Джоан Силбер - Improvement

My first idea had been to just send her mystery cash in the mail, unsigned—put a wad of bills in a big envelope, put it inside a gift box with a nice scarf or something, and take it to the post office. The mail was really very reliable these days—slow in New York, but things didn’t get lost. Didn’t our tax forms always arrive at the IRS? They did.

I had to send the money fast before I spent it. There were things I wanted to buy, things I needed—an iPad for Oliver, great shoes I saw in a store window, a better phone. Just this, just that, very tempting, and once I started chipping away, the dollars would shrink to nothing. My customer had thirty days on her money-back guarantee, but I decided (somehow) that I could take my chances after a week. A risk was better than a total loss. I couldn’t stay like this any longer, caught in the middle, snagged.

I did know Lynnette, and she was famous for loving a particular kind of chocolates, caramels with smoked salt, which she said were better than sex (what a tacky cliché); she’d be glad to get them in the mail. They came in packs of six, so I bought three of those and wrapped them, along with a large plastic baggie full of hundred-dollar bills, in nice gold wrapping paper and put this big lump inside a large padded envelope. I wrote the candy company’s address in Seattle as the return address.

I was all charged up, waiting in that long fucking line at the post office. I was holding so much cash—all those bills in my package sending off burning rays, smoking in their own heat. What if someone in line grabbed it from me and ran off? Oh, who was I kidding, it wasn’t that vast a fortune anyway. And money was nothing, money wasn’t everything. But I had made a great errand out of this money. My sacred padded brown envelope, labeled and stapled and taped, getting sweaty in my hands, overstuffed with meaning. I had to wait till the next postal clerk would take it from me.

For days I looked for Tania at Oliver’s daycare—who else could tell me about Lynnette? I showed up early, I lingered as long as I could, no Tania in sight. What if I never heard any news at all? Why had I done this? Not for gratitude (I’d given up that part). For my own private mind. My aunt always said that was what you had at the end of it all.

When Tania appeared, finally, at the end of the week, she said, “I guess you heard—it’s so insane! Lynnette and the Isaiah thing.”

The what? Lynnette had understood at once that her old boyfriend, Isaiah, who had first given her such candy, was behind the anonymous envelope. For a long time he’d been unfindable (hadn’t she tried to trail him online?) and he seemed to need to stay that way, but he was providing for her. “Providing big-time,” Tania said.

And what a change it had made in Lynnette. “You wouldn’t know her if you saw her. She was never what we’d call a smiley girl. But now she goes around blessing everybody. I know, it’s horrifying.”

Look what love had done, even if it hadn’t done it.

“She sent some bucks to her crazy mother in Phil-adelphia. And now she’s moving back there, so she can set up a brow bar. I guess it’s cheaper there. Well, anywhere is cheaper than here.”

Isaiah was the light on her horizon, the joy in her illusion. So Boyd hadn’t even been the one.

“She claims to know how to run a business,” Tania said. “Big surprise to me.”

Love was lifting her higher. Candy in the mail and she was ready to rule.

“She can do it,” I said. “All sorts of idiots do it.”

Claude would’ve been very pleased , I heard myself think. He and Lynnette would’ve been partying all over town, hitting the clubs. I hoped she had other people to celebrate with. Maybe Boyd, maybe he was toasting her right now, maybe Maxwell, if he was back. Lynnette would be holding forth about the importance of proper eye beauty, its contribution to global progress.

I had done what I wanted, which was a great thing, and I was mostly pretty delirious, but also confused. What if Isaiah turned up one day and let slip that it wasn’t from him at all? What if, what if. She would still have gotten the money, and she’d have her business up by then. Lynnette would never guess it was from me either—I wouldn’t be on her list. Maybe she’d decide it was from Boyd.

People always went for the romantic interpretation; you couldn’t blame them for that. What they felt most strongly seemed most true. But other forces were operating in the world. Not just sex, but the armies of the righteous, battling on. I was the dispenser of blood money, the phantom bookkeeper. With an identity like that, fat chance anyone was going to uncover me.

I hadn’t meant to nourish Lynnette by feeding her false information, but she might live to a ripe old age under the glow of what she believed about Isaiah. However people’s eyebrows looked fifty years from now, she could be the gabby proprietor telling stories about the clever way her old lover, who never forgot her, had set her up in life.

No one knew the real story but me. I wanted to tell Boyd. He would think better of me if he knew; it would cause him to look back at our time together and see me differently. He would remember our bad spots and think I had been more generous than he realized—that my grouchiness had come from being a good mother, my crabby remarks from real worry. And my tenderness in bed had not been that of a shallow person. I wanted him to find out who had sent the money. I had my vanity.

I hadn’t told anyone. Aunt Kiki believed that I listened too much to other people, that that was the danger of being young. She was in favor of self-sufficiency, her and Marcus Aurelius. I wasn’t very attracted to any of this, but I was keeping my mouth shut now in some kind of imitation of it. I wasn’t telling Kiki either.

But of course Kiki found out about the rug. Oliver told her on the phone, he said his mother had thrown out the rug he liked to play on, she was always doing things like that. “I didn’t throw it out,” I had to say. “I sold it. I wanted the money for my friend. I hope you’re not mad.”

“When I gave you that rug,” my aunt said, “it was to do whatever you wanted with. What kind of gift would it be otherwise?”

“I got a good price,” I said. “eBay is good. My friend, the thing is, she was really in a bad way. Bad as it gets.”

“I hope she’s better,” my aunt said. “I’m sure it meant a lot to her that you helped.”

“She says she’ll never forget this.”

“Well, she won’t. These things stay. Maybe she’ll help you someday.”

It was a little alarming to think of being helped by Lynnette. I’d have to be pretty wrecked and ruined. Maybe she could rescue me if I made an especially bad choice in a boyfriend. She could come swooping in and give him a piece of her mind, clear him out. “You listen to me ,” she’d say.

“I had it appraised,” I said. “If you ever need money, you could go to this place.” I had no real idea how much money my aunt had, though I had sometimes wondered.

“I kept the Kurdish one,” my aunt said. “Well, you know my rug. They’re much more popular now, the Kurdish patterns. Not so formal. It’s worth more.”

“Would you ever sell it?”

“Of course not,” my aunt said. “You know that.”

Oliver was still complaining in the background about how he needed a rug, his truck had no roads to play on, and nobody cared that he didn’t have it. “You could get him a cheap one at Kmart,” my aunt said. “That’s what you should have.”

There was a rumor that Lynnette had decided not to start any business after all but was going to buy a marble tombstone for Claude instead. I had no idea what gravestones cost, but this was a terrible idea, and only Lynnette could have thought of it, unless maybe her mother put her up to it. I heard about it from Angie, the girl in my building who’d once dated Maxwell. She was standing by the mailboxes in our hallway when she told me. “It’s just throwing the money away,” she said. “You think Claude really would’ve wanted some big hunk of rock? I do not think so.”