Thomas Mcguane - Keep the Change

“Stop!” Joe said. “Stop!”

His room was on the ninth floor but he mistakenly took the elevator to the seventh, got off, and had to press the call button and wait once again. A woman in her early thirties came along and pressed the down button.

“Hi,” said Joe. She had a sunny, outdoors look and wore a green-checked dress that suited her pretty figure.

“How are you?”

“I pressed the wrong button.”

“You mean you’re going down?”

“No, I mean in the lobby. I meant to get off at nine.”

“Your face is red,” she said.

He said, “I’m lonely.”

They had leapt through layers of intimacy with this exchange. He could have said anything. He could have asked her to have sex with him and gotten an uncomplicated yes or no response. But an elevator arrived, and she stepped aboard, saying, “Ta-ta.” Presently, his own elevator came and he was on his way to his room. His message light was on. How had she gotten his room number? But it was only Ivan confirming their dinner hour. He stretched out and watched television for a while. His bones ached. He let his mind follow the sirens from the street below. He imagined living here and the thought was a happy one. He could go upstairs to the library or take squash lessons. He could breakfast here every morning before venturing into the street. Finally, a kind of sight which lay buried inside him, stunned to blindness not only by open country but by the sea, would awaken to something he never could have predicted. And he would choose to depict it. Out would come the brushes and paint. Dab, dab, dab.

Joe put on a clean shirt and a blue-and-green-striped silk tie. His suit jacket was rumpled but it was of such acceptable tailoring that he thought it made him look either hard-working or scholarly. He rather liked the figure he cut. When he got to the foyer of the dining room on the twenty-second floor a few minutes before eight, the girl from the seventh floor was there waiting for a table by herself.

“So, we meet again,” he said, a remark so deplorable to him that he immediately understood why she furrowed her brow and smiled formulaically. The intimacy of a short time ago was withdrawn. “So sorry.” The smile changed and became genuine. She turned her wonderful almost Mediterranean face to one side and regarded him. She is about to ask me something, and something big, he thought. She may ask me if I’d like a loan. I don’t know yet but soon I will.

The silver doors of the elevator opened and Ivan Slater stepped out, wearing the latest Italian fashions, wide shoulders, a kind of one-button roll, really an old-fashioned hoodlum suit but made in the bright shades of a discount carpet barn. The shirt was green and the tie was red. He wore great spatulate suede shoes and his pants were held up by what appeared to be a pajama string. His proximity to the fashion centers entitled him to spend a fortune to look like a fool.

Ivan’s round, pumpkinlike head and piercing black eyes seemed to say “Stop the music!” while he regarded his illustrator. Joe remembered when he and Astrid used to stay in New York at Ivan’s apartment, making love by the second-floor glow of streetlights, mantis shadows climbing the walls.

“Hold it right there,” said Joe, turning to the young woman. “You were saying?”

“I was saying?”

“Weren’t you about to say something?”

“I wasn’t but I will if you like. I can see you’d like me to.”

Ivan, watching close, pounded Joe on the back with a sharp laugh. “I see you haven’t lost any of your speed,” he said in a voice that swung the headwaiter around from the middle of the dining room. “Not you,” Ivan called to the headwaiter, jabbing a finger up and down in midair over Joe’s head. “ Him .”

When the headwaiter came, Joe deferred to the lady. She said she was waiting for someone. Joe and Ivan took a table near the middle of the room and Ivan ordered a margarita and buried his face in the menu. Joe asked for a bourbon and water, thinking it seemed like a vaguely out-of-town drink.

“I can’t wait to hear about what you’ve done for Miss X,” said Ivan from behind the menu. Joe was baffled: he thought Miss X was dead in the water.

Right after the drinks arrived, the young lady came to her table, the next one over, by herself. “I’ve been stood up,” she said and grinned. She pulled the corners of her mouth down in a sad-face. Joe shook his head sympathetically and insincerely. Then her embarrassment looked real, the sort of vulnerability one galloped into like a hussar.

While they drank and waited for the waiter to take their dinner order, Ivan brought Joe up to date on the manufacturing problems he had hurdled since they last met. Some of them were quite considerable, having to do with separate manufacturers using different quality-control procedures for each of the components, so that holy terrors existed at the assembly end. With Ivan, personnel matters tended to be “love feasts” while manufacturing matters were “blood baths.” Ivan had been through this before on simpler things and with purely industrial products involving robotics in the garment industry, which had made him unpopular but had made him money while putting others out of work. But this time it was different. This time it was a blood bath disguised as a love feast. To offset its effect, he said, “What made you want to go back to Montana?”

“Nothing else seems to be home.”

“Is that important?”

“It is to me.”

“At this point, right?”

“I think it’s generally important,” said Joe.

“Aw, bullshit,” said Ivan. “ ‘Home’ is a concept whose importance rises when people are down in the mouth. Healthy minds don’t give a big rat’s ass whose country they’re even in. How’s my friend Astrid?”

“She hasn’t seen fit to join me as yet.”

Ivan and Astrid frequently spoke on the telephone and even wrote letters. They would have made an ideal elderly couple. Joe sometimes wondered whether it was only sarcastic brutes like Astrid and Ivan who could rise to uncomplicated fondness.

The soup came, saffron chicken. Joe dipped his spoon in it. Ivan looked quite crumpled in his fashions of the hour. By sitting in his slumped position he caused the shoulders of his jacket to stand straight out beneath his ears. Industrial leadership from this man seemed out of the question. The well-bred diners all around them paused to look twice at Ivan, though as he himself would be quick to point out he could easily buy and sell any one of them. Their vague curiosity was felt by Joe as a pressure. He had seen Ivan burst into a chorus of “I’ll-buy-you’s” before and it wasn’t pretty.

Joe had ordered a piece of scrod and a dinner salad. Ivan had ordered a steak, after inquiring which one was the biggest. Their meals came and this seemed to cheer him. In fact, after a brief moment’s thought, Ivan seemed to be emotionally restored. Ivan was a hearty, life-loving man, and it wasn’t long before he was greedily passing hunks of steak into his mouth. He had to raise and lower his eyebrows with every mouthful to show how good it tasted. A shadow crossed his features while he thought about death, or so Joe assumed.

“The key to me,” Ivan said, “is solitude. I have no family. If I had children, all would be different. I’ve always known that. Alas, my personal miniseries is somewhat different. I continue my wolfish roaming in the capitalist forest. Indeed, right now, I’m having a big love feast with the Chinese. They’re our kind of guys. No malarkey about work being their only natural resource, as per the Japanese. In their plant management practices, they do not live in romantic illusions about inventory control. I greatly prefer them to Japs. Japs are racists. Japs like to set you up in business so they can later steal whatever business you capture. But now the Japs are growing hubristic. Their society is changing. Their kids are narcissistic pukes like ours are. They think they can kick back and take it easy but they don’t have the resource cushion that permits Americans to take dope, watch TV, and get out of shape. As soon as they lose a couple of steps of that big speed, their former allies are going to call in their marks. Meanwhile, the Chinks are in the passing lane with their balanced attitude, their cultural depth, their emerging talents, the scum of communism just beginning to be rinsed from their eyes”—the sedate dining room was quite concentrated on Ivan now—“and they’re looking across the Sea of Japan at their ancestral enemies and crying out, ‘ALL RIGHT YOU FUCKIN’ SLANTS, STAND BACK FROM YOUR TELEVISION SETS! WE CHINKS ARE GOING TO WHIP YOUR FUCKIN’ ASSES!’ ” People stopped eating.