Good Faith (42 page)

Susan said, “Joe.” She removed her hand from mine, and I realized that I had been rubbing her thumb a little hard, and I kissed the spot that I had been rubbing. She took it back anyway. She went on. “I have to say that I really don’t want to go on with this.”

“With what?”

“With this thing that happened to you. Or that you did. Or, anyway, it’s going to take a long time to sort this out, you said so yourself, and I don’t want to go through it with you. I like you, but I thought about what sort of thing this is going to be, and I have to be honest. It’s not for me.” She smiled quietly and with complete conviction. Then she glanced into my face and shrugged slightly. She said, “But it’s late. I wasn’t going to say this until tomorrow, but, you know, I just don’t want to talk about it. You can stay if you want to. I don’t mind.”

I got off the bed and left. At that moment, I was mostly annoyed with her for not letting me finish my question about Marcus and for not giving me her opinion. She could have allowed me at least that. Afterward, though, I was more surprised that I didn’t miss her, and surprised that I had been thinking I was going to marry someone I didn’t actually miss when she was gone. But this was what she was like—she was like those oranges. Like holding a cool, perfect, fragrant orange in the palm of your hand, and putting it to your cheek, and being glad you have it, because it is perfect and strange, but then, after all, it’s not important. That was the first good thing that happened to me, but I have to admit I didn’t realize it was good until long after I saw Felicity’s picture in the paper.

We all knew when Felicity got back in the country, because her picture was in the paper. When I opened it that day, which was just as the forsythia was coming out, the first thing I noticed was that she had cut her hair after all, and that her head was beautifully shaped, just as she’d said, and her eyes and mouth looked bigger, though she wasn’t smiling and she was looking down, and a man in a uniform had his hand on her arm.

I heard from Betty within a couple of days of Felicity’s return. She said, “She hasn’t been with Marcus. She hasn’t been with him since the end of January.”

“Where is Marcus?”

“When Felicity left them, they were in the Bahamas. She doesn’t know where they are now.”

“Really?” I loved Betty, but I knew I sounded hostile, suspicious.

“Really. She’s been in France. I mean, she was in France until she ran out of money. We had to send her a ticket.”

“She ran through ten thousand dollars?”

Now there was a long silence for which I wanted to apologize but couldn’t. Finally, Betty said, “They can’t link her to Crosbie in any way, so they’ve kind of lost interest in her, I gather. She’s staying here while she and Hank work things out.”

“What about Marcus? Aren’t they interested in Marcus?”

“Not very, I gather. I mean, the bird in the hand at the savings and loan is so big, the bird in the bush in the Bahamas is small by comparison.”

We were silent again. She said, “She would like to talk to you.”

“Why wouldn’t I talk to her?”

“She thought they were going on a vacation. She thought they were going to run off for two weeks and decide if they had a future. She thought it was her idea, even, and her money. Marcus told her he couldn’t afford a vacation, but she wanted to do it. She didn’t realize there was anything else going on until they got to the hotel and Jane was there.”

“Do you believe that, Betty?”

“I think when a woman has been married for twenty years and is crazy to leave her husband, she thinks anything is plausible. Now she realizes she was an idiot.”

I admitted that Marcus was good at getting you to think that his ideas were your ideas.

“You see?” said Betty.

But then I couldn’t stand to talk about it any longer.

I have to say that Betty was persistent, though to what end I didn’t understand. One day I ran into her at the shopping village, and it took her less than a minute to get back on the subject. She put her finger on my arm and drew me into a corner. She said, “She never realized that Marcus had our money or your money or the money from the savings and loan until she got home. Norton told her. When she was with Marcus and Jane, the only person who bought anything or paid any bills was Felicity.”

“Was that why she left?”

“That was the catalyst, I guess. I mean, when she realized they were living off her, she knew she had to get out of there. But she said they started bickering almost as soon as they got there. Marcus would leave her in their room, and go to say something to Jane, and then he would be gone for hours, and Felicity could hear them through the wall. Joey, you should see her. She wants to see you.”

“I will. I really will.”

But I never went over, not as long as I knew she was staying there. One time, I even saw her at the end of the aisle in the grocery store and turned around and walked out the door and got into my car and drove home.

I asked Betty, “Why did he take my money?”

She said, “I think it was Jane’s idea, myself. I liked Marcus. I think he was committed to the project, and then Jane saw it wasn’t going to work and she cooked it up. You never really noticed Jane, did you? I mean, she was plain. Men like you are friendly towards plain women, but you never really
observe
them, do you?”

“But why did he take
my
money?”

“Why not?” said Betty. She smiled. She smiled genuinely. I never understood that about Betty, how she never lost her equanimity. She and Gordon moved into one of the townhouses we had built, and Betty continued to run her antiques shop. The lease had been in her name all along, ever since Gordon bought those pink silk chairs. Bobby went to work for her, and he and Fern got married, but they never had any children. Gordon found himself a truckload of antique-furniture-making planes, and then a traincar load of brick paving stones from somewhere in Connecticut, which he sold to Columbus, Ohio, for repairing the brick streets of some quaint neighborhood they were trying to preserve. We didn’t see much of each other, and so I don’t know what was really behind how he and Betty went from land baron and patriarch to an elderly couple in a townhouse. His lawyer was Martin Jenkins, and then he got Sol Bernstein, who after a while joined the poker game. Betty’s voice always sounded light and good-natured. When I didn’t want to talk about Felicity, she told me stories about her grandchildren. She asked me if I was seeing anyone. I said I wasn’t. I said I wanted to see her, but I didn’t. It was odd the way that friendship dissipated, or at least I thought it was odd until I woke up in the middle of the night and realized how I had betrayed them, bit by bit—first for Felicity and then for Marcus.

I had lunch with George Sloan every so often. He was very philosophical about Marcus. I would sit quietly while he would expound his theories. He was on a low-fat diet, eating his salad and waving his fork around. “What you’ve got to ask yourself about Marcus,” he would say, “is when exactly did he know what he was going to do? I mean, if we could talk to him now, what would he say? Maybe he would say that it was
us
who tempted
him
. We—I mean you-all, really, since I only let him have about five grand in all. You just handed it over. Maybe he was planning to go right down the straight-and-narrow but how could he, because here was the land and here was the estate and here were the guys, and, eventually, here was the girl, and so why not? Sure his wife thinks he’s the devil incarnate and so do you, probably, but who’s the tempter and who’s the tempted here?” He would chuckle at this point. He was an investment genius, making money hand over fist. “So, that place. They redid the roof and fixed it up, and now they’re out of business. Look into it for me, okay?”

George Sloan was the only person I could talk to about it. My lawyer kept saying, “Look, don’t speculate. Every motive you attribute to the guy, every story you make up, it compromises you. And I don’t just mean legally. Put your life back together. You’ve got your real estate license, and you’ve got some listings. If you keep turning this over in your head, pretty soon you’re going to be fifty and you’ll still be sitting on square one. Between you and me, be grateful you aren’t the wife and get on with it.” Linda
was
in a pickle; eventually she got a ruling that divorced her from Marcus and went back to New York.

The prosecutors and the auditors and the federal officials and the state officials breathed on me, and their breath was hot, but in the end the flame from the throat of the federal dragon burned others. They would send me notices and call me up and have me come in and talk to them, or they would subpoena me, but there was never a trial except for Crosbie. I read about that in the paper. People from North Carolina and even New York had more important things to say about him than we did.

Of course, my parents were getting older. In the fall of ’84, I sold their house and my condo and found a duplex, three bedrooms downstairs and two up. They had almost a hundred thousand dollars in equity. We were moved in by the first snowfall. I kept the walks shoveled and salted. My dad parked his car in the garage and never drove it again after that, but we weren’t far from the center of Deacon, and they went for walks in the spring, two or three blocks and home again. My father discovered gourmet coffee. Every morning, he would walk down to the Larkspur Café and have some roast or other—Blue Mountain, from Jamaica, or Kona, or dark Sumatra—and he would read a newspaper from a different town or a different continent. My mother would lament to me, “I know he thinks we should have traveled more. I know he’s sorry now that we didn’t even get to New Orleans.” But my father said, “This is enough for me, just the papers and what things are called and the different flavors. I never was much for leaving home.” In my spare time, which sometimes was quite plentiful, I fixed the place up. It was soothing.

The hotel division of Avery Development bought the farm for a million. They paid off the lien Gottfried had put on the place, brought in a big construction firm from Florida, and added on to the house to the west and the south. Ten suites and a hundred rooms; another dining room, which made two gourmet restaurants; eight tennis courts plus the golf course; gift shops that were auxiliary to the fanciest ones in the shopping village; and an ice rink and hot tubs and saunas for the winter, when guests came to eat steamed vegetables and slim down. No horses. When it opened in 1988, they called it
THE SPA AND RESORT AT SALT KEY
.

By 1988, Gottfried’s houses were selling for half a million dollars. He was using Carla King as his Realtor. The only thing he ever said to me about Marcus was, “I told you you should have listened to me about that asshole. If you’d listened to me, you would still be selling my houses.” That I wasn’t selling his houses was my one relief.

They wanted more for the former restaurant than it would have cost George Sloan when we first saw it, but not as much more as the improvements were worth, and anyway George had a lot more money now, and he could buy it without deciding, for the moment, what he wanted to do with it. What had happened at the farm, what had happened with the restaurant, perfectly illustrated his theory of value, which he expounded to me more than once—“In the end, you know, there’s a premium to be paid for starting something yourself. The deal is, tempting as it is to start it yourself, it costs more. You got to get in there after the building’s done but before they’ve got anything to show for it, and you can get yourself a deal. That’s what I think anyway. I mean, this restaurant is a case in point. It was a good idea. Who says it might not still be a good idea, but not every good idea is a profitable idea, if you know what I mean. Now, your friend Marcus, I always thought he was full of good ideas, I’ll say that for him.”

I did call Marcus my friend. I would say, “He was my best friend. I don’t understand it.” But, really, I hadn’t called him my best friend when he was still around. Calling him my best friend was a bad idea, an expensive idea, too. During the period that I was referring to him as my best friend, I had shooting pains in my knees, constant migraine headaches, and a persistent pain on the right side of my neck. I spent a lot of money at the chiropractor, who took X rays and decided that my atlas was completely out of alignment, and then I went there and had my atlas aligned six times, which cost plenty of money with all the doctors I was seeing as well, but the pains didn’t go away until I stopped referring to Marcus as my best friend and started referring to him as Marcus-Burns-Oh-I-had-a-run-in-with-him-too.

George Sloan would go over to the house on the hill and sit in a chair in the front room and gaze out over the valley and the trees and the deepening twilight until the earth was dark and the entire dome of the sky was a fountain of stars: “As good as a movie, as far as I’m concerned.” He was right. The time I went with him, it was quite spectacular. We sat in a couple of plastic chairs, with beers, and for once George was quiet and I was the one who talked. I looked out at the cosmic display, and I said, “But why did he have to take all my money too? It was like he was waiting around just to screw me. He got the bank’s money on December seventeenth, but he waited around an extra two weeks for me to clean out my bank account and give it to him. Why did he want my money? My own money? Was it revenge for me holding out on him somehow? Did he see it like that? I mean, I gave it to him of my own accord, but he acted as if he was my friend. He
said
he was my friend.”

“Every word Marcus Burns ever spoke was a lie,” said George, “even when it was factually correct.”

“Yes, but—”

“Think about that. Just think about it.”

We were sitting entirely in the dark. I was quiet for a moment; then I said, “But George. Listen. You could say he just decided to steal the money at the end, or you could say he looked at us right from the beginning and saw us as patsies, or you could say the plan kind of grew as things went along. I feel like it’s killing me not to know. He was my best friend.”

“He
was
your best friend.”