The Dream Merchant Read online

  Even now, living with the girl, who feels like my enemy, he pulls me back in. I am enticed by his scheme, maybe “connected” is more accurate, preposterous and gaudy though it is. This has nothing to do with logic. Jim’s ideas are the dreams of my own father.

  Jim lays out the terrain: stacks of Wow Cards piled high in stores across America. He’ll put them in topless bars, gas stations, and eventually they’ll go into supermarkets. The Wow Card is a debit card that works in ATM machines, but its primary purpose is to allow a buyer to rent pornography anonymously at steeply discounted prices. Jim talks a little about the value of pornography while the girl smiles as if he’s preparing to open a flower shop. My friend can turn a deal on its side and make it seem adventurous or cozy or sexy or the very answer to a life of pain and wanting. I’ve seen him do it many times. For me his pitch is a child’s song.

  We’ll soon buy a big fishing boat together, he says to me, a sixty footer. We’ll cruise the islands in style.

  She listens to each word and seems to adore him.

  He’s laughing. The gap from his missing front tooth looks ridiculous. There’s no money for a cap, but having nothing, starting again, unhampered, is so much sweeter than standing pat and being mediocre. The greatest thrill for a gambler, he’d told me years before, is losing a fortune and bottoming out. And now he’s flat broke, never been this low since he was a child growing up on the outskirts of Edmonton. And he feels content watching her clean their little place and listening to the yammer of her Israeli children, or turning on Frank Sinatra.

  She smiles. She loves him. I don’t know. Maybe she loves him.

  3.

  When the girl frets or feels idle or homesick, he uses the past like roses and chocolates. Jim has described to her the houses: the last condo he and Phyllis lived in had seven bathrooms, the girl was amused about the bathrooms, never having had more than one herself, and the river of money, for years everything he touched turned to money. She squirms when he talks about high times, his two new Rolls-Royces parked in front of the cavernous modern house Jim had built on a peninsula for his second wife, Ava. There were two smaller houses on the property for the servants. Some called it the finest estate in Canada. In the morning, Jim chose between the white convertible and the silver sedan depending on his mood or whom he was meeting for lunch. He told Mara about the night Tony Bennett crooned from speakers in Jim’s Learjet “Fly Me to the Moon” while Jim and Ava screwed face-to-face in his buttery leather recliner, screwed and laughed, and then he pointed to a glowing full moon blasting through the oval window as the plane descended from thirty thousand feet into Vegas. That was when Jim was at the very top. I heard Jim describe the moment at parties in the big condo on Brickell Avenue above the Intracoastal where he often entertained with Phyllis—it was the perfect address for Jim’s marketing business.

  There was always a subtext to his tales, usually narrated to several eager men standing off from the main group (most nights of the week you would find Jim holding forth at some party or business gathering); more or less, the stories all led to the same happy conclusion: If I can have yachts and planes, gorgeous women, all the thousands I need to play at Caesars, so can you. It’s easy. First you have to understand your hot button. What is your hot button? Take a look at yourself. Be honest. What is it that really turns you on? Do you love beautiful young women? Do you love big-game fishing? Fast cars? Cars? Have you seen my new BMW 740? Come on, let’s walk outside a moment.

  For sure, Jim was gauche with his Cuban cigars and ornamental women, his flashy Liberace suits festooned with a pocket handkerchief folded into a pouf (his suits were inspired by his father and Jim owned a hundred in his heyday, had a hanging closet the size of a nice bedroom, lined with fine shoes on custom teak racks, a hundred poufs, three hundred silk ties, on and on), but so what if he might have been more understated? Jim was always fun to be with, charming, a good storyteller, and best of all, he tantalized with the impossible, opened hearts with the lure of opportunity. Jim promised very big things. He intrigued lawyers and doctors who resented working for an hourly wage, grand though it might be, and failed entrepreneurs who could feel the deep dream of wealth, the very essence of their life’s meaning slipping away, the aching sadness of it; but in his later years he devoted more of his energy to the vast dispirited army of the unemployed and the nearly unemployed, maids, janitors, repairmen, and the like, who had never tasted the sweet life, didn’t have a clue. He’d educate them. Are you ready to make a move? he’d ask when the moment was right. Jim dallied in the late afternoon with cranky, aging housewives, had them buying and sometimes offering withering favors. His favorites, no question, were the ones barely hearing, bent and shaking with years; Jim called to them with his music, a sinuous stirring refrain to awaken forgetting seniors stacked in rank, forgotten rooms around North Miami. Are you ready to make a move? He just got a warm feeling selling the ancient and near to dying, tapping into the greater good. Look at my BMW, he said. (Or, That’s my yacht, or, Have you seen my apartment with its own gym, seven bathrooms? or, Did I tell you about the years I lived in the Amazon? Yeah, the Brazilian Amazon. Or, Do you like a good cigar?) Feel the softness of the black leather, go ahead, sit down, sink in. Let me turn the sound system on; feel how it surrounds you, makes you feel like a new man. Go ahead, grab the wheel. Look at the glint in your eye. The years are falling off you, man. You’re a free spirit. Would you like to own one of these? The company gives me this for free. You could have one.

  Why not, if Jim could do it with his high school education? Actually, he was a dropout, and look at the way he lived, where he’d been, what he owned, the big boat docked in the backyard, his joie de vivre, no despair, no despair on the horizon, you could have all of this, but custom-tailored to your own desires. First, understand your hot button. He laid it out step-by-step—how to get there, layered in the joys of life, the myriad sensual pleasures he knew so well.

  The products changed over the years I knew him—it is inevitable in network marketing—but Jim was a constant, selling hope, new chances and possibilities, the big time. How could anyone turn down a resplendent, prosperous, sensuous, healthy, never-ending future? Many didn’t. Jim brought tens of thousands of men and women into his organizations, no exaggeration, tens of thousands.… His present state, his poverty and occasional listlessness (“docility,” as Phyllis described it to me—perhaps defensively—one afternoon when I was visiting her) as we see him now, at this late hour in the story (except when Mara touches him and Jim begins to awaken in her hand, his sweet smile then like a country boy coming of age in western Canada), is assuaged by the restless army of dream workers waiting behind him; he will tap them again, when he is ready. Jim is getting ready.

  4.

  It’s been nearly forty-eight hours since my first visit to Jim’s new life. I would have returned the following afternoon to their place in Homestead, except before I drove off Jim had leaned into the open window of my compact rented car and said, Buddy, do me a favor, skip a day or two before you come out again. You know, enjoy the beach.

  Reasonable, I suppose. A new couple needs their space. But I felt angry and talked to myself the whole forty-five-minute drive back to Miami. What the hell did Jim think I was doing in a cheap motel near the Miami airport?

  Every year I come down from New York to visit him four or five times—twenty years of visits. He picks me up in the airport in a shiny new Mercedes, Jaguar, or BMW—bad times or good he drives a luxury sedan.

  These trips—usually three days or five days, occasionally a week if we’re going fishing—have burrowed themselves into my psyche. Usually from the airport we drive to a fancy waterfront restaurant on South Beach, called the Blue Moon, and pick up the thread of a dozen conversations about women or pro football or making money or how life is soon going to take a fantastic turn. Most of my Florida time we are in Jim’s condo. While he makes his calls I sit on their terrace and smell the ocean. I read a novel or work on the d
raft of an article or interview. My ideas feel fresher, more enduring, within the familiar glow of Jim’s wholesale optimism and glamour—okay, tarnished glamour.

  Instead of coming over I spent the last two days sitting in my motel room stewing in my juices. I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate.

  Now I am driving back to their place along an unfamiliar road. I feel disheartened and lost. I’ve just called his cell. I think he said, Take a right, then a left, right at the church. I don’t see any church, but maybe I’ve missed it in the bleak landscape of run-down homogenous strip malls, one after the next. Jim was speaking so quickly on the cell. She was talking in the background and he was distracted, not thinking about what he was saying. Jim is getting old, forgetful. I’ve already called him twice for directions, but I have to call again. I know that he’ll make an annoying joke that I’ve never been good navigating on the land.

  Soon he and I are standing on their back patio that is irretrievably grimy, as though sixty years of tenants have never once bothered to hose down the rough crumbling concrete. There are some worn plastic kid toys piled in a corner. Jim tries to push the sliding glass door closed so we can talk in privacy, but the tracks are bent and the door catches in place, remaining partially open.

  My old friend leans in close, striking an intimacy that leeches away my anger. He wants me to understand.

  I had to do this to save myself, he explains quietly. For the last year with Phyllis I was broken into pieces that didn’t fit. I no longer knew who I was. Jim pauses for me to take this in. I began thinking about suicide. Did you know that?

  I shook my head, no.

  Well, I became obsessed with the idea, he said in a quavery voice. Every day I sat by the bay window in front of the canal and imagined putting a gun to my head.

  He gestures toward the door, where we can see Mara puttering in the kitchen and from time to time looking our way, trying to catch his eye.

  She makes me feel young again. When we make love I could be twenty years old. Jim glances her way, and his expression turns daffy.

  All of our conversations soon loop back to Mara. In fact, everything that we talk about is a prelude to expressing his love and gratitude or some detail about his girl that charms him to distraction. He is like an adolescent boy.

  Jim is now drawn into the kitchen, where they kiss a few times. I watch through the dirty glass feeling stiff as a board.

  After twenty minutes he rushes out the front door to buy beer and pizza. It is awkward for me to be alone with her. I really don’t know what to say, but apparently Mara has been waiting for this opportunity to speak privately and goes right to the point.

  I want to know about him, she says in her fetching Israeli accent. Everything. Tell me about his girlfriends. How many lovers Jim has had? Please.

  I shake my head, no idea.

  Tell me. I’m so curious.

  Sixty, I answer. Who knows how many? Mara, come on. This is ridiculous.

  But she persists, flirts, how many lovers?

  Mara wrests open my delight while I should be alerting my friend, Caution, Jim, storm warnings ahead.

  How many in the last year before he met me? I know that you know this. He tells you everything. He whispers to you.

  Then she pauses a beat: Why is this wrong? I love him. (She lingers on the word “love.” How could he ever resist her?) What’s wrong? She repeats looking into my mind, my mistrust.

  Jim doesn’t tell me everything, I offer weakly. But in truth, Jim eludes me, especially now. I don’t understand how he moves on without regret. How much has he told her? I wonder if he described the girl in Brazil, eighteen years old with a voluptuous body; she forgave his sins and he desired her endlessly. (Jim is circumspect about certain events, and for good reason. He speaks with careful pauses or he coughs for time.) One night after dusk the two of them were in a hammock in the jungle clearing, wrapped in mosquito netting, drenched and dozing or making love while an armed guard stood a few feet away like a stone figure. Jim held the girl in his arms and decided that he loved her, he would marry her and bring her back to the States. He can still hear the rustling, screaming sounds of nights in the rain forest with terror and ecstasy all around, the smell of her in his hair and fingernails. But he can’t remember her name. Maybe tomorrow he’ll remember.

  Jim has a history of shedding past lives, molting. Bankruptcy is absolution from debts and love and remorse, particularly remorse. He can no longer recall half the deals or whose fault it was. He confuses the names of his ex-wives. Does he feel remorse for Phyllis? I can’t tell. Even when his face approaches real grief or guilt, Jim listens for the phone, jumps to grab it lest he’ll miss an opportunity.

  * * *

  After pizza he and Mara are back lying on the ratty sofa making out. The girl doesn’t mind the missing tooth. She explores the dark hollow with her tongue and then takes a breath. I love you, Jim. I love you too, baby. Jim’s discolored toes are curled every which way like stubby claws; some nails are missing. One ankle is swollen and stained black-and-blue. She has perfect toes with pink nail polish, shows me her feet for approval. She keeps looking at me until I nod and say they are beautiful. Mara tests me even while I test her. She smiles finally, but it enrages her that I will pass judgment, tell Jim what I think, yes or no, like passing on a heifer.

  He puts a trembling hand—his hand always trembles now—on her girlish ass without sag or even a trace of cellulite. Her toes curl into his. I love Jim’s feet, she says, and then begins to kiss him again, ardently. I wonder if she is going to suck his dead toes. I’m afraid she will. She doesn’t, but I can feel the weirdness of their turn-on, shivering explorations and discoveries, their laughs and little nips, her small rosy nipples; he savors them between his stiff fingers. His chest is powerful but sagging despite curls, push-ups, and crunches every morning. She soothes his tearing, hooded eyes with her cool mouth. Her hand finds his gray pubic hair, while I watch. No secrets, she says to me earnestly.

  This Israeli woman keeps Jim coming time after time as though he were a boy, three times, one night five times. She milks him with her soft hand, entices him back. In the morning Jim wakes up hard. She mounts him, laughing, rides Jim while he tenderly holds her adolescent breasts, careful not to hurt his little girl.

  Whenever we are alone he describes their sex, every detail. It is painful to listen, but he needs for me to know as though I am his Boswell, chronicling for all time the great miracle in his life.

  I am back watching them from the La-Z-Boy. In the huge condo this was my favorite television chair for pro football. He and I used to bet one hundred dollars on every game we watched together. He would let me choose either team. It didn’t matter to him. What mattered was the action.

  They are curled around each other, fondling, kissing. Jim puts a shaking hand to his chest, a habit whenever he feels stress. His heart is fluttering. He calls it a warning. He notices that I notice and raises a finger. He doesn’t want the girl to know.

  5.

  Jim has been telling me stories from his life since the first days of our friendship. From time to time he’s even suggested that I write a book about him. Journalists hear this a lot from people. But Jim is a very smart man with a sense for time passing and for the uniqueness of his story. Also, he’s very persistent. For years he has wanted this from me and my reticence has annoyed him. Some years ago he said to me there is another writer he knows and if I won’t write the book he’ll begin talking to the other guy, give him the scuffed-up tan briefcase that still smells of jungle rot and is crammed with memorabilia and yellowing photographs of Brazil. Ridiculous. It was the kind of blackmail I grew up with in my father’s home. Except my dad had a feather trigger and it was very dangerous to cross him—he would take away his love for years. Anyhow, Jim’s book became a tease and a tension between us. I would tell him I was thinking about it. From the scenes he recounted to me over the years, it was a story with incredible runs of glory and degradation. He hint
ed at violence, lots of it, but held back telling me these parts. During the span of our friendship I was writing pieces for a half-dozen national magazines, hustling ideas to editors, pressing to meet deadlines. So for me, Jim’s “book” wasn’t a real option. In any case, I was more interested in our fun together, listening to the shoptalk of salesmen, sometimes going fishing and diving with him. Writing his book would almost surely change things, maybe ruin us.

  But Jim’s final rebirth turned me around. I have long harbored a fantasy about leaving my home for distant lands, saying good-bye to my family, my worn, comfortable chair beside the front window, starting a new life and, more important, a different way of seeing the world. I’ve wondered if I could shed my fears and basic format, even outrun the shadow of my age, or if I would quickly fall back into myself. As I’ve gotten older this fantasy has seemed both more far-fetched and also more poignant and impossible to neglect. With Mara onstage, Jim’s “book” began to percolate inside me.

  Now when I visited him in their shabby place, I began to ask questions about his past as if he were the subject of a piece I was researching. I took notes and a few times I brought along my little tape recorder. Jim was delighted by this display of his importance. Even then, they fooled around on the sofa, acted like they couldn’t wait for me to leave so they could retire to their cubbyhole bedroom. I wanted to hear about the businesses in Canada, his partner, Marvin. Yes, Marvin. From the little I already knew, Marvin was physically disgusting and a world-class schemer, a true Svengali mastermind. And Jim’s wives. I knew Phyllis of course, but about the alluring Ava I knew next to nothing except he had never fully gotten over her. Of course I wanted every detail about my friend’s life in the jungle. But their sex was always in the air and that’s what Jim really cared about, or that’s how it seemed at the time. I still hadn’t fully committed to writing the book. Jim was still enticing me, pulling away the bait. He was such a con artist.