Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
You, alas, are unmoved by it. A tissue of worry lies like a layer of cirrostratus between you and the moon. Your eyes are oblivious to the heavens, but when the Lincoln, on its way back to Belfords place, glides past several couples socializing in the moonlight outside the popular 5 Spot Cafe, your ears are reasonably certain that they hear people barking.
TEN TWENTY-FIVE P.M.
Yamaguchi-san, says Q-Jo, in a fake Japanese accent. She chuckles.
Right, Belford agrees. Dr. Yamaguchi. He, too, manages to cough up the husk of a laugh.
Hey! What is this with Yamaguchi and people barking? you demand. Something is afoot, something silly and stupid, no doubt, but you are irked that you seem to be the last soul in Seattle who isnt in on the joke.
I didnt personally catch it on the tube, Q-Jo explains, but—
Look there! Belford interrupts. Is that him?
What?
Where?
Belford brakes the Lincoln and angles it to the right so sharply that its front tire black-faces the curb. You entertain a whiff of burnt rubber and the feeling that the curb is down on one knee about to sing Mammy. Then you see it: an anthropoid shape scrambling on all fours across the lawn of a duplex. Only a millisecond separates the synapse that falsely registers the silhouette of AndrE from the one that accurately informs you that the shape is much too large for a monkey.
Its a man, says Q-Jo.
Yeah, Belford reluctantly agrees. The bellows of a huge sigh fills the car with the vapid carbon dioxide of his disappointment.
As the three of you look on, the man crawls into the shadow of a rhododendron shrub and all but vanishes there.
Think its a burglar?
Q-Jo scoffs at you. Gwen, the guys in his underwear.
The poor fellows drunk, says Belford. Or disturbed.
Probably a stockbroker, then, you say. You check your gold Rolex. In another thirty-five minutes, there could be a guy like him behind every bush in town. You issue a bitter little laugh and lay your hand on Belfords. Its the first time youve touched him tonight. Lets keep moving, dear.
Belford, however, is already reaching for the door handle. He may need help, he says. He might be in pain.
Theres no use trying to restrain the socially responsible once they are locked in on their suffering target. You pull back and let him go. Q-Jo makes a move to follow him, then thinks better of it and lights up another noxious cigarette instead.
Youre wise to stay in here, you say. What if hes on drugs?
Belfords lucky if he is. People on drugs are always less trouble than people on booze.
As your supposed boyfriend slowly approaches the night crawler-for an ex-logger, its amazing how daintily, almost primly, he moves-you strain to remember if your father was more trouble when he was drinking dago red or smoking Humboldt weed. Trouble may be the wrong word. Seldom was Ferdinand Mati trouble, he just wasnt much of a dad.
Out of the shrub-shadow, an arm suddenly materializes. Long and alabaster in the moonlight, it is reminiscent of those disembodied appendages that in old horror movies strangled, one by one, the occupants of Gothic mansions and played tortured Rachmaninoff solos on grand pianos in the middle of the night. The arm is vigorously, frantically waving Belford away. Belford does stop but failing to get the picture, asks the flailing arm, Friend, are you okay?
At that instant, the front door of the lower duplex flies open, and onto the tiny porch bursts a man in a postmans uniform. The man is wielding a croquet mallet and appears agitated and potentially dangerous, except for the fact that his progress is impeded by an equally agitated woman, wearing a red bra but no underpants, who has a firm grasp on his collar. The woman is weeping and wailing, and the man is attempting to shake her off while his vision adjusts to the dimmer light outdoors.
Theres two of em! the man yells. He lunges forward so forcefully that the woman falls, releasing his jacket. Were you fucking two of em? As he bolts down the steps, brandishing the croquet mallet, you call out, Belford! Your voice sounds so high and tweety to you that you are embarrassed to add anything further.
At the same time as the disembodied arm is retracted into the shadows, Belford raises his own arm in a conciliatory gesture. Belford wishes to pacify, Belford wishes to reason. However, neither reason nor logic nor gloom of night shall stay this courier from his appointed rounds. The postman takes a running swing that grazes the sleeve of Belfords placating gesture. Now, it is Q-Jos turn to holler. Get behind the wheel! she orders.
For some reason, you cannot move. You sit there as if mesmerized by numbers on a computer screen while the mallet whizzes around Belfords head. Goddamnit, Gwen! Get behind the wheel and start the car! Q-Jo pokes you hard between your shoulder blades with her cigarette holder. Thus prodded, you slide across the seat, turn the ignition-and whimper. Will the worst day of your life never end?
Whump! The sound of the mallet smacking Belfords face mimics the sound of a fastball landing in a catchers mitt. Belford has not tasted so much cellulose since a limb fell on him his first week at work in the woods. Spotted owls circle his skull, chased by miniature putti with their diapers on fire. Belford is staggering, the mallet is rising for another whump, when the night crawler darts from his hiding place and lopes off down the street. Switching attention, the presumed cuckold follows him in hot pursuit. Prodded by Q-Jo, you inch the Lincoln forward. Q-Jo opens the door for Belford, whereupon you experience simultaneous horror at the blood he is dripping and jealousy at the way he waves good-bye to the pantless blond on the porch.
TEN FIFTY-FIVE P.M.
Although Belfords apartment is clean and tidy, it reeks so of monkey that it turns your stomach. Q-Jos sinister cigarettes will soon mask the animal odor, but the tobacco has been punching your nausea bag, as well. You slip out onto Belfords narrow balcony for a suck of fresh air. The night is coolish, but mild enough to be restrained by your Armani trench coat. Trees, newly leafed, block your view of downtown and its lights, but you can see (good for you!) that the sky is aprickle with stars and that the moon looks like a radiation blister that a primitive physician has treated with sulfur. That your brain cells might be catenated to those distant fossilized fireballs would strike you as preposterous, but only slightly more preposterous than your emotional links to the fellow who is lying on the sofa with an ice pack on his face.
Neither you nor Q-Jo can claim any first-aid experience-the stricken soul who relies on either of you for CPR can kiss his tush and his ticker good-bye-but between the two of you, you accurately determined that Belfords nose was merely bloodied, not broken, and that the cut in his lip should not require stitches. Q-Jo made him pinch his nostrils together until the blood flow clotted, you sponged his features with a wet hand towel. You werent as gentle as you could have been-damn Posner if he thinks youll take up nursing!-but Belford didnt complain. When he spoke at all, it was to express pity for those involved in the duplex triangle. Which, of course, annoyed you since you believe that the sordid of the world get what they deserve.
Now, hes speaking again. Muffled by the ice pack, no intelligible word makes it as far as the balcony. Intuitively, perhaps, you shoot another curious look at the stars, as if the constellations might hold an answer for you. (And, could you project your gaze all the way to the suburbs of Sirius, indeed they might-although not to any question that you have so far thought to ask.) Then you go back inside.
What were you saying, Belford?
He said, Q-Jo replies for him, that he wants to look for AndrE some more. He wonders if youll mind driving him.
I guess I could, you consent with a minimum of enthusiasm. What time is it? You follow the rhetorical question with a glance at your watch. Good grief! you exclaim. Its …
ELEVEN-THIRTEEN P.M.
You knock over a chair and bounce off an ottoman in your explosive sprint to the phone. Good grief, good grief, good grief! How could you have allowed the crucial moment to pass unnoticed? Damn Belford and his meddling, damn proletarian immorali
ty, damn the monkey, and damn the stars!
At Posner Lampard McEvoy and Jacobsen, the phone burbles, burbles, and burbles some more. The first few burbles mimic electronically the sound of neurological urgency, the next few the sound of the hearts frustrations. They sure as hell got out of there fast, you think. The Nikkei not closed fifteen minutes and theyve already blown the disco? What does it mean? Banzai or hara-kiri? A hollow recorded voice comes over the line, informing you that the offices are closed until Monday and wishing you a happy Easter. Slamming down the receiver, you wonder if God doesnt have an answering machine to screen out the prayers of the venal and the boring? And in which category has he placed you?
Ignoring the encouragement that Belford mumbles through his ice pack, you let your fingers run not walk through the yellow pages. R is for restaurants. There are so many. The only yellow-pages list longer than the restaurant list is the one for attorneys. So one eats out, one breaks a tooth or finds glass in the chowder or gets food poisoning; one sues. What does that say about America? Here it is, Gwen. The number of the Bull&Bear. Punch it in.
Once again, you are privy to a crosstown attack of chronic burbling. You try to imagine conditions under which the Bull&Bear might have emptied out, but you are not quite that creative. At long last, the receiver is lifted off its cradle, and you hear the aviary gabble-gobble of a crowded lounge, followed by the bartenders curt hello.
You ask to speak with Phil Craddock, good ol Phil, and while hes being paged, strain to hear if you can pick up any clue concerning the Nikkeis performance from the tone of the barroom babble. It is definitely not subdued. But is that a skinny blade of panic snickersneeing through the roar?
Not here, grunts the bartender.
As clearly as if he were on closed-circuit camera, you can tell he is hanging up the phone. Wait! you scream.
Yeah?
Try Sol Finkelstein, would you? Thanks.
Phil is a commodities trader, a different breed, hes probably home in bed snoring like an overturned tractor. You should have asked for Sol in the first place. Good ol Sol. As you await him, you hear, or think you hear, from somewhere so deep in the phone that it might well have emanated from a source other than the Bull&Bear, might have danced off like a stray spark from another conversation on another circuit, perhaps in another city, you hear, or think you hear, the word Bozo. It gives the back of your neck a most puzzling tingle. You are still trying to make sense of it when the bartender comes back on the line. Sols not here, he says.
Well, then, would you please page—
Lady, for Christs sake, Im not your social secretary! Im busy! He bangs down the receiver, leaving you with an earful of dead but vibratory air.
You bury your head in your hands. You can almost feel random hairs, strands that a moment ago were glossy black, turning gray in their follicles. Number twenty-four. Twenty-five, twenty-six. Your presumed friends hasten to console you.
We havent consulted the cards yet, says Q-Jo, stubbing out a cigarette in a thick vortex of gagging smoke. Could put this whole affair in a different perspective.
Gwen, honey, says Belford, removing the ice bag and sitting upright on the blood-flecked sofa, lets think about this for a minute. Theres got to be someplace else you can get the information you need.
Oh, it doesnt matter, you say, your voice as burnt-out as a picnic marshmallow thats fallen off its stick. It doesnt matter how Tokyo closed. Im doomed anyway. Goddamn doomed!
Baby, baby, thats not so, Belford says. He puts a bloodstained arm around you.
Q-Jo just looks at you. She is hardly astonished that the Wall Street quake is rattling skeletons in your personal closet. She-and the tarot-have suspected for quite a while that youve been picking toadstools without a field guide.
MIDNIGHT
Obviously, a birthday candles worth of optimism continues to flicker in your heart, else why would you be stopping by the Bull&Bear on the way to fetch your car? Belford had dropped you off at the parking garage, and while hed been occupied with emptying his wallet for a delegation of the derelict, the dipsomanic, and the dispossessed that had found in him a sympathetic ear, you slipped around the corner, still intent on reception of a report from Asia.
Q-Jo had gone home to bed. She had scheduled an early morning tarot reading, for which she must be rested, plus a noon appointment to eat cucumber sandwiches and watch out-of-focus videos of an elderly widows tour of the gardens of England. For pay. This was Q-Jos second job. As you hugged each other good-bye, the two of you had made a tentative date for a midmorning consultation with the cards and a firm date to go out together Friday evening; to a nice escapist movie if you have your way, to the Werewolf Club to catch Betty Spaghetti&the Meatballs if Q-Jo is allowed to choose. After weak tea and underexposed vistas of anal-retentive planting habits, Im gonna require loud sounds and plenty of them, she said. You hate music clubs for any number of reasons, including the distinct threat of encountering your father in one of them, but you consented to consider the Werewolf, since it has a state-of-the-art ventilation system and since substantial persons-real persons, persons with incomes above five figures-have been known to show up there (although should they observe you in the company of Ms. Huffington, it could do you more harm than good).
Once Q-Jo, trailing a plume of acrid smoke, had been seen safely into her building, you had suggested to Belford a change in the AndrE strategy. Two cars can cover twice as much territory as one, you reasoned. Regardless of how he might covet your companionship, he could not argue. And regardless of your fatigue, a result both of the days blows and the martinis with which you sought to soften them, you were intent upon demonstrating your often unappreciated goodwill. Thus, Belford eased the Lincoln down the Queen Anne incline, carrying you to retrieve your beloved Porsche so that you might enlist it in the sweep of the monkey-haunted hilltop.
Belford hates his automobile as much as you adore yours. For the present, a luxury car is a necessary accoutrement to his Realtors image, but he is looking forward to the day when he can exchange it for an unassuming little egalitarian model such as Q-Jos. He had mentioned this again as you neared the bottom of the hill and the cardboard lean-tos of the homeless came into view. As usual, it annoyed you. The trouble with Belford, in your opinion, is that he achieved financial success without ever dreaming of it, a situation contrary to the American way of life. The American dream is wasted upon those who never dreamed in the first place. Now that the schism between rich and poor has grown so wide, the old-style, anything-is-possible-in-America dreams are falling through the crack. Today, the road to the pot of gold is paved with lottery tickets and frivolous lawsuits. A thoroughly cheesy way to go. How grand, how noble your dreaming has been in comparison. If only you had had a whit of fortune, had not been forced by circumstance to cut corners, bend rules …
What happened today, sweetums? Belfords question had jarred you loose from your musings. I mean, how could the stock market fall apart like that?
At last. He had finally got around to it. He was pooping the question. (As opposed to popping the question, which he had done on a couple of occasions as well, meeting with an evasive response: you wanted to keep your options open.) I shouldve seen it coming, you confessed. I did see it coming, only I didnt do anything about it. Why? If I had pulled my clients out of the market and it shot up, which it did last year, they wouldve hated me, deserted me, I wouldve been the lone dumb wimp who missed the rally. On the other hand, if Id stayed in and the market sank, everybody wouldve been in the same boat, it wouldnt have been me in the dunce corner all by myself. So I kept my people in. Worse, I stayed in myself. Yesterday, we tested HIV-positive. Today, we landed in Intensive Care.
Yeah, but why, exactly?
Well, its no big secret the economys been skating on thin ice all year. Stocks overpriced at the same time that earnings have been weak. Money flowing out of this country, not much flowing back in. In their hearts, most Americans believed the government would sooner or later
do something to reverse the stream. Thats giving the government credit for more brains and more integrity than its obviously got. The equities markets been chugging along on faith alone. There was a real vile character in the Bull and Bear this afternoon, a former hotshot broker, disgraced now, really … vile; but anyway, I overheard this creep say, Faith is believing in something you know isnt true. And hes probably correct. Yesterday-God, it seems so long ago-that faith was badly strained when two cities in Pennsylvania and one in Maryland defaulted on their municipal bonds. The Street was skittish and set to stampede, and this morning one of the top analysts fired the shot. He predicted New York would also go into default and that Trace Manhattan Bank would turn toes up. Thats all it took. The institutional and pension fund investors lit out for the hills, with the little guys running right behind them, hanging on to their suspenders.
Down what? Eight hundred points?
Eight hundred and seventy-three, to be precise.
Thats awful. But I thought that after the crash of eighty-seven, they fixed it so that couldnt happen anymore. They put in safeguards, automatic circuit-breakers, or something like that. Wasnt it something like that?
From what Ive heard about eighty-seven-I was a mere schoolgirl at the time-that carnage was the result of internal factors. A market discrepancy between the New York exchange and the pit in Chicago. A result of hedging short-side in futures. The futures market didnt have an uptick rule. It could short into weakness. In a down market, Wall Street traders had to wait for an uptick to go short. So to stay in the game, they would hedge their portfolios in Chicago. What with the volume increase brought about by programmed trading, it simply caught up with them.
Had Belford understood what youd just said? And if he had not, how could he expect you to marry him? How could he expect that, in any case? In the shine of passing street lamps, you had tried to project what Belford would look like in ten years. Belford the social worker. Jaws gone to jelly, wire-rimmed spectacles, bald on top, tufts longish and gray on the sides. Benjamin Franklin without a kite.