Five Fortunes (15 page)

“Sorry—did I get you out of the pool?”

“Hey! You’re back,” he said, sounding pleased.

“Did you call me? I didn’t get the message.”

“I didn’t leave a message, I’m too shy. Where were you?”

“You won’t believe this.”

“I’ll sit down.”

She told him.

Jerry roared with laughter. “Which one?” he wanted to know.

Jerry was an aficionado of fat farms? She told him which one, and he loved it.

“You? With the Rodeo Drive crowd, drinking potassium broth?”

“DeeAnne tricked me. She was afraid I would have a heart attack like my mother if I didn’t stop smoking.”

“I’d thought about that myself. So, did you want to show me the new body?”

“No, I do not. The computer and I are having a family quarrel.”

She explained what had happened.

“I think you just need to rewrite the config.sys file.”

“Why? It was fine before.”

“The Install program has changed it and now you have to change it back.”

“To what? From what?” The silence on the other end of the line meant Jerry was trying to calculate the odds that she could understand the answer to the question if he told her what it was.

“I better come over,” he said.

“Tell Graciela I’m sorry to bust up your Sunday.”

“I have to get dressed, but I’ll be right along.”

“Thanks.”

Five Fortunes / 111

Jerry arrived in forty-five minutes. He was wearing white shorts and a crisp blue and white dress shirt, and driving his Eddie Bauer-model forest green Explorer.

“Thanks for coming,” Carter said at the door.

“Whoa, look at you!” He stood back and gave her a once-over, head to toe. This made her blush.

“Can you really see a difference?”

“You look
great
! Look at this, you’re all…” He made an hourglass shape with his hands. “And I love the hair…”

“I didn’t do anything to the hair.”

“Are you sure? You look very—chic, somehow.”

Carter socked him on the arm. “Chic—what do you know, chic?

You’re a Ukrainian peasant.”

He laughed. “My wives teach me these things.”

“Not me.”

“No, not you. You probably don’t even know what a French manicure is.”

“I’m proud to say I have no idea.”

Jerry was quietly taking in all her domestic arrangements as they walked through the house to her office. She liked that about him…he really noticed what things looked like. Of course it was also what drove him nuts about her: she didn’t. She noticed all kinds of details like license plate numbers and dents in cars, but not style things.

She always meant to sit down with the Design section that came with the Sunday
Times
now and then, but by the time it occurred to her to do it (these moments usually coincided with a sojourn on the throne), Julia had already thrown it out.

Jerry sat down at the computer and turned it on. It went through its boot routine.

“Now, try to make it do anything, and it will tell you it’s lost its mind.”

Jerry typed a DOS command and the machine obediently showed him a string of numbers and letters.

“Okay,” he said, apparently talking to the machine. Carter 112 / Beth Gutcheon

watched. Maybe it was talking to him now after pretending to be dead because it recognized its true owner.

“Let’s try this. First we’ll save this…” He typed some more. “Then we’ll try this…” He typed some more. “Then we’ll have a look at the autoexec.bat.”

When he had finished he pushed the Reset button, and sat waiting for it to run its routines.

“I’d forgotten how slow this thing is,” he said. “It might be faster if we rearranged your memory…”

“Don’t touch it! Just make it work and then don’t change a goddamn thing, ever again.”

They were now looking at a screen with little pictures all over it, the pictures standing for programs.

“I’ll be damned, there it is,” said Carter. She was pointing to an image with the letters of the program she had been trying to install.

Whatever had been clogging the works had been sent skulking back into its hole.

“So, shall we give it a try?”

“No, first I have to see if all my real programs are back.”

Jerry brought them up, one after another. Everything worked fine.

All files were in order. Carter finally relaxed enough to pull over a chair and sit beside him, looking at the screen.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see.”

Jerry clicked at the new program and up came a screen with new pictures all over it, and a voice cried, “Welcome!”

“
Hola
,” said Carter.

“There it is. All you have to do is choose a name for your e-mail address, and sign on.”

“What kind of name?”

“Anything you want, as long as no one else is using it.”

“Are you on this thing?”

“Certainly.”

“What’s your name then?”

“JC9999.”

Five Fortunes / 113

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing. JCarter was taken, JerryC was taken, and LittleBoPeep was taken.”

She laughed. Jerry looked at his watch.

“You’re all set. I’ve got to go. Graciela has people coming.”

“I really appreciate it. You take good care of me.”

“I’m a very nice guy. Ask anyone in Century City.” Jerry’s repu-tation in the legal community was that he never slept, never made a mistake, and never showed mercy.

When he was gone, Carter settled down in her office with the instruction book in her hand again, and began the process of setting up an account. It was so simple it made her suspicious. She didn’t trust the computer when it pretended to be her friend.

Finally she got up her courage and typed a letter.

Yo, Jill—

Wow—it’s big in here!

I feel so modern I may decide to go downtown and have
something pierced.

Love, Auntie Carter

She pushed a button that said it would send the mail, and a message appeared saying it had been sent. Then she sent a message to JC9999, saying:

Thanks for the service call. If this works I may never go to
the post office again. Is everyone online? Even your mother?

What’s her handle? And what’s Graciela making for dinner?

She sent it, and then began poking around to see what there now was in this box on her desk besides mail. She clicked the picture that said Newsstand, and found herself looking at a list of periodicals ranging from the
San Jose Mercury News
to the
Wood Turners Times
.

Suddenly, a window opened in the middle of her screen, and in it appeared: From: JC9999

114 / Beth Gutcheon

Salmon in egg sauce. She’s trying to kill me. And my mother
IS on line, but she never picks up her e-mail. Maybe she will
if you write to her. Her handle is 1 Rugelach.

Underneath there was a space for an answer. Carter wrote:
That’s the scariest thing that ever happened to me. What IS

that?

She waited for a second or two. Then this appeared:
It’s called Instant Mail. Any two people on-line at the same
time can talk to each other.

She answered:

Does the telephone company know about this?

He wrote back:

The question is, does God? I finally understand the term deus
ex machina.

She replied:

I have to hang up now, this is too frightening.

The message came back:

’Bye, kiddo.

Carter, smiling, went back to her electronic Newstand, and wasted hours reading long reviews of new bicycles, and then discovered a magazine for survivalists. After she’d read all about how the U.S.

government was
pretending
that the Soviet Union had collapsed as part of a plot to disarm and enslave its citizens, she spent a long time reading the classified ads for weapons to buy or build. Then she composed an e-mail message for her former mother-in-law.

A
my had always been a favorite with the assistants in Noah’s office. She shopped for the birthday and Christmas presents Noah gave them. She attended their children’s bar mitzvahs and first communions and sent copies of
Bartlett’s Quota-tions
when they graduated from high school. Noah was a shaman in the kingdom of the very sick, a man who worked alone against evil at the cellular level, assisted and attended by women at work and at home. He had male colleagues but he always said his best friend was Amy.

There was a twelve-year difference in their ages, a difference that sometimes felt like a generation. Amy had to remind Noah not to call the nurses his “girls.” Amy had to hint strongly on their fifth wedding anniversary, as they lunched on a flowered terrace in Italy with all of Florence spread like a carpet below them, that if he hadn’t stopped talking about his first wife by their tenth, it would be their last. He made the cut, but barely. Amy and Jill lived always with the shadow of Noah’s two brilliant sons from his first marriage whether he spoke of them or not. These boys had scored in the fourteen hundreds on their college boards; would Jill? If the boys both went to Harvard and Jill didn’t, it must be Amy’s stupid genes that made the difference.

There were, on the other hand, distinct advantages to Amy’s position. Many of Noah’s colleagues openly envied him his juicy young wife. Amy was fun-loving and socially fearless. She once got up from the table, marched outside, and dived into the pool in her evening clothes in the middle of a stultifying suburban dinner party given by a

115

116 / Beth Gutcheon

world-famous oncologist. The (to Noah) wholly unexpected result was that the host began to view Noah with respect for the first time in their long acquaintance, and never failed to send his love to Amy when he and Noah met.

Noah liked the fact that men flirted with Amy and that she gave it right back to them. It was clear that she liked men, and sex, and equally clear that she was as straight as an arrow, a woman who kept the bargains she made. If there was ever a testing undertone to the flirting, to see if any part of her was serious, she never went anywhere near it. At a party she liked to listen, and she liked to laugh, and women liked her as much as men did.

Amy was a great cook, while Noah’s first wife had been fond of saying that what she made for dinner was reservations. Amy enjoyed people so much that she once tried to get Noah to allow her to list their apartment as a Bed and Breakfast, since they had an open guest room, but Noah said no because he couldn’t stand it if people tried to talk to him when he was reading the paper. He did, however, allow her to rip out their nice 1930s Gramercy Park kitchen and put in a restaurant stove and an island with two dishwashers and something called an “appliance garage.” After the dust had cleared he said it was the best money he’d spent in his life. They started having friends in to dinner two or three times a week, sitting on stools in the kitchen chattering while Amy fed them prosciutto wrapped around chunks of melon or fig, and then produced platters of hot, fresh asparagus and perfect racks of lamb. It wasn’t just that they had friends to dinner, it was that they had friends.

Noah became a wine buff. He installed a “cellar” in their storage room in the basement and laid down cases of cabernet. He gained about twenty pounds. He learned to stop deflecting the men’s conversations to politics and sports while the women talked about children and schools and relationships. These younger men, the husbands of Amy’s friends, had all had as much therapy as the wives had, and the wives mostly had high-powered jobs just as the husbands did. Noah liked this. It was new, and it was fun. Some of these men enjoyed laughing at themselves, and had regular lunch and squash dates with

Five Fortunes / 117

each other during which, it appeared, they voluntarily talked about their feelings. Some had weathered professional upsets, some had frankly never hit the marks they had expected to when young. One had had a terrifying bout with melanoma and become quietly spiritual. One had fallen down an alcohol well and managed to climb back out, and was sometimes very funny about the things he had learned in the process. Noah began to see the social advantages of occasionally stepping down off your dignity.

Noah’s fifty-ninth birthday fell two days after Amy and Jill got back from the fat farm. She had given him a surprise party for his fifty-fifth, which apparently
was
a genuine surprise to him, even though you would have thought he’d have noticed the homemade pelmeni for sixty people that had gradually displaced almost everything else in the freezer. The next year she took him to the opera, but it was Benjamin Britten, and he had hated it. The next year she had tickets to a hot musical, but when the day came she was in bed with a fever of 102 so not only did they not go out, they didn’t even sleep in the same room that night. This broke her other favorite birthday tradition of surprising him with some unusually inventive sex.

She had planned all year to recoup the loss on his next birthday, but somehow the whole evening had fallen flat. She had very good tickets to the show they had missed the year before, but he told her only after they were seated that he had seen it already, while she was in Idaho visiting her mother. This rather hurt her feelings, and as a result, the business she’d planned for afterward, with the black and silver bustier, didn’t come off perfectly either. This year she had started early, planning a surprise he would definitely not have experienced before. That was where her long friendship with Noah’s nurses came in.

Noah had been in surgery early in the morning, a sloppy business that should have been simple, and he resented it. He had looked forward to telling his patient in the recovery room that the tumor had been encased, that he had gotten it all and could virtually promise no recurrence. Instead he had encountered a spongey mass of a color and consistency that meant the worst possible news. He had refused to go in to talk to the patient until her young husband, whom he had per-118 / Beth Gutcheon

sonally urged to go on to work, could be found and called back to the hospital.