Green Ice (3 page)

Wiley spent quite a lot of time with Galanoy after that. At first he suspected the man might be trying to con him into something. Then he told himself he was only amused by the way Galanoy carried on about making millions easy. Galanoy hardly ever spoke of anything else—except his ulcer. He had a peptic ulcer, which he complained about with a kind of pride.

Harry Galanoy.

He didn’t convert Wiley. The proselytizing had been done long before—in the public school system, where it was said that as undoubtedly as George Washington was the father of our country, anyone could make it from nothing all the way to the top in this land.

God bless.

During the 1940s, Wiley had sat in elementary classrooms where “No talking” was a commandment and talking back an offense, and had his thinking saturated with the need to achieve. Had ambition tied in a knot to his future manhood. There were names to keep in mind, such as Frick and Carnegie, Ford, Mellon and John D. himself, during the course in U.S. History—compulsory. John D. appeared cadaverous in photographs. Skin and bones and millions of dollars. Wiley always thought there was something incongruous and repulsive in that, but it would be irreverent to mention it. A Miss Pearson and a Miss Selkirk and a Mr. Mosely taught and tested and passed Wiley on in the general direction of opportunity.

Anyone who didn’t make it was a lamebrain.

It was a free-for-all.

The red, white, and blue grindstone.

“A guy can burn his nose and his ass down to the bone on it,” Galanoy said.

Wiley had already come to that conclusion.

Galanoy had a stockpile of gimmicks in mind.

The one he and Wiley went partners on was a mail-order idea. The investment was $15,000.

Galanoy sold his car for $1500 and scraped up another $1000. Wiley had $2000 in checking. He called home, and before he could finish explaining the deal, his father said he’d send the money right off.
Your money
, his father called it. His parents had been putting into a separate account whatever Wiley had sent over the years. Saving it for when he might want it. Ten thousand and some.

He lost it all.

Galanoy moved somewhere and never called.

Wiley tried not to remember him.

He tried to concentrate on his job at Litting. His imagination kept veering toward ways to make a financial killing. After about six months of paydays, he quit, gave in to it and, ever since, had been on the cycle:

Think of a gimmick.

Hold down a job long enough to get a stake.

Try the gimmick.

Go back to a job.

Think of another gimmick.

Often it was just a matter of timing. He tried selling organic food before the big demand. The same with hanging plants for city apartments. He was a little late getting into posters, water-beds, backgammon sets. He missed out entirely on an indoor tennis complex in Westchester, American Indian jewelry, musk oil, mood rings, pet rocks, Art Deco furniture, imprinted T-shirts, and frozen yogurt.

He had bad luck with a tropical fish venture when the heating system failed on a January night, froze the entire stock in blocks of ice that shattered the glass of all the aquariums.

Korean ginseng. He was right on time with that, when its libidinal benefits were only in the rumor stage. He’d heard about it from a pretty Korean model who chomped on those phallic-shaped roots as though they were carrots—and demonstrated excellent results. She claimed she had a cheap and plentiful source of ginseng roots, tea, and extract—a man in Namchiang, Korea, which happened to be her hometown. Wiley put up the money. She flew. The only excuse he could find to forgive her was she must have been extremely homesick.

Wiley had another business adventure with an Oriental. A man named Chun Ta Ha, who hoped his constant smile compensated for his inability to speak English. Ta Ha had jumped ship in Boston, made his way to New York City and was working in the Hop Tee Hand Laundry on West Seventy-second Street when Wiley met him. He was the son of a farmer in Canton and was astonished at the prices being paid here for Chinese vegetables. Wiley saw the possibilities. Ta Ha would grow, they both would reap.

They rented an abandoned warehouse downtown, in the Bowery area. A large, dark, awfully damp place. Perfect. They bought forty-three field-kitchen kettles from an army surplus dealer in New Jersey. The kettles were four feet in diameter, had drain holes in their bottoms. They also bought five hundred pounds of mung beans, a portion of which they washed and soaked and put into the kettles. Ta Ha hosed the beans down three or four times a day, kept them damp.

They were in business.

Within five days they had their first harvest. Two tons of bean sprouts they could wholesale for twenty-five cents a pound.

A thousand dollars, just like that.

What was great about it was the beans did practically all the work. With more kettles and more beans, there could be a harvest every day. All they had to do was pack them. A thousand dollars a day, every day. A take of over a quarter million dollars a year.

Ta Ha giggled, and Wiley’s voice echoed in that place as he joyfully shouted, “Sprout, you little moneymaking bastards!”

On the seventh day of production Wiley received a frantic telephone call in Chinese from Ta Ha. Wiley didn’t know what was wrong until he saw it.

Rats had eaten all the bean sprouts.

Rats. There was no way to stop them. It seemed as though the word had been passed to every rodent in the city. Despite traps, poisons, and wire mesh covers, the rats kept on coming—to eat Wiley and Ta Ha out of a fortune.

In such ways success eluded Wiley. However, each near-miss only made him all the more determined. His schemes weren’t really quixotic, he told himself; his time would come.

Now there he was at
the
office, thirty-two New York City floors above the ordinary level of life. His hopes this day were higher than ever. He was close to pulling off a deal that would net him millions. A simple little gimmick: clear plastic disks about the size of a quarter that could be worn as medallions or charms or carried in the pocket. Sealed within each disk would be a pinch of dirt, certified to be a pinch of the old homeland. From Ireland or Italy, Poland, Greece, Puerto Rico, Israel, or wherever. Millions of people were latter-day Americans. Most families had been here only two or three generations. Practically the entire country retained pride in some foreign land.

Wiley had gotten the idea one Sunday when trying to get crosstown in a cab while there was a parade on Fifth Avenue. The cab driver was bitching: “Every fucking Saturday and Sunday and every fucking holiday somebody’s jamming up traffic with a parade. If it ain’t the wops, it’s the Polacks or somebody.”

The very next day Wiley found a manufacturer in Brooklyn who specialized in molding the sort of cheap little plastic toys that came in bubble-gum machines. The manufacturer would deliver the disks complete with dirt sealed inside for two cents a unit in million-unit lots. It took considerable time and effort to arrange for dirt to be shipped from the various countries, but finally Wiley had it lined up.

He took his gimmick to the largest cereal company. Positive reaction. A fantastic premium, they thought. An actual pinch of the homeland for a boxtop and only fifty cents. The cereal people gave Wiley an initial order for twenty million units. If the premiums were moderately successful they’d reorder, and projected they should be able to sell at least another twenty to thirty million.

Wiley stood to make a nickel a unit—a million dollars right off.

The cereal people had one condition. They didn’t want any part of a fraud. The soil had to be absolutely certified as to its foreign origin.

Absolutely, Wiley agreed.

And today was the day.

There were 17 fifty-gallon drums of foreign soil sitting in the customs depot on the dock in Hoboken. Wiley couldn’t think of much else. He wasn’t even aware of Miss Kerby, the secretary standing in the doorway.

“I was wondering if it was all right with you if I didn’t get back from lunch on time,” she said. “I want to go Christmas shopping at Bloomies.”

Wiley glanced at her quizzically. All he’d heard was Bloomies.

“Mr. Farley and Mr. Carlino said it was all right with them,” Miss Kerby said.

Wiley shared Miss Kerby with Farley and Carlino. She had a huge behind, a tiny voice, and a habit of blaming others for her mistakes. “Said
what
was all right?”

Miss Kerby repeated her request.

Wiley didn’t care if she went to Macy’s in Nairobi—as a matter of fact, he’d prefer she did.

“Don’t forget your lunch with Mr. Codd,” Miss Kerby said.

“I thought Farley was taking him.”

“It’s your turn.” She smiled for punishment.

Wiley decided not to let it spoil his day. Nothing could spoil this day.

He lighted another cigarette from the still-burning stub of his last, transferred a thick sheaf of papers from incoming to outgoing. He’d take care of those next time around—but doubted he’d still be there.

The phone rang.

Miss Kerby didn’t get it, just for spite.

It was the divorce lawyer: “I have news for you. I met with her lawyer this morning. She was there.”

Wiley and Jennifer had been married for three years come January, separated for the last six months. His first marriage, her second.

“She’s asking for too much, but that’s normal,” the divorce lawyer said.

“What more does she want?” It seemed every week the ante had gone up.

“I didn’t realize she was so unstable.”

“She cried.”

“No.”

“She turned her back to you.”

“What a ball-breaker!”

Wiley resented anyone else saying that.

“Tell you one thing, I’d like to get this woman on the stand. I’d tear her to pieces.”

“I don’t really want to give her a hard time,” Wiley said.

“You haven’t been seeing her, have you?”

“No.”

“I mean it now, it’s important. Have you been going to bed with her?”

Wiley was sure someone else had been doing that.

“From what I made of her this morning, if she ever got in court under heavy fire she’d fold,” the divorce lawyer said.

“Drop her case?”

“No, pull a collapse.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. Literally. She’d collapse.”

“She’s not that fragile.”

“Soon as she started getting the worst of it she’d have a mental breakdown, blame you, put herself into one of those rest-home mansions up in Scarsdale or someplace. No divorce. You couldn’t divorce her for seven years, and you’d be stuck for a hundred a day plus psychiatric expenses.”

“That ever happen?”

“Some guys have been paying for years. Poor bastards.”

“Jennifer wouldn’t go that far.”

“Want to bet seven years on it? Hold a second … I’ve got to take this other call.”

The silence made Wiley aware he was clenching the receiver. Before the call he’d been only normally tense. He sat forward, flexed his back, let his head go dead weight, and rotated it one way and then the other. A deep breath. Closed eyes.

Recall.

Her with him, wading through dry fall grass on Nantucket. To a tree set apart as though estranged. Leafless, black, networked branches. The nearest house, a new one that looked unoccupied, a hundred yards away. The ocean only a silver line on the afternoon horizon because the land was so level. Sitting, lying, the grass all around tall enough to hide them. It took a while for them to become confident enough of the place. Their sex-making was no swifter than it would have been if they had been surely secluded—and better than any of the several times before, with a sort of intensifying thievery to it.

And afterward … her thinking aloud: “We go well together.”

They laughed at the word
go
.

She had also said at other times: “You’re spoiling me for any other man, which, of course, would be fine if there never had to be anyone else.” And: “I’m vulnerable again. My telling you I am proves it.” And: “I promise I’ll never expect more of you than I do now.”

She had helped him fight the rats, stayed up all night two nights in a row with him in that horrible damp warehouse, trying to protect the bean sprouts. The rats didn’t frighten her. The first one she saw, she attacked with a piece of pipe, broke its back.

Right after the rats they had gone to Arlington, Virginia, where no waiting period was required. Bought a nosegay at one of the flower shops around the corner from the courthouse and were serviced by the same judge who had married the Kissingers. She gave her age as twenty-nine on the license application. A two-year lie.

Jennifer looked married the moment she was. Her eyes and mouth seemed relieved.

As it turned out—she had a thin voice that became whinier.

Insisted on calling him Joseph.

When she was nude, her walk changed, shorter steps, a sort of awkward ballerina waddle with toes pointed out.

Yellow to purplish bruises on her thighs from everyday slight collisions, because her body was almost depleted of potassium from years of taking extremely strong diuretics. She was compulsive about keeping underweight, feared gaining like death.

She had every possible thing monogrammed.

She sent away for a dwarf banana tree to grow at home. And a hanging strawberry garden that didn’t have a chance above the radiator.

Soiled or not, whatever she wore she sent to the cleaners after only one wearing.

She had a nightly bowel habit that was the most unromantic thing he could have possibly heard just before bedtime.

As it turned out …

“I’m fed up with your bigshot ideas. I want security. I want to own a house and be like everyone else. You’re a compulsive neurotic. You and your fucking financial roller coaster,” she said. “If you quit this job, I’m going to quit you. I mean it.”

Her and him in the dark in their king-size bed. A space like a firebreak between them.

“Hello … you still there?” The divorce lawyer.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry about the interruption. I didn’t think it would take that long. Anyway, now she’s accusing you of trying to influence her to commit sodomy.”