“Yes.” A rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation.
Nell goes on talking and there is nothing to do but shift around as best one can, take care not to fart, and watch her in a general sort of way: a forty-year-old woman with a good open American face and another forty years left in her; and eager, above all, eager, with that plaintive lost eagerness American college women get at a certain age. I get to thinking about her and old Eddie re-examining their values. Yes, true. Values. Very good. And then I can’t help wondering to myself: why does she talk as if she were dead? Another forty years to go and dead, dead, dead.
“How is Kate?” Nell asks.
I jump and think hard, trying to escape death. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”
“I am so devoted to her! What a grand person she is.”
“I am too. She is.”
“Come see us, Binx!”
“I will!”
We part laughing and dead.
AT FOUR O’CLOCK I decide it is not too early to set in motion my newest scheme conceived in the interests of money and love, my love for Sharon. Everything depends on a close cooperation between business and love. If ever my business should suffer because of my admiration for Sharon, then my admiration for Sharon would suffer too. Never never will I understand men who throw over everything for some woman. The trick, the joy of it, is to prosper on all fronts, enlist money in the service of love and love in the service of money. As long as I am getting rich, I feel that all is well. It is my Presbyterian blood.
At four fifteen I sit on the edge of her desk, fold my arms and look troubled.
“Miss Kincaid. I have a favor to ask of you.”
“Yes sir, Mr Bolling.”
As she looks up at me, I think how little we know each other. She is really a stranger. Her yellow eyes are quite friendly and opaque. She is very nice and very anxious to be helpful. My heart sinks. Love, the very possibility of love, vanishes. Our sexes vanish. We are a regular little team.
“Do you know what these names are?”
“Customers’ files.”
“They are also portfolios, individual listings of stocks and bonds and so forth. Now I tell you what we do every year about this time. In a few weeks income taxes must be filed. Now we usually mail our customers a lot of booklets and charts and whatnot to help them with their returns. This year we’re going to do something different. I’m going to go through each portfolio myself, give the tax status of each transaction and make specific recommendations to every customer in a personal letter, recommendations about capital gains, and losses, stock rights and warrants, dates of involuntary conversions, stock dividends and so on. You’d be amazed how many otherwise shrewd businessmen will take long term gains and losses the same year.”
She listens closely, her yellow eyes snapping with intelligence.
“Now I’m already familiar with the accounts, so that’s no problem. But it’s going to mean a lot of letters. And we don’t have much time.” Why I must have been crazy; this girl is a good little sister.
“When would we start?”
“Can you work an hour later this afternoon and Saturday morning?”
“I’d like to make a phone call,” she says in the brusque-kindly manner of country folk who grant favors with an angry willingness.
A moment later she is standing at my desk stroking the beige plastic with two scarlet nails.
“Is it all right for someone to pick me up at five for a few minutes?”
Someone. How ancient is her wisdom. I am nothing to her, yet by the surest of instincts she labels her date a neuter person. She knows I do not believe there is such a person. But she knows what she does. Despite myself I believe a someone will pick her up, a shadowy and inconsequential person of neuter gender.
“I hope I’m not interfering with anything too serious.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Why no.”
She surprises me. I said “serious” ambiguously and perhaps purposely so. But she is quick to give it its courtship meaning.
Here is an unexpected advantage. It could be useful to me to see what sort of fellow her friend is. But I needn’t worry about managing a glimpse of him. A few minutes before five he walks right into the office. He is much to my liking — I could throw my arms around him. A sharp character — no youth as I feared — a Faubourg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour of wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all. I nod at him with the warmest feelings, and he appears to nod at me but keeps on nodding, nods past me and at the office as if he were appraising it. Now and then his lip draws back along his teeth admitting a suck of air as sharp as a steam blast. As he waits for Sharon, he swings his fist into an open hand and snaps his knee back and forth inside his wide pants.
The Faubourg Marigny fellow leaves at last and we work steadily until seven. I dictate some very sincere letters. Dear Mr Hebert: I happened to be looking over your portfolio this morning and it occurred to me that you might realize a substantial tax saving by unloading your holding of Studebaker-Packard. Naturally I am not acquainted with your overall tax picture, but if you do have a problem taxwise, I suggest taking a capital loss for the following reasons …
It is good to have both Mr Hebert and Sharon on my mind. To be thinking of only one of them would make me nervous.
We work hard and as comrades, swept along by a partnership so strong that the smallest overture of love would be brushed aside by either of us as foolishness. Peyton Place would embarrass both of us now.
By six o’clock I become aware that it is time to modulate the key ever so slightly. From now on everything I do must exhibit a certain value in her eyes, a value, moreover, which she must begin to recognize.
Thus we send out for sandwiches and drink coffee as we work. Already the silences between us have changed in character, become easier. It is possible to stand at the window, loosen my collar and rub the back of my neck like Dana Andrews. And to become irritable with her: “No no no no, Kincaid, that’s not what I meant to say. Take five.” I go to the cooler, take two aspirins, crumple the paper cup. Her friend, old “someone,” turns out to be invaluable. In my every tactic he is the known quantity. He is my triangulation point. I am all business to his monkey business.
Already she has rolled a fresh sheet into the platen. “Try it again,” and she looks at me ironically and with lights in her eyes.
I stretch out both hands to her desk, put my head down between my arms.
“All right. Take it this way …” O Rory Rory Rory.
She is getting it. She is alert: there is something afoot. Now when she looks up between sentences, it is through her eyebrows and with her head cocked and still, still as a little partridge.
She watches closely now, her yellow agate-eyes snapping with interest. We are, all at once, on our way. We are like two children lost in a summer afternoon who, hardly aware of each other, find a door in a wall and enter an enchanted garden. Now we might join hands. She is watchful to see whether I see this too.
But this is no time to take chances. Although Baron Ochs’ waltz sings in my ears and although I could grab her up out of her chair and kiss her smack on the mouth — we go back to work.
“Dear Mr Fontenot: Glancing over your portfolio, it struck me that you are not in the best position to take advantage of the dawning age of missiles …”