Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
Eric showed up early for a second 9:00 A.M. meeting with Tess, and Brian was ready and willing to eat another breakfast. "I just had a couple donuts," he explained. "Ingrid feeds me better then any of the others ever did, but only when she's around."
"Not as often as you like?"
"She's spends some serious time doing her economic research. Like eighty or ninety hours a week. And then Connie has been getting her to help with a financial analysis on that train thing. Ingrid says that the original estimates provide a really interesting example of how numbers can tell lies."
"I'm not surprised," Eric said as they turned onto Main street. "Where are we going?"
"I thought that the bagel place would be good," Brian ventured.
"The Poppy Prince? I don't think they serve breakfast really, just bagels and coffee."
"What do you have against bagels," Brian asked, a little more aggressively then necessary.
"Me? Nothing. You're the guy who always said its not breakfast unless it comes with some form of dead pig. Could you be flirting with the idea of becoming a vegetarian?" Eric goaded him.
"No, it's just, I'm watching my weight a little, you know. I'd rather cut a few calories out of my breakfast then out of my beer," he said, puffing out his chest.
"Stated like a man, but lies all the same. No, No," he prevented Brian from speaking, "I'll say no more on the subject. Bagels are fine."
A bagel with cream cheese or preserves and a coffee at the Poppy Prince cost about twice as much as a real breakfast at the diner. The waitresses were a lot prettier though, teenage girls picking up spending money rather then divorcees supporting their families. If the legislature ever put through a serious law to force deadbeat dads to make their child support payments, diners everywhere would close for lack of help. Brian paid for their orders at the counter, and they carried them, a bagel in one hand and a coffee in the other, to one of the little round tables, where they sat themselves on a couple of high round stools.
"Don't do that," Brian kicked Eric's feet off on of the lower rungs of the stool that Brian was sitting on. "You make us look like a couple of fairies."
"They don't reach the floor," Eric complained, "And the rung spacing is exactly wrong for my leg length." He demonstrated trying to sit with his feet on the rungs of his own stool, and it was rather comical. On the top rung, he looked like a jockey, and on the bottom rung he looked like a cowboy. The problem was that the rounded seat was no saddle and the stool was no horse. Brian leaned dangerously on his own mount and pulled an empty stool from along the wall to where Eric could reach it.
"Use this," he offered sympathetically.
Eric tried to get his feet up, but the stool skidded away. "It needs weight on it," he said. At that moment a large woman took the table next to them, settling down with an extra-large coffee and the New York Times. Brian made a furtive head gesture in her direction, but Eric was already moving. He got up and did a few ludicrous stretching exercises, then slid his stool within two feet of the newcomer's before sitting down again. His feet reached the rung, without any reaction from the host. He had to twist a bit to look at Brian, who grunted and moved the whole table.
"Comfy?" he ventured.
"Meat?" Eric shot back.
"Cease-fire!" they declared in chorus.
"Great," Brian moaned, looking around. "Talking in chorus. Now everyone is sure we're fairies."
"What's with you?" Eric asked. "Two months without changing girlfriends is a good thing. If people thought you were a closet queen, it was when they saw you with a different beauty every week. Don Juanism and all that."
"Aw, you're right. I'm just not used to dating a girl who doesn't have time for me."
"That bad." They'd finally got back to the original topic of conversation.
"I don't know. Maybe she's normal, and the rest of them were a little ditsy. I'm used to these girls who believe that sex is good for the environment, saves the electricity you'd use otherwise watching TV."
Eric made his most skeptical face, the one that had convinced Anthony to put the plywood back. "It's true," Brian insisted, "Heidi actually said that once, or maybe it was Grettel."
"Or maybe it was Hans Christian Anderson," Eric suggested.
"Whatever," Brian gave up, "All I know is I'm lucky if I see Ingrid three times a week. It's easy for you, you're used to it."
"I was used to it," Eric corrected him. "Connie has pretty much moved in with me, you know."
"I asked Ingrid to move in," Brian continued, "I've never done that before. She said, 'Maybe, depending on how the semester goes.' What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"As long as she didn't say trimester," Eric joked.
The woman who's stool Eric was using as a foot-rest swung around and started berating them. "I'm sorry," she said un-apologetically, "I try not to eavesdrop, but this is a public place and the two of you are a couple sexist pigs. It's just too damn early in the morning to sit and listen to this sophomoric blather, and I'll thank you," she directed this to Eric, "To keep your feet off my chair. It's quite rude." She turned away red-faced, and Brian and Eric sheepishly finished their coffees and hit the street.
"So what are you in for this morning?" Brian asked.
"Tess, what else. She wants me to speak at some other event, and she said something about my getting a corporate sponsor."
"You're kidding. No one sponsors an unknown, not even if you were good."
"I don't have any illusions about what I'm doing," Eric replied, "I'm more of a pitch man than a poet. I only started doing it because I wanted to impress Connie. School starts again in a week, and I'm really not going to have to much time for screwing around anyway."
"This is it, right? Your last year?"
"If I don't screw it up." He started to say something, stopped, then started again. "I got a funny sort of a problem." Brian gave him time. "With Connie." He paused again. "She wants to help with the bills, for the apartment."
"What, are you nuts?" Brian jumped in, "Take it."
"It's more then that. She wants to, well, pay for everything. She says that she's making so much that she doesn't know what to do with it, and that it doesn't seem fair, my still working forty hours a week when she's making real money. She say's when I'm back in class she'll never see me."
"Connie wants to be your sugar daddy?" Brian almost fell down laughing. "Guys dream about something like that. You'd be a hero at the university."
"Get serious, I'm not doing it. The problem is she's got it worked out in her mind that if I don't quit my job it's because I don't love her. I tried to explain that I can do all my studying at work, that I wouldn't have that much extra free time anyway, but she says I'm just being sexist. I'm afraid she'll bring it up some time when we're with her sister and her girlfriend, and the three of them will beat me up or something."
"How about a compromise, you know? Drop a couple nights, maybe move to second shift, let her pay some of the bills." They arrived at the Green Valley building, and went in. The huge sundial in the lobby read just past nine. It wasn't really a sundial, of course. It was more of a modern sculpture, equipped with hidden light sources and computer control. It had cost a little over three thousand bucks and consumed about 600 Watts, but it was accurate to within about ten minutes, between eight in the morning to eight at night.
"I'm going to have to do something," Eric answered. "To tell you the truth, I have trouble saying no to her about anything."
Brian laughed again. "Join the club," he said, and pushed Eric down the hall in the direction of Tess's office. The door was open, and Tess practically jumped over her desk to greet him.
"Oh Eric, I have such wonderful news for you." She had somehow turned her enthusiasm up another notch when Eric was sure it was already at the top of the scale. She was waving a light blue slip of paper in her hand like a hanky at a parade. "Meet your sponsor," she practically sang, holding it out to him.
Eric took the check, and did a double take. Three hundred dollars, he would have been surprised by thirty. People didn't go around handing out money to bad poets, except maybe the government. The check was written on a business account, the Peace Dividend Corporation, a likely sounding name for a philanthropist, he thought. He tried to make out the name on the signature line, but all he got was an 'M' followed by a squiggle, and an 'O' followed by a longer squiggle with a big bump near the beginning.
"Such a wonderful man," she gushed, "He gave a very handsome sum to the QSP, I can tell you. He was truly sad about missing you, but he said he was only in town for a day. What's more, this isn't it. He gave me an address to send a copy of each poem you publish, and you'll get a hundred dollar check in return."
"It doesn't make sense," Eric said, "How could he even have heard of me at all." Tess looked down modestly. "Tess, did you set this up for me?" She blushed. "You shouldn't have, I mean, really. I have a job, and I'm going to be an engineer next year, I just do this for fun. There's lots of real serious artists in this town just scraping by, and most of them believe," he stumbled "Uh, feel even stronger about the environment then I do."
"That's quite a long speech for you Eric. I told Mr. O'Flahthery that I didn't expect anything different. The point is, you were the one up on the platform reading your poems, not some artist who writes stuff anti-globalization and NAFTA that nobody understands. Why most of it doesn't even rhyme," she accused. "Now none of that famous false modesty, and let's talk about the future. I need you for a QSP rally in Cambridge this weekend. It was completely organized by our eastern office, and I only received the request yesterday. It appears that the poet they had scheduled refused to work the word Quabin in anywhere."
"That's pretty short notice, Tess. I think my girlfriend might have had something planned for us."
"When you explain the nature of the emergency, I'm sure she'll agree." What emergency, Eric thought, but Tess was rushing ahead. "You'll give me a written copy of your Quabin poem to put in the Valley, and I'll send it in to PDC also. Now I wanted to loan you to WhamRammer, that's the Western Massachusetts Residents ..."
"Against Magnetic Radiation," he spoke over her voice, "I'm familiar with them."
She cocked her head at him, "Really. Well one of our executive committee members lives a few hundred yards from the turnpike in Westfield, and wants to stop them from building that dreadful train. She's asked if you could whip up some relevant verse for a demonstration they have planned in Amherst next month."
"Amherst?" he exclaimed, "They aren't even within ten miles of the proposed route."
"Oh, Eric. I can see that you don't know very much about organizing a demonstration. Anytime you're organizing any sort of public even, the first rule is to hold it in a place that people will come. Amherst is home to over thirty thousand university students. I've pulled more trains up there than any activist in the valley"
"I think you mean 'organized trains' Tess, and as a former English student, I'm against adding an 's' to a verb and using it as a noun, especially when the slot is already taken. I don't know about this Tess. Besides, I might have a conflict of interest."
"Please explain what your talking about and stop beating around the bush." She was plainly disappointed by his reaction, "I thought you'd be pleased by the chance for exposure, not to mention that whatever you read will be republished in the Green Valley, at a hundred dollars each."
"Tess," he took a deep breath, "My girlfriend works for the people who are trying to get that train built. If this demonstration is being planned to coincide with the public meeting that's been arranged, Connie will be there to represent the, well, the other point of view."
"I see," she said coldly, then suddenly changed tacks to her most persuasive. "You know, Eric, I've been married for over twenty years, and Mr. Bookman and I have had plenty of differences. Learning to work out those differences has been the most rewarding part of my marriage." Eric pictured Mr. Bookman in the cutout with water dripping down his face, yelling that books read better when you use whale oil in the lamp. Interesting compromise. "Call her," Tess continued, handing him the phone, "Call her right now and see how she feels about this. The worst thing you can do is get into the habit of making a woman's mind for her."
Eric shrugged and dialed his number, hoping that Connie would turn him down flat. When he explained the situation, she was amused. "That's great," she said, "This way one of us wins no matter what."
"You don't think it could get awkward?" he asked.
"Not a bit," she replied, "You're not really against the train, and I'm not really for it. How are we going to get in trouble over something like that?"
"Brian tells me that Ingrid has been helping you with some financial stuff. Has H Vector given you more work?"
"Nope," she replied cheerfully, "I just want to be prepared in case anyone else has read the economic analysis. It's a real work of fiction. I asked Ingrid to check my conclusions, because they differed so far from the bottom line."
"Why didn't you ask me?" Eric sounded hurt. "I could help you with that stuff.
"You're starting class next week. You already have too much to do," she added significantly.
"So you don't think I should do the poetry thing?" he asked hopefully.
"You know exactly what I mean. You tell Tess that I'm happy to have someone to carpool with so that I waste less gas and have somebody to average down the contribution to global warming. Hurry home now, I'm making an omelet." She laughed, and rung off.
Eric reluctantly handed the phone back to Tess who had easily followed his half of the conversation. She gave him a faxed copy of the flyer that was being used to advertise the Sunday rally in Cambridge, complete with a little map and parking information, then she sent him on his way before he could think of any further objections. As he got into his car, he reflected that about the only thing that had gone right that morning was his only having had a bagel for breakfast.