THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror, Page 2

  The neighborhood around Calumet had been one of Joy-Ann’s longest-standing grievances. First it had got decrepit, then blacks moved in. Then, without her ever noticing, that process had gone into reverse. Houses were painted (except her own) and lawns tidied. Children reappeared on the sidewalks. Though some of them were black, they did set a general tone of prosperity as they pedaled their tricycles and pulled their wagonloads of symbolic sand, since one knew that not even automobiles require as large and constant a cash outlay as children. The Roman matron who said that her children were her jewels was not exaggerating.

  Eighty thousand dollars: to be sitting on top of a pile of money like that and to know that it would all go to waste—that was no happy thought. Not literally to waste, of course. Literally it would go to her son-in-law, Robert Glandier. Joy-Ann didn’t like him, but he’d always been a dutiful rememberer of Christmases and birthdays. After the tragedy of Giselle, and even more after her own spell in the hospital, he’d been as thoughtful as anyone who was basically inconsiderate could be expected to be. He phoned a couple of times a week and came around on Sunday mornings to take her to church if she felt up to it. Or, more usually, to join her in a Sunday brunch of waffles and bacon. Joy-Ann loved waffles. It didn’t make any difference that a few minutes after she ate them she’d have to go into the bathroom to throw up; waffles remained a major satisfaction.

  “Are you sure,” he had asked her one such Sunday morning, “you don’t want to go to eleven o’clock mass? It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “No, really. Do you want another waffle?”

  “Mmf,” he said, nodding his head.

  She poured batter onto the two grills and covered them. “The thing is, it doesn’t seem so important to me any more. I mean, I don’t see any reason why God should be there in church any more than somewhere else. Do you?”

  “No. But then I don’t believe in God.”

  Joy-Ann pursed her lips and shook her head, as though to say, Naughty, naughty. She was of the widely held opinion that at bottom everyone believed what she believed, if only they’d be honest with themselves.

  “I still go to bingo on Tuesday nights,” she continued thoughtfully. “Alice Hoffman drives me over. Would you believe I am actually lucky at bingo? That’s weird, isn’t it? I’m consistently lucky at bingo, though sometimes it’s a little ironic. I mean, last week I won a turkey. What am I going to do with a turkey?”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “Well, I could see Alice definitely had her eye on it, but I didn’t see any point giving it to her. I mean, she isn’t exactly starving to death, is she. So I gave it to the sisters. And I got the nicest letter from Sister Rita thanking me. I wish they’d wear habits though, like they used to. And do the mass in Latin again. It just isn’t the same.”

  Joy-Ann started quietly to cry. Latin made her think of requiem masses, and that reminded her that she was dying at the age of only forty-eight. Through her tears she watched the steam rising from the waffle iron.

  Glandier watched the waffle iron too, so as not to have to look at his mother-in-law. He resented displays of emotion. He knew, from watching such moments on TV, that he was expected to say something comforting, or else to hug her. But all he could think to say was, “That’s all right,” which didn’t seem much of a comfort, while the idea of physical contact with Joy-Ann was slightly repellant. Not because she didn’t still have her looks. Now that she’d slimmed down, she looked all right, especially for a gal of forty-eight. But she was dying, and Glandier had never given any thought before to the inevitability of death, to cancer and what it must do to stomachs, livers, lungs, and all the other spaghetti a person has got wrapped up inside his skin. He wished, fervently, that Joy-Ann would hurry up with her dying.

  “They’re done,” she said, drying her eyes with a napkin, then opening both halves of the waffle iron. The waffles dropped from the upper grills like ripe fruit. She speared her own with a syrup-sticky fork and began to butter it. Lyrically, the butter melted from a solid yellow to a liquid, amber gleam, as though the brown grid of the waffle had been encased in Fabulon.

  CHAPTER 6

  After he’d got married, in ‘69—he was thirty then—Glandier’s body had started going to pot. At regular intervals all through the ‘70s he would panic and start dieting and lifting weights in the workshop at the back of the garage. But the diet made him foul-tempered, and he got bored with the weights, so eventually he would return to his original attitude, which was, Fuck it. If that was the way it was going to be, there was no point fighting it.

  He let his paunch sprawl over his belt. His jaw softened from Dick Tracy to Porky Pig. Even his arms and shoulders, which used to be beefy if not rock-solid, turned to flab. He didn’t get sloppy about what he wore; that would have been a mistake, since his company was particular about its executives’ dress code. He bought new shirts and suits as his bulk demanded and, in general, surrendered to the inevitable.

  A businessman: that was the image he liked to think he presented. A businessman who played golf and smoked dollar cigars and spent a lot of money on drab clothes. A big, fat businessman eating boozy lunches and boozier dinners and leading his peer-group into the life-styles appropriate to middle age.

  Not all his peers were prepared to follow him down this path. As the ‘70s advanced, the serious jocks got more serious. You could see them out jogging on the winding lanes of Willowville, where there’d never been pedestrians before, their styled hair bouncing on their shoulders, their jogging suits stained dark with sweat, their faces locked into defiant grins. Not for Glandier. For him it was the back yard, the lawn chair, a daiquiri, a magazine. When old college buddies kidded him about it, he made Falstaff-like jokes at his own expense and filed away his resentment for later revenge. The older executives at work became friendlier. They liked to see a young man in such a hurry to join them in their decrepitude.

  Once, drunk and soaking complacently in the bathtub, it dawned on Glandier that every businessman at some point in his life must have come to this same decision—to become a businessman and leave his youth behind. Now, at forty-one, the transformation was complete, but the bottom had dropped out of the image. Without a wife to show for himself, a wife such as Giselle had been—pretty, deferential, and thirteen years younger than he—there was no longer that important announcement being broadcast to the world concerning his undiminished vitality in the physical department that mattered most of all, the department of sex. He had entered upon a new and scarier stage of disintegration. His figure was ballooning from the slack-muscled grossness allowable in a Brando or an Elvis to the blimpy, sexless softness of an out-and-out fatso. Even the shape and meaning of his face was altering.

  He knew he looked terrible, that people made remarks about him, even the secretaries (especially the secretaries), that he was regarded, in some quarters, as a man who was coming apart at the seams (as his suits were, once again). But he couldn’t help himself. He would get home at night after a hefty dinner at a downtown restaurant and immediately start swilling Heinekens and Dorito Tortilla Chips in front of the TV. The beer made him put on weight faster than hard liquor would have, but it moderated his tendency to get stinking drunk every weekday night. This way at least he could keep his wits about him, and when there wasn’t anything worth watching after the news, which was usually the case, he could beaver away at the dining-room table, compiling or inventing statistics to stuff in reports. The work was the thing that kept him going. The work and the idea that somehow things were going to change, that he was on the verge of something important. Even if that importance was a negative factor, Glandier needed it in order to maintain a balance between himself and the universe, one in which the latter did not too much preponderate.

  He figured that people supposed he was becoming so fat as a result of the shock of his wife’s death in such unsavory circumstances. Maybe there was even something to be said for that idea. Maybe he was feeling some kind of burie
d guilt (it was possible), and that guilt triggered this terrible craving he felt whenever he resisted the least doughnut. If so, he was glad that the symptom offered no clue to the crime. There was no M chalked on the back of his jacket for everyone but himself to see.

  CHAPTER 7

  All the bodies were arranged in a pattern that resembled the neatest of suburbs, a checkerboard, a gigantic crossword puzzle. Above the dead, like clues to the puzzle, their names would be cut into the stones. The bodies she was aware of, quite as though she were in a room with them; the names and stones she had to imagine. All that lay above the ground was denied to her perception as much as that which loomed beyond the red-checked veil—heaven, she supposed.

  As a girl, she’d been troubled by the pictures she’d seen of heaven—the saints and angels going to church in the clouds—until Sister Rita had explained to her that it would surely be more exciting than that, that it just wasn’t possible from our point of view here below to imagine the splendor of looking straight at God’s face.

  She still couldn’t imagine it, though she could, almost at will now, approach that crisscrossed whatever-it-was that separated her from…

  Then she remembered.

  Remembered, in the first instance, only the checked potholder clinging mysteriously to the white enamel face of the Frigidaire.

  Then floods of remembrance. Not the small change the mind yields up by pressing associative buttons, such as that little homily Sister Rita had delivered in fifth grade; instead, a whoosh of awareness that she was a complete, unique person with her own identity and a past life and a name that had always made her uncomfortable: Giselle. After the singer, Giselle McKenzie. One day in the middle of that life (or what ought to have been the middle of it) she’d realized, in just such a flash of clarity as this, that perfection existed and she was part of it. She had been standing in the kitchen and zing, it had come to her with sudden, sweet inevitability, like the punch line of a joke.

  Like (which it was) the gift of grace. She hadn’t understood then, or for a long while afterward, that she had been changed, only that the kitchen didn’t quite seem itself. It was breathtaking, a fairy kingdom, lovely, inexplicable, hilarious.

  And mild.

  She could see it all again and hear, here in the stillness of the grave, the Frigidaire and the clock above the stove humming their old electric song. The clock face, which was contained, like a large fried egg with numbers on it, in a walnut skillet, gave the time to be 3:06. She had watched (and she watched again now) the thin red hand sweep graciously around the face. Its motion soothed her quite as though it were a human hand, stroking away all pain, all memories, every thought. She could have watched it go around all day, forever, mindless as the moon, but then as though to demonstrate that in fact she could not, that time and consciousness march on, there was a knock on the door and she had gone to answer it.

  CHAPTER 8

  Joy-Ann was searching, in Monday’s puzzle, for the last three flowers beginning with B: bloodroot, bluet, and bridal wreath. She’d find a B and then trace the upward diagonals through the grid of scrambled letters. There was a knock on the door, and she put the paper aside with a little huff of impatience. The puzzle was always the nicest part of the morning, and anyone calling at this hour was bound to be unwelcome. A salesman, probably, or a bill collector. Ever since she’d started dying she’d stopped bothering with most of the bills.

  Instead, and more dismaying, it was Sister Rita from Our Lady of Mercy.

  “Sister!” she exclaimed, and Sister Rita’s thick black eyebrows flew up like two alarmed crows. She was wearing a knitted cap and a dowdy dark-green winter coat. A stranger would never have known she was a nun.

  “Sister, my goodness, I certainly wasn’t expecting… I mean, the house is a mess. But come in.”

  “Just for a minute, if I may. I only stopped by to thank you again for that lovely turkey.”

  Sister Rita followed Joy-Ann into the littered living room. The couch was covered with yesterday’s papers, the nearer of two easy chairs with unsorted clothes from the drier. Capacious ashtrays scented the air.

  “Actually,” said Sister Rita, setting down her two paper shopping bags and removing her bright striped mittens, “that is a white lie. Thanking you isn’t the only reason I dropped by. Though the turkey has been appreciated. It served as the basis for four meals and a great deal of nibbling besides.”

  “Four meals? They must have been small.”

  “There are only five of us in the convent, now that Sister Terence has departed.”

  “Rest her soul,” said Joy-Ann, without a tremor of her usual dread before the naming of death. Somehow it seemed appropriate for nuns to die, as it did for them to teach music.

  “May I?” With an air of comfortable authority, Sister Rita seated herself in the wooden rocker.

  Joy-Ann cleared space at the end of the couch next the rocker and sat down with the oddest sense of expectancy, as though she was about to be given a present.

  And so she was. Sister Rita reached into one of the shopping bags and took out a present wrapped in obviously recycled wrappings. “This is—” She handed it to Joy-Ann, whose spirits sank as soon as she knew, by the heft of it, that it was a book. “—a token of our appreciation.”

  “Thank you, Sister, that’s very thoughtful. But there’s no need—”

  “Go ahead, open it, see what it is.”

  It was a paperback she’d never heard of—some sort of religious book. For the sister’s benefit she read the big cerise title aloud: “And These Thy Gifts by Claire Cullen. Oh, isn’t that nice.”

  “It doesn’t look like much, I realize, Mrs. Anker, but it’s provided inspiration for thousands of individuals in the same situation as you.”

  Joy-Ann could feel, at the back of her throat, the first premonition of tears, but she resisted it. Sister Rita had no right to involve her in a serious discussion of her situation, even indirectly.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Joy-Ann suggested defensively.

  “No, thank you.” She unbuttoned her coat to expose a wooden cross hanging on a leather thong, clear warning that she meant to stay and talk. But then, as though she could read Joy-Ann’s mind, Sister Rita said she couldn’t stay, that anything she might have had to say was said much better in Claire Cullen’s beautiful book.

  Joy-Ann promised to start reading it that very morning. A lie—she had no intention of reading it, ever.

  “There is one other matter, but I really don’t know how to bring it up, Mrs. Anker. I understand that you’ve been receiving… chemotherapy?”

  Joy-Ann nodded guardedly.

  “Sometimes with chemotherapy there can be undesirable side-effects. Nausea, especially. Sister Terence had weeks, I remember, when she couldn’t hold down so much as a glass of milk. But there is, as Sister Terence learned through one of the nurses at the hospital, a way to avoid all that. Did anyone at the hospital discuss this with you, Mrs. Anker?”

  Joy-Ann shook her head, not even trying now to hold back the tears. Only an hour earlier she’d thrown up every bite she’d eaten for breakfast, and now she felt a hunger worse than the hunger of any diet.

  “I thought they might not have. You see, it’s… a sensitive matter. It seems that anyone can overcome the nausea associated with chemotherapy by using the drug marijuana. In fact, it’s quite certain. It works. It worked for Sister Terence quite wonderfully. Of course, she had to learn to inhale the smoke, but once she did she never had any problem keeping down her food.”

  “Really? But if that’s so”—in a tone of incredulity—“why didn’t they tell me at the hospital?”

  “Because marijuana isn’t legal. It will probably be made legal one day, at least for chemotherapy patients, but it isn’t yet, not here in Minnesota. That’s why I feel a little funny telling you. You may feel it would be wrong to take the law into your own hands.”

  “You mean, if I smoked marijuana, I wouldn’t lose what I ate? A
s simple as that?”

  Sister Rita’s heavy eyebrows lifted in confirmation. “Yes, as simple as that.”

  “How can I get some?”

  “I really can’t answer that question, Mrs. Anker. It’s been some time now since Sister Terence passed on. Do you know any young people who might… experiment with drugs?”

  Joy-Ann tried to think if she knew any young people at all. “There’s the delivery boy. But I haven’t paid him for four weeks, and anyhow he’s only twelve or thirteen. By young you mean college age, I suppose. No, I really can’t think of anyone.”

  “A relative?” Sister Rita prompted.

  “There’s my son-in-law, but he’s not exactly a young man. I could ask him. Marijuana. For heaven’s sake. Thank you, Sister. Thank you very much.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Good morning,” said the boy on the other side of the screen door, with a bright, tight, vacant-eyed smile. “If you could spare me just five minutes or less of your time, there’s something I’d like to show you that I know you’d like to see.” His hand dug into a cardboard box that rested on the concrete step. “Now you’ve probably already seen through me, ha ha. And if you’ve guessed that I’ve come here to sell you something you wouldn’t be too far wrong. Would you mind telling me, please, the color scheme of your kitchen.”

  The color scheme of her kitchen. It was like a question from one of the tests she’d taken in high school. Name the five causes of the Civil War. Petroleum is the basis of our industrial strength: discuss. You had to say what they wanted to hear. Without thinking, without peeking into the kitchen or the book.

  “Blue,” Giselle said, without thinking.

  Blue, an immensity of blue, rested above Willowville, a message from heaven straight to her heart. All that was not rooted in these level lawns—houses, garages, trees, clothesline poles—was blue.