions. He’s got the plans. He’s gone over the plans three times with all of us. Let him follow the plans.”

“What if we want to make a change, or there’s something that doesn’t look quite—”

“My first choice would be that you not make any changes at all. But if there’s really something, let me suggest it. You keep your mouth shut. Just stand around and admire, if you have to be there, which I don’t really buy.”

“It’s our project.”

“Don’t think of it that way for the next four or five months. Think of it as his project.”

“But what if—”

“I’m telling you. If he walks away, he won’t come back, and there isn’t a single other builder we can get in the area or at the price. The houses will be different. Now we’re talking about the clubhouse.”

“I don’t think money is the real object here. We want it to be exactly right.”

“He will do it exactly right, but he’s very touchy. Imagine the touchiest person you’ve ever met.”

“Linda?”

“Whoever. Now, imagine someone ten times touchier.”

“Gottfried?”

“Yeah. Now, if you make one inadvertent mistake, or maybe two, I can work through the wife, but that’s all the rope you’ve got, so don’t waste it and don’t use it up.”

Marcus laughed, which I didn’t think was a good sign, but at the end of the first week I still hadn’t heard from Gottfried, so I began to relax a little, though I did say to Jane, “Give him as much work to do as possible to keep him away from there.” Jane understood. I was coming to like Jane.

One day not long after this, I was pulling into the parking lot at about the same time as Marcus, and when he saw me he jumped out of his car and sprinted over to my spot. As soon as I had gotten out, he said, “Come with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“No, really. You’ll love this.” He slapped me on the back. He was in a better mood than I had seen him in weeks. He stepped behind me and hustled me toward the door. He didn’t even turn his head to look at Mary King, sitting behind her desk, though I saw her eyes follow us. Good, I thought.

When we got into the building, he turned me right instead of pushing me straight ahead, and in a moment we were standing outside of the South African Gold Trading Exchange. Marcus reached around me and opened the door. I had never been in here before.

But Marcus had. The receptionist said, “Hey, Marcus!” with a grin, and Marcus said, “Hey, Dawn!” and then a door to one of the offices opened and out came George Sloan. He was dressed in a black funereal-type suit and a very white shirt, but he didn’t have a mournful air. Rather, he was grinning, and he had large yellow-gold cuff links. He too said, “Hey, Marcus! I was hoping you’d come in.”

“How’s it going?”

“Great! Say, Joe! Long time no see!”

It was as if our most recent interaction hadn’t ever happened. In fact, it was as if all our interactions hadn’t happened. The George Sloan I had taken around to house after house, the faintly exasperated, suspicious middle-aged guy who had transformed into the lovelorn trespasser had now transformed again into a chuckling, hearty, welcoming, even good-looking man. I said, “George! I thought you’d disappeared.”

“You thought I’d gone to jail, I’ll bet!” He guffawed.

“Well, they didn’t say anything in the paper—”

“Oh, I paid a fine.” He waved his hand. “But come into my office. I want to show Marcus something.”

He ushered us into a nice hard-edged office with severe black and gray décor, except that everything had bright gold accents. I said, “So, how long have you been in the gold business, George? I thought you were in business supplies or something like that.”

“I’ll tell you what happened. I came into some money, I won’t say how much, but enough to have redone that house if those restaurant people hadn’t bought it and gutted the downstairs to build the kitchens, so I was looking around for an investment, and I came over here—just a little research—and I got to talking to one of the partners, Simon Lever, you know him? And a couple of weeks later, here I was, and Simon said he’d teach me the business, and of course Marcus was in on it.” He glanced at Marcus. “But look.”

There was a lighted computer screen in one corner of the office, and numbers were scrolling across it.

“This is like minting money. The trade I made this morning has already earned four percent, and it’s only been—what?—a couple of hours. If it keeps going like this, I’ll be ready to buy a piece of land.” He looked at the computer screen admiringly.

“And I’ll be ready to buy an ingot of gold,” said Marcus.

“I keep telling you to get in.”

Marcus shrugged. “Simon Lever is a good prospect for us.”

“Look at me. I’m an idiot,” said George. “What have I been doing all my life? Glorified inventory. But this is making me rich. This is making
me
rich. All you need is a stake. Doesn’t even have to be a big stake. What I do is retire a certain percentage of everything I earn.         I learned that from watching my father-in-law play blackjack in         Vegas. He’d go out there with a stake, absolutely ironclad. If he was         losing, well, so be it, but if he was winning he put money into his left pocket every winning hand, and he never took it out. Over the years, he’s one of the few guys I ever saw who made money gambling.”

“And paid his taxes,” said Marcus.

“Yes, he did. I told you that.”

“So he wasn’t as smart as he looked.”

We all laughed.

George put his hands in his pockets. “Fellas,” he said, “it’s lying around on the floor here, waiting for you guys to stoop down and pick it up.”

“Everything I got is tied up.” Marcus glanced at me. “I don’t know about Joe.”

I shook my head noncommittally.

“You know where I am,” said George Sloan.

As we went up the stairs to our office, I said, “Between you and me, it is quite a transformation. Like a personality transplant.”

“He got rich.”

“Well—”

“George Sloan is the first guy I’ve met around here who can take a dare.”

“You could’ve fooled me.”

I went to bed before ten Sunday night. I thought I heard the phone ring; I was sleeping so soundly I couldn’t even begin to wake up and answer it, but when I got to work in the morning, Marcus was waiting in the parking lot for me again. The weather had turned especially cold overnight, below zero, and he was bundled up to the eyebrows. I almost didn’t recognize him. But he opened the door to my car as soon as I turned off the ignition, and said, “So, what do you think? Did you think about it over the weekend? I tried to call you last night but you didn’t answer.”

“I fell asleep early.”

“It’s fucking cold out here. Let’s go for a drive. Let’s drive out to the farm.”

“Okay. I’d like to see how Gottfried’s getting on, anyway.”

“He hasn’t done a thing except set up. It’s taking him forever to set up.”

“When were you out there?”

“Saturday. He wasn’t there. I didn’t touch anything. I wore gloves. I didn’t leave fingerprints. But he seems slow.”

“He isn’t fast, and he also takes a long time to set up and scope out the job. He always says,
Well begun is half done
. Believe me, you won’t see Gottfried running to the lumberyard for three two-by-fours and a package of screws he forgot to account for. Don’t worry about it.” We turned out of the parking lot and headed down the street. The car was warm, and Marcus unwound his scarf. After a moment, he unbuttoned the top button of his overcoat. He stared out the windshield. I could recognize that stare now. It was the worried stare, the what’s-going-to-happen-to-us stare. I didn’t say anything. I let Susan Webster come into my mind, the way she looked when we were dancing, bright and happy and pretty, just a little disheveled, pinning her hair up after a fast dance, then putting her head against my chest for the next slow dance.

Marcus said, “I think we have to do something on the side, something that the others aren’t involved in. I think we have to diversify.”

“What do you mean?”

“This thing George Sloan is into is a great thing. I hate to see it get away from us.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

He looked at me. “Neither does George.” We laughed.

“How much do you think he’s made?”

“Well, actually, I can tell you that, because he’s another one who can’t keep his mouth shut. His mother or someone left him about a hundred and twenty-five. He’s turned that into something like seven.”

“Seven hundred thousand dollars?”

“As of Friday.”

“This time last year, he was griping about how he was going to meet his sixteen-thousand-dollar down payment for his mortgage. Of course he was also stalking that hillside house, so I don’t know what was really going on with him. Maybe he was just griping in front of his wife, as a cover.”

“Well, I didn’t know him then, but I feel like the chance of a lifetime is getting away from me.”

“What about Jane?”

“Jane doesn’t have any money either. At least, not what she calls poker money. You know, my authority with Jane only goes so far and no farther.”

“I know that.”

“If I had fifty thousand bucks I could turn it into three in no time.”

“Three thousand?”

“Three hundred thousand, you idiot!” He started laughing. “And get this. Mike put two thousand with George. You might ask yourself where Mike got two thousand? Well, he’s saved it in a tin all these years. In a tin! When I met Mike, he thought a financial instrument was a money clip. They ran the two up to fifteen, and he went and bought some futures in soybeans, got it up to nineteen, then sold those and decided to try the currency market. He’s turned that two into twenty-three thousand dollars, and now he wants to buy a house. By the way, I meant to tell you to look for a house for Mike out there in Plymouth Township somewhere. First a suit, then a house. But, shit, they’re leaving me behind.”

“I’m feeling a little stodgy myself.”

“I am in a dangerous mood.”

“In what sense?” I looked him up and down.

“Well, I’m not going to do you any bodily harm. But I’m sort of in a let’s-plunder-the-children’s-college-fund mood. I was the guy who got these guys into this! It’s driving me crazy, but I am so overextended!”

I thought of the eight hundred thousand but I didn’t mention it, not wanting to tempt him, if he was indeed in that sort of dangerous mood. I thought it was probably a good thing that the         eight hundred thousand was still safely at the savings and loan. Moods tended to pass, didn’t they?

“I’ve got to get some money.”

I looked at him. We were on the highway now, and it wasn’t very crowded, so I looked at him for a long moment. Then I said, “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you—I don’t know, desperate like this. Is this thing with George Sloan really the problem, or is it something I should know about but don’t really want to?”

“Like what?”

“Like something with the project.”

“Nah. The project is fine. I mean, fine enough. Slow. It’s so fucking slow. I didn’t realize it would be so fucking slow. But it’s still a sure thing. This is how I look at it. It’s 1983. My best guess is that 1985, or even 1986 are going to be the best times to be selling luxury homes. The longer we can hold on, the better off we’ll be. We don’t want to panic and sell and see our investment turn into gravy for the buyer. That’s the worst thing in life, to be on the buy-low end of the equation. My parents owned a house once, for about three years at the end of the sixties. All the kids were pretty much on their own, so they bought a brownstone pretty cheap. My mother was beside herself, she was so happy. She felt like she’d achieved a lifelong dream, but then my dad lost his job, and they were late with the mortgage payment, and she didn’t say anything to the kids because she was embarrassed. So anyway, someone offered her the same price they’d paid for the place three years before, and she took it, because she was afraid, even though the two of them had fixed the place up pretty well in the meantime. She said it was just too nerve-racking, worrying about the mortgage every month. Anyway, a couple of years later, when property values began to shoot up in New York, the guy who bought it sold it for twice what he’d given her. My father, who was the reason she sold in the first place, raged at her for months for being such a sucker. All he could think about was that free money he could have had if she hadn’t let the other guy get the best of her.”

We were silent.

He said, “So anyway. What was her mortgage payment? Maybe two hundred fifty a month or something like that. I always thought that was the worst thing that ever happened to her in a long life of bad things. Because it was the most unnecessary.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut and kept driving.

“You know what the rich have?”