And everybody else’s database always had some unseen edge over his. Professionals brought out the absolute worst in him. The inside traders, the ones who ran the racket. When Tim was in that respirator for so long, gasping for life, Don spent days just trying to get the doctors to admit all the things they weren’t telling. “That’s our job. That’s the patient’s job.” And the doctors’ job was to maintain their edge by keeping us in ignorance.
Back when they were married, Don couldn’t even pay the phone bill without second-guessing the entire cartel, from Bell Labs down to the guy who climbed the pole. Always figuring people. The mortgage officer, the clerk at the video store, the paper boy. That’s what made him so good at his own job. His way of making people think they’re cleverer than they are. That they’re holding more cards, closer to the vest.
He only got worse as he moved up in the world. Every promotion left him more of an old maid. Director of Development had that many more angles to second-guess than Associate. He had to make the appropriate second-car statement. He had to pick the right investment for their retirement account. He once spent half of January researching the perfect summer camps for the kids.
It drove her nuts, finally. After a decade, she got tired of trying to get him to take the world at face value. He wore her down. She started imitating him, unconsciously. Asking the woman at the post office if there weren’t some better way to send things. Getting a second opinion after the termite guy gave the house a clean bill of health.
Such a relief, finally, breaking free. Like getting out of those old size-10 suits after a size-14 day. Like having that nose tube pulled out of her gut, only bigger. The freedom to breathe, to be ignorant of the worldwide conspiracy, to fuck up sometimes, to say “fuck up.”
While all the blood was being spilled, she swore she’d never do it again. Never get involved. A person would have to be sick. It dies hard, the habit of a man. Worse than quitting smoking. And Ken seemed almost perfect: invisible, low-maintenance, like one of those renewable, twenty-ride monthly passes for the commuter bus. He’d watch any film in the world. He didn’t care whose name was on the six-pack. And he never made her call the radio stations about anything. Never.
Best of all, he was never underfoot. A lot like eating out: you got to have the roast beef while somebody else did the dishes. Of course, there was that part about having to drive for an hour just to find a safe restaurant. But then, if it weren’t for Ken, she would never have gotten out so much.
They sit in the Round-Up Steak House, Peoria. Ken wanted the view of the river, but he didn’t want to wait the twenty minutes for a window table. Not a waiting kind of man, Ken. They sit in the back room, filled with bronze statues of bucking broncos and wall tapestries of the Marlboro Man.
His eyes wander around the room, as they always do. Appraising the situation. Planning the quick exit. He glances at her plate and frowns. “Honey, you aren’t eating very much.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You want something else? You want the Surf Special?”
She tries to remember the last time she saw the surf. The last time she was anywhere near the ocean. Not since that abysmal vacation to Nags Head when the kids were little.
“It’s fresh,” he insists.
“Ken. Fresh shrimp? Peoria?”
“Sure. They fly them in by the ton, every day. Okay, they’re packed on ice. But they never actually freeze.”
And St. Louis, she wonders. Lawrence, Kansas? Denver? Bozeman? How can there possibly be enough Surf Specials to go around?
“Honey?”
“Sorry. I’m back!” She grins as wide as she can.
“Laura. Would you like something else to eat?”
She can tell he’s getting angry by how polite he’s becoming.
“That’s all right. I’ll just pick at this for a while.”
“Picking is not eating.”
How to tell him that the steak tastes like that yellow scum that builds up on the inside of the toilet tank?
“Ken. I’ve got cancer. I have three months’ worth of heavy metals in me.”
“Okay. Should we talk about something else?” And he smiles at her. What he loves most about her is her offbeat sense of humor.
“Sure. Why not? Something else. That would be great.”
“Work?” he asks, pouring on the irony like A.1. sauce.
“Yeah! Tell me again. What is it that you do for a living, buster?”
“Nothing that polite people would want to talk about at dinner.” He looks away, toward the room with the window tables.
She’s wounded him. And it won’t be right until she sucks up and apologizes. As usual, she cannot really pinpoint what she did wrong. All men, every last one: no matter how casual they seem. No matter how mature, how much money they make, how secure. No matter what, they need you to eat what they’ve killed and brought you.
He’ll sulk now, for as long as it takes for her to apologize. Which, at the moment, is fine by her. They sit in silence. Actually, nothing so nice as silence. The ever-present audio system supplies them a sound track. The equipment is out of sight, back in the kitchen with all the illegal Latino cooks. Some kind of multi-CD changer, set to shuffle tracks from seven different disks at random. Now that she listens, she hears it go from some kind of plunky Bach thing to sixties psychedelic, followed by Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” followed by another movement of that Bach. Schizophrenia, raised to an art form.
Ken sees her listening. “Something for everyone,” he scoffs.
She studies him, trying to remember what the assets were. All the assets have fled somewhere offshore.
“So what the hell’s eating you?” he says, when they are back in the car.
“What? You couldn’t ask me that in the restaurant?”
“I could have. But I’d just as soon not air my linen in public, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Ken. You and I don’t go out in public. We just skulk around Peoria.”
“So you would have eaten the damn steak if I took you somewhere in Lacewood. Is that what you’re saying?”
“And you and I don’t even have any dirty linen. We just have Handi Wipes.”
She hears the pathetic jab dribble out of her mouth. She hates herself for saying anything. She doesn’t even know why she’s angry. She wouldn’t want linen with this man, even if he were buying. The last thing in the world she wants is more of someone else’s wash.
This is their private fight, their quiet, familiar combat. The one they’ve been having since the beginning. They know this war. They do it by heart, even when happy, even at peace with each other. They go through its motions while whistling cheerfully and shoving all the corpses under the rug. But she has no idea what the power struggle is over, what either of them hopes to win.
It does not even feel raw to her, anymore. Just these ancient scabs, bloodless festerings that they’ve calked over with realism and styptic pencil. The most civil of aggression, so domesticated that they might as well be married. I don’t want to pull, but I hate you pushing. You don’t have to be in this with both feet; you just have to be in deeper than I.
“I thought we agreed on this,” Ken starts.
And Laura begins to will him into the lamp poles by the side of the interstate. How did they get from perfect to this? They started out with all the convenience of companionship and none of the responsibility. Now, for months, ever since she’s been sick, the man has felt like all the responsibility with none of the convenience.
“Do you want me to leave Julie? Because . . . Because we’ve talked about that, Laura. You know that I . . .”
“No, Ken. I don’t want you to leave Julie.” The first time Laura has spoken the name since her operation. Julie. Perfect name for a small, high-strung, soap-opera brunette.
“What do you want, then?”
She breathes from her stomach, as the self-cure tapes tell her to. “I want you to leave me.”
He
turns steely. His hands look like driving gloves, on the wheel. Of course it had to come to this. She should have known not to implicate herself, even casually. Never get involved with a man who uses a Relax-Or car seat and lashes rubber grips around his steering wheel.
They go three No Passing zones in silence. Or not silence. Nothing is ever silence anymore. It’s a radio call-in show, deciding what’s best for America. Trickle down: always trickle down. Apparently, most people with phones still believe that when the water in the harbor rises, all the boats go up.
“Honey,” he says, talking right over the caller who’s pushing for medical savings accounts. “Honey, you’re right. You have to forgive me. It’s just . . . I can’t . . . You know, that awful medication . . .”
It wrecks her, his even trying to name her illness. She did not imagine him capable. To want her so much that he’s willing to talk about it. She has not realized how much the threat must poison him, too. She feels awkwardly for his hand on the wheel.
“Oh, Ken. It won’t last forever. Only three more doses.” She wants only to reassure him: I won’t puke forever. I’ll get my strength back. My hair. My color. My self.
He shoots her a confused look. And before he can grasp the mix-up, before he can recover, she sees the error register in his eyes. He doesn’t mean her taxol. He means his flurazepam.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”
Another caller pushes for privatization of the Marine Corps.
“Laura. I didn’t mean . . .”
“I know what you meant, Ken.”
She never had him anyway. You can’t miss what you never really had.
After a long time, they see the Lacewood smokestacks. He rushes his words, as if he has to get them out before they hit the edge of town.
“I need you, Laura.”
Need? Like that’s the deciding factor. Like need would clinch it for her. Some inarguable staple.
She’s not even numb. It’s just over. Last week’s lottery ticket. She can’t even remember why they were going out for dinner. She looks at him. Like looking at all the funky hairstyles in her high-school yearbook. Is that how we looked, once? It’s as easy to be kind to him as it is to the mailman.
“Ken. This isn’t how two people are supposed to be.”
“Maybe we should try again. From the beginning.”
She wants to smother him again. “What beginning?”
“Look. Why don’t we just forget all this, and . . . Why don’t we just enjoy each other?”
“I’ve got too much else on my plate to enjoy you, at the moment.”
“I know, honey. I . . . do you want me to leave Julie? Because . . .”
“Ken. Look. I can deal with cancer, or I can deal with you. But I can’t deal with both.”
Something plays across his face. Not distress. The conventions of distress. Distress’s opposite. All these wretched days, she has put off the inevitable break, sure it would devastate him. And he’s relieved. Exonerated. Off the cancerous hook.
He inhales, starting to reason with her again. Going through the motions. Her one, crimped eyebrow silences him.
“Stop here,” she orders. “I’m getting out.”
“Honey, don’t be crazy.”
“Stop the fucking car.”
It takes her as long to walk the last miles in as it took them to drive to Peoria. The air is cool. Mist tattoos her face with tiny needles. She feels like a little girl.
She walks home, wondrous in the dark. She has never seen the town on foot. Never realized how many people live here. Never imagined what the place looks like at eye level. She gets turned around, lost. Lost in her own neighborhood, six streets over from the one where she lives.
For three decades, the firm had shot up like a backwoods boy fed on bear meat. Each return on investment financed new rounds of growth. Clare Soap was now too large for any one Clare to conduct. But by assembling into a single body under the law, that body of men could learn to conduct itself. And so, while the century began to experiment with laissez-faire, Clare began to experiment with management by chartered structure.
Size bore no delight for Samuel. He watched the teams of anonymous labor, transient and unreliable, blow through his swelling assembly plant. He yearned for the days when he knew all his employees’ names by heart. Now he no longer even recognized the men by sight. He lost himself in the thundering thicket of steam-powered shafts and belts. The hulking machinery, custom-built at great expense, breaking down more often than it ran, utterly bewildered him.
He stood baffled before the maze of diverse retailers required to sell into the opening continent, the same continent that Mr. Jefferson once predicted would take a thousand years to settle. He could no longer tell his reliable distributors from the hopelessly inefficient ones. Suppliers changed orders on him without his noticing. Carrying expenses cropped up without cause or occasion.
Chemistry confused him most of all. Samuel knew only that the chemist would soon do to the manufacturer what he and his fellow manufacturers once did to the sedentary trader. The future belonged to the man who could turn sulfur into bleaches, tar into dyes, and saltwater into libation.
Fortunately, Clare Soap’s president did not need to trouble himself with labor or retail or equipment or science. Such was the glory of governance by chain of command. The incorporated firm matured to where each business task now fell to someone with some skill in the matter. For almost every concern, a son or nephew or clever foreman. The grooves and tongues of the second generation meshed like the gears of a most marvelous machine.
Samuel left to his remarkable sister-in-law all monetary concerns. And Julia, with her fiscal skill, kept the corporate open boat from smashing up on the shoals of a prolonged postwar depression. She could not, of course, be an officer of the firm in anything like public fact. J. H. Clare had long since been unmasked as a woman. Men of business would not knowingly deal with such a creature. But Peter Clare, the nominal treasurer, knew enough about cash to act tacitly on his mother’s instructions.
Clare passed out of the fiduciary age still a family business. But Julia brought it into the monetary age a true company. She edged operations onto a cash basis. She greatly curtailed the drain of suppliers’ credit. She steered the business clear of those ever-deeper spirals of murderously expensive borrowing that claimed so many of its competitors.
In these actions, too, Julia beat her favorite political drums. Commerce aimed at manipulating nature on a truly grand scale. For that, it had to put an end to such travesties as sixty-day payments. Debt handcuffed development and held capital hostage to indigence. Inventory had to return hard coin, if anything was to be left over to stoke the next boiler run. The destiny of American business required fiscal terms fast enough to match it.
Lotus-eaters in the lazy plantation latitudes might get away with trafficking in a papier-mâché profitability. Such storybook climes could cleave to the pace of nostalgia as if there were no competition, no tomorrow. But in the North, in the land of turbine and loom, only cash would carry the day.
Julia grasped the radical rearrangement that the coming era required. And her monetary reorganization of the firm opportunely coincided with Clare’s chemical expansion. The same inspiration piloted both. For in Julia’s self-making mind, cash was a kind of chemical conversion, and chemistry, highest finance. Rub two coins together. Boil two reticent compounds. The turn of these ceaseless turbines transmuted coal grit into the heat of heaven.
Clare’s finished soap had always exceeded the worth of its sources. Everything that lived and breathed depended on that same slender edge. The noblest business on earth would have expired without the slight profit residing in conversion. One could not, Julia often tutored her son Peter, long survive by feeding expensive soap to a machine that took it apart into cheap alkali and fatty oils. At each repeat of the seminal lesson, the sickly child would nod profoundly.
Yet mother and son both distrusted extreme profit. Too fat a margin mean
t something was wrong. Today’s excess spelled tomorrow’s liability. Profit bred complacency, and complacency bred the death of endeavor. Advantage existed only to be reinvested.
For a long time, profit seemed to lie in boosting the finished product’s value while holding the cost of raw materials to a minimum. In keeping this gap of gain as wide as possible, Clare naturally sought out the cheapest and best alkali available. But the sheer plenitude and quality of British soda so oiled the soap cycle that it blocked fabrication’s next leap, a leap already made on the other side of the ocean.
Common wisdom had it that you don’t fix what ain’t broke. And yet, Julia argued, by the time the thundering thing is broke, no doctor exists who can put it right again. It became the woman theorist’s favorite litany: Clare needed to shed the plum of near-term profit in order to reach for a vaster fruit.
Even back when Clare’s self-bootstrapping soap works ran on natural potash, it already depended on countless other linked operations. Like those chained catalogs of biblical begats, Clare subsisted on the industry of innumerable ancestors. Its glass, nails, paper, wire, its stoves and boilers, the clocks and bells that regulated the workers’ shifts—the entire Clare factory had been constructed in a score of other so-constructed factories, sprouting up everywhere across the face of the land. Saugus supplied the compressors and pipes needed to build each new harrower. A firm in Lynn sold Saugus the tools it needed to machine its parts. This outfit got its iron from the Bridgewater hoop works and the Norwich rolling mill, which got their coal from the anthracite fields in Pennsylvania, transported by the Lehigh canal company and Reading railroad and New York chartered steamers.
And by the beauty of this closed loop, three of every dozen and a half of those precursor miners, shippers, and forge laborers now worried no more about their skin than the average Red Man. Clare had long since converted the home soapmaking competition into its best customers. Along the way, it also made devoted clients of its own providers.