A few days after she was back, Hurricane Boris struck.
“I straightened things out for you, son,” he said. “Enough of this screwing around. You want to wind up like your old man?”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. I didn’t want to say anything that might start a real conversation.
“My telepathy saw it coming. We got her out of here pronto. I felt the vibrations a week before it hit. We spent nine days inside playing ping-pong,” he said. “Those niggers can play some ping-pong.”
“Dad, please don’t use that expression,” I said.
“Oh, go screw yourself,” he said, and laughed. “Those niggers are my parishioners. That’s my flock, Bobby. We just about went crazy. Smoking dope, eating jerk chicken, and playing ping-pong. Holy snapping bald-headed eagles.”
When I got off the phone I stood, slid open the pocket door, and leaned into Jim’s office. There were no customers at his desk. He was picking baguettes for a custom job. It was one of his better designs, a Judith Ripka knockoff, a chrysoberyl ring in pink and white gold with the diamond baguettes on one side only. It looked a bit like a headless peacock with his tail fanned off to the side. But quite nice.
“I just talked to Dad,” I said. “He doesn’t sound bad. He sounds better.”
“He’s not coming to town, is he?”
“No, he’s still down in the Virgin Islands,” I said. “But I think it’s doing him some good. He sounded like his old self.”
“Did he ask you for money?”
“No, I’m serious. He really sounds like himself. Like the old Dad.”
“I’ve fallen for that one too many times, Bobby. Believe me. It’s an old trick of his. Next time he calls he will ask you for money. Speaking of which, have you looked at the gray account lately?” The gray account was our estate-buy account, another one of Granddad’s upside-down accounts. “We are down to a hundred grand in there. I ran an inventory and we only have three hundred at cost. That leaves us almost two hundred thousand short. We have to take better care of that account. I don’t want to have to call Granddad. He’s already asking about this quarter’s check.”
I sat back down at my desk and drew a picture of a bird on my desk pad. I put a little wave beneath it so it might be a seagull. The phone was ringing. No one on my sales floor was answering it. How much effort does it take to pick up the phone?
Before I left I would lie in bed at night in our dark bedroom and watch the red dots from my alarm clock reflected in the brass light fixture on the ceiling. I came home after ten, after eleven, my blood thin with the long day and night, and quietly, as smoothly as I could, slid my uncomfortable body beneath our covers. Next to me in the bed our baby daughter’s head and small curls rested in a sweaty ring. Their breathing was shallow with sleep. I tried not to move. I kept my arms at my sides. But there was no point in closing my eyes. So I watched the red dots from the alarm clock on the brass chandelier above the foot of the bed. In the silence with the two of them barely breathing, like air among green leaves on their twigs, I could still hear the canned music that we piped in all day throughout the store. I listened for it and that listening in bed made me forlorn, self-pitying, and resentful.
I figure it out,” the Polack said.
I looked up from the buy I was weighing. It was a Tiffany sterling set from the 1930s. It was a huge set, over four hundred pieces, soup ladles and onyx-handled hot chocolate tureens, and even a samovar. We paid four dollars an ounce — after deducting the estimated weight of the onyx, inlaid mother-of-pearl, and ivory — which was exactly what a smelter would pay us. We could have paid as much as twelve or even fifteen dollars an ounce, but it was brought to us by one of Jim’s oldest and best customers and we knew she would take whatever we offered her. That’s how it works with regulars: because they are already sold they are much easier to screw. But you have to screw them, to make up for all of the skinny-margin deals you did to get their business in the first place. If you don’t screw your regulars you won’t be around for long.
“I figured it. What I want for my present. My birthday.”
I had forgotten her birthday was in a few weeks. Maybe she would like a nice pair of Manolo Blahnik boots, I thought. She did not spend enough money on her footwear. But I wouldn’t get off that easy. A fur. That’s what she’s after. That coat is going to set you back, Bobby, I thought. It can’t be just any fur coat. She will know the differences between them.
“You do not know?” she said. “Guess!”
“I guess I better know,” I said. “Since I’m buying it.”
“The Rolex. I want a Rolex,” she said.
“A Rolex? Would you actually wear a Rolex?”
The jewelry business really is two things, in the end: diamonds and Rolexes. The truth is there is no other luxury brand, of any kind, that has achieved the same supremacy within its area as Rolex. It’s a subject worthy of closer study.
“I change my mind about this. The Rolex is elegant. I want the boy’s size. In stainless steel. We refinish the dial pink. To make it more feminine.”
Pink? I did not understand this woman at all.
Still, I could rustle up one of those from the Watchman for a thousand, twelve hundred bucks. I was getting off cheap.
“You want to go out tonight?” I said. Thursday was our late day, we stayed open until eight, so Wendy was always asleep by the time I came home. “Want to go to Dallas, maybe?”
“Yes, I am going to Dallas tonight. But not with you,” she said. “I have business to take care of. I leave early, in fact.”
Okay, I thought. She has ordered her birthday present and now she is going to Dallas without me, leaving Jim and me with the cases to pull on her own, to do her side deals.
Maybe Jim will want to go have a few drinks, I thought. With Wendy already in bed it was a shame to waste the Thursday night.
•
I understood how grown men should view their offices. My office was supposed to be a refuge. This is my tree house, I ought to be thinking. But I preferred Jim’s office to my own. My favorite place to sit was on the other side of his desk, in one of the customers’ chairs, after closing.
“I’m moving out. I’m leaving Wendy,” I said.
I watched his face as I said it. I knew he would be pleased. Not at my unhappiness, not at all. But between brothers, if you are close, it is a victory when your brother has serious trouble with his wife. Otherwise the wife divides the two of you, at least partially.
“What a shock,” Jim said. Then he saw my face and he was gentler. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “You know what I think. That hasn’t been a real marriage for some time now. You don’t have to get divorced right away. Separate. That’s what I like to do. It makes it easier when things turn legal anyway. They are less combative. But easier on both of you, I mean. Get a little distance. Clear your head.”
Even at this desperate moment I did not like him criticizing my marriage. But I knew he was trying to encourage me.
We were sorting South Sea pearls on oversized pearl trays into calibrated colors and sizes for three matching necklaces. Jim had already sold one of the necklaces and made enough profit on the deal that the other two were free. They were astonishing. Twelve to fifteen millimeters in diameter, and white with that undertone of pink and gold that good South Seas have. You could see half a millimeter or so into the pearl, as though it were still alive in the oyster, as if it were the skin of a living human face.