“Couldn’t you pretend?” she said in his ear, softly, bending down so that she was speaking only to him, in a whisper that none of the other students were intended to hear. Her voice lost its harshness. His head down, he shut his eyes. Above him, close to him, her voice murmured and rustled. “Just think what it would be like,” she said, her lips almost at his ear. “Wouldn’t it be very nice?”
“I guess so,” he answered, not daring to raise his head or open his eyes. Yes, he thought, it would be nice. But it’s too far. Too unreal. There’s no point in concerning myself about something that remote. “I’d like to go to New York,” he said to her. “I’d like to do a lot of things. But hell—I know my own limitations. I’ll never get there. Let’s try to be realistic.”
She said, “Then what would you like to do your composition on?”
I have no desire to do it on anything, he thought as he lay on his back, his hands over his face. Why should I? Where will it get me? Can’t I find anything pleasant? Imagine this or that; an imaginary journey to a peaceful, comfortable land. He picked up the pencil and considered. Anything? he wondered. On any topic at all? Am I free to do that? Pretend anything I wish?
“I think I’ll write about what’s going to happen,” he said. I’ll imagine ahead into the future a few months. Even more: several years. How it would have worked out between us. If everything had gone okay. If I could have brought the goddamn typewriters back and go to working on them down at the office, in the evenings, until for almost no money I had transformed them so that they could be sold at a really good price. If she hadn’t gone behind my back and dumped them, and then, when I found out—as I was inevitably going to find out—she dumped me, too. And put an end to everything. So all I can do is lie here and put together an imaginary composition.
The title, he said to himself, is:
HOW WE MADE A KILLING WITH THE JAP TYPEWRITERS.
AND WHAT BECAME OF US BECAUSE OF THAT.
When the Mithrias typewriters get sold, he decided, we’ll have enough money to interest some major American typewriter company. We can really represent them, once we get the franchise. Maybe they won’t want to dole out any more franchises in Boise. But that won’t bother us. We can open up a place somewhere else with all the money we’ve made. We can operate anywhere we want.
He thought, For instance, we could open a store in Montario. I know the town so darn well we’d really have an edge. I’ll have to drop down there, some Sunday, by myself. And see what the situation is.
The Luxury Movie Theater was open, since it was Sunday, and a few boys in jeans and girls in skirts and blouses had collected around the box office.
At each end of town the drugstores were open and doing business, but except for them and the cafés and the movie theater everything was shut up tight. Most of the parking slots were empty. Dust and a litter of paper lay spread out over the pavement and street. Beyond the railroad tracks the cut-rate gas station was doing a fair business with out-of-state cars. And, in the front of the Roman Columns Motel, on the lawn, a woman in shorts sat reading a magazine.
Getting out of his car he strolled around, gazing into the shop windows. Most of the stores had been there all his life, but he saw them now from a different perspective; he was not a kid or even a customer but a potential business-equal wanting to open up his own place. And it was not a dream but a very real, close possibility.
Down at the corner, in his drugstore, Mr. Hagopian puttered about with a display of insect repellent. There goes the fat old man, Bruce thought. Still glum. If he saw me he’d revert to being sore at me. As long as he lives.
I wonder, he thought, what old man Hagopian would think if I opened up a store next to his.
Will he have a heart attack? Will he chase me around with a broom? Or, he thought, maybe he’ll be unable to understand that it’s me.
Hands in his pockets he wandered on, across the railroad tracks and then back past the abandoned warehouses. On the bench at the train station an elderly man with a cane sat slapping at the long-winged lake flies that gathered in the afternoon air.
Far off on the highway a truck horn tooted.
In August they closed up the store in Boise and moved everything to Montario. They had rented what had formerly been the town’s older hardware store. It had been vacant for months, a narrow, dust-begrimed building squeezed in between a Scandinavian bakery and a laundry. But rent was low. And they did not have to buy any of the fixtures; the owner let them simply rip out the ancient counters and lighting and throw everything away.
Early in the morning he and his wife arrived wearing old clothes. First they scoured and then they painted. And then, using basalt blocks and mortar, he built a new front the length of the display window. He put up a sturdy stone window box for shrubs and planted a couple of evergreens and some short-stemmed perennials. And finally he took off the door and mounted in its place a modern glass and copper door with a star-shaped lock.
Business, almost from the start, flowed in satisfactorily. But during the second or third month he became conscious of something that neither he nor Susan had anticipated. Nothing in the town interested him any longer. Even operating his own business there had a monotony to it; the same old Hill Street from his childhood confronting him every day, and the same Idaho farmers, and even with a good steady business he would never be really happy. So he began to cast around, trying to stir up some new opportunity. Now, for the first time, he began to think in terms of a real move; not just down the highway a dozen miles, but a move perhaps to a city he had never seen before, another state entirely.
And, too, this was still Milton Lumky territory.
One afternoon Lumky dropped by with his leather satchel, on his official rounds for the Whalen Paper Company.
“Where’s your car?” Susan said. “I don’t see it.”
“I sold it,” Milt said. “Too hard to get service for it out on the road.” He pointed out the window at a foreign sedan parked at the curb. “I traded it in on a Swedish car.”
“Won’t you have trouble getting service on a Swedish car?” Bruce asked. They walked outdoors, to the far side of the street, to view the car.
“It’s new,” Milt said. “It won’t need service.”
From where they stood they could see Susan inside the office, at work behind one of the desks.
“How’d you happen to locate yourselves in a dinky out-of-the-way town like Montario?” Milt asked him.
Bruce said, “I was born here. I grew up here.”
“That’s right. You’re an Idaho boy. I keep picturing you as a big-city man. Wasn’t that discount place of yours down in Reno?” Pondering, Milt said, “Somebody else lived here for a while. Yes, it was Susan. She told me once she used to teach grammar school here.”
“I was in her fifth grade class,” Bruce said.
A slow expression appeared on Milt’s face, a register of disbelief. “Is that the truth?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I never know when to believe you. You get a big boot out of saying things to shock people.”
“I don’t see what’s shocking about that,” Bruce said.
They meandered back toward the store, and then Lumky, still battling away inside himself with his emotions, said, “Did you know that when you married her?”
“Sure,” he said.
“How about her?”
“Sure,” he said. And then a malicious delight seized him; he could not restrain himself. “That’s why we got married,” he said.