Within a day it was the donest of deals. The lawyer’s extermination issues had been resolved; a crap-free two-pager, with an unconventional real estate clause, had been sent to Gil as a PDF attachment. The subcontractor had agreed to organize purchase and fixing-up of a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh, within walking distance of Carnegie Mellon, subject to bank appeasement. One of the NYU dudes had lowered himself to make contact with his contact at Fox. Fox wanted in. And Mr. Bergsma, presented with the deal, had assigned the rights, minus the costs of the Pittsburgh fixer-upper, to Benny.
Mrs. Margaux, meanwhile, brought pressure to bear on Mr. Margaux; within a week she was able to go to her “friends” with an offer they could not, in all decency, refuse, using the new vocabulary item “drilling down” to killing effect.
Time passes.
The Dumbo dudes achieve a successful flotation and do, in fact, do something so inconceivably brilliant that their investors are happier than they could reasonably have expected. Thanks to the Iowan Investor Interface the dudes are spared actual personal contact with said investors, so they too are happier than they could reasonably have expected.
Mr. Bergsma moves to Pittsburgh and immerses himself in his Automatika world. Fifty creative types move to Pittsburgh and comprehensively outperform the types who pipped them to the post in their initial grant applications. The subcontractor realigns his construction business. Automatika the movie succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of the NYU dudes, such that they can select their projects. Loopy Margaux packs the bare essentials (five suitcases of shoes) and goes to Berlin to pursue her dream. Mr. Margaux has fun. While the actual money involved is peanuts, his genius for applying financial acumen to support of the arts and urban renewal is noticed at the White House. Mrs. Margaux is the envy of her friends.
Benny gets $500,000.
Benny got what he always said he wanted, the freedom to do what he wanted. He’s not as happy as he might have expected.
Mr. Bergsma had been talking for years about the kind of deal he was looking for, and Benny, Lord knows, had the inside track. So what was to stop Benny from pulling a CFD out of a hat? What was to stop Benny from finagling the fixer-upper? What was to stop Benny from expanding the Pittsburgh idea, to the point where Mr. Bergsma looked like a visionary instead of a crank? Meanwhile some kid just walks in the door, a kid who has never even read the books, and hands him the CFD on a plate. The son he never had.
Benny hates talking to people about his father.
Gil, needless to say, moves into Manhattan, where he lives to this day.
Remember Me
Gerald was only a Canon in the Cathedral, not a very forceful one. He put it to the Bishop that it might be A Good Thing to invite a Jew to participate in the VE-Day service, and the Bishop waved a hand affably, as who should say, if a Jew can be found it might not be a bad thing at all. Gerald made noises to the local Rabbi, who could not personally undertake but put him on to a man who might do.
Gerald got on to the man. He had not had much to do with Jews, but the fellow seemed pleasant enough.
Gerald mooted. The fellow began to talk excitedly, throwing out all sorts of wild ideas which seemed to involve rather a lot of Hebrew. Gerald could not quite see where all this was to be slotted into the service, nor, come to that, what the Bishop would make of it all. He explained diffidently that he had really rather thought that perhaps the fellow might be willing to read the Old Testament reading for the day.
‘Oh, I see,’ said the fellow. ‘You’d like a Jew to read from the Old Testament.’
‘Er, yes,’ said Gerald.
‘I’m not interested, thanks,’ said the fellow. Hung up the phone.
The Bishop’s withers were thankfully unwrung.
K had seen too much of this sort of thing to be disenchanted.
He sang lustily:
(K had Purcell very much on his mind, though his thoughts had been running chiefly in the direction of The Fairy Queen; he was to be married in the fall. He had a pronounced aversion to the Wedding March from Lohengrin as nuptial accompaniment.)
The regular association of ideas naturally led K at this point to walk down to Blockbuster to borrow the DVD of Kiss Me Deadly. Only to find — O tempora, o mores! — that his trusty Blockbuster was no more. (It had been one of the good ones.) Enquiries at his hotel elicited the suggestion that he watch the thing on his laptop by streaming it off Amazon. Pfui!
Gerald discovered, somewhat late in the day, that this would have been the most terrific coup. He had once read a novel by Iris Murdoch and had not enjoyed it; for the most part the word ‘contemporary’ sufficed to put him off a work of fiction. He had never heard of K. He happened to mention the incident in a moment of fretfulness to one of the younger Canons and was told that K was in the running for a Nobel Prize. Oh my ears and whiskers! The man’s name, mercifully, had never happened to come up in water-testings with the Bishop.
K had gone back to England for a few months to do research and organise documentation for his wedding.
K, as he had often expatiated, had nothing against marriage provided it was sufficiently ritualised. It seemed a modest requirement, but when he did in fact engage to marry people kept trying to clutter up the ritual with effusions of sincerity. K simply wanted the Hebrew text in the programme and if people wanted to feel something that was entirely their own affair. (K’s views on the Kaddish of Mr Leon Wieseltier, in which the Aramaic text is conspicuous by its absence, may readily be imagined.) He had thought that in New York, of all places, this would be simple enough to arrange, but as it turned out none of the printers they approached had anything remotely suitable. He was left to try to drum up something passable in Golders Green. A strategic sortie to Glyndebourne, where they were putting on a delectable Rosenkavalier, palliated the anguish. (Printers! Gaaaa!)
K returned to New York at the end of the summer and was chagrined to discover that Der Freischütz was on at the Met on Erev Yom Kippur. Damn and Blast! He worked out that he could snatch a last meal, just, before the curtain went up and begin his fast during the first act.
An excellent plan in its way, it meant that he was hors de combat when social arrangements were made during a longueur in Kol Nidrei. K’s fiancée, Rachael, invited a friend to join them in breaking their fast.
(Thanks to the mixed seating so popular in America, K could easily have put the kaboosh on the plan had he not succumbed to the superior charms of Der Freischütz.)