Keep the Change

6

It seemed Joe would always spend plenty of time unraveling misunderstandings with women. The following summer, when he was eighteen, he’d hitchhiked to Mexico and wound up in a small town in Sonora. He remembered cattle trucks going between the adobe walls on the edge of the town and kind of careening around the fountain too fast, like in the movies. He remembered the constant murmuring of mourning doves and the First Communion girls in white clouds in front of the church. He remembered the century plants and ocotillos with their orange blossoms and gaunt cattle that seemed to walk so hopelessly. He remembered a shirtless man standing next to a hanging side of beef, cutting and weighing pieces of meat for passing customers and rolling the pesos nervously around his forefinger. Joe remembered the town being a dusty grid, poor animals carrying things for the poor people, insignificant things to our eyes like bundles of sticks. It made him ashamed to have anything.

He was led by two boys into a cantina and up to a prostitute, a nice-looking girl who was very tall for a Mexican. He went upstairs. She gave herself to him and Joe responded by falling in love with her and spending every effort to think how she could be reformed and taught English so that he could make her his wife. Joe sat all night in the cantina, a shrunken presence, entertaining her and allowing her to peel his roll of pesos like an artichoke. They danced. They arranged to be photographed at their table. When Joe left for the States, he had the picture, the shirt on his back, and a stricken heart.

In the fall, when he was back in school, Joe’s mother found the photograph. She was holding it between her two hands, staring at it, when she called him to her room.

“Joe,” she said, “I’m so ashamed of you.” Joe didn’t know what to say. Nothing was appropriate. She lifted her eyes until she had him. “Here you are”—she returned her gaze to the photograph—“with this lovely young woman”—she looked up at him in penetrating disappointment—“and your shirt is out!”

Joe’s mother taught everyone to play bridge, and about this she had a sense of mission. There was some kind of opiated cough medicine available with which she had dosed Joe, aged four, so that his antics would not disrupt the games taking place in front of the big sixteen-pane window that looked out on the low bluffs that still had the bones of buffalo exposed by spring rains. And Joe daydreamed the bridge afternoons away in apparent bliss. His mother played bridge every week, deeply bored by her companions, the lumpish locals. She thought of her fellow Montanans as humped figures limited by the remote flickers of undeveloped consciousness. She had hoped against hope that her son Joseph Starling, Junior would set out and find culture somewhere, uplifting companionship, make a name for himself, and more or less stay out of town.

As an only child, Joe had been most divided by the contrasting claims of his parents. His father still had the Westerner’s ability to look into pure space and see possibilities. His mother saw traditional education as a tool for escape, an escape she couldn’t think of making but one which her son could somehow make for her.

Joe graduated from the Kentucky Military Institute and to his father’s great satisfaction was accepted by Yale. That happiness quickly disappeared at Joe’s decision to study art. When Joe’s father visited him at Yale and saw displays of student work and, worse, the crazy-looking building where art was taught, he told Joe they would have nothing to say to each other if this kept up. Joe painted landscapes but they were so austere that they approached not being there at all. They deepened his father’s suspicion that this was, despite the endorsement of major institutions, a complete swindle.

His conviction was not altered when Joe got out of school, moved to New York, and became a successful painter. Though it was a career, it was apparently not enough of a career. From Joe’s point of view, something wasn’t sinking in. The next thing was he couldn’t paint. It didn’t seem all that subtle psychologically; and he had a good grasp of it. He had always painted from memory and for some reason he couldn’t seem to remember much of late. He hoped it was temporary but at the moment, he didn’t have anything to offer anyone, even the gallery owners who were practical enough and who knew what was called for. He seemed to have folded his tent and that was that.

But before this, before his love of paint and painting deepened to a kind of dumb rapture, his relationship with his mother grew closer. She resumed a long-buried girlishness. Eventually, this closeness applied to more serious matters. One summer after the family had moved to Minnesota, Joe was staying on the ranch, painting and doing most of the irrigating. His mother, having announced the seriousness of her mission, flew out from Minnesota for a visit.

Joe made iced tea and they went out and sat at a picnic table under half a dozen flowering apple trees; the trees hadn’t been pruned in years but sent forth flowers in drenching volume among the dead branches. There was a telephone pole in the middle, which took something away from the scene; and, just beyond, a wooden feed bunk for cattle with four tongue-worn salt blocks. A handful of pure white clouds floated overhead without moving. Joe and his mother had sat right here in the same spot when he was a child discussing sack races, nature, wild flowers, life, anything that came up. His mother still twirled her hair with her left forefinger when she was thinking, while Joe went on lacing his fingers and staring at them until a thought would come. They had always called the desired outcome of events “an amazing voyage,” as in “It would be an amazing voyage if you passed physics this term.”

“Make a long story short,” said Joe.

“It’s inherently a long story.”

“Try your best.”

His mother drank some of her iced tea. She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing her head back to look up in the sky. She made a single click on the picnic table with an enameled fingernail. “Dad is going to have to be dried out. He has had serious problems with his diverticulitis which surgery would cure, but surgery is out of the question because he will go into the DTs before he can recover.”

Joe thought for a moment. “Maybe he should just go through the DTs and deal with the rest of it afterwards.”

“At his age and in his state, I am assured that he will shake himself to death if he goes into the DTs unless he does it in a clinic.”

“Can he live with the diverticulitis?”

“No.”

Beyond the orchard, the beavers had dammed a small stream and the cattails had grown up. A dense flock of redwing blackbirds shot out, followed by a goshawk in tight pursuit. The goshawk flared off into a cottonwood and watched the blackbirds scatter back among the cattails. At a certain point, it would start again.

“I have a feeling you can make this story shorter than you’re letting on.”

“This part I can condense. You have the best chance of getting Dad into the clinic.”

Joe leaned one elbow on the table and rested his face on his hand. “Does he even like me, Mother?”

“Not particularly.”

“In that case, maybe I do have a chance,” he said, as though elated at a glimmer of light. In fact, he was quite wounded. And in the end it was to no purpose.

That summer, Joe’s father went bankrupt in Minnesota. But he saw it coming and signed his ranch over to his sister Lureen to protect it from receivers. Speaking directly to Lureen, confirming that conversation in a letter and sending a copy of the letter to Joe, he expressed his intention to one day take the ranch back and finally to leave it to his son Joe. But he never got the chance: He died driving his car to bankruptcy court, a black four-door Buick coasting through Northfield, Minnesota, with a corpse at the wheel. This ghastly scene dominated the local news for a month.

His father had played around with his wills so often that none of them was binding and for all practical purposes, he died intestate. The property in Minnesota went to Joe’s mother, and sufficient investments had withstood bankruptcy proceedings that she was able to live comfortably. Lureen never offered to give her the ranch back. She made it clear that she was holding it for Joe. She and Joe’s mother had known each other since the days in the two-room Clarendon Creek schoolhouse when they were both girls. They never liked each other. Joe’s mother said, “Lureen has been a wallflower and a cornball since kindergarten.” Lureen said Joe’s mother had “enjoyed all the benefits of prostitution without the health risks and the forced early retirement.” It was the sharpest statement Lureen made in a long, quiet life; and it had so tremendously amused Joe’s father that he had repeated it to Joe with delight. To this day, Joe didn’t know what to make of it, or know why it had delighted his father, the banker and former cowboy. A year after his father died, his mother died — connected events.

Joe and Lureen had never failed to communicate with perfect clarity on the matter of the ranch. Lease payments were made to her; she deposited them and sent a check on to Joe. A separate account was opened to compensate Lureen for her increased taxes as well as a management fee for discussing arrangements with the Overstreets once a year. Lureen lived on her teacher’s retirement money and on social security. She owned her home and lived in it simply and comfortably. Joe offered to help out with her needs. She didn’t seem to want that, and often remarked that she saw it as her mission to properly attend to the business which Joe’s father had placed in her hands. At some point, the matter of transferring it into Joe’s name would be taken care of; and that would be that. Unfortunately, Smitty developed pride of ownership.

After a couple of years in New York, Joe moved to Florida where it was always warm, and soon he met Astrid, riding the front of a 1935 Rolls-Royce, wearing nothing but gold spray paint. She was going to a costume party as a hood ornament. When they danced, he got gold paint on his clothes. This much he could remember about their first kiss: the instant it was over, she said, “You’re driving me crazy.” He had been dating a girl he’d met when he delivered a specimen for his annual physical, a big-voiced Hoosier girl whose tidy apartment was decorated with Guatemalan molas and posters from gangster movies. She didn’t stand a chance against Astrid, who went everywhere with a train of dazed men who hated themselves for being so drawn to her. Astrid scalded them with her Cuban laugh or sent them on demeaning errands.

Not long after the costume parade, Joe and Astrid spent an entire evening making death masks and Joe propped his next to his place at the dinner table, and then so did Astrid. She said, “You look incredibly old in your death mask.” He had been uncomfortable breathing through a straw.

Joe said, “Yours doesn’t look so good itself.” He stuck his tongue through the mouth hole of her death mask. “The other thing is, I’ve got an empty feeling,” he said.

After they began living together, Astrid used to ask him why he didn’t paint. He asked her, “Paint what?”

After a few years, she quit asking.

To make a living, Joe became a freelance illustrator of operation manuals. This attainment, through his perfect draftsmanship, had at the beginning peculiar satisfactions. He went to work for his old school friend, Ivan Slater, now a successful businessman. Ivan was not interested in art; Ivan was interested in making others understand how things ran. Ivan would tell them how things ran and Joe would show them. He felt he was selling something real. He had nothing more neurotic to concern himself with than meeting deadlines and his vision of people he hadn’t met operating diverse gadgets. The big catch with this work was that it always involved Ivan Slater, Joe’s most annoying friend, who had failed upward to a considerable personal fortune. Joe wasn’t the least bit jealous and was even flattered that Ivan construed it an act of friendship to try to lure him away from what he considered his fairly dopey earlier life.

The first thing Joe showed Americans how to run was a battery-powered folding hair dryer. The former landscapist made the instrument jump out at you, its operating features so vivid as to be immediately understood. On the bright curve of the instrument’s side, Joe let the outer world suggest itself in a little glint. Joe poured his heart into the glint. The glint contained tiny details of his ranch in Montana and gave the impression that the hair dryer was right at home in fairly remote circumstances. It made him happy and it in no way impeded the new owner from acquiring knowledge of drying his or her hair. The company comptroller cut Joe a check. Joe went on with his life. The grazing lease allowed him some selection in the jobs he took. Astrid blamed the lease payments for his not painting; she called them his food stamps.

Joe showed people how to operate an electric lazy susan, a garage door opener, an automatic cat feeder, a board game based on geopolitics, a portable telephone so small it could be pinned to one’s clothing, a radar detector for cars, and a gas-powered fire log. For a long time, Joe built up his interest in these projects by imagining that he was working for a single prosperous family, five painfully stupid yet happy people who wanted to be able to run this worthless shit they’d paid good money for.

Ivan Slater had consolidated a lot of solid-state and semiconductor information and come up with a “portable secretary” brand-named “Miss X,” a laptop computer powered by batteries, the same size as the average briefcase. Miss X was complicated to use and complicated to describe in that her functions were so diverse — typing, dictation, filing, and more. Ivan Slater was an ingenious technician but a poor salesman, and dragging Joe by the sleeve through the trade shows of a dozen cities, Ivan made the same startling pitch time after time: “Miss X will do everything but suck you off back at the Ramada!” Ivan saw himself as one of the new “hands-on” industrialists, a growing class of powerful men led by the owners of Remington Shaver and Two Thousand Flushes Toilet Cleaner, who appeared in their own television commercials excitedly demanding your business; Ralph Lauren, casting himself as a cowboy in his own print ads; and the king of them all, Lee Iacocca of Chrysler with his immortal “I guarantee it.” These men were Ivan Slater’s heroes and he did not defer to them in forcefulness.

At a trade show in Atlanta, Joe had an opportunity to taste the resistance among some of his peers which Ivan Slater had generated. They were set up in a booth of their own at a convention center near Peachtree Plaza. The style of their industry was such that a curiously sedate atmosphere prevailed. At an automotive or homebuilders show, it would have been pandemonium. But these were the businesspeople of a new age; restraint and an ambiguously intellectual tone made it a ghostly crowd. Joe stood behind a table upon which rested a mock-up of the laptop secretary. He had a stack of brochures and, since he had not finished the instructional drawings, he was there to explain the machine in his own words. Ivan had long since driven himself into the middle of the crowd.

A man approaching sixty made his way toward the table. He was tall and dressed in a well-tailored gray pin-stripe suit. He stared at Miss X without taking a brochure. His left arm was wrapped around his waist and his right hand held his face as he thought.

At last, he spoke: “Is this the one that does everything but suck your dick?”

“Yes, but we’re working on it,” Joe said.

A week later, Joe was back in Florida. He called Ivan in New York and admitted that he didn’t think he could go on with Miss X.

“Miss X,” said Ivan, “is history.”

Joe believed that he had lost all control of his fate. He knew he couldn’t stand one more liaison with someone with irons in the fire. Whatever it was that had pushed him from one place to another was not going to push him any farther. He couldn’t understand why when he looked within as he had done for so long in his apprenticeship, he found nothing he could use.

Within a week, Ivan came to Florida. He took Joe and Astrid to lunch at a restaurant so heavily air conditioned the windows were fogged.

“It goes like this,” Ivan was saying. “Miss X was a classic example of not actually having an idea, of trying to synthesize what was already out there. And it was a good synthetic but its prospects were limited and, hey, I don’t blame you for being bored by it. At its center was a complete lack of originality. To invent Miss X, I had to turn myself into a committee and it showed.”

“I gather the reason you’re so cheerful is that you have a better idea,” Joe said.

“I looked out and asked myself, What is the one thing that most characterizes our world? What one thing? The answer is ‘distrust.’ ”

Astrid said, “That’s true.”

So Joe said, “It’s true.”

“I set myself the task of inventing a machine that addressed itself to distrust, that my Chinese friends could make with microcircuitry, and that I could sell grossly marked up by the carload. A man once told me that the perfect product costs a dime to make, sells for a dollar, and is addictive. This is along the same lines.”

“What is it?” Joe asked, annoyed by the long buildup.

Ivan lifted his glass. A smile played over his lips as his eyes shot back and forth between Joe and Astrid. “A home lie detector,” said Ivan.

“Have you brought it with you?” Astrid asked anxiously.

“Not to worry. It is only a twinkle in my eye. But the projected cash flow on this one looks like a pyramid scheme. It’s going to be as universal as television. It’s going to shrink white-collar crime. It’s going to drive cheating housewives into the streets by the millions. The President and the First Lady will be gangster-slapping each other on the White House lawn after an evening with the product. A worldwide defrocking of priests will stun believers. Fundamentalist preachers will be turned out of their Taj Mahals by the grinning hordes that placed them there. Four officials will remain in Congress, all truthful morons. It will be necessary to staff our hospitals with veterinarians. Farriers will pull teeth. Canned goods will be sold without labels by word of mouth. America will stand revealed.”

“Will this be difficult to operate?” Joe asked feebly. He felt disgraced as Ivan’s stooge.

Ivan massaged an imaginary ball in the air in front of him. His delight at Joe’s cooperation was boundless. “Difficult to operate! It’s only got two buttons: ‘true’ and ‘false’! It’s as simple as the cross they crucified Christ on. It’s got everything that’s been missing from modern life in two eloquent buttons. By the time this baby makes its third pass through the discount stores, it will have produced a cleansing fire. I mean, the little things! The waiter in Fort Lauderdale who hands you three-week-old cod you ordered as snapper and says ‘Enjoy.’ I mean, you follow the sonofabitch to the kitchen and strap this baby onto him—”

“Wait a minute,” said Astrid. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You can’t use this thing like a gun. You can’t hook a waiter up to a lie detector while you are ordering in a restaurant.”

“You will be able to once society has accepted it,” said Ivan with a wounded look.

It was at this point that Joe, and maybe Astrid too, realized Ivan had some problems, that the whole idea was not completely reasonable, any more than Miss X was reasonable, and that what they were seeing here was desperation. In fact, when Joe caught Astrid’s worried eye, they managed to communicate that some humoring was in order. And for a moment, they enjoyed the closeness that spotting Ivan’s disease implied. Then Joe thought, Maybe they’re humoring me. Ivan and Astrid had developed what was to Joe a cloying camaraderie, a nauseating chumminess that produced periodic bursts of advice, often directed at Joe.

Ivan felt the awkwardness. His volubility had vanished. “The air is so humid,” he said.

“You get used to it,” Astrid said, as though interpreting the situation, yet sitting back to watch him handle it.

“What do people do around here?” he asked.

“Oh gosh,” Joe said, “the usual things.”

“Barbecues?” Ivan asked. He was back in control.

“Oh, no. Much more than that. They have movies and their clubs,” Joe said, struggling with each of these replies.

“Clubs? Name a club.”

“The Moose.”

“The Moose? That’s a club?”

“Yes.”

“That they go to?”

“Yes.”

“Do you go to The Moose?”

“No.”

“But what do you do, Joe?”

“What do I do?”

“Am I putting too much pressure on you?”

“Not at all,” Joe said. “But that question is completely hypothetical.”

Astrid lit a cigarette. Now she was watching Joe.

“Hypothetical? ‘What do you do?’ is hypothetical?” Ivan asked.

“I think it is.”

“Joe, no you don’t.”

“You guys mind if I turn that down?” Joe asked, pointing to the air-conditioning register. He held his throat with his thumb and forefinger, swallowing emphatically. “I’m not sure how healthy those things are, actually.”