Keep the Change (5 page)

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.”

Now Joe was seated at the end of a bar. There was a ball game on TV. He looked into the bottom of his glass for a big idea. He was sitting with a guy named Mack thinking about the ranch, about Smitty and Lureen, about his childhood enemy Billy Kelton, about Ellen and old man Overstreet, about the hills and all the moving water. It wasn’t just nostalgia; the lease money had quit coming in. And he wasn’t getting along with Astrid.

“It’s a tie game,” Mack said, staring over the silhouetted heads at the screen. “You think you’ll go up and see who?”

“My aunt and uncle. They live in our old house in Montana. I might just go on up there.”

“Call first,” said Mack. “They could be dead.”

“Don’t you ever feel like seeing your relations?”

“I think it’s all this roots thing. My kids go out and tape the locals. I must not be the right guy for this one. It’s a little off-speed for me. That’s three thousand miles!”

Joe went back to the apartment. Astrid had tied her black hair back with a strip of blue cloth. She smiled at Joe. Something
was in the air. Astrid was not a worrier and you couldn’t make her worry if it didn’t really come to her on her own. She looked at him, held his eye. Silence fell over the room. He came over and kissed her slowly. She was sitting in a chair at the end of the dining table and he was standing over her, kissing her. She undid his pants and held him. When he stopped kissing her, she took him inside her mouth. He had one hand on the back of her head and supported himself with the other on the table. The mail was piled there and most of it was bills. He tried not to acknowledge that he had seen the bills but it was impossible, there were so many of them. He moaned and she sucked harder. He looked at the gas bill. Knowing it would be enormous, he moaned with particular feeling. She gripped his buttocks with both hands and tried to take him in farther. He shuffled the mail with his free fingers and came to a letter from American Express. Surely their card was going to be canceled. A particularly expressive wordless cry came from his lips and Astrid tried for it all. He could feel the irony all the way to the center of his stomach. He stood as long as he could, then sank faintly into a chair.

After a moment, Astrid said, “What do you have in your hand?”

She pulled the crumpled letter from his grasp. Her brow darkened. “They’re dropping us, huh?”

“Who?”

“Are you pretending you haven’t seen this?”

Joe shook his head.

A peculiar look flickered across Astrid’s face. “Has this been a great blow to you?” she asked.

“I can’t win,” said Joe. The thing was, he loved Astrid. And he could have brought out better things in her than he had. He brought out things in Astrid that were bad and went around
disliking her for them. He sat in his chair and mused about his own unfairness as the wind pressed green masses of Florida holly to the window. “My character,” he said, “is composed almost strictly of things I hate in other people.”

They were under a new pressure. They were going to have to live on less because of Joe’s difficulty with his work and the sudden termination of the lease money. None of the explanations Joe received from his Aunt Lureen made sense or persuaded him. He was suspicious that his Uncle Smitty was somehow getting the money from his sister. At first, he’d felt that if it meant enough to them to just take it, they could go ahead and do so. Though it was a technicality, the ranch was in Lureen’s name and, as a technical thing, she could do as she pleased. But that was not the understanding she had with Joe’s father, blood to blood, and she knew it. On this note, Joe could get indignant. Sometimes it passed. Sometimes it embarrassed him and sometimes the whole thing made him feel guilty. The worst part of it was that Ivan would come to sense that Joe had less choice about whether or not to do his projects. Ivan said it pained him to see an old friend refuse to abandon himself to the fiesta of consumption that was our national life.