T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Gesh grunted his assent. My eyes burned with indignation over the wrongs and inequities Phil had suffered — not to mention the wrongs and inequities I’d suffered myself. “I know what you mean,” I said. We were sitting around the living room, idle and impatient, and we were profoundly drunk.

Society was rotten to the core, I said. It was dog eat dog and every man for himself. I was fed up with academics, real-estate agents and carpenters alike. You gave them everything — heart and soul and sweat — and they gave you nothing in return, not even the satisfaction of a job well done.

Phil said he knew exactly how I felt.

Gesh was perched on the windowsill, staring into his glass. After a moment he raised his head. “Society sucks,” he said with real vehemence, and then waved his hand in disgust. “That happy hippie crap.” I knew what he was driving at. The whole hippie ethic — beads, beards, brotherhood, the community of man — it had all been bullshit, a subterfuge to keep us from realizing that there were no jobs, the economy was in trouble and the resources of the world going up in smoke. And we’d bought it, lived it, invented it. For all those years.

His laugh was bitter. We were older now, he said, and wiser. We knew what counted: money. Money, and nothing else.

It was late afternoon, the day before we were to dine at Vogelsang’s, work out the last-minute details and then head up to the summer camp. I felt good. I felt ready. As ready as I had ever been for anything in my life. For six months I’d been idle, living off what I’d made from my last remodeling job (the housing market had closed up like a fist) and the pittance they gave me at the community college for teaching a summer course in freshman English, sinking lower into the pit of inactivity, self-denigration and loneliness. Now, sitting there in the glow of anticipation, the moment rich and immediate, Phil and his friend at my side like supporters at a pep rally, I felt purged of all that. Sunlight suffused the room like a dream of kings, Bruce Springsteen was singing about the Promised Land, we were drinking gimlets from a pitcher. I looked out over the rooftops of the city and pictured a fleet of ships lying at anchor, masts stepped and washed in golden light, and I felt like Coronado, like CortéeAs, gazing on the vessels that would take them across the flashing seas and into the vestibule of the treasury of the gods.

“Saltimbocca alla romana,” Vogelsang announced, backing through the door with a platter in each hand. “With steamed asparagus, and homemade pasta on the side.”

The table was littered with the remains of the first four courses, with beer bottles and fiascos of wine. After the antipasto, Vogelsang had served a dish of agnolotti, a brodo di pesce and caponata. About halfway through the soupcourse, Dowst joined us, bobbing into the room in blazer and button-down shirt, apologizing for his lateness and showing us a mouthful of gleaming equine teeth. We were eating so hard we barely noticed him.

When the meat had gone round, I tore a hunk of bread from the fresh-baked loaf and made a joke — in dialect, with Chico Marx flourishes — about the “unafortunate congregation of our-a late associates at-a the Appalachian lodge-a.” Phil laughed. “This is more like the last supper,” he said. No one else cracked a smile. There was a silence, broken only by the moist rhetoric of mastication and the ring of silverware. Finally Phil looked up and said: “Good stuff, Vogelsang. It jumps in your mouth.”

Vogelsang said he knew the chefs at Vanessi’s and Little Joe’s personally, and that he’d been invited into the kitchen on several occasions. He was eating a minuscule portion himself — no more than a single bite of each dish — and supplementing it with what looked like soggy cornflakes. “You’re not eating?” I said.

“Oh, God.” Vogelsang looked offended. “This stuff is much too rich for me.” He was eating a mixture of dried flaked fish and pine nuts. The saltimbocca stuck in my throat.

“Listen, Herb,” Gesh broke in, “why don’t you fill us in on the house and all — you know, what sort of thing we can expect up there.” The silence that fell over the table was absolute: no fork clattered, no lip smacked or tooth champed. Vogelsang’s Christian name was Herbert, but no one called him by his Christian name, not even his mother. He was known as Vogelsang, pure and simple. One of his girlfriends — I can’t recall her name — began calling him “Vogie” after the three of us had sat through a double bill of The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. The next time I saw him he was alone.

Gesh’s words sank into the silence, absorbed like the butter that oozed into the hot bread before him. Gesh knew perfectly well that our benefactor hated to be addressed as Herb or Herbert or any other variant of his given name — I’d specifically warned him against it — and Vogelsang knew that Gesh was trying to provoke him. But if Vogelsang was anything, he was imperturbable. I’d never seen him angry, had never seen him display any emotion whatever, for that matter. To be angry, frightened, happy, moved, was a weakness, a loss of control — and Vogelsang never lost control. “Certainly,” he said, flashing Gesh a smile, “what do you want to know?”

Gesh was tearing at his veal with knife and fork, talking through the wedge of it stuffed inside his cheek. “Well, shit,” he said, “I mean we’re going to be living out there in the asshole of nowhere for the next nine months while you’re chewing the fat down at Vanessi’s — I want to know what kind of shape the place is in, does it have running water and electricity and all that?”

“Oh, yes,” Vogelsang said, reaching for his fish flakes, “yes, it has all the essentials.”

“You’ve got a generator for electricity,” Dowst said. “Runs off an old Briggs and Stratton engine. The water comes from a big redwood holding tank just up the hill from the cabin.”

“The place is perfectly adequate,” Vogelsang said. “With a little work it could be really cozy.” Aorta was sitting beside him. Her eyes caught mine and she smiled — she actually smiled — before looking down into her wineglass. I watched a piece of veal disappear between her black lips, then turned my attention back to Vogelsang. “It used to be a hunting lodge back in the twenties,” he was saying. “Great view, you’ve got a hilltop overgrown with fir and oak and madrone. There’s even a couple of redwoods.”

I could see the place. Or rather I could see the cabin we’d rented each summer when I was a kid. It was in Vermont, by the side of a lake. There was the smell of pinesap and wet leaves, the close comforting feel of tree trunks grown so thick your eyes couldn’t penetrate a hundred feet. In the morning, loons cried like lost souls and tanagers whistled outside the window. I remembered sitting around the stone fireplace at night, sunburned and happy, playing hearts with my father. This was going to be all right, I thought. Soothing. Rustic. An adventure. When I tuned back into the conversation, Dowst was talking about worm castings and the need for soil preparation. “The drainage stinks up there,” he was saying, “too heavy a clay content. So what you’ve got to do is create your own environment for each plant — a sand-mulch mixture for drainage and root expression, and the worm castings for nitrogen …”

Later, over espresso and millefoglie, the lights turned low and Vogelsang’s museum fading into the shadows, we got down to business. The cabin, the supplies, the equipment, the seeds, the eight-dollar per diem Vogelsang would front Gesh, Phil and me each week above and beyond our share of the final profits, the disposal of the mature plants (Vogelsang had a connection who would buy all we could produce, cash up front, no questions asked) — all this was easy. It was Gesh who asked for clarification of the one point that had crouched in all our minds like a stalking beast: “What if we get busted?”