The Dream Merchant (6 page)

One evening Sally came home with her face flushed and a bad smell on her breath. Her speech was rambling and her message unusually candid.

We need to start making money or we won't survive, Jim. We'll all be dead, she continued, grabbing her son's hand. This is your father's fault. The way he left us with nothing at all. How can we pay the rent? What are we to do?

Sally careened into Nathan's history of idleness and lavish spending and told the boy how his father had stolen her money. She spoke to Jim with candor and detail, as though he were her confidant and last chance rather than a kid. She wept. She beseeched him, What are we to do?

*   *   *

Jim narrated this early history in a dilapidated cottage with filthy sheetrock walls, soiled rugs, and broken furniture, a house wreck presided over by a flagrantly sexual and opportunistic girl. Who says you can't go home again? I couldn't help thinking that Jim's father would have died for a Mara. He left his family in a freezing house without a few dollars to pay the rent or buy a morsel of food. The family would have starved to death except that Jim was clever and charming even then.

There was a dairy farm a few miles down the road. Jim decided he would go there and speak to Mr. Hayes. Jim wasn't really sure how much he knew or didn't know about cows. More than a half year had passed since they had left Grandpa's farm, a long time for a boy. But he had moxie and seemed to understand he'd have to introduce himself in a way to catch the farmer's attention. Jim planned to tell Farmer Hayes that he knew how to talk to cows.

Jim knocked on the door and waited until a big man in overalls opened it up. The hulking farmer did not exactly embrace young Jim. These days Hayes was bothered too often by poor people looking for a nickel or something to eat. When he said, I can't use you, go on home, kid, Jim didn't budge. This familiar place warmed him inside, the barn and the machines, the smell of the tilled earth. But Jim felt something besides nostalgia. The farmer's vast green meadow spread out before Jim like a calling. Jim wanted to make this first big step into the world. He camped on the porch and the farmer shook his head and went back inside. He didn't need a boy who talked to cows, but he couldn't help chuckling.

A little later, Hayes came back out with a piece of apple pie and an offer: You go out and find my herd and bring them back to the barn for milking. If you can do it, I'll give you work to do around here. It's like a test, he said, while Jim savored his last bite of pie. Mr. Hayes was only getting rid of a little beggar in a tattered coat. He was a good man, but he didn't want the boy's misery around his farm. He was sure Jim would get tired or bored in short order and head back from where he came.

The cows are out there. The farmer gestured with his hand and shut the door firmly. Out there, beyond the meadow and distant tree line—somewhere, it might have been the end of the earth he was pointing to.

Jim set off to find the cows. If he had been a few years older he might have experienced this as an agony—a test to save his starving family—but for an eight-year-old it was just a game. Starvation was a mother's concern and Jim was still licking apple pie off his lips. He felt at home in the big meadow, picked a few daisies and smelled the spring. He headed off for the trees, about a mile and a half away, swinging an empty bucket he picked up in the yard. It was a game he'd played before. Find the cows. In the meadow there was no dirt for tracks, so he searched for bent underbrush. He was an Indian crisscrossing the meadow until he found a route of trampled grass pointing toward the trees.

In the shade of a narrow stretch of tall pines Jim found some hoofprints in the dirt. This would help. He walked along the trees for a half hour and wondered how the cows would look and how many he would find. There was no question of finding them. In fact, he wanted to draw the game out; more hours in the country meant time away from their house that was cold even in the spring, their rooms permanently imprinted with chill and a mother's sorrow. He came to another stretch of meadow and lost the tracks in a confusion of trampled grass and brush. He found tracks again approaching the river and walked along the bank for a mile.

Sure enough, the small herd was drinking at the river's edge. Jim approached casually, as if he didn't have a care, and then he started talking softly to himself, and when the cows looked up he turned away as if he weren't really interested. Talking to cows was just a trick. Jim kept up his prattle to some trees rustling on the bank, to the swollen river, soothing words to go with a spring afternoon. He yawned. By the time he began calling the cows he'd become a part of their place. They swished their tails and looked up at him, licked water off their faces. They didn't come to him. Not yet. He knew they wouldn't. They didn't know him. But they weren't afraid. He kept speaking to them while he walked to the riverbank and scooped a couple of handfuls of gravel into his bucket. Then Jim called to them again, this time in a louder voice, and he shook the bucket as if it were filled with grain. The cows began to walk to him as they had many times before when he carried the chop bucket on Grandpa's farm. Jim knew they would come.

It was easy to fool cows, although the farmer could hardly have been more surprised when Jim came back leading a procession of twenty Herefords ready for milking. He gave Jim two quarters and was true to his word about the job. Each afternoon after school Jim found the cows and then did some chores for the farmer. Most evenings Jim gave the quarters to his mom. It was enough to pay the rent and put a little food on the table.

*   *   *

Young Jim was tireless and seemed endowed with a precocious sense of responsibility and limitless goodwill. By the hour he listened to the woes of his abandoned mother. He soothed her. He rubbed her blistered feet. At first light he was delivering newspapers in the snow before school, and afterwards he worked for the farmer. When there was an hour Jim gathered wildflowers in the field for his mom to sell in the church. If there was a job to be done Jim never had to be asked twice. Before the age of nine Jim was the breadwinner and patriarch of his home, adored and fully relied upon by his faithful mom. But this hardworking, better-than-good boy had a secret passion that burned stronger with the years. He lusted for his father.

 

6.

In his daydreams Jim reaches for Mara while he drives their creaky Volvo for the morning paper or takes her children to school. He burns for her. When they walk together on the street she puts her hand inside the pocket of his tight jeans and smiles tenderly. She touches him a little. He feels empowered by their rebellion, this fevered, improbable chapter even in a long life of fresh starts. Imagine a seventy-five-year-old man turned on while walking across the intersection headed to the supermarket. He is with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. Her two young kids trail behind calling him Daddy. He hasn't worn such tight-fitting pants for twenty years or more—she chooses his clothes. Mara kisses him deeply, defiantly, in front of the Wynn-Dixie. She will show everyone their love. Old ladies turn and shake their heads. She is wearing sexy white shorts on a hot fall afternoon, presses her shapely tanned leg against him, kisses his ear. She is amused, but it is more. She is incited by the spectacle of her and Jim. It is their desire that presages everything good down the road, belittles the stares of ladies in front of the Wynn-Dixie and the bitchy arguments against their chances from Jim's friends like me, and Phyllis, his abandoned wife.

The girl smiles. They don't have our happiness, baby, she says.

When they are alone in their shabby rooms, Mara seems oblivious to his age. She talks exuberantly about their lives in twenty years, in thirty years: their homes, cars, long-term mortgages. The best colleges for her kids, who will soon be their kids. She is a careful planner. In the mornings they sip coffee and use the sunny palaver of young couples just starting out. She usually calls him baby.

One afternoon I ask Mara, What will you do when he is sick, when he can no longer go places with you? She seems completely confounded by this question. What about when he is too old to fool around? I ask.

He is not old, she says simply. But her face has turned crimson from surprise or perhaps the cruelty of my question. I'm not sure what to make of it. I wonder whom she sees when they are making love. Or when his bunions are hurting and he can barely make it from the car into the pizzeria. Is it that she is imbued with a child's transforming optimism that I can barely recall?

Jim keeps placing me in front of them so that I will record all of this for “the book.” He envisions his magical effect upon her as a part of his legacy. Although there are moments when a shadow passes and Jim asks me, What do you think?

The question cuts too many ways.

*   *   *

Before Jim met Mara he had been marketing a line of appliances—mattresses, blankets, pillows, back and ankle braces—purported to alleviate pain and foster healing utilizing magnetic therapy. After a half-dozen years of considerable success and high living the business had fallen into decline. Prior to his leaving for Israel, things had become so bad financially that Jim and Phyllis had been forced to leave their spacious condominium for a one-bedroom apartment that was also on the Intracoastal. Jim was humiliated about this move. He traveled to Tel Aviv, where network marketing was still in its infancy, hoping to revitalize his business by signing on new recruits (down lines), but more fundamentally trying to revitalize himself.

During his three-month stay in Israel we spoke on the phone every couple of weeks. Jim described his new life in considerable detail and especially his courting of an attractive young woman whom he met at one of his introductory recruiting meetings. He spoke about their unlikely romance and his own sexual rebirth at considerable length, and he described their sex with details and candor that embarrassed me and frankly put me on edge.

I tried to reel him back. Hey, Jim, it's time to come home, I said. You realize, it's the football season. Come on. Enough.

If I could just get him on the plane back to Florida the old life would take hold. I'd come down to Miami and we'd be back talking in the Blue Moon, betting the games and plotting the next moves. The girl would soon become another old story, some laughs in a bar.

Not yet, buddy, he answered firmly.

When I got off the line with Jim I felt unnerved.

*   *   *

The evening Jim met Mara, he had been standing at a lectern in the meeting room of a small hotel in Tel Aviv, looking a little tired, but natty as always in one of his custom-tailored Florida suits and sleek Italian leather shoes. He was looking at his notes and trying to summon the old pep for his bread-and-butter talk about the ease of building a residual income for life. It was one thing to give this talk when you are flying high in a palace on Brickell Avenue above the Intracoastal and another when you are depressed and alone in a foreign country, worried about the next month's rent. Jim was looking around the audience—mostly middle-aged men, dressed badly, fidgeting and sweating as if they'd soon be asked to perform up front like Jim—when he noticed a young woman, lovely auburn hair to the shoulders, lipstick, a slight girlish figure. Their eyes met. She was staring at him, which was disconcerting but also pleasurable. His energy for the presentation came from her.

She came up to him after the talk, wanted to know more about the business. They went out for a cup of coffee. She and her husband had fallen into a financial rut. They weren't getting anywhere. The husband, Shimon, had no motivation to do anything. When he came home from his job, he plopped in front of the television, barely acknowledged the children. She touched Jim's hand to make her point. She was interested in magnetic therapy; could he tell her something more about it? And what is this thing you call network? Her accent was intoxicating and alive. No, network
marketing,
he corrected with a smile. She listened earnestly. But he wasn't up to this. The business trip had been going poorly. Hardly any sales of his products, and few recruits were signing up. Apparently it hadn't been such a good idea to sell his magnetic healing aids to a population preoccupied with war. When he wandered the streets of the city, young men and women rushed past him, fearful or quickened by the violence; older folk were just weary. Jim wasn't noticed, Jim who had always been the center of the party, but this girl hung on every word. She asked if he would meet with her husband, talk to him about the business. Shimon was sleepwalking through his life. Maybe Jim could wake him up. You are so convincing, she insisted. It was very hot in the room. She had dark hair under her arms, thick lipstick. She wore a short skirt, and when she slowly crossed her legs Jim shivered like an old horse. What if she noticed? She was so young and fresh. He tried to shake off this far-fetched desire. But he knew that he must get free of his loser mentality. Jim began to explain what the business could do for them, the many riches it had given to him and Phyllis. He talked past the ache in his gut, the sadness of recent failures, and described the palatial condo where he had once lived with Phyllis in Miami, the great parties they had held overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, the smell of the sea air in the evening when storms blew in from the east. He didn't mention that his business had nearly gone broke and they had been forced to move into a modest apartment.

Jim and Mara walked back to his small rented room so he could give her material to study. When she took his hand he began to tremble as if the temperature had plummeted. Jim couldn't stop shaking. He didn't know if he could still make love. He felt so diminished, pared right down to old age. It was humiliating to be shaking on the street. The girl wasn't nervous at all. She wanted to stop for a moment and then she kissed him deeply. He almost said, Thank you, as though she'd given an old man a gift to remember, but her face was flushed with desire. Once they arrived at Jim's small room she took the lead. Mara nursed him back to life with passion served up with innocent eyes and much laughter. She could not get enough of her older lover, kissed his aging chest and legs with irrepressible relish. For Jim this was flattery that felt like redemption.