“Just so I can understand, Grace, Edward realizes that we are meeting?”
“He does.” Gracie had her hair tied up with a piece of yellow silk. A few strands fell across her forehead and temples.
“I just don’t understand why that is acceptable to him. I know there’re plenty of weird new males out there. But are some of them completely unpossessive?”
“You would hope so, wouldn’t you? I think in Edward’s case it’s important for him to know that my … amorous past is erased. If I can freely meet with you, I think that would satisfy that requirement.”
“ ‘Requirement.’ ”
“Yes.”
“It would seem that Edward is a completely healthy new man, then.”
“He doesn’t think so. He believes that he has an addictive personality.”
“Addicted to what?”
“Money.”
“You can be addicted to money?”
“Edward thinks so. He thinks that it is every bit as addictive as cocaine or alcohol. His wife is very rich and he worries he will go back to her because of his addiction.”
“He’s already spoken to my accountant about my financial health. Maybe he’s having a little slip.”
“Haven’t you reached the point where you’ve lost interest in scoring off other people?”
“My testosterone levels are about where they’ve been. Anything with warm blood makes my trigger finger itch.”
Gracie dug around in her purse until she found her Carmex. She opened the lid and swirled the surface inside with her forefinger, then applied some to her lips. “Look Frank, I’m going to be honest with you. Edward feels his relationship with me began in deception and typified the behaviors he associates with his addiction. He says that if you don’t actually make something, the acquisition of money has to be based in deception. For example, in sales, the money you make is the difference between what the thing you sold is worth and what you have deceived someone into believing it is worth. On the other hand, everything Edward does turns to gold.”
“Is it true he buys the life insurance policies of AIDS victims?”
“Yes,” said Gracie, unmoving. “But it’s not what you think. The sick person needs some cash and gets it. In this case, they deceive themselves because they think if they get the money they can keep from dying. Whereas Edward knows he’s soon going to have the insurance settlement. Or if they don’t deceive themselves, then it’s the insurance company who are kidding themselves by never realizing that people would understand the idea of being doomed and that those people would go on ahead and discount their policy to a complete stranger.”
“It’s depressing.”
“I think so too,” said Gracie. “But so much is depressing. It’s depressing that Holly has grown up.”
“Isn’t it.”
“It seems like yesterday she was fingerpainting in her room,” Gracie said.
“Yup. Or how about at her piano recital when she stood up and said, ‘I cannot play “Streets of Laredo” because I have a sore G-finger’?”
“No more. She’s a cheerful right-wing fanatic with her own life now.”
“Wipe your eyes, Gracie.”
“Give me a sec.”
“So, where were we?”
“These chairs are hard, aren’t they?”
“You sit in my lap?”
“Stop it, Frank.”
“I still love you, Gracie.”
“No you don’t, and if you do, shut up about it.”
“Why?”
“You make all these statements. I’m not real big on statements these days.”
“Okay.”
“So, like, can the statements.”
“Okay!”
Gracie paused to blow her nose. Frank noted happily that she was comfortable making a loud, unselfconscious honk. He bet she didn’t do that around Edward of the Money Problem.
“Anyway,” she said, “I much preferred it when we were younger. I suppose it’s a good thing that most of the world has no idea about what fun hippies had. Otherwise, nothing would work. It’s necessary for most of the world to be deceived. That’s where Edward and I differ. He is now addicted to the idea that he can put an end to deception.”
“For the whole world?”
“He says it’s little steps for little feet.”
“Does this mean that when Edward gets his way, I’m going to have to pump my own septic tank?”
“Maybe.”
“Pull my own wisdom teeth?”
“Could be.”
“This is not a world I’m looking forward to, Grace.”
Gracie got up from her chair and went to the window. Frank looked at her, remembering that he liked the way she held her shoulders back so that her back seemed concave and her shoulder blades disappeared even under a thin dress. He liked that the dress still gathered at the top of her buttocks.
“Anyway, I’m going to try to help Edward with what he thinks is his problem. I owe him that.”
Frank thought that the concept of this debt had a conclusive note that he was not sure he was correct in hearing. Any relationship between men and women was a mounting debt. Why would she single this one out?
“So, I won’t be seeing you …?”
“That’s why I asked you to meet me this morning.”
“To say goodbye?”
“Not at all. Edward wanted me to find out if you would be willing to meet with him in some sort of therapeutic way. Do you think you would?”
This was like hearing from your draft board during a national emergency. He could be as frightened as he wanted to be but he could hardly decline.
“Uh … sure.”
45
He got back to the office, let himself in and turned on the lights. There were several messages trailing out of the fax machine but the phones were silent. There was the Journal, Barron’s, The Economist. He enjoyed the otherworldly atmosphere of a modern office after hours. He tried his secretary’s chair; it had an extraordinary flexibility of movement and she had had no view to distract her from the possibilities the chair offered. He ripped off the fax messages and noted that two of them were from the bank and were rather firm. They were far from summonses but they were certainly firm. The last message was from Jerry Drivjnicki at Reed Point, reminding him of their pig partnership. Frank had forgotten the pig partnership, but in this message Jerry asked him to please come to the stock show in Bozeman and show some interest in at least their show pigs. Jerry’s message was relatively firm too.
Maybe Frank would have to go. He knew this particular walkthrough: in a stockman’s hat and camel’s hair coat, you stood next to your pigs and stared into their genetic future while waiting for the judge. He realized that this small investment notion had put him somewhere he had no business being. But even as he smiled at the picture of himself in his big hat at the pig show, he realized he’d better not miss it. He remembered that when he had partnered with Jerry, the bank had said they “had trouble seeing money for him.” He didn’t know how he had gotten into so much action with cows, pigs and chickens. If he got the little dish he could play the commodities on the satellite, but that was too fast, too dangerous. He’d seen many a good man taken down by one of those dishes, Old MacDonalds of the microchip.
Frank parked well beyond the show barns, among the stock trailers. He climbed out of his car, pushing his big lizard cowboy boots out ahead of him. Several 4-H kids had tied their animals to the sides of their trailers for a final grooming. There was a beautiful slick steer, half asleep, being painstakingly brushed by a girl in her teens; there was a self-important ram having his forelock combed by a boy in a cowboy hat, several unattended horses under blankets and hoods like big ghosts, all out in the parking area. The stall barns were dark and smelled of straw bedding and dung. Here and there people were grooming their animals inside the stalls and portable radios played next to plastic trays of brushes, combs and hair spray. He felt first rate in his topcoat and big hat, eager to be among the pigs he co-owned, grand red Durocs he’d held to his chest as babies, now avatars of swine genetics the size of ponies, squinting with wiliness. He shot his coat cuff to look at his watch: he was just in time for the theoretical heart of pork belly futures as understood in the northern Rockies.