Early Warning (39 page)

“Some of that is yours. Joe can get a loan and buy you out. The banks are crazy to lend these days. A hundred grand—I could put it in the stock market.” He rattled his glass and ate a piece of ice.

“They're crazy to lend? Rusty Burke told me that getting their loan was horrible. Anyway, interest rates are seven and a half percent. Why would I ask Joe to pay five hundred dollars a month or more so that you can play the stock market? Five hundred dollars is more than our mortgage payment.” Minnie had told her on Monday that Joe, Frank, and Gary, the last Vogel cousin interested in farming, were already tiptoeing around this issue of who owned what and what would be done with it; Claire did not want to get involved. However, every time Paul thought of that two million bucks, he decided not to investigate where she had been at four o'clock Tuesday afternoon, and why, when he saw her, her hair was uncombed. In fact, she had overslept her nap, but she was too annoyed with him to confess.

He adjusted his hat so that his bald spot was covered, then pressed his finger into the skin of his forearm, checking for sunburn. Claire had to wonder why they had built the swimming pool to begin with. He said, “At the very least, if there is value, it's important to diversify the investment, so as not to lose it all if the market plunges.”

“The market? The market for what?”

“Farmland has gone up thirty percent each of the last two years. That's a bubble. Bubbles pop.”

She sat up, set her feet on the concrete, then leaned toward Paul and put her face right up to his, which she knew he hated. She said, “Paul, it's not yours.”

He pulled back, but he said, “It's ours. It's the boys'. Do you think an Ivy League education is cheap? We have to start saving now. There's no telling what those tuitions are going to be in eight years.”

Claire lay back again. Gray had abandoned the float, and was now bouncing up and down on the end of the diving board—another danger. If Paul had had girls, Claire often thought, he would not have had to make men out of them. She said, “There's no telling whether they can get in at this point.”

“They can get in,” said Paul, evidently aghast that his sons' own mother had so little faith in their intellect.

Claire placed her palms together, bent her legs, and put her hands
between her knees, telling herself: Say nothing. Say nothing. That Paul made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year in his practice, and that his father, who was seventy-eight, would certainly leave him a nice portfolio, must remain unsaid. That his parents' six-bedroom English Tudor in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, was worth $150,000 must remain unsaid (though Paul had said this very thing a few weeks earlier). Their own house, with pool and three-car garage, was worth eighty. She adopted a wheedling tone: “Come on, sweetie. You didn't use to be so interested in money. You knew you weren't marrying into the landed gentry.”

Paul smiled, but then he said, “I hadn't met your brother then.”

“Joe is a farmer, not landed gentry.”

“I mean Frank.”

“Frank has plenty of money.” Claire meant that he didn't need any more, but she saw immediately that what Paul meant was that Frank was to be simultaneously mistrusted and emulated. She sighed. She had come to think that there was a golden mean for money. Around that mean, which Claire estimated to be about five thousand a month, you worried less than if you had too little, and less than if you had too much. There was space in your inner life for other interests.

She was thinking of this because of Eliot. Eliot was older than Paul—fifty-five, he said—and balder, too—his well-shaped pate had a neatly trimmed pepper-and-salt fringe. He talked more than Paul, but he never talked about money, never talked about his children or his ex-wife, never talked about what people should or could be doing that they were not at present doing (one of Paul's favorite topics). He did not talk about hippies or weather. He talked about books. His favorite phrase was “Did you ever read,” as in “Did you ever read Auden's ‘Stop All the Clocks'?”; “Did you ever read ‘The Rocking Horse Winner,' that's by Lawrence?”; “Say, did you ever read ‘Bitter-Sweet'?” And then, “ ‘Ah, my dear angry Lord, / Since thou dost love, yet strike; / Cast down, yet help afford; / Sure I will do the like.' ”

She'd known Eliot now for six weeks, since she'd met him at the car wash on Hickman. He'd been carrying a book then, too, reading while waiting for his car to emerge. She'd gotten his attention by saying she'd read that book
—The Golden Bowl
—though of course she
never had. It was by her bed now, however, along with two of his favorites,
The Good Soldier
and
The Plague.
Just last night, Paul had said, “Why are you reading those books?”

“They're supposed to be good.”

“Who says?”

She almost told him.

Now he got up and went over to the thermometer. “Ninety-seven in the shade. Gray should come in. I'm going to close down the house. We need to relax and cool off for half an hour before ingesting any food.”

She was not going to sleep with Eliot—he was much too old and reminded her of teachers she'd had at North Usherton High. Besides, Dr. Sadler had to remain solitary and pristine in his position as her great love. He would be thirty-six now, and according to Paul was married. Another thing to be grateful for—that he had vanished at the apex of his beauty. But she would keep her date for coffee with Eliot tomorrow at ten. She would have the last chapters of
The Golden Bowl
finished, too, and they would discuss them intelligently, just as if they were in London, or at least in New York City, and not in Des Moines.

Claire picked up her towel. Paul said, “It's all very well to be sentimental about your family and about the farm, but you have to be realistic, too. You understand that, don't you?” And then he stepped closer. “Don't you?” She nodded, the way she always did.

—

TO SAVE ON
heating oil, Janet and Marla had closed the door of her room and wrapped themselves in blankets. Marla was in the chair, Janet on the bed. They were reading
The Madwoman of Chaillot
, their third session, and they were nearing the end of the first act. Two of Marla's plays had been put on, the best one, a one-act called
Cedar Rose Park
, by the Berkeley Rep. She went to the Temple with Janet every Sunday, but she complained about it and swore she was going to write a play about Reverend Jones called
Loudmouth.

Though she didn't like the Giraudoux play very much, Marla always wanted to finish. She read,
“Dans les trois cent cinquante. Nous n'enverrons qu'aux chefs.”
Her pronunciation had gotten better, but it
wasn't perfect, so Janet repeated the line slightly more fluently, then waited while Marla pondered it for a moment before translating it as “In the three hundred and fifty. We will not send the heads.” This was correct as far as Janet was concerned, so she nodded and Marla read the next line,
“Qui va les distribuer? Surtout pas le sourd-muet! On lui rend en moyenne quatre-vingt-dix-neuf enveloppes sur cent!”
Marla was now twenty-four, and seriously worried that she was getting too old to make her way in France. She was to turn twenty-five at the end of March, so she planned to leave by the first of February, to take advantage of the two months of her remaining youth when she arrived in Paris. She had gotten her passport; her savings amounted to $1,498.76. She planned to put aside another two hundred in the two months before she left, and with luck, she would find a wealthy Frenchman to take her on when she got there. This aspect of the whole thing Janet could not help her with, but she had no doubt that the willing Frenchman would present himself—Marla was as careful of her appearance as any Frenchwoman Janet had ever seen, and much more friendly. She corrected Marla's translation, and Marla went on to the next line. One thing they had done in the summer was to translate
Cedar Rose Park
into French—not writing it down, but saying it aloud. Marla was proud; she did not want to be less than perfect from the moment of her arrival.

The door opened, and Lucas slipped into the room. Marla kept reading, but Janet made a smooch and waved him over to the bed. Then she did what she could never resist doing, which was to press herself into Lucas as tightly as she could. His skin tonight was chilly enough to make her shiver. When Marla finished reading, Janet said, “You are cold, baby.” He kissed her, kicked off his shoes, pulled one edge of the blanket around himself, and said, “Keep going. I like to hear it.”

Marla read,
“Vous, Fabrice, vous me reconduisez. Si, si, vous allez venir. Vous êtes encore tous pâle. J'ai de la vieille chartreuse. J'en bois un verre tous les ans, et l'année dernière j'ai oublié. Vous le boirez.”
Janet corrected her pronunciation of
boirez.
Her translation was excellent. Janet nodded. Lucas took the book out of her hand, stared at it for a moment, then shook his head. “Makes no sense to me.” He gave the book back to her.

Marla said, “Really, Lucas, you should act. You look good, you
don't give a shit about performing in front of an audience, and you've got style.”

Lucas shrugged.

“Start now. You're perfect. Pisses me off, you wasting your talents while the rest of us work our asses flat.”

Lucas laughed. “Show me when that happens.”

Marla read the next line. Cat and Marla disagreed about how Janet should handle Lucas.

Marla said he had stage presence, which was rare in a drummer, too bad he had to sit at the back, because the lead singer ought to have a bag over his head, he was so ugly. Lucas was way out ahead of all of them, but he didn't have a lick of ambition, “and that seems fine to you now, but give it ten years,” she often said.

Cat, who had given up all her acting ambitions and was going to community college in marketing, had a list as long as your arm of musicians who thought they were going to hit the jackpot, and of course never did. She thought Janet should get Lucas to go for his GED and then learn something like accounting or library science. She said, “He smiles, white people aren't afraid of him—he should make the best of what he's got.”

Janet turned the page. Almost the end of the first act. Lucas leaned against her while they kept reading, correcting, translating. By the time they were finished, Janet thought he was asleep, but Marla wasn't going to allow that. She tossed down her book and jumped out of her blanket. She went over to the bookcase, stared for a moment, then chose a volume. She dropped it in Lucas's lap, and he sat up a little bit. She said, “Let's try it.”

“Let's try what?”

“Let's try you taking a little advice.”

Janet did not think that Lucas was looking for someone to tell him what to do. She could see it when he was watching Reverend Jones—when Reverend Jones was saying something he agreed with, his face looked receptive, and when Reverend Jones was saying something he disagreed with, his face looked blank. He was like a radio that could receive only what it wanted to receive. His face went blank now. Janet took a little breath and held it in.

Marla leaned toward him, took the book, and opened it to a page. It was the first page of
Miss Julie
, from a book of one-act plays Janet
had studied in college. She said to Janet, “You be Miss Julie, I'll be Kristin, and Lucas can be Jean.” Then she read the stage directions in a clear voice and handed the book to Lucas. Lucas stared at it and handed it back. Since she had her hand on his arm, Janet could feel it go tense. “Oh, come on,” said Marla. “It's my favorite game. Just a page. Or two.”

There was a feeling Janet hated—the feeling of looking back and forth between two people who did not agree. She glanced at Marla, who was smiling, and then down at the blanket, which she smoothed over her knee. The room no longer seemed cold.

Lucas cleared his throat. As far as Janet knew, Lucas didn't have a temper, but she was beginning to get nervous, as if he did have a temper. Marla, however, was never intimidated. She said, “Just say the first line, ‘Miss Julie's crazy again tonight; absolutely crazy.' ”

He said the line in a natural way.

Marla took the book and said, “ ‘Oh, so you're back, are you?' ” She made it sound a little teasing, as if she was glad to see him and would be more glad in a minute or two. She again handed Lucas the book.

Lucas stared at the far wall for a space, then said, “I'm not into this. I hate plays.”

“Why is that?” said Marla.

“People keep talking and talking, and if they don't start yelling eventually, the audience falls asleep. I can only take so much talking.”

Janet realized that this was true.

Marla was not to be deterred by mere theory. She said, “Just read the speech.” The two of them stared at one another for a long moment, Marla looking more and more like a teacher—a French teacher, stylish and haughty, but a teacher nonetheless. And then she shifted, actress that she was—a smile burst out that was both saucy and cheerful, and she said, “You could do me a favor, Mr. Jordan, just this once.”

Lucas's gaze went back to the page. After a minute of silence, he looked back at Marla and said the speech, shaping it, giving it warmth. Then he put down the book, took Janet's hand, and set Janet's hand on top of the book. He held it there. Marla said, “My Lord, you are stubborn. But I thought you'd be good, and you are. Just because I'm telling you what to do doesn't mean you can't do it.”

Yes, it does, thought Janet.

Lucas smiled his brilliant and charismatic smile. No wonder Marla wanted him to act—if he was in your play, audiences would come back for more and more and more.

There was a long silence, during which Marla sat down again and picked up the French play. She said another line, Janet corrected her, and she said it again. Lucas leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. With her hand still on the book underneath his, Janet and Marla finished
The Madwoman of Chaillot.
As soon as they had read the last line, Marla stood up, leaned toward Lucas, and said, “I'm going to write a play just for you. A one-act.”