Some Great Thing (16 page)

There was a plan for a memorial to great public servants.

There was a plan for an art gallery made of glass.

He had yet to realize what it all might mean for him.

After Eleanor and Renée, after the travel agent and his accountant, no one, for months, perhaps a year. Years. Just the women in his head, scenarios and desires from the past reimagined with limited variation.

The scenarios with Matty, in his head for so long, kept growing. He knew her better than he ever actually came to know her. That mouth, her confidence, that face insisting itself on the face of everyone else who populated his fantasies. But how could he ever see Matty again when Leonard had ceased inviting him to dinners? When all his colleagues, her friends, were beginning to shun him?

People in marriages say they lose their identities; they become, for better or worse, an amalgam of two people. That may be the
case. But what was this life alone? Would Simon amount to the sum of the people he met, whom he wouldn’t meet often or long? He tried befriending some of his neighbors, some of the men, to test himself, to see if he could refrain from desiring their wives. He tried to prove that his house, in the middle of all theirs, was legitimate, was indeed a house, not just a vessel for a single, restless man. But the most he could ever bring himself to say was, “You’ll have to come over for a drink some time.” He shouted it from his car a few times. The neighbor to his right was once remarking upon the weather, and before he finished his remark, Simon shouted that invitation.

“I can’t believe how much snow we’ve had this year,” the neighbor said. “Last year, around this time, it was definitely looking like …”

“You’ll have to come over for a drink some time!”

And of course the man just stared. He did his best to seem grateful, cheerful, but he certainly never came knocking, and Simon never repeated his invitation because what was the point of having a man over who talked about snow? The man’s wife might have made snow seem charming, but the man himself … Men are predictably earnest or jocular. He knew all their routines.

No one, nothing, would ever surprise him or grow to a pleasant conclusion. The houses around him, especially his own house, seemed more and more like manifestations of mediocrity, not just vessels, but constant reminders of the boundaries that prevented Simon from growing, from learning who he really was. The people within them might once have been fascinating, perhaps still were, but how could Simon ever truly reach them? How could they ever learn who he was?

All he could keep was an unchanged persona and a hope or a hunger for other people’s lives.

T
HE DREAMBOOK ONCE MENTIONED
converting the canal into a skating rink in winter. That idea was crossed out and made real. The longest skating rink in the world!

But most of the ideas remained dreams.

Someone had once proposed a wind tunnel. A gigantic white tube, is how the proposal described it.

O
NE WAY TO STOP
the blur, to keep things still and give them color, was to learn as much about as many people as he could.

He looked through the personnel files of his colleagues.

He read everyone’s, including his own, which he discreetly improved and corrected. He took the liberty of correcting Renée’s here and there, not according to what he had learned from her, but according to what he had originally imagined she should be. He created new lives for himself and all of his colleagues.

Susan, his secretary, with contacts in personnel, was his aid. She was not only helpful, she was slim and lascivious, five feet six and three-quarter inches in heels stuck firm in the mind of Simon.

“Susan,” he said, “let’s have a look at our colleagues.”

She was an excellent facilitator, knew where to find everything, was open to all suggestion, gossiped homicidally, wore clothes like fleeting thoughts. It was inevitable that Simon would love her. She was always dropping things and bending far forward to pick them up. He was often there to help her. Bosses and their secretaries don’t really fall in love with each other. They don’t really even sleep together. They unite to share knowledge. The beating heart of any successful organization is a coupling boss and secretary: her wisdom, her acuity, her knowledge of process, of people, her dreams of dominion, combined with his jerky movements—such union is the only guarantee of an organization’s vitality. Simon’s coupling with Susan did much to improve his knowledge.

For one, he soon learned that he needn’t read their files to gain knowledge of his colleagues. Susan knew it all.

In Simon’s kitchen at home, on a Sunday morning in June, Simon mumbled the following thought with his lips on Susan’s thigh:

“Leonard’s file gives no home address. I wonder why that is.”

“Because he doesn’t want anyone to know where he lives.”

Simon thought for a moment. “Why do you think that is?” he asked.

“I
know
why it is. He’s bought a new house. Use your lips. His secretary told me. Mmm. But he doesn’t want mmm people to know. He has suspicious deals. With builders. Mmm. His secretary told me.”

Simon’s chin was wet like he was dreaming of hunger. A breeze was blowing through the house, from a window in the front, into the kitchen, over the counter, past his chin, out the kitchen window where the world was watching.

“He’s always taking bribes. His secretary’s been through his trousers. Mmm. Wads of cash. I think I’m going to come … no.”

“I wonder if it is a very grand house. Why does he not want people to know where it is?”

“Keep going. I think he just, you know, yeah … just doesn’t want to know, people to … I’m not … where … how he got his house … God … there’s something suspicious.”

“I see,” said Simon. His face was getting wetter. “Do you know where he lives?”

“Yes. Would you mind if I sort of … turned around? There. Nice. No, I don’t … I do know where he lives but … I don’t know exactly … God, that’s nice …”

Why did Simon want to know Leonard’s address? Why not keep it all imaginary, everything, everyone, where Leonard lived, what he looked like in his living room? Why did he want to know?

“I know the address. Why do you want to know? Don’t tell me … don’t tell me yet … don’t tell me … don’t tell me …”

The breeze, persuasive, kept blowing through the house—through the foyer, through the dining room, into

“I’m coming.”

Past Simon’s chin.

He did not wait to be asked again. He hadn’t even known the answer until it came out of his mouth. “I want to know,” he said, “because I think I am interested in his wife, Matty.”

T
HE BREEZE BLEW OVER
the houses, carrying Simon’s sentence with it. The sentence tickled its belly on roofs, luxuriated in the sun, spent several weeks blowing around. It took a while before it caused trouble.

Susan did not like to hear, naturally, that Simon was interested in someone else, not while she was there on his counter naked from the waist down. So she curtly told him where Leonard had bought his house and within a couple of weeks she had told enough people at work that Simon was interested in Matty that Leonard caught wind of it.

And, eventually, when he tired of his own surveys and introducing himself to strangers, Simon went to that area of new houses, and knocked on Matty’s door.

T
HERE
’
S MY JERRY UP
high.

Look up there.

Giggling.

Having a jiggle.

I discovered when he was around the age of five that he liked to ride in the shovel of a tractor. He was on-site one morning and I guess I lost track of him for a while. Next thing I see is Tony Espolito driving toward me in a tractor about to pick up a load and there’s my Jerry sitting sort of primly in the shovel with a laugh on his face, Tony unaware of it all. Jerry was up high, coming lower, lower, lower with his smile and a pair of bouncing happy fists. (He wasn’t hurt.)

So I’m taking him for a ride now—that’s what he’s doing up there. He is still around five or so, maybe six. And that’s a new John Deere (maker of the finest tractors since I don’t care when), which I bought cash in hand, on the barrel, bang.

If you keep looking up, seeing Jerry’s dangling feet, the new yellow shovel, the blue sky he’s eating, you don’t have to notice that it’s January, that you can’t feel your fingers. And if you just hold on to that lever there, just hold this speed and keep it straight, I’m going to climb up the arm and join Jerry in the shovel.

Ohh, it’s blue! It’s bright and goddamn loud, isn’t it, buddy?

I think he loved the noise, the rumble of it. I loved that smile on him. He just kept looking forward, rumbling into the blue, bouncing his fists on his knees and swinging his feet.

I’ll tell you what the feeling is from my point of view. It doesn’t feel like flying. It doesn’t feel like you’re sitting on a tractor looking like a goof. It doesn’t feel comfortable. It doesn’t feel fast. It doesn’t
feel like nothing. It’s slow enough and the sky is empty enough that you feel like you’re standing still. But the noise and the shake of the thing make you feel like you’re moving in every direction, and you are actually going fast enough that if you fell you would feel it (especially if you were five) and you would probably be run over.

But everything’s all right and Jerry doesn’t need me there in the shovel with him, so I’ll climb back down and drive, thanks. That’s how I prefer it—Jerry up high, sun in the sky, and me driving after him.

That’s, at least, how I preferred it then. I don’t know why. It felt safer. Not for Jerry, for me. Driving straight down a half-built road, Jerry always in front of me.

T
HINGS WERE GOING WELL
(my friend). I was into my second big development. I had a couple of crews now.

I owned things. New things. Some equipment is better to own secondhand, but some that was smarter to own new, I owned, and when I wasn’t using it I leased it out. Admire me, if you wish.

I was still completely in debt, but I was in a phase where I felt rich despite my debt. I understood that there are huge mountains under the oceans, which are still mountains even though they’re not above ground.

The first development was sold, every brick in it (boy), and that’s a happy moment. I loved—I still love—being able to look at that development and turn my back on it. To turn around, or walk past it, like it’s any other neighborhood that has been there for a while. That is true manhood, I tell you, it’s a sign that you are becoming one of the wise ones, when you know you have created something big and you can walk right past it because it is just your modest contribution to the bigness of the world. It’s just another neighborhood. It melted my insides and chafed a mile of skin, but it is just another neighborhood. I truly had the wisdom to think that.

I wanted to turn my back on it, too, because I was also sick of living there. Our house wouldn’t keep clean, for one thing. Kathleen
could
not look after Jerry and keep the feckin house clean, and it occurred to me that I could actually build a house that looked after some of the cleaning itself. (I was ahead of my time.) And a new sort of house was exactly what I needed for another development.

K
ATHLEEN AND I HAD
been through a rough patch, a bumpy ride, some trouble, whatever you pale, lazy people like to label the plights of strangers. We had some trouble, I’ll be the first to admit it, but we worked through it.

It reached its worst when, on top of all my labor, I realized that to make it all worth anything I had to perfect my business sense, my office work. You can’t just build in secret, draw back a curtain to reveal what you’ve built and watch while strangers start bidding for it. From beginning to end, it has to be planned, plotted, written down, proposed, asked for, noticed, advertised—all that. It’s not the side of things I liked.

I had to set up a small office at home, get a calculator and typewriter, filing cabinets, all sorts of expensive stuff that welcomed me home after a long day at work, and I never saw Kathleen. It was too much for me sometimes and it appeared to be too much for Kathleen.

One thing I never quite understood was the fact that Kathleen would get angry when Jerry and I were together. He would come into my study sometimes, sneaking out of bed, and we’d have a little chat. (It was very rare, because I was usually home too late.) Within thirty seconds Kathleen would be in my study telling Jerry to get back to bed. It didn’t matter where she had been, whether she had been fast asleep or in the farthest corner of the house; as soon as Jerry and I exchanged some words Kathleen was onto us.

I was only just getting used to Jerry as a human, so they were important chats. I have some shame in admitting that I had been a bit scared when Jerry first changed from a baby to a boy to a bigger proper boy. It’s a little spooky to watch a thing become a person. So our chats were about testing each other, partly. He would look at me closely and I would feel a bit shy.

“What’s up, big guy?”

“I painted.”

“Oh yeah. What did you paint?”

“I dunno.”

“Oh yeah.”

But it wasn’t like I wanted Kathleen to come screaming at him, or at us. We should have spent more time together.

It felt like Jerry and I were conspirators. Maybe it was something to do with where we met: a typewriter, filing cabinets, and a calculator were the tools of conspiracies.

No?

Anyway, after Jerry came and chatted maybe ten or so times (probably spread out over a year, so that each time he was a different boy), Kathleen really lost her temper. She pushed the typewriter off the desk, I really shouted at her for one of the first times, and Jerry stopped his visits.

I don’t remember exactly how that fight started—it was something aside from Jerry talking to me. I think that might have been the time when she ran into the room and threw an empty roll of toilet paper at me, wondering how I could use so much if I was never at home. Anyway, it was soon “What is he doing in here at this time of night!” and then the usual buildup with Jerry somehow disappearing from the room and Kathleen hitting something. This time she knocked the typewriter off the desk.