'Man,' I said, 'my customers just kill themselves with the product.
Your customers kill other people.' 'Not the same,' he insisted. 'I deal with nice people, respectable people.' And he tells me all these important people he knows, CIA, secret services of other countries. So maybe I'll get out of the dope business and become a big-time merchant of death.
You like that better?'
'Is that your only choice?'
'Serious? No, of course not. I could buy and sell anything. I don't know, my old man may have been
slightly full of shit with the Phoenician business, but there's no question our people are traders all over the world. When I dropped out of college, first thing I did was travel. I went visiting relatives. The Lebanese are scattered all over the planet, man. I got an aunt and uncle in Yucatan, I got cousins all through Central and South America. I went over to Africa, some relatives on my mother's side are in a country called Togo. I never heard of it until I went there. My relatives operate the black market for currency in Lome, that's the capital of Togo.
They've got this suite of offices in a building in downtown Lome. No sign in the lobby and you got to walk up a flight of stairs, but it's pretty much out in the open. All day long people are coming in with money to change, dollars, pounds, francs, traveler's checks. Gold, they buy and sell gold, weigh it and figure the price.
'All day long the money goes back and forth over the long table they got there. I couldn't believe how much money they handled. I was a kid, I never saw a lot of cash, and I'm looking at tons of money. See, they only make like one or two percent on a transaction, but the volume is enormous.
'They lived in this walled compound on the edge of town. It had to be huge to accommodate all the servants. I'm a kid from Bergen Street, I grew up sharing a room with my brother, and here are these cousins of mine and they've got something like five servants for each member of the family. That's including children. No exaggeration. I was uncomfortable at first, I thought it was wasteful, but it was explained to me. If you were rich you had an obligation to employ a lot of people.
You were creating jobs, you were doing something for the people.
' 'Stay,' they told me. They wanted to take me into the business. If I didn't like Togo, they had in-laws with the same kind of operation in Mali. 'But Togo's nicer,' they said.'
'Could you still go?'
'That's the sort of thing you do when you're twenty years old, start a new life in a new country.'
'What are you, thirty-two?'
'Thirty-three. That's a little old for an entry-level slot.'
'You might not have to start in the mailroom.'
He shrugged. 'Funny thing is Francine and I discussed it. She had a problem with it because she was afraid of blacks. The idea of being one of a handful of white people in a black nation was frightening to her.
She said, like, suppose they decide to take over? I said, honey, what's to take over? It's their country. They already own it. But she was not completely rational on the subject.' His voice hardened.
'And look who she got in a truck with, look who killed her. White guys. All your life you fear one thing and something else sneaks up on you.' His eyes locked with mine. 'It's like they didn't just kill her, they obliterated her. She ceased to exist. I didn't even see a body, I saw parts, chunks. I went to my cousin's clinic in the middle of the night and turned the chunks into ashes. She's gone and there's this hole in my life and I don't know what to put in it.'
'They say time takes time,' I said.
'It can take some of mine. I got time I don't know what to do with.
I'm alone in the house all day and I find myself talking to myself. Out loud, I mean.'
'People do that when they're used to having somebody around.
You'll get over it.'
'Well, if I don't, so what? If I'm talking to myself who's gonna hear me, right?' He sipped from his water glass. 'Then there's sex,' he said.
'I don't know what the hell to do about sex. I have the desire, you know?
I'm a young guy, it's natural.'
'A minute ago you were too old to start a new life in Africa.'
'You know what I mean. I have desires and I not only don't know what to do about them, I don't feel right about having them. It feels disloyal to want to go to bed with a woman whether I actually do it or not. And who would I go to bed with if I wanted to? What am I gonna do, sweet-talk some woman in a bar? Go to a massage parlor, pay some cross-eyed Korean girl to get me off? Go out on fucking dates, take some woman to a movie, make conversation with her? I try to picture myself doing that and I figure I'd rather stay home and jerk off, only I won't do that either because even that seems like it would be disloyal.'
He sat back abruptly, embarrassed. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I didn't mean to spout all this crap at you. I hadn't planned on saying any of that. I don't know where it came from.'
I CALLED my art historian when I got back to the hotel. She'd had her class that night and wasn't back yet. I left a message on her machine and wondered if she would call.
We'd had a bad time of it a few nights before. After dinner we'd rented a movie that she wanted to see and I didn't, and maybe I was bitter about that, I don't know. Whatever it was, there was something wrong between us. After the movie ended she made an off-color remark and I suggested she might make an effort to sound a little less like a whore. That would have been an acceptable rejoinder under ordinary circumstances, but I said it like I meant it and she said something suitably stinging in return.
I apologized and so did she and we agreed it was nothing, but it didn't feel that way, and when it got to be
