Gleason crunched an ice cube. “You know, Henri, your wormy mind might have crawled into the truth.”
The minister raised his tumbler. “Mèsi, my friend. To our mutual health.”
“But how can we be sure the farmers will want to buy the trees—even on credit?” Gleason asked.
“Wanting has nothing to do with it,” Henri snorted. “We will merely pass a new law. How many would you like them to buy? Five, ten each?”
Gleason raised his glass. “Your lack of conscience is an inspiration.”
“Thank you once again. But it’s for their own good, dear friend. You see how avaricious they are, without any appreciation for your kindness. They are like infants. We have a responsibility to teach them the value of money, do we not? Teach them that money doesn’t grow on trees.” He coughed with laughter at his own pun, and the hack knotted into a gasping choke. He motioned for Gleason to slap him on his back.
But something strange had caught Gleason’s eye, and he was no longer paying attention to the commerce minister. A denuded oval, perhaps a half-mile wide, scabbed a southern mountainside. This patch of eroded earth was different from the surrounding washed-out land, a more ghostly gray, mounded like a grave. If the mountainside resembled a dying man’s waxy pate, this was a basal-cell carcinoma, a ceraceous mole, a malignant hatchery feasting on its victim’s scalp, gathering strength to metastasize.
Gleason stared at the spot with a terrible premonition. Clouds congealed on the mountain’s brow. A premature chill rose zombie-like from the veranda floorboards. He shivered, and his ice cubes crackled. When the city fell completely into shadow, and distant voodoo drums began their twilight rumblings, the chapter head of the BWI Benevolence Club snapped out of his waking nightmare to glance over at his host, face down on the table, passed out from his pun-guffawing lack of oxygen. Gleason bolted up, frightened. “Cléo!” he yelled into the house. “Come help! Help!”
“I feel like such a failure,” Diane told Les, as she swirled an asparagus spear around a dollop of Hollandaise sauce. A week after she had dropped the bomb on him in his office and his catatonic meltdown, they sat in a cozy booth at Chez le Pitre just west of Chicago’s Gold Coast, Les apparently recovered.
“We wanted to change the world, remember?” she went on. “We were going to, too.” She self-consciously paused, wondering if it was ungrammatical to juxtapose two homophones. But since Les didn’t cast a disapproving look, she assumed that, its awkward (and ill-conceived, to be sure) construction aside, it was probably kosher. “You did your part,” she went on, “ridding literature of all those oppressive European males—Shakespeare and Hemingway and Dickens—but me, what have I done? Matzo balls, that’s what.”
“Matzo balls?” he asked, nibbling his Moët (true champagne, having been produced in France, not that ersatz California excretion, and also containing a French tréma diacritical accent mark over the e).
“I’ve become my mother, plain and simple. No, I mean it. It’s not funny. Remember how I used to mock her? How she would call me to make sure I had enough clean underwear and Tide, how she’d send me all those chocolate coins for Passover? The time she sent that two-pound block of halvah that I didn’t pick up from the post office for a few months, so that by the time I did, it was an ant farm?”
Diane wouldn’t mention how comforting the tiny, industrious pets had been after Les had stopped calling. “It was a good joke at her expense…and now I’m sure my daughter is laughing at me. It’s true, I call her every night for no rational reason. ‘Hello. Fine. Goodbye.’ I’m even starting to talk Yiddish to her. ‘Nu? Vus machst du? Zay gezunt.’ Once a month I send her a jar of matzo ball soup. Can you believe it? Me, bell-bottomed, love-beaded, toe-ringed, hippie-Diane, sweating over a stove, boiling matzo balls?”
“It’s not morphing into your matronly progenitor that’s bothering you,” he offered. “It’s having become”—he crinkled his nose—“middle class.”
She sighed. “What happened, Les? I was going to join the Peace Corps, feed the hungry, build houses in Africa. Instead, I’m rolling matzo meal.”
“But you produced a female progeny.That’s something. The world needs more women. If only women ran the world. Progressive-thinking women,” he hastened to add, “not Margaret Thatchers or, heaven knows, Michele Bachmanns. Again, I use the word heaven in its secular sense.”
“I was sure she would grow up to be everything I wasn’t. Until… this.”
“One door se ferme and another s’ouvrit,” Les assured her.
“Isn’t that just like you.”
“When you told me, I admit the first thing I thought of was my relationship with Chancellor Beebe—how my career was going to be completely deconstructed. Don’t get me wrong. I’d like to be dean. I certainly deserve to be, and, for all its faults, DePewe deserves to have me. Liberal Arts and Sciences could definitely use my superior intelligence and administrative hyper-competence. But it got me cogitating. I’ve been kissing Leona’s posterior for almost three years now, and regardez-moi—I’m still only head of the English Department. After seeing you, I faced the inescapable realization that she’s never going to give up that power over me. Power never gives itself up voluntarily, does it?” he sneered. “There’s your so-called democracy for you. It’s enough to make you want to join forces with—”
He stopped. He pierced her a look. Had he said too much? But no, her eyes were still focused on some faraway galaxy, where couples were always in love.
He cleared his throat. “So,” he said, steering himself back on message, “my realization turned out to be positively epiphanous. It got me to thinking even more globally—figuratively globally, that is. I actually have a daughter now, an heir, a child who wants me in her life, in addition to which I have a former girlfriend who doesn’t despise me—”
“Despise you? Oh, Les, you couldn’t be more—”
“No, please, let me get it off my chest. It’s been swirling around my région d’intérieur for too long. All right, I ratiocinated, so what if I never become dean? So what if I never see Leona socially again? So what if I’m reduced to persona non grata, career-wise—if I’m professionally nihilized? The important thing is, now I have you and Karma and…”
“Angus.”
He studied her again for any sign that she wasn’t buying this. But she just continued to gaze fatuously at her distant galaxy.
“I’ve been given a second chance, Diane, if you’ll pardon the passive construction. How many people can say that? I mean the second-chance part, not the passive-construction part. In any event, you can’t imagine”—he secretly winced—“how much I’m looking forward to meeting her and, um…”
“Angus.”
“The Four Seasons restaurant, you say?”
“Thursday night.”
“I’m fervently anticipatory.”
She smiled at him over entwined fingers. “You’re a mensch, Leslie Fenwich.”
“Who knows, maybe menschdom’s been in here the whole time, subcutaneously. But now, thanks to you, it’s risen to the dermis.”
“And you know what? I still adore your dermis.” She glanced around at