The Arriviste. James Wallenstein
haven’t even opened the file. I don’t know the first thing about his business.”
“The usual hocus pocus, charts, graphs, tables . . .” Mickey couldn’t be bothered to read business proposals and relied on me to brief him. It was part of his pretense to being duly diligent. Though he disregarded what I told him when it wasn’t what he wanted to hear, he couldn’t or wouldn’t proceed without consulting me, as if by pointing out the risks of a venture I was diminishing them. It wasn’t short-term prospects that concerned him anyway. Our interests and those of the businesses we funded weren’t always strictly aligned. Their early struggles could be turned to our advantage.
We described ourselves as sleeping partners, declining to mention even to ourselves the more active role we might take in a business’s later stages. We were certainly aware of it, yet it went unacknowledged. I don’t know what Mickey felt about it: something less than pride, I’m sure, but also less than shame. Whatever this feeling, he didn’t let it get in the way of his appraisal of entrepreneurs. It was hopefulness he looked for in them, the hopefulness of the man who’s said to himself “If only I can find a way to get started” and who sustains himself by saying so.
This could make the entrepreneur grateful to the investor who’d help him get his start, lead him to accept unfavorable terms that boxed him in but left this investor room to maneuver. By being too accommodating when it comes to what might seem to be technicalities—redemption dates, rates of conversion, events of default—a man who thinks he is finally going to be working for himself may discover that he has traded one boss for another, whose power, if it is less overbearing from day to day, may ultimately be more insidious.
“It looks good to me. Still, I may be missing something in the numbers,” Mickey said. “I count on you to tell me.”
The snow was letting up, or had stopped. I couldn’t tell whether the flakes I saw drifting around were falling from the sky or had blown from the trees.
“There’s nothing you really want me to tell you, Mickey. You know it all already.”
“I want to know whether his assumptions are sound and his estimates hold water.”
“And what if I tell you they don’t?”
“I thought you said you hadn’t looked at them.”
“I haven’t. I’m speaking hypothetically.”
“Let’s not cross that bridge before we have to. My guess is that the man may be on to something.” What Mickey meant was that he himself might be on to something. “Which night next week are we on for?”
There was no escaping the meeting. The thought of the pleas I’d have to endure if I refused was enough to secure my capitulation. Mickey and Bud seemed to feel that their connection had to pass through me. Though a party to their dealings, I was also to serve as the witness to them. But what kind of witness? If I was neutral, it was by virtue of being biased against both sides.
Coffee cup in hand, I was headed for the door when the phone rang again. Mickey often called back a second after we had hung up—the thing he’d have forgotten to mention was usually his real reason for calling. Fearing his postscripts, I let it ring.
The scent from a patch of chrysanthemums that clung to life hit me as I went through the door. I crossed a section of the lawn and stopped beside an upside-down wheelbarrow that leaned against a tree stump. A few birds that hadn’t had the sense to fly south flitted around it. The air was surprisingly warm and still, and the horizon was the yellow of a guttering match flame. Directly overhead, a whiter light tinged the outline of a cloud, an enormous snow crystal flaking into millions like a giant sloughing its skin. Snowflakes hissed as they melted in my hair.
Frances nosed her way out the storm door and bounded through the thin blanket of snow, kicking up her back legs, and trawling her snout through the powder. I threw snowballs and she tried to fetch them. After a dozen or so, she figured out that I was putting her on and capped off her frisk by barreling straight into me. I barreled back. The bout was brief but furious. I came away with slobber-caked snow melting on my wrists and waist and under the tongues of my brogues.
I marched to the bottom of the driveway, picked up the paper, and dusted off the tube into which it had been rolled. On snowy days, Peter and I had taken this walk for the paper, playing catch on the way back. The tube and paper together made an excellent football, easy for a little boy to grip. As I went back up the path, I saw the moss beside it nearly hidden, the juniper beginning to kneel, the tool-shed ramp like a model of a glacier. The sand trucks were already out on the access road; the flagstones were rumbling.
But from upstairs, through the arched window opposite the medicine-chest mirror, the same patch of lawn looked cheerless, the light a flat gray over the meager snow cover. The tree stump and wheelbarrow were hardly distinguishable from the rocks beside them, and the birds looked smaller than the whiskers I was shaving. I had just come out of the shower and kept having to wipe steam from the glass.
I cleared the mirror once more and saw a man in it, far off in the background, on the lawn beside the stump and the barrow, where I’d been. His image was all of the length of a finger and quickly passed out of the frame. I tried to recall him as soon as he was gone: the tilt of his fedora brim, his camel hair overcoat the color of a giblet-rich gravy—a youthful, prosperous-looking, raffish figure. But how could I have gathered all this from a tiny, fleeting image in a foggy mirror? It wasn’t possible. I’d taken myself in, overlaid a daydream on a steamy reflection.
This dismissal was disappointing. The appearance had restored the exhilaration that had come to me with the snowfall. I rinsed the last of the lather from my face, unstopped the drain, wiped the mirror. And I had the sense that if I looked into it hard enough, I might see the barrow wheel spinning in the wind, the sparrows flitting, the stump casting a blue shadow.
I heard a sharp rapping on the front door as I knotted my necktie. A new housekeeper, Magda, had been coming in on weekdays, though she usually arrived after I was gone. Maybe, worrying that the snow would hold her up, she had left earlier than usual. As I trotted down to let her in, I reminded myself to set her straight on a few things. She cleaned in out-of-the-way places, worked miracles on fixtures and moldings, and turned up an old parking permit and backup sets of keys in a trophy cup she’d taken down to polish. But this meticulousness was bound up with a tendency to protest my burgeoning bachelor disorder by piling miscellaneous items in visible locations. I’d come home to cough-drop tins, eyeglass cases, bank books, cigarette packs, tie clips, pocket combs and collar stays heaped like jacks that children play with; to a mountain of books and magazines and newspapers teetering on a coffee table beneath an urn that was no paperweight. The idea that particular record albums belonged in particular record jackets also escaped her: Saint-Saëns would turn up in Mancini, who would turn up in Stravinsky, which should have left Stravinsky on the turntable but didn’t. Her method of promoting temperance also rankled. She put liquor bottles on top of the refrigerator. This was no reflex. The refrigerator was tall and Magda was not. She’d have needed the stepladder to get them up there. Sometimes she set them so far back that I needed it myself.
I was glad she’d come early. It would be easier to explain to her in person. I opened the door and felt my face fall.
“What’s the matter, fella? Expecting someone better looking?”
Bud brushed the snow off his rich-looking overcoat, stamped his feet on the doormat, and stepped inside. We were standing too near each other. The brim of his fedora nearly grazed my hair. I retreated a little, but not much. “It was you,” I muttered.
“Come again?”
“On the lawn. A couple of minutes ago.”
“Well, sure. I had to cross it to get here. Actually, I got a call when I started over. I had to go and come back again.” His gaze drifted past me as he spoke, toward the top of a credenza where I threw the mail after opening it. A bank statement lay open there, near enough for him to identify but not to read.
“So, what can I do for you?” As I was asking the question,