After a little while I make certain that the doors and windows are all closed. I take pieces of her clothing from the discard pile on the floor at the foot of the bed, and I soak them in the kitchenette sink and tuck them into the gaps under the doors and on the window sills. I recognize familiar things, the little pink robe, a scarf I bought her.
It takes me a long time to figure out the best way to support myself at the right position, and at last I try the dressing table bench. If I take out the center divider of the small oven and put a pillow in there, I can lay on my back along the bench with my head on the pillow. I remember to blow out the little pilot light first.
So I am comfortable, and I can hear the random sounds of the city, the random sounds of love over the nearby whisper of the burners. I wedge my thumbs under my belt to keep my hands resting on my belly. The deep constant noise of the city merges with the hissing and with other small noises, the sound of her hairbrush, the sounds of the spray cans she uses, the sound of a palm sliding along flesh in a slow caress, the rustling of bedding, the whistling of her eager breath, and her sated cozy sighings.
There is something I have forgotten. Some small thing. Unimportant. It slides into my mind and slips away, like a piece of paper fluttering down, passing through a narrowing beam of light. Unimportant. I’ll remember it another day.
Dear Old Friend
Lucy, please save this whole tape. This is a tough letter to write, and I may not get it right the first time. But I want to save any false starts, just for the record. No need to transcribe the false starts, if any. Just file the tape, after you type up the final version. The letter goes to Howard J. Faxton, at that Holiday Inn north of town. You can check the proper address. I’ll want hand delivery on it.
If I don’t get it right the first time, I’ll leave a note on the machine with the index number of the final version.
Dear Howie. You might be able to guess that after you left the house the other night, Ruthie and I stayed up a long time and talked. It was quite a shock having you come out of the blue after seven long years.
And naturally we were very upset to hear that Annabelle passed away over a year ago. Ruthie was quite hurt about your not letting us know. Remember, she gave up writing when Annabelle wouldn’t write back. After all, the gals were the best of friends. But I suppose there comes a time when a woman has to be loyal to her husband. And it was pretty obvious at the time you and I split up that Annabelle had the strange idea that I’d given you a raw deal. You know that is not so, and I know it, and so does Ruthie.
All three of us had a little too much to drink the other night, and we finally started saying things that none of us really mean. The evening shouldn’t have ended on that note.
Ruthie and I did some reminiscing, and she remembered a lot of things I’d completely forgotten, after you left. I’d forgotten how scared and edgy and insecure you and I felt back there in nineteen fifty-six when we cut ourselves loose from Win-Tech and all that nice job security and set up as Ray-Fax Associates, Inc.
One crummy little cinder-block building out on Route 181, eight grand working capital, two employees — four if you count Ruthie and Annabelle. Those gals worked like dogs for no pay at all.
Those were the fun years, Howie. How many times did we nearly sink without a trace? I can count three times that first year. But then the contract from Army Ordnance got us over the hump.
I am perfectly willing to admit, anywhere, anytime, that you are the fella that made it work. You are the wizard. Win-Tech tried a lot harder to keep you than they did to keep me. I’m a backstop-type guy, hot on administration and controls. But people who can design circuits and take the bugs out of them are rare birds.
Like you said the other night, you haven’t kept up with the state of the art, but I’d think that, once you caught up with all the miniaturized advances, you could write your own ticket anywhere.
Because I’ve got confidence in what I know you can do, I’m willing to make a place for you in Ray-Fax. Our budget on R. and D. is a little slender, but the way the projected earnings look, I think I could get the Board to agree to fatten it up some.
But I wouldn’t want you to come in again feeling as if you were getting the dirty end of the stick on our option arrangement that we made seven years ago.
Let me refresh your memory, Howie. You wanted to keep the company in high-risk areas by concentrating all our resources in money and manpower on new product development. I said we had to dig in and milk the maximum return out of the Diatrex line, cut costs further, go for volume.
We argued bitterly for months before we decided to split. And then we negotiated. Right? You wanted to peddle your twenty thousand shares to me for twenty dollars a share and walk away with four hundred thousand dollars. How was I supposed to raise that kind of money? I couldn’t put up the stock, because there was no established market in it then.
I did the best I could, Howie. I scrambled up one hundred thousand dollars and that looked like all the money in the world back then, believe me. That was, as it says in our contract, an option for ten years for me to buy your twenty thousand shares at fifteen dollars a share, and you agreed to escrow the stock and give me a proxy to vote it for you.
And you went away and left me with the whole ball of wax and more fifteen-hour days and seven-day weeks than I want to count.
I can see your point on how it could seem unfair to you for me to exercise that option at this time. With the stock splits and dividends during the past seven years, your twenty thousand shares is now thirty-one thousand six hundred, which means that I would be buying for a little under ten dollars a share stock now bid in the O.T.C. market at forty-one and three-eighths, as of today. So it will cost me an additional three hundred thousand dollars to pick up shares now worth $1,307,450.
I am not promising anything, but maybe we can get together and work something out. We both have to take any kind of chip off our shoulder and talk, man to man, the way we used to be able to.
I only wish that...
Scrap that letter. Try it again, dammit
Dear Howie. You left Ruthie and myself in a pretty bad state the other night. I think that when a man wants to amend or adjust a legal contract, it isn’t exactly smart to show up all of a sudden without warning and say some mighty ugly things.
I was so taken aback the other night that I didn’t get around to telling you some cold hard facts.
You know the shape we were in when you left. You know how the books looked, how the orders looked, how much money we were making. We’d been in the new buildings a year, and the debt service burden was heavy. Your stock interest wasn’t worth a dime more than I agreed to pay for it, at that time. Increase in value has happened since you left, and you had nothing to do with it. Right?
In a pretty unpleasant way, Howie, you brought up the fact that profits have come from the Diatrex line, which you developed and which we have fenced in with good solid patents. I want to remind you that, at the time you were working out the circuitry, we were both employees of Ray-Fax, working on Ray-Fax time, and so any developments belonged to the corporation, not to you as an individual. If you were an outsider and I had bought the Diatrex concept from you, I would imagine that I would be paying you royalties amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, even though you would hardly recognize the line these days. I have some hot young kids who are really on the ball, and they have made some interesting improvements and refinements.
I think you ought to face the fact, Howie, that you are a little bit out of touch with reality. I realize that you had a very hard time, learning that Annabelle had leukemia, and I can appreciate your going abroad where living was cheap so you could be with her for those three years, taking care of her. I can appreciate the fact that you are out of touch with the industry and that you are broke, but, old friend, three hundred thousand dollars isn’t exactly a pittance.