did. That and tobacco. But Daddy, he wanted to pass Doctor Todd’s on to us, so we went to work for him straight out of college and learned on the job. Same as you would do, Leonard. And someday you could pass Doctor Todd’s on to your son, Cornel. And let me tell you, that would make our daddy, Cornel’s great-granddaddy, very happy.
Benjamin says, I know you’re thinking of your writing ambitions, Leonard. And your scholarly interests. You wouldn’t have to give all that up. In anticipation of this conversation I had my secretary—you recall meeting Lucy at our party here last Christmas—I had Lucy find me some famous writers who successfully combined business and literature, and she came up with quite a few. Benjamin draws a notebook from his shirt pocket and opens it.
Fife is touched by this gesture. He is moved that his father-in-law has done this bit of research into a type of work that he ordinarily regards with suspicion and condescension.
Some of them were poets, he says, which makes sense, on account of there being fewer words in poems than novels, he adds and laughs. But look here, he says, tapping his notebook. T. S. Eliot, he was a banker. Won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And Wallace Stevens, who was almost as famous as T. S. Eliot, he ran a big insurance company up in Hartford, Connecticut. You probably know his poetry. A couple were doctors, like Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer. And the English novelist Trollope, he was actually a postal inspector for the government. Mark Twain was a publisher, among other things. Bet you didn’t know that. Published Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs of the War, which kind of surprised me. I always thought Twain was a southerner. A riverboat captain, I seem to recall. Nathaniel Hawthorne, there’s another civil servant. He worked as a customs officer. So did your favourite, Herman Melville. It’s a long list, Leonard. It surprised me.
Never read any of those fellows, Jackson says. Not since college anyhow.
These are not lives that Fife envies or desires for himself, the lives of poets and writers who were also bankers, insurance executives, civil servants, physicians. For Fife, it is the slightly mad ones who count most, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Stephen Crane, and the writers who made youthful poverty attractive, like Hemingway, Joyce, Frost, and Faulkner, whose deprivations and sacrifices when young were rewarded with fame and riches later, while they were still living. None of them, not the mad ones, certainly, and not the bohemians either, would have agreed to be the chief operating officer of a company that manufactures foot powder. None of them would have agreed to be the podiatry-products king of America.
For Fife, it’s humiliating enough as it is, earning a doctorate in literature and working as a part-time adjunct professor and writing unpublished, maybe unpublishable, novels, stories, and poems in the air-conditioned comfort of an apartment—and soon, a house—paid for by his wife’s trust fund. If he accepts Benjamin and Jackson Chapman’s offer to stay here in Richmond and take over his in-laws’ family business, whether he is good at it or not—though he is sure that if Benjamin and Jackson Chapman, who are neither clever nor industrious, can handle the job, he can handle it, too—in a few years he and Alicia and their children will be living in a big brick colonial Carillon Park mansion that overlooks the James River, and he will join the Country Club of Virginia, the Chamber of Commerce, the board of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and one night after a half dozen bourbons and branch he will go into the library and lock the door and put a bullet in his brain.
Whoever, whatever, he is now, though he’s only partially solidified as a self-created being, if he accepts their offer, he will liquefy and eventually vaporize. He will become an invisible, odourless gas, and the best thing he can do to make sense of what he has done to himself is light a match, like one of those self-immolating Vietnamese monks protesting the war in Vietnam.
Fife stands and sets his glass on the coffee table, leaving his half-smoked cigar lying in the large antique pewter plate they’re using as an ashtray. Well, you’ve given me a lot to think on, he says. There’s that Tidewater accent again, he notes, too late to curb it. Of course I’ll need to discuss your offer first with Alicia, he says. This concerns her life as much as it does mine. It’s too late to change our plans to complete the purchase of the Vermont property, he says. Not without forfeiting the deposit. But it’s a good investment, regardless of what we decide, and would make a nice little summer place for someone, if not for us. How soon do you need to know my—our—decision? I was planning on staying in Vermont for a week to get the renovations on the house started.
Benjamin says he should take his time, as it’s the biggest decision he’ll ever make in his life. They can hold Beech & Nettleson off another week or two, no problem. But take longer, if you need to.
Fife says, I think that Alicia and I will want a block of time to consider all the ramifications. Because there’s a lot of ’em, he adds, smiling broadly, as if he’s already made up his mind to accept their offer and has become one of them. A lot of ramifications. I couldn’t commence working for Doctor Todd’s till June first, you realize. When the spring term’s finished in Charlottesville. Probably have to get me a shorter haircut, too, Fife says and laughs.
The Chapman brothers laugh, too. They’re relieved he said it and they didn’t have to. It would not do for Doctor Todd’s CEO-in-training to look like some kind of long-haired hippie protester. He probably ought to get rid of that moustache, too.
We’d have to find us a place to live here in Richmond.
You could always stay with us till you had your own place, Leonard.
We got that big three-bedroom apartment over the garage, Jackson adds.
All Alicia’s doctors are in Charlottesville, Fife says, and she’s due in early June.
We can recommend people here at VCU Medical Center. Best doctors in Virginia are right here, Leonard.
Okay, then. Give me a week to decide. Fife shakes Jackson’s hand with emphasis, as if they have a deal, and then shakes his father-in-law’s hand, and turning, exits quickly from the library, wearing a smile that’s almost a grin, and makes his way up the wide, carpeted stairs.
3
From the darkness, Malcolm says, You okay to take a break, Leo? We don’t have to change cards yet. We’re shooting 1080 by 1920. Sorry, man, this is for Sloan’s benefit. You know all that shit.
Fife says, Yeah, yeah, I’m okay to take a break.
He’s fighting off waves of nausea and thudding back pain. His body is a battlefield, as if his liver is at war with his kidneys and both have been mortally wounded. He’s woozy and suddenly confused about where he is exactly and who’s here with him. As long as he is talking into the mic and being filmed, he is able to forget his body, to wear it like loose clothing, and it doesn’t matter where he is located or who is there with him. But as soon as the camera shuts down and he goes silent, he becomes his body again, and he worries about where it is and who is near it.
I want to keep doing this, he says.
Diana says, You sure you’re not too tired?
From what? Of course I’m not too tired! It’s her voice that he snaps at. No matter what she says, it’s the shriek of an irritated blue jay.
He’s quickly sorry he was sharp with her. Nothing she can do about it, he tells himself. She’s had to overcome the unintended effect of that voice her entire life. Especially its effect on men, men who cultivate their baritone and bass and hold their time signature at 4/4, except when slowing it for emphasis to 3/4. Or dropping it all the way down to half notes for winning arguments. Men who are actors. Men like Fife.
Despite
