William Gaddis - J R

— Well that makes enough sense but…

— Now and so, excuse me, from your point of view even though you may have reason to regard the prospect of your, of the decedent’s daughter holding this larger number of shares as a threat to your position, it still might be somewhat safer than the alternative I just outlined if you can explore the possibility of these five remaining shares, added to yours of course they would give you the bare majority you…

— Yes well I can add Coen, he said looking up from the long narrow ellipse constricting Gibbs 5 that had taken shape under the blunt pencil, — the problem is so can she, so can Stella.

— But I oh, oh I see, I wasn’t aware this Gibbs person might be someone you both had access to, in that case of course the sooner you can…

— Well I don’t know who in hell she has access to as you put it, Jack Gibbs, I lost track of him a few years ago but, this may sound funny but I thought I saw him not too long ago right out here a few blocks away, that first minute I saw him it couldn’t have been anybody else but him and then ljust wasn’t sure, playing ball with a little girl there and he had a bad limp that Gibbs never had and what the hell he’d be doing out here next to nowhere in the first place. And then he was gone and when I asked the little girl after she said that was her father, I’d heard someplace he’d got married that didn’t last but just a few months, right after him and Stella stopped seeing each other and he got to drinking there for a while…

— Yes, well of course the sooner you…

— See he worked here for a while just before I came, just real brilliant but, I don’t know but just to give you an idea, one time when we’d all three had lunch and he’d taken a few drinks a bum came up to us on the street with his hand out and the wind blowing his torn coat, a whole wreck of a man that couldn’t hardly see us anyway but Jack all of a sudden reached out and gave him a dollar and that really, well you know a long time after that I said something about it once to Stella and all she said was, she said he did it because what he saw coming toward him was himself. And I just always remember the way she said that… he broke off, returned to the figure before him to fringe its edge with heavy strokes and stand abruptly, reaching his cup as he passed toward the cabinet. — See Stella, he said from over there bent to tug at the door again, — sometimes she’s just got no real understanding of just how the way things are, that this idea you can fail will just build up inside a man… he tugged it, — or you know maybe she does, he tugged sharply, — better than anybody can guess…

— No be careful!

— There…! He stood with half the door off in his hand, — now look at this thing, look at it! That’s a wood cabinet I had put in here, did that split like wood with no grain to split along? There isn’t any. They press sawdust and glue together and paint on a grain…

— Yes I, I see it is Mister Angel but I wouldn’t let it upset me this much, after all it’s only a…

— Coen God damn it can’t you see what I mean? Can’t you see this is what’s going to happen right here, after all it took to put all this together? Can’t you see you go public and all these people owning you want is dividends and running their stock up, you don’t give them that and they sell you out, you do and some bunch of vice presidents some place you never heard of like the ones that turned this out, this wood product they call it, they spot you and launch an offer and all of a sudden you’re working for them trimming and cutting and finally bringing in people to turn something out they don’t care what the hell it is, there’s no pride in their work because what you’ve got them turning out nobody could be proud of in the first place… He broke the piece over his knee and stood up with the bottle, — if they’d just understand I’m not just trying to grab this whole show for myself but to keep it doing something that’s, that’s worth doing…

— Yes and of course the sooner you can…

— You know it’s funny, I look back sometimes and I think if it hadn’t of been for Stella in there, sometimes I think we could have done something here, me and Gibbs, really done something.

— Yes of course the sooner you can reach him… the unemptied cup was placed carefully aside for a sharp squaring of papers on the corner of the desk, — the sooner the status of these five shares can be clarified and…

— I know, I’ve been keeping my eye on the time here, I thought I’d just walk over about now where I saw him playing with that little girl if it was him, if it really could have been him I saw… He’d put the bottle down on the desk and stooped behind it to pick up his jacket from the floor and shake it, and he dropped it over the back of the chair again.

— I thought you might want to ride back into Manhattan with me, the day’s practically over… and the briefcase came up for papers squared smartly on the desk, — I could wait for you if you…

— No you go ahead, he said without looking up from the pad on the desk before him as though reading something in the heavy shadings of pencil for the first time, tore off the page and crumpled it as he sat down again, — I wanted to try to get a word with Terry later anyhow, don’t want to bother her now but I thought I’d get her aside after we close up shop here, just something I want to clear up… he reached for the blunt pencil and sat back picking it clean with a thumbnail. — That’s her plant over there, she was helping out on the decorating, I thought she might have some ideas for bringing it back to life a little.

— Oh yes, well we’ve given up on them in our offices, all bamboo now, a Japanese miniature bamboo, of course the initial outlay for these plastic varieties runs somewhat high but eventually… the briefcase snapped closed and then paused in its swing toward the door. — I’m just leaving this to be typed out and, Mister Angel if you don’t mind my, if you just got your mind off all this for a little while and did something to, went somewhere and had a good time…

— That’s funny you’d say that right now Coen, you know when I was a boy we were brought up pretty strict, I had a kind of asthma problem that made it kind of rough sometimes. You see we grew apples up there and my brother and I had to work packing crates, and we’d get a chance to read the funnies down there in the papers we used packing apples because funny papers just weren’t allowed in our house. We weren’t real close at all but in a way you look back maybe we were, we used to hunt rabbit together with twenty-twos and I still have that old octagonal barrel Winchester in a closet somewhere. I remember it seemed strange to me then, before he got killed in the war what he always wanted to be was a geologist.

— I, I see yes, well I’ve left those papers there to be typed and as soon as you…

— I’ll get Myrna to knock them right out… he leaned forward, hand searching the button under the desk, and reached the unemptied paper cup. — Anyhow every year in the spring the circus would show up, but with the animals and all the hay they’d have around I never could go to it with that asthma I had, I couldn’t even go near the parade. So the night it would come to town, there was a hill right up outside the town you could look down from and my father would take me up there in the old open Reo we had, and we’d sit up there and watch the whole thing, just the two of us up there. You couldn’t see everything too clear because it wasn’t all that close and the evening was coming on, but you could see the wagons and horses and the elephants and hear the band playing, you’d get a sudden little breeze that was almost warm and bring the music right up with it, and the lights coming on all along the way, I don’t think we hardly talked at all, and you know? he said, chair tilting back and the jacket gone to the floor again. — Maybe those were the best times I ever had…