Lydia Millet: How the Dead Dream

At twenty-two he had an office in Santa Monica and two assistants much older than he, one in her mid-thirties, the other fifty-three. What might have seemed an awkward age discrepancy to someone of different character made no impression on him; he knew only that all the job applicants in their twenties had been incompetent. Various could not spell, add, or type, two did not remember his name after he shook their hands, and one came into the room wearing earphones, which she did not take off until several minutes after he began speaking to her; a dumpy woman with large, frizzy hair told him she enjoyed Primal Scream Therapy. If he had even briefly thought to find himself the proud employer of a secretary young, smart, coy and possibly wearing bright lipstick, this vanished when the interviews began.

Finally he was satisfied with his choice of amanuensis; that she was almost his mother's age was to him unworthy of note, since she was smart and came to respect his own efficiency, first in planning, then in making money. He knew that when she took the job she believed it might not last, but within weeks she trusted him and was even somewhat deferential. She hired for him a second woman, also competent, who handled contracts and bookkeeping.

The two were quiet and kept to themselves, though on occasions such as holidays or his birthday they would step forward with small tokens. Further they sent a rare orchid on his behalf for Mother's Day, without needing to ask; on Angela's birthday and Christmas they delivered Bonsai trees and shiitake mushroom logs. This seemed to please her and made T. feel, for his part, that he was treating her well. He kept Susan's and Julie's birthdays and anniversaries of hire on record and made sure never to overlook them. He knew Susan was married and had a daughter who was in a wheelchair; he knew Julie had an old and incontinent cat named Bookchin and shunned Christmas in favor of a holiday called Kwanzaa. He had never heard of this holiday before he met her.

"It's a Swahili word. It celebrates the African-American community," she told him.

"I see," he nodded, though he was confused since Julie was a Caucasian Protestant from Milwaukee.

"I personally observe it as a gesture of solidarity."

"Very thoughtful," he said. "Are there, uh, certain special days? Rituals?"

"Basically it's a harvest festival. To celebrate the crops."

"African-American harvest," he said, nodding.

She and Susan were his only intimates in the city; he trusted them, in part for their capable hands and in part for the puzzle of their willingness to labor indefinitely in menial positions, which linked them to him in a pact of loyalty.

What wings lifted him then, what banks shored him tip along the river of work? Not the mechanics of the deal: rather it was the faces and the words of those he moved through and past and with in seeking his object, the nuance of his own approach in knowing and predicting the impulses and calculations behind them, that captured his interest. In pitching his company's plans or services it fell to him to read the tics and quirks of investors as he sat across from them in restaurants, county commissioners as he rode the elevator beside them, urban planners across tables in well-lit rooms. He caught the small tells that accompanied a lie, the fluster and the cover-up that followed an inadvertent truth, the way these varied among persons: but he was most astute in that he gave the appearance of being caught up in his own velocity when in fact his mind was carefully fixed on the other.

Although always watchful, always wedded to the close observation of detail, he pretended otherwise. He projected a confident nonchalance, an air of serene neutrality, and with this attitude would casually make reference to vast sums. The rules for his own comportment were few and simple, and first among them was, always speak as though unimpressed by large figures; always convey the impression that the grandiose is commonplace.

And so it will be.

In time he planned to leave development and begin to forge a path elsewhere. It wasn't that he needed to be wellknown-he would be happy to be the gray eminence behind a publicly traded logo-more that he wanted to have a hand in the revolutions of the market itself, in the ebb and the flow. But he needed to make connections. That other people found a community easily struck him as mysterious; the city was a wide network of generic streets and buildings, among which small figures were suspended in casual segregation. The space between them was air and metal. Mainly it was air, though also concrete and sheetrock and glass.

How was this air to be bridged?

Finally he joined an exclusive racquet club whose monthly membership dues would have paid the rent on a small mansion; a dully middle-class clientele would be no use to him. He hired a racquetball instructor and went to the courts four or five times a week; when he was competent he wrote his name down on lists. His games were played with older men mostly, who shook his hand with a too-firm grip beforehand and afterward wore their white towels around their necks and talked to him at their lockers while they sprayed their armpits for too long with powerful deodorants. He averted his eyes from their stocky and hairy bodies as they changed, the deep tans that looked like plum-colored bruises in the hollows of their sagging chests. He walked with them out to the parking lot. One showed him a motorcycle; another tried to interest him in sex. Most had wives and girlfriends and business cards, and some of them had capital to invest.

One of the younger players, name of Fulton, was blustering and arrogant and tried hard to impress. He spoke in jocular terms of his wife's intimacies and wanted T. to be aware of the dimensions of his new power yacht, anchored over in the Marina, which had platinum bathroom fixtures; he made sure that T. knew the cost of his redwood cabin in Tahoe.

"What the hell do you do for fun, man?" asked Fulton, after a game T. had played neatly but without much vigor. "All work and no play."

"I'm a dull boy," said T. "Granted. But if you've got cash sitting around you're not doing much with, I can make you more than a ten percent return on your money. Far more."

"Color me hooked," said Fulton. "Wanna pick up a beer?"

Over the beers T. pulled out a copy of his business plan and prospectus, at which Fulton barely glanced. He pitched the current project steadily-the purchase and renovation of an industrial park on a Superfund site-and Fulton nodded generously, though in fact, T. suspected, he understood almost nothing. But he liked to use words that implied he was in the know, and to be treated as though he was not faking it.

Still, T. assumed it was a waste of time until three beers in.

"Get your lawyer to write up the whole deal and fax it to my guy," said Fulton. "But we gotta go in slow till I see what you're made of. Few hundred K to start."

They stayed at the bar for some hours. T. had the nagging suspicion there was still something to be secured, details to hammer out. It had been so easy it seemed impossible. Likely the man had no money, finally, and was playing him.

At last the drinks trailed off and it was time to go, and it dawned on T., as they walked along the sidewalk back to the parking lot, that though Fulton had almost nothing to say, what he chiefly wanted was someone to listen.

When they reached a white Cadillac, one of a fleet of personal vehicles Fulton apparently owned, he turned the key in the ignition to show T. the dashboard in the dark, a vast expanse of red and indigo lights. Rap music blared: it turned out that Fulton, despite several racist remarks at the bar, enjoyed gangsta rap. "When I'm called off, I got a sawed off. Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off," he recited loudly, tapping the steering wheel.