“It’s untraceable income. You know how it works. We just sweep up the gold dust from the drilling off the floor. You sweep every night and this is what you have at the end of thirty days.” We did not mention the extras that never went to the smelter, or that we kept half of every sweep for ourselves.
“But you probably shouldn’t deposit it in a bank, no,” Jim had said. “A safety deposit box would be fine.”
“I don’t think you’re listening to me. I wasn’t asking. I was telling. This is a great system you’ve thought up, Grandson. We all go to jail together,” Granddad had said.
It was strange that Jim had not told me about the sweeps coming in.
“Glad you asked. I was about to tell you,” he said, and gave me a look. He pulled the envelope from his desk drawer and slid it over to me. “Forty-four hundred. Almost twice what we got last month. I love it when we are building this much custom. The extra cutting and polishing make all that much more gold dust. Even the platinum was up this month. If we knew what we were doing we’d start our own smelting company.”
That reassured me. He didn’t sound like he was making that up.
“Wendy will be happy,” I said. “Seems like that’s the only thing I can do these days to please her.”
He didn’t look up as he spoke.
“It’s just the baby. It’s called departum depression. When the baby departs the womb. She’ll come around. Concentrate on work, Bobby,” he said. “That’s what I do. Take one worry at a time. Focus on things you can fix. The other problems will solve themselves.”
“She wants me home more, she says. But as soon as I walk in the door she hands me the baby. I feel like all I do is work, and then I work more when I get home.”
“She won’t even drive up here to meet you for lunch,” Jim said. “I mean, I don’t want to say anything. But she should make an effort, too. It takes both of you. I hate to say it, but I told you not to marry a Canadian. They don’t understand the business environment. It’s foreign to them. They don’t understand what it takes to make it down here. Lily was no better than Wendy is, in that way. That’s why this time around I bought American-made in the wife department. Look at Wendy’s old man. He’s a professor, for chrissake. A Canadian college teacher. He probably drives a damn Volvo. I bet he was home every day by three o’clock. That’s what she’s comparing you with.”
I tried to remember if Wendy and I had been happy before the baby was born. But as far as I could remember the last time we had had sex was when she got pregnant. That was nearly two years ago, on my twenty-fourth birthday. Now I was almost twenty-six years old, and the baby was about to turn one.
Wendy hated the store and over the years she had come to dislike Jim. She would even come out and say it. “I hate that fucking store,” she would say, and I would say, “Wendy, that store is our life.” But I was trying to make us rich. This was what it took. Then we’d have time together. And great vacations. It wouldn’t be like this much longer. I told her that, too. The night before, when we started to fight about it again, I tried to explain this to her. I had said, “I promise, it’s temporary. I love you. Give me five years. I love Claire. I want to be home more.” That last was a lie, but all the other parts were true.
“You never see Claire,” she had said, and handed her to me. “You never even see your own daughter. When was the last time you changed a diaper, Bobby? When was the last time you bathed her?”
Claire started to cry. I did my best to hold her the right way. It is a tricky thing to hold a baby properly. Even your own baby. I handed her back to Wendy.
“Hush,” she said to the baby. “That’s enough, Claire,” she said more firmly.
“She’s just upset,” I said.
This is not working, I thought. We had only been married for three years. It was too soon to get a divorce. My mother will love that, I thought.
Claire continued to cry. Her eyes and her fists were closed. Something about her mouth in its lonely curl reminded me of myself.
“Stop that, Claire! If you don’t quiet down I’ll give you back to your father.”
“What did you just say?”
“Well, if it works,” she had said, and walked out of the room.
“Come on, cheer up,” Jim said. I looked up and saw him watching me carefully. His phone was ringing. It was after hours, so we had the ringers off, but I could see the red light blinking like the light on a police car. The private line. One of the women. Wendy, or Jim’s new wife, or possibly his ex-wife. He sensibly never gave the private line to his girlfriends. His new marriage was going well, however: she was thoughtful and she did not call often. Or it could also be the Polack. The Polack had the private line, naturally.
“I’m cheerful,” I said. “I’m just sick of sorting melee. Do you mind if we get out of here?”
“Let’s put the rest of this package in the papers and go have some fun.”
After the last of the diamonds we went to a dark topless bar in Euless Jim liked. The girls were not as pretty as in the Dallas titty bars but they worked harder. Lap dances were two for twenty dollars, and for fifty you could get a hand job in the back room. You don’t get that kind of treatment in the upscale places. We each blew five hundred bucks or so of our sweeps money. It was a pleasant evening.
My first and my best crow at Clark’s was Joe Morgan. I picked him up at a giant tent auction we held that summer under a circus tent we erected in the parking lot. The whole parking lot was beneath this enormous white and red tent that the rental guys inflated like an air balloon with enormous fans. We parked the twelve vintage Rolls-Royces we were auctioning at the far end on either side of the auctioneer’s stage. It was the full-page color ad featuring those Rolls-Royces that brought in Morgan, he later told me.
Many crows are women, and the luxury jewelry business lives on them. Wealthy women who shop for jewelry in the way normal women gather shoes. But a rich male crow is even better than a woman, because women are buying for themselves, but men can at least pretend to be buying for their wives. It is easy for a husband to tell a wife that she does not need another diamond bracelet. But it is difficult, and very unusual, for a wife to tell her husband that she has enough jewelry. Even if she has more than she wants, she does not want to discourage his affection.
I was selling Morgan an eighteen-karat white gold diamond-and-emerald bracelet that had been assembled a few days before by our antique dealers over in Dallas. They had put it together for a “Grand Jewelry” event Neiman’s was putting on — these two fellows were among Neiman’s largest consigners — but they brought it to us first, because Jim and I had acquired a reputation for turning enormous pieces quickly if they were flashy enough. As soon as I saw it I called Morgan.
I did not own this bracelet, it was on memo, and I told Morgan that I was preparing to purchase it from a wealthy client and old friend of mine who needed some cash in a hurry.
“She needs some money that her husband doesn’t know about,” I said.
He gave me a sly look. “She’s got something on the side, you think?”
He had a Jack and Coke in his hand. He was a tanned old Texas rancher who had made a fortune, young, in the Gulf, by building and leasing enormous steel barges. He liked to stir around the ice cubes in his drink with his large brown index finger. Usually he would have three or four while he was in the store, and I told the Polack to keep them coming and pour them strong.
“I don’t think so, she must be in her late seventies.” He was in his early sixties. I tell my salespeople: make the old ones feel young, and the young ones feel grown up. “I think it’s for her daughter. She’s in some kind of trouble.” I knew that his daughter had left her husband and moved back home several years ago.