Jane Smiley - Early Warning

They got into the Mercedes. Loretta said, “This is comfortable. I’ve never ridden in a Mercedes before.”

She was always full of surprises.

Frank said, “What do your parents drive?”

“My dad drives a Chevy truck, and my mom drives an El Camino.”

Frank burst out laughing.

“My dad swears that his headstone is going to read, ‘Here lies Raymond Perroni, who drove twenty-five Chevy pickups into the ground, 1938 to whenever.’ He doesn’t want it to include anything insignificant.”

“And your mother?”

“Well, she says she’s going to be cremated. There’s an altar at the house…. I guess we’ll put her between the Catrina she bought in Oaxaca and Hickock’s left front hoof, which she had plated in silver after he colicked and died.”

Frank said, “Catrina?”

“Oh, that’s a Mexican statue. It’s a ceramic skeleton of a woman, all dressed up. Mom’s is wearing this red picture hat with yellow flowers sculpted over the crown.” She stared out the window. They were approaching the Garden State Parkway. She adjusted her breasts and kicked her feet. It was interesting to Frank how he enjoyed Loretta, Ivy, and Jesse so much more than his own children. Being around his own children was like having sand in his underwear that could not be gotten rid of — the timbre of Janet’s voice, the knowledge of Michael’s empty brutishness, the sight of Richie’s temperature rising and falling in perennial reaction to Michael’s slightest move. Such thoughts didn’t come up with other people’s children; you appreciated them for themselves. Loretta was a one-of-a-kind eccentric who did not seem to know how rare she was; ambitious Ivy was sharp and amusing company; and Jesse was the son he could not have had because he was not his brother. And he didn’t at all mind his son-in-law, Jared, who was reserved in his Minnesota way, but knew all there was to know about 1’s and 0’s and how to string them out until they magically spiraled into some sort of electronic DNA. Janet had talked Jared out of North Carolina and into Silicon Valley, just because, Frank knew, she couldn’t stand Frank’s presence in their lives, but money was getting more and more disembodied every day, and Jared was no more averse to it than any red-blooded American. Frank drove steadily. The traffic was sparse; the Mercedes had a kind of feral quickness; they were already passing Elizabeth.

Frank said, “Chance is very good-tempered.”

“And so he always gets his way. You can deflect him or forbid him or put him to bed, but as long as that idea is in his mind, he keeps at it. This summer, he decided that there was a treasure under one of the flagstones by the driveway. He went into my father’s shop and found a big nail, and started scraping out the cement around that flagstone. Every time anyone saw him, they’d say, ‘That’s enough,’ and Chancie would nod and put his nail in his pocket and walk away, and then he’d be back. It took him two weeks. He even figured out how to lever it up with a table knife. There was nothing under there. He didn’t care. He just had to know.”

“I was like that,” said Frank. But, he realized, what he meant was, he’d just had to break it, whatever it was — not see what something was, but feel it fall apart. “Some kids are curious.”

“Well, I wore a pair of underpants on my head for a year, because I thought they made a very nice hat. But Chancie isn’t opinionated, he’s dedicated. Tia doesn’t talk much yet. I see her staring at Chancie, making up her mind to do everything exactly opposite to the way he does it.”

She went on. They were past Perth Amboy now, not far from Sea Bright. It was too bad, Frank thought, that listening to people talk about their kids was so boring, because there were lessons to be learned. One of them, in this case, was that Loretta was an observant and thoughtful young woman, with a measure of self-knowledge. If so, Frank thought, she was surely aware of Lynne Rochelle, whom, according to Richie, Michael had installed in her own loft in SoHo over the summer. Why Michael wanted two wives, Frank could not imagine. Richie said that it was for their explosive potential — Loretta was the nitro and Lynne was the glycerin.

Frank glanced at Loretta. She was looking out the window at the passing forest. Three children in three years had done no favors to either her figure or her face. She looked forty to Michael’s thirty-three. But she also looked like being a wife and a mother was her avowed destiny, and Michael could take it or leave it. If that was the case, then Michael’s strategy was maybe the only one.

When they got back to Jim’s double-wide after exploring the cranberry bogs, Loretta took her bag from the Mercedes and asked where the bathroom was. Frank and Jim went into the kitchen. The sink was full of coffee cups and soup bowls; the trash bin was piled with Campbell’s cans on top of plastic bread bags. Not the diet Frank would have thought Jim Upjohn preferred — or had even experienced, since his ancestors had been obscenely wealthy unto the fourth generation at least. What was he, seventy-one? Five years older than Frank? Over the years, Jim Upjohn had remained far more innocent than Frank had, far more innocent than anyone Frank knew, a nice boy who might cut your head off, but always gently, gracefully, with regret, a rare breed these days. Now he went to a kitchen cabinet and took out some peanuts. He said, “Come on, watch this.” Frank followed him onto the back porch of the double-wide. Jim Upjohn trotted down the steps and over to one of the taller cedars, where he slipped out of his loafers and set them side by side at the base of the tree. Then he whistled and called out, “Ronnie! Nancy!” He squatted down and sprinkled peanuts in the heel of each loafer, stood up, and backed away. There was chirping, and within moments, two squirreis, their tails fat and furry, their coats thick, scampered down the tree. Each took a different loafer, as though they knew just what they were doing. They sat upright on their tails, picking up peanuts and putting them in their mouths, all the time expressing various opinions. When the peanuts were gone, they paused a moment, almost bidding adieu before scampering back up the tree. Jim Upjohn said to Frank, “It’s surprising how little they cost.” He was twinkling.

But then he spun around and said, “Miracle you came, Frankie, because I need a favor. Involves you firing up that plane of yours and heading into the sunset.”

“Everyone agrees that I’m semi-retired and have too much time on my hands, so I am at your service.”

“I know.”

“How do you know? I haven’t talked to you in four months, and you don’t have a phone.”

“You don’t think the complaints go only one direction between Paris and Englewood Cliffs, do you?”

“Andy doesn’t complain.”

“She remarks upon.”

This would be true, thought Frank.

“Anyway, I want you to go to Aspen and meet someone. There’s a conference there. I was supposed to go and help take over the world, but I can’t stand the odor anymore, so I stayed home.”

“Do you go anywhere?”

“To the beach over at Barnegat. There’s a fellow supposed to be in Aspen, Prechter. He’s got a theory about how the market works, and I want you to talk to him about it.”

“What is his theory?”

“Well, basically, it’s a mathematical version of Yes, uh-oh, well-maybe, or-maybe-not, okay-one-more-time. Large-scale, small-scale, middle-scale. He resurrected it, he’s not taking credit for it.”

“What do you care? Look at this place. You have it all.”

Jim didn’t disagree. He said, “I don’t have a theory. I would like to have a theory.”

The ultimate luxury, thought Frank.