House of Gold (3 page)

"Yeah, I know. You love my hands, not me."

"That's right, Buzzy."

Buzzy again. What was a guy to do?

"So what brought on the Tiger Lady?" he asked, referring to their activities moments earlier.

He knew her eyes were closed. His were open, although he was really
"looking" through the tips of his fingers at the muscles in her back. She was much tighter than usual. Their little master bedroom was fuzzy with vaguely perceived grey outlines.

He waited. One good thing about them: they both liked to talk. No communication problems here.

Still, she didn't answer him for several minutes.

"Nightmare," she finally explained, then yawned. "I guess I was so frightened
I needed to know I wasn't alone. All of me needed all of you."

She found his hand, and pulled it over her shoulder, giving it a tender kiss.

"In the dream," she continued, "I was in the basement of our house. It was smaller than our real basement. It smelled awful. Markie was older, and whining in that way we both hate. 'Mommy, I'm hungry!' he cried over and over.

"Markie was starving. Really,
truly starving. His stomach was bloated out like those poor African children you see on television. You were nowhere to be found. I was in a panic."

She shrugged off his massage and twisted to face him, placing one arm on his shoulder to steady herself.

"Buzz," she mouthed with a barely audible voice.

He let his hands fall to his knees. It was closer to sunrise than they had realized. Outside
the dawn was breaking, and he could make out the features of her face now–but not the freckles.

"Yesterday," she continued, "I agreed to sell the house on a purely intellectual level–because I trust Sam and I trust you. It's different now. I don't want to risk what happened in my dream happening in real life. I'll hate moving, for sure, but I'll go. I'll do whatever I have to do to protect the
boys."

He put one hand on her cheek. "Honey, it was only a dream. The Book of Sirach says only a fool pays attention to his dreams."

"Can we just skip the Sirach for once? It's the only book in the Bible you ever quote. Didn't Joseph have a dream telling him to take Mary and Baby Jesus to Egypt? Besides, you're the one who wanted to get out of Dodge, not me."

"Somehow I thought you would go along
with it but drag your feet," he snorted. "That was my master plan for getting out of following Sam to God-knows-where. Now our only hope is that Ellie continues to stonewall."

Buzz was admitting that he really didn't have the expertise to make a hard decision about the technical aspects of the problem. He, too, when it got down to it, was trusting Sam's judgment.

"Well, I'm in," she said with
finality. "Ellie might be strong, and we both know she's willing to go toe-to-toe with Sam on this, but in the end, he'll convince her."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because Sam is Sam."

He closed his eyes and said a little prayer, the kind with no words, where your soul just kinda dances a two-step in the direction of heaven.
Lord!

"Good," he tried to sound firm, in his best Head-of-the-Household
voice, as he lay back down.

She slid down next to him, half his size, and arranged herself in his nooks and crannies. Her kisses glanced off his lips, his cheek, his neck, then she nestled her chin on his shoulder. They held each other in this way, awake, under the K-Mart covers for another hour until the alarm rang.

Where are we going to go?
Buzz asked himself.

+  +  +

"Montana," Sam informed
him two days later from across the antique oak table in the kitchen of the Fisk home.

Behind Sam, Lake Erie stretched out like a calm blue comforter. Their house wasn't large–a three bedroom Cape Cod, forty yards from the cliffs which winter winds and summer storms wore down a foot or two every year. Except for refinishing the hardwood floors, the house was virtually untouched from the day they
bought it.

The rage in Bay Village was to pay huge sums for small old houses on the lake, then tear them down to be replaced by enormous Ego Domes, as Buzz had taken to calling them. There was an Ego Dome on either side of the Fisks' house–and fortunately, these monstrosities were hidden by equally ostentatious landscaping.

Sam and Ellie's lawn, pockmarked by occasional bald patches surrounded
by flat grass and a spattering of indifferently maintained oaks and malnourished pine bushes, seemed antique by comparison.

Sam's son Christopher was at his iMac in the small den off to the side of the kitchen, engrossed in a game. The tall, thin boy, blond like his mom, was already following in his dad's footsteps; Chris had programmed and published three simple shareware games online–with a
little help from Sam.

Markie was sleeping over at the Pennys, and Packy was sound asleep on the couch in the living room.

Ellie walked over from the counter, holding a pot of coffee. She was wearing faded jeans, a dark blue polo shirt, and her favorite set of 'everyday' diamond earrings. She was keeping her hair short this year, and her bangs hung over her brow, unkempt, with a lone set of strands
coming over one of her brown eyes. She blew at it from her lower lip.

Despite their friendship, and despite having known Ellie for several years, Mel bore a familiar expression, an expression Buzz had seen on many female faces when they saw Ellie Fisk:

How does she do it? How does Ellie manage to look so striking without any apparent effort?

"Montana? That's really far away–yes, El, thanks, I'll
have another cup," Buzz said. In the mode of the Irish, he had already poured cream into his cup to accept the coffee.

Sam pulled a color computer printout from a folder and held it out; Mel snatched it. She held it up so she and her husband could both see it. It was an image of a statue of Mary, Our Lady of the Rockies, in Butte, Montana.

Ellie plunked herself down next to Buzz to see the picture–or
to be on the opposite side of the table from Sam. It was hard to tell.

"Wow," Mel whispered. "She's incredible."

"Yeah, wow," Buzz seconded. "How come we've never seen this before?"

"I don't really know. I just saw it myself a week ago, surfing on the Net. It's as big as the Statue of Liberty, except this one is made out of steel and it's perched on top of an eight-thousand-foot mountain, straddling
the Continental Divide. A group of local guys put it up in the Eighties–just regular welders and steelworkers. It's a dramatic story. The whole town eventually took part in the project. There's a book I'm reading by an incredible guy named Lee Royalle, who engineered the structure without the benefit of having graduated from high school. And he's not a bad storyteller, either."

Ellie placed her
cup on the table with a jitter, a flash in her eyes.

"What is it?" Mel asked, not unkindly.

"Montana," Ellie said coldly. Her answer was directed at Sam. She was obviously trying to hold her temper. "You expect me to move to Montana? To leave our life behind? Montana is nowhere. Why can't we just buy a farm in southern Ohio to satisfy your computer-nerd fantasies?"

Ellie glared at Buzz, who looked
down at his hands, suddenly feeling guilty.

Sam didn't answer her at first.

"Well, Sam," Buzz jumped in, "why Montana?"

"Ellie just said it for me: Montana is nowhere. I believe we'll be safest if we go as far from population centers as we can manage. I've been thinking about upstate-Wisconsin–"

"–That's news to me," Ellie interjected.

For the first time in his life, gauging from the look in his
friend's eyes, Buzz felt as if Sam were going to blow sky high.

Instead, the storm within him passed quickly, and Sam responded with serenity, "That's not fair. You have refused to discuss this with me while you continue your research–"

"–well I recently finished my research. I'm not going anywhere."

"Finished?" Sam asked, genuinely surprised.

"Yes. I could quote you twenty of Bucky's friends,
and none of them think the bug is going to cause more than a mild recession. Some even think that it could be a boon to the economy as foreign money seeks safe haven here because doomsayers like you have got them scared out of their wits."

"Oh, I see," Sam replied.

He turned to Buzz and Mel. "Ellie has made up her mind about the computer problem. We won't move from Cleveland unless she agrees
with me that it's necessary. She doesn't. I'm sorry I wasted your time. Sorry Mel. It was premature of me to ask you over."

Sam looked away from his wife. "But I'm still selling Edwards." He rose to his feet slowly.

An awkward silence ensued.

Buzz kicked out of his seat, then jumped up and got Mel's chair. He started to help put her windbreaker on. Mel and Ellie locked gazes for the entire interlude.

"Walk Buzz to the door, Sam," Mel ordered with a smile as genuine as a Clinton denial. "Ellie and I need to talk alone."

Buzz and Sam exchanged looks.

The men walked through the living room to the front door. Mel sat back down with Ellie. She saw that Ellie's eyes were now watery. She took her friend's hand.

"Please," Ellie whispered. "I don't want Chris to see me like this. I'm falling apart.
Let's go out to the back deck."

"Sure thing, El," Mel replied. "I'll go grab your coat from the front closet. Take my coffee with you. I'll meet you there in a sec."

+  +  +

"What's going on?" Buzz asked on the front porch. It was a chilly evening. The two men could see their breath in the air. It had been years since Buzz had yearned for a cigarette. He wanted one now.

"Ellie's under a lot of
mental stress," Sam replied. "I think the shrinks call it cognitive dissonance."

"Huh?" Buzz turned and leaned back against the stone railing, then began to put on his gloves. It was a small porch, and Sam was right in front of him.

"She's holding two contradictory views at the same time," Sam explained. "She's read the same evidence I've read, and she's heard all my reasons,
and
my counter-arguments
to her objections. She knows I'm right. She's too smart
not
to know I'm right–on some level. Yet, she doesn't want to accept the truth because she doesn't want to move–and who can blame her?–so she's grasping at straws from her father's friends, who, frankly, don't know the difference between a computer and an infrared toilet at a truck stop."

Buzz laughed. Sam tucked his head sideways and squinted
in agitation.

"My my," Buzz managed between laughs, "aren't you the amateur psychologist. Hey, I thought that was my job.

"Listen Sam, how's this for an analysis. Bucky's friends are right about the computer bug, therefore Ellie is right. Your wife knows that you are wrong, and it's quite rational for her to believe that you've lost your mind, and now she's really pissed.

"Let me use more clinical
terms. She is
expressing strong dissatisfaction
that you're going to make her move two thousand miles away to the middle of nowhere near a town named after a man's backside.

"Butte? Who the hell moves to
Butte?

"She is perhaps a tad
disenchanted
that you're willing to throw away everything you two have built together since you got married. Oh, and you're going to ruin my life and family while
you're at it. I think that about covers it."

Sam nodded slowly. He gazed up his long driveway to the peaceful streets of Bay, imagining what those well-manicured avenues would look like without street lamps.

"That is a reasonable alternative analysis, Dr. Buzz. But you don't believe it, do you?"

"No, not really!" Buzz declared with a slightly manic pitch, throwing his hands up in the air.

He turned
to look down the driveway with Sam, imagining troops and gangs and starving children wandering the streets.

"Hey, I wonder what my little Mel is saying to your El on the back deck?" Buzz hugged his own shoulders.

"I have no idea," Sam replied.

"There's a perfectly warm house between us," Buzz observed, "and we have to decide if we're going to ruin our lives while freezing out here on the porches.
I wonder how long they'll make us stay out here?"

After forty minutes, Buzz went around back to get an update. Mel told him to buzz off, and that she and Ellie were going back inside to talk in the kitchen.

Ellie waved and gave Buzz a wan, happy smile.

Buzz and Sam decided to go to Joe's Deli with the cell-phone and wait for the women to hash things out on their own.

Chapter Two

Whiskey Island Rules

The following evening, Buzz stood in his backyard watering the grass. Several weeks earlier, he had taken down a giant oak tree to make more room for playing whiffleball with Markie, who was just beginning to show interest in learning how to swing a bat. Teaching Markie how to hit had been one of those iconographic dreams of fatherhood which Buzz had spun to Mel
when they were courting.

He had the tree guys cut and split the tree into three cords which were now stacked against the back fence. Just weeks earlier, Buzz had trekked to Builders Square to buy topsoil, fertilizer, and grass seed to begin the first battle in what he had described to Mel as the Lawn Wars. It had taken him an entire Saturday: filling the hole, tramping down the dirt, raking it,
then seeding. The directions on the grass seed bag had cautioned to water often during the first crucial weeks.

Since the problem had come up, Buzz found himself watering the little five-by-five foot patch two or three times a day. As soon as the water soaked down, Buzz felt an uncontrollable urge to water it again. The tiny, lime green shoots were growing taller, greener, and stronger.

He dreamed
of a world without electricity.

Mel opened the kitchen window. "Buzz, you're gonna kill that grass!"

He did not answer her. He was in his own world, preparing for the New Paradigm, as Sam called it–a world without electricity. A world where trains and planes and automobiles were a thing of the past.

A world where most of the populations of the Western world had died from starvation and disease,
and like serfs, the survivors were spending most of their time trying to grow something to eat.

Mel came outside and stood beside him, her hands on her hips. Yes, she loved him, but he was always late. Dinner was getting cold. His lack of consideration for her schedule was a cross she bore.

"I
said
you are going to kill that grass if you keep watering it so much. And dinner's ready."

"Oh, uh."
He shook out of his reverie. "What?"

"Dinner's ready."

"Great. I'll be right in. I'm almost done. Did you say something?"

"Yes," she repeated with a sigh, "you're watering the grass too much. Do you realize this is the second time since you came home? You've been like this all week. Why are you doing this?"

He looked down, as if for the first time. The patch
was
a bit waterlogged. He released
the handle on the nozzle.

"I guess I just want to see something live. I want to see something grow."

+  +  +

Buzz yelled "Hey!" at the top of his lungs as he came to the table in the cramped kitchen nook. Packy laughed with gusto. Buzz shouted "Hey!" again, even louder, bugging his eyes out at Markie, making a scary face. Both boys laughed again.

Melanie rolled her eyes. Buzz called it Startle
Training. From the earliest possible age–usually as soon as the babies recognized sounds and were able to smile–he began daily efforts to sneak up on them and frighten them with loud shouts. Buzz would then laugh as if it were the funniest thing in the world. It took a few weeks of repetition, but now, the boys would invariably giggle when he attempted to frighten them with his loud, booming shouts
or animal cries.

"When my boys grow up," he had explained, "they won't get nervous or freak out in times of sudden danger. They've had Startle Training."

Yes, she loved him, but wasn't quite sure if she loved him for this. The boys did seem to enjoy it, but somehow she doubted that the best parenting books had a section on Startle Training. Perhaps, a parent did need to begin the training early.
Though he did this every night when he came to the dinner table, his shouts never failed to give her a jolt.

"Let's pray," he intoned slowly after he sat down. "You lead, Markie."

Markie, a perpetually moving bundle of muscle and flesh, transformed himself into a little monk, folded his hands, dropped his head, closed his eyes, and said grace perfectly. As always, Packy observed his parents and
brother in prayer, and just as grace ended, brought his hands together, pleased with himself. Sometimes he clapped. He was an excellent clapper.

"So did you talk Ellie into moving last night? What did you talk about?" Buzz asked before plunging a huge chunk of chicken breast into his mouth.

He was a world-class speed-eater.

"That's between me and Ellie," Mel answered with a small smile.

"Shouldn't
be any secrets between a husband and his wife," Buzz said, looking at his food.

"A good friend never breaks a promise of confidentiality," Mel rejoined, still cutting chicken into little pieces for Packy.

By the time she finished getting Packy's food ready, she knew that Buzz would be done with his dinner. Melanie was accustomed to this state of affairs.

"Oh," Buzz said. "Then she's agreed to
move."

"I didn't say that."

"You implied it."

"How could you possibly infer that I implied that?" she asked him.

He was right, of course. This drove her crazy, how he knew her so well that he could tell what she was thinking. Other wives complained that their husbands were out of touch; had no clue what was going on in their minds. For Mel, it was just the opposite. There was nothing she could
hide from him. Sam knew the future. Buzz could "guess," as he called it, what she was thinking.

Yes, she loved him, and she supposed she loved this about him.

It's not wise to dwell on why I love Buzz,
she told herself.
It might remind me of all the things I don't love about him.

Often what she loved and didn't love about him were the exact same things.

"You know me, little Mel," Buzz explained
matter-of-factly. "I just know. I'm glad you convinced her to get out of Dodge."

"I don't think I convinced her at all," Mel partially broke her promise, although with a feminine strategy. "Men just never understand women. She needed someone to listen to her. She's terrified. To Sam it's all a matter of logic and reason."

If I tell him some of the truth, then I don't have to reveal the whole truth.

Buzz gave her a look which clearly asked:
So what's wrong with logic and reason?

She read him. "Did it ever occur to you or Sam that Ellie might not want to make a decision out of fear, even if the situation is truly, logically frightful?"

"I can't speak for Sam."

He was finished now. Two full glasses of RC Cola were sloshing around with the chicken in his belly. Mel was just starting on her peas.
The chicken breast was cold.

He slipped down from his chair and layed back on the floor. He lifted his calves up onto the chair, and continued to speak to his wife, looking up at her. He did this every night, claiming he was more comfortable and that it was a good position for digestion.

She closed her eyes and sighed.

"And you wonder why Ellie doesn't want to move out of Cleveland with us?" she
observed.

"Huh?" he asked.

"Forget it."

She was used to his ways. She continued her previous explanation, "Ellie needs time to adjust psychologically."

"What about you? What do you need?"

She laughed.

"I had my dream, remember? Mommy I'm hungry. That was enough psychological adjustment, thank you very much.

"Besides, I've come up with a great way to put it out of my mind. I just refuse to think
about it. We're going to move, and I'm going to help, but I'm not going to think about why. I'm going to make believe we're just moving like anybody else moves. I'm going to tell myself normal-sounding lies like, 'I've always wanted to move to Montana.'"

"Isn't that called denial, Sweetie?" Buzz asked, then, "Let the baby out of his highchair, wouldya?"

She did this. In seconds, Packy had slithered
down and was riding horsy on Buzz's chest.

"Whatever gets me through the night, Buzzy. At least I'm not watering the lawn eight times a day."

"Sounds like a plan to me. You're willing to move, but are purposely in denial as to why. I'm watering the lawn. And Sam...and Sam, he..."

"Sam is Sam."

He pulled his legs off the chair, and deftly positioned the baby on his knees.
Airplane!

Packy squealed.
His drool came down on Buzz's shirt.
The trick,
Buzz thought, an expert dad,
is to keep that drool from going in my mouth.

"Did I ever tell you about the time me and Donna and Sam went to the beach in New Jersey?"

"Like all your stories, yes, many times. But tell me again."

"Forget it."

He laughed, and snuck under the table and grabbed Markie's legs, making growling noises. "I'm gonna bite your
belly! The lion is hungry!"

"No!" Markie shrieked with false terror, meaning, essentially,
Please go right ahead.

Mel shook her head.
Boys will be boys.

It was the same every night. Yes, she loved them all. Her three little boys.

+  +  +

Sam was snoring. His wife rose from the bed and padded into the bathroom, flicked the light, and gently closed the door halfway.

Ellie took a hard gaze at herself
in the full-length mirror. She was wearing a smock, as Sam called them, for reasons she never fully understood. Perhaps his mother had called plain cotton one-piece pajamas
smocks.

No, that couldn't be. He lost his mother when he was a child. Me, Buzz, Sam–motherless children all.

She stepped closer and looked into her own eyes.

Who was this girl before her? She still thought of herself–of Mel,
of Marie Penny, Kathy Lawrence, her woman friends–as girls.

But they weren't girls. They were moms. Front and center. First and foremost. Top to bottom.

Am I looking at a mom?

She placed her hands on her stomach, and yearned for a working womb the way a paraplegic yearns to walk.

This was a useless place to go, but she would go anyway. Chris made her a mom. Of course. And she hid her yearnings
well. From Sam, from the girls, from herself. She was thirty-eight. It was a physical impossibility that she could conceive a child, but even if she could, that hypothetical part of her life as a woman–the part with a precious eight-pound bundle, a bundle worth more than all the gold in all the vaults in all the world–the part with nursing, strollers, with quiet times on the bed with just her and
a baby–was passing by so quickly, so inexorably. They had taken out one ovary. The other one–she couldn't ever, ever, forget the phrase the doctor had used, thinking she was out of earshot–her remaining ovary was
shriveled up.

Shriveled up.
Not a day went by. Not a day.

Thirty-eight. Pushing forty. Soon, she would not even be able to
hope against hope.

She shared everything with the other moms–except
the yearning. Mel, Marie, Kathy–all they ever seemed to talk about was their children and having more children. They were proto-modern Catholics, part of the new generation of believers–still a minority–that loved children, loved the
idea
of children, loved mothering, and embraced the very cross of motherhood as if it were the True Cross of Christ. They loved 'being open to life' more than life
itself.

Perhaps other generations had embraced motherhood, but none against a culture so hostile to children.

Pope John Paul II had led the way. In the vast Ocean of Death that was the late twentieth century, this new breed of mothers flew the standard of life on the masts of their little arks.

Weary of her own image, she looked back to the bedroom. Sam's feet hung over the end of the bed.

Mel
married crazy Jack,
she thought.

And I married the Beanstalk.

And like the beanstalk of the famous fairy-tale, her husband's lofty top poked up into another world. A world of certainties. And there was a giant bug up there.

Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an IBM.

She smiled at herself.

Is he right? Is Sam right?

She knew Bucky and his friends were wrong. She had heard it in their voices–the
ignorance, the smug denial. They had written Sam off so casually.

Sam was
never
wrong.
Never
about computers.

Did Bucky actually believe that she would doubt Sam?

She had fooled her father into thinking just that while researching the bug. She loved her father, but he had always underestimated Sam.

During her whirlwind courtship, others saw only Sam's awkward features and pockmarked complexion,
and wondered why Ellie James, who could have had any man she wanted, chose Sam. Ellie had seen the promise of something unique: a man capable of greatness.

And so humble, so considerate.

Greatness and humility together.

How rare was that?

Sam is never wrong.

Only a fool would discount Sam's unerring success for almost two decades in the industry. As if he had done it by chance! The fools.

Of course
he was right. Of course the lights would go out, with all the repercussions which Sam so dryly listed.

"Why don't you put it on a spreadsheet," she had suggested to her husband with only the teensiest bit of sarcasm.

"Do you really think it would help?" he asked her right back, clueless. He always treated her thoughts and suggestions and ideas with such gravity.

Of course he was right. He was
Sam Fisk.

She had no doubt that given another ten or twenty years, he would have become a billionaire. Another Bill Gates. Only a fool could fail to see that.

But the world is filled with fools.

"They're going to party hearty right up 'til the rain starts falling, just like in Noah's times," Buzz had said about the millennium.

You got that right, Buzz.

She felt the yearning again.

It was not really
a feeling. It was something that was not there and could not be ignored. A lack.

An absence.

Fertility was a house of gold, and she was on the outside, looking in. A house of gold.