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| No. 8 |
Winter 2005 |
William Borden
Small Business
Julia Cathcart, in her thirties, divorced, childless, majoring in communications and hoping someday to be a news anchor, gazed out her dormitory window at frozen Lake Betawigosh and the two or three hundred fish houses sprinkled across the lake's cold whiteness. Roads had been plowed from the lakeside to the houses. Here and there she could see pickups, snowmobiles, cars, snuggled beside the houses like faithful pets awaiting their owners. Smoke drifted from a few houses, where a wood or charcoal brazier warmed the interior. Most of the houses were warmed by bottled gas. Most of the houses, smaller than a prison cell, were of wood, a few were of light-weight but durable plastic, easy to move to a better fishing spot; here and there sat a larger enclosure, built for company, card-playing, and the comforts of home. She watched a pickup wind its way through the spontaneous alleys and pull up beside a large bright blue fish house. A man climbed out of the pickup and stepped into the house, pulling the door closed behind him.
Because Julia was also taking psychology in hopes that it would help in interviewing and understanding people, the fish houses seemed to her like a speckled Rorschach blot, patternless yet inviting some interpretation, some projection of the observer's unacknowledged desires. The thought, oddly enough, brought to mind her grandmother, Celeste, who had been a rather notorious self-employed entrepreneur of the region, servicing first the lumberjacks and, later, after the timber had been clear cut, the Civilian Conservation Corps that had moved through the area, constructing buildings for state and county parks. Celeste had outfitted a school bus with a bed and hot and cold running water and driven from camp to camp, covering, with an enviable reliability, a several-country territory extending from St. Cloud north into Manitoba and west to North Dakota. Julia remembered a white-haired, buxom matron who made sugar cookies and wild blueberry pies and sang popular songs of the '30's and '40's. Her grandmother passed on when Julia was still a child, a year after her husband, Julia's grandfather, a gregarious former tavern owner who had not held Celeste's profession against her but rather had admired her for her initiative and self reliance, her grandfather recognizing that to fulfill a need, to meet a demand, whatever it might be, was in the truest American tradition of Emersonian self-reliance, Dale Carnegie initiative, and Rockerfellerian intrepidity.
Julia was also thinking—or rather it was her next thought, although it came so quickly, as thoughts do, that it seemed coincident with the first—that her job as a waitress at the Calistoga Café made her feet sore and her back ache and didn't pay enough for her to keep up with her bills for tuition, books, dormitory, and incidentals. The Calistoga patrons were mostly working class and retired and believed that even a ten per cent tip was asking a lot. Julia had tried to get a job at the upscale Lakeside Resort, but they seemed to hire only young women, who were cute and flirtatious.
Not that Julia wasn't good looking. She had what a mature man might call an interesting face—high cheek bones, arched eyebrows, straight nose, dark eyes, and black hair which she had let grow now, since her divorce, until it flowed lushly to her shoulder blades. She was slim but not thin; waitressing kept the weight off, and she watched what she ate. She walked, too, and swam sometimes, and in the winter she liked to cross country ski. Her legs looked good, even in sensible shoes, and her breasts were ample and firm. Her voice was husky, even though she had quit smoking.
Julia had not grown up in Betawigosh. She knew few people there. Her mother had married a salesman who thought there were more opportunities in the Twin Cities, and Julia had grown up on the south side of Minneapolis. When she married Justin, just out of high school, he took her to Brainerd, where he sold boats, then cars, then snowmobiles, then electronics, then appliances, until he finally went into rehab and joined AA and met Marjorie, who, he said, understood him.
Justin ice fished, and so Julia had an understanding of the psychology of men who ice fished. It was, in the first place, almost entirely men who ice fished. It seemed to be something coded in their DNA—the hunt, the solitude, the escape from the mysterious female presence. Just as South Sea tribesmen went off to live in male-only long houses, just as Aboriginal adolescents proved their manhood with year-long solitary walkabouts, just as anchorites retired to mountaintops or caves to plumb the vagaries of God's dispensations, so, it seemed, men in Minnesota retired each winter to their small ice-bound huts—to catch fish, to meditate, to escape. Some men brought old easy chairs or abandoned sofas or even cots. They might stay out on the ice for days.
Rafe, 60, living now on his disability check after the chain saw slipped from his hands and nearly severed his foot, sat on his folding chair peering into the green luminescence of his fish hole. His spear rested lightly in his hand. His lure hung listlessly in the water. He was in his long underwear. The fish house was warm from the propane heater. His mind was blank. He had ice fished every winter for over forty years. The one thing he could count on was that he would not be disturbed. It was better than being a Trappist monk.
So when he heard the knock he thought it was the wind rattling the plywood door. When the door opened, and the afternoon's pale light fell into the darkness, he thought the door had simply come unlatched. When the shadow fell into the light, and the figure appeared in his peripheral vision, he figured it was maybe Carl Osterholm, who had a fish house a few yards away and maybe wanted to borrow a lure or a beer.
But the figure, face hidden by the fur-trimmed parka, didn't seem to be Carl. It was slipping its boots out of cross country skis and then stepping inside and leaning the skis against the wall before a mittened hand pulled back the parka's hood to reveal a woman's face and tousled black hair.
Rafe didn't have any money with him -- what was he going to buy in the middle of a frozen lake? -- but said he would have some tomorrow, if she'd come back. She gave him a 5 X 8 card that had printed on it the various prices, so he could decide ahead of time what he wanted, or what he could afford. She told him she was working her way through college, and she knew it could get lonesome out here in a fish house, and it was private, no one would know, it was their business strictly, and she could provide a variety of services, for different prices, and it was all up to him what he might want or might want to afford. She understood that different men had different inclinations, and different abilities. She could, she said, for just five dollars, take off her sweater and her flannel shirt and let him look at her breasts. In fact, as a kind of sample, or free preview, she whipped off her sweater and unbuttoned her red and green flannel shirt and let him gaze at her breasts, which, he thought, were not bad at all, the nipples sticking out from the sudden change in temperature. For ten dollars he could feel them, she said, and for fifteen he could suck on them, for up to five minutes.
He said that seemed kind of steep.
Here, give it a shot, she said, stepping into him, being careful not to step in the hole in the ice, her breast suddenly right in his face, the nipple seemingly drawn like a magnet to his lips, already open in astonishment. She let him suck for almost a minute, let him squeeze her breast. She said her philosophy -- she was taking Introduction to Western Philosophy from Professor Jens Andreesen and thought this was the idea behind Kant's categorical imperative -- was that a fellow should know what he was paying good money for, and that she would get more business in the long run, more paying business, if she gave out samples, the way they do Saturdays at Olson's Supermarket -- the little chunks of summer sausage speared by a pretzel, the little wedge of Northern Star pepperoni pizza, the little paper cup of Johnson's New Orleans coffee -- because, she said, "Once you have a taste of something really good, you definitely want to come back for more."
"You definitely want to come back for me," was what Carl thought she said, not "for more," but he wasn't sure, because he didn't seem to be thinking clearly, with her nipple, larger, it seemed, than his wife's, although it had been so long he couldn't be sure, hard against his tongue.
She didn't protest, either, when his hand found her buttock and rested there for a moment. Finally, though, she stepped gently away and buttoned her flannel shirt. "Tomorrow?" she asked. He nodded. "Same time?" He nodded.
Rafe wasn't a bad-looking man. His gray hair was disappearing from the top of his head, but he sported a rakish walrus mustache. He was a sturdy man, having worked outdoors most of his life, although since his injury his pants had gotten smaller just hanging in the closet. He took his current disability as he took most of life -- philosophically, he liked to say, although he had never studied the subject, never gone to college, but everyone at the Next Door Bar, where he sometimes went on Friday afternoons in the spring and fall, when there wasn't any fishing to be done, seemed to understand what "philosophical" meant. It meant simply to take what life threw at you, without complaint or even much surprise, whether what hit you was a chain saw gone wild, an unexpected tax increase, a wife who preferred Jay Leno to sex, an enlarged prostate, or, ultimately, the final long cold sleep.
Rafe was so used to taking disappointment with a shrug, he didn't quite know how to take sudden good luck. After his free sample from Julia he was disoriented. He tried to maintain his usual aplomb, but he found he couldn't sleep that night, and his mind kept replaying those few minutes of surprising nurturance as if his brain had a film loop that couldn't be turned off. When he did sleep, his dreams were vivid and chaotic, images of women with huge breasts chasing him across the ice, women with pendulous breasts rising like mermaids from his fish hole in the ice and pulling him down and dragging him deep, where they made love in green water and he didn't have to breathe or come up for air.
In the morning his wife, Gert, asked if he had had nightmares, he had been moaning and gasping for air.
With the winter-spring semester that began in January Julia was able to schedule all of her classes -- Advanced News Reporting, Public Relations II, Public Speaking, Psychology of News Gathering, and Controversies in Ethics (Professor Andreesen's specialty, using the book he had written in which famous ethicists such as Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Russell, Confucius, Jesus, Moses, Moses Maimonides, Henry Ford, and Joseph Mengele meet and discuss various moral topics) -- in the morning and early afternoon, leaving later afternoons and evenings, and weekends, free for business.
Of course, she had to have time to study, but she soon developed a regular clientele whom she could visit by appointment, reducing the time wasted in door-to-door solicitation. She had her appointment book, and her pencil (the ballpoint didn't always write in the cold), and the client's requests, so she could estimate how much time she should allot for each appointment, and she could have a pretty good idea of her weekly income, and so know when she could give more time to her studies. She also developed a more efficient wardrobe, one that was warm, for skiing between ice houses, but which could be removed and restored in mere seconds, snaps and zippers replacing buttons.
Rafe's disability check wasn't large, but then he didn't have a lot of expenses. Gert worked as a nurse's aide at the rest home. Their modest house was paid for. Their car, with over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer, was good for another hundred thousand. He was a cautious man, though, and so the first time Julia came back he opted for the breast sucking she had let him sample the day before. He liked it that she was mature, not too young. She didn't make him feel so old. She had a frank, saucy way about her that he appreciated, and she had a sense of humor. When he had finished with her breast, she glanced down and blurted out a spur-of-the-moment variation on the old Mae West line, Is that a big Northern in your long johns or are you just glad to see me? Rafe said he was glad to see her. She said she was glad to see him, too, and she impulsively gave him a playful little squeeze. Then they both had the same idea at the same time.
She admitted she hadn't thought of putting this on her card. How much? he asked. She let her hand slide back and forth as she thought. Forty dollars, she said. Rafe hadn't brought any extra. But she could tell they were too far along to stop without grave disappointment, so she told him he could bring it tomorrow, she would trust him, and he said okay, and he did.
She received an A on her paper for Professor Andreesen's class. She argued in her paper that prostitution was like any small business and could be ethically justified—not, perhaps, by the Old Testament Moses, but by Moses Maimonides, who took a more Talmudic approach than his ten-commandments namesake, and it was clearly in keeping with Jesus' befriending Mary Magdalene and his golden rule. She quoted The Oxford Companion to Philosophy to the effect that Spinoza believed that "our primary aim should be joyous living in the here and now." And she found Spinoza himself stating, "There cannot be too much merriment, for it is always good; but on the other hand, melancholy is always bad."
Professor Andreesen, a boyishly handsome man in his forties who felt himself misplaced by Fortune to be in a two-member philosophy department in a small midwestern college, believed that he should by rights be at a prestigious university on the east or west coast, and that if he just had a stimulating intellectual environment and a lighter teaching load he could do the research and writing that would, he was sure, make his as formidable a name as Rorty or Nussbaum.
As it was, he encouraged Julia to major in philosophy, even though it could lead nowhere, vocationally speaking, because she had a gift for incisive argument, and he had to agree that prostitution was a victimless crime and the Europeans were more sophisticated about it and that, yes, temple prostitution might prove the essential sacredness of the profession.
Julia almost confessed her after-school small business, but she wasn't sure Professor Andreesen would accept the material reality of an idea as readily as the abstract concept. Sometimes it seemed as if he lived mostly in his head, and the nitty gritty of life could throw him for a loop. Instead, she asked him if he ice fished.
Rafe didn't talk much, which was all right with Julia. She liked to keep things moving, the way she had as a waitress -- take the orders, bring the dishes, clear the table, bring the check -- get the work done and go home. But she was discovering that the men on the ice were like the men at the Calistoga Café; they were lonely, and they wanted to talk. They seemed to need conversation as much as physical discharge. They talked about their wives and pulled out photos of their children. They revealed their fears, admitted their failures, volunteered their hopes, listed their troubles, and confessed their misdeeds. She even wondered briefly if she should give up broadcast journalism and go into psychology, but she soon realized that these outpourings of confidences were, to Julia's way of thinking, unseemly. She didn't want to be kneeling between a man's legs as he told her how wonderful his wife was, even though she had certain inhibitions; and she didn't want to waste valuable time listening to stories of how a son scored the winning goal last night in peewee hockey when the fellow should be dropping his drawers and getting himself ready.
Sometimes, when a customer was rattling on about how his wife wouldn't try this or that, or he was taking a tediously long time to get to where he wanted to go, Julia found herself staring at the greenish glow of the ice hole, gazing idly at the languid mosaic of light and water, imagining that the ripples formed themselves into spider webs or maps of Europe or Jackson Pollock drip paintings (she had taken Modern Art last year) or even into faces, some strange and disfigured, others familiar, like Robert Redford or Katherine Hepburn.
So Rafe's taciturnity came as a pleasant relief. He didn't even mention Gert until Julia asked him one day if he was married. She was pulling on her parka and unaccountably felt a curiosity for something personal, after the personal things they had been doing to one another for the past hour. She had guessed he was a widower, he seemed so solitary, so accustomed to loneliness, so resigned to a kind of persistent, low-grade sadness.
Her question, however, opened up something in Rafe. The next time she came he asked her questions about herself. He asked what foods she liked, if she went to the movies, what courses she was taking. He became especially curious about her philosophy courses. He hadn't known there was such a smorgasbord of opinion and argument when it came to philosophy.
He listened attentively as she summarized the courses. Once she left, he did his best to think through the things she had talked about, the knots her readings seemed to tie ideas into. Things that before had seemed to him clear and plain now lurked in shadows and skittered away along twisted passageways. The next time she came he would raise some new question, he would stop her -- sometimes at a particularly sensitive stage of their professional engagement -- for clarification.
Sometimes Julia brought him books -- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Apology- -- but Rafe wasn't one for reading. The words swam before his eyes. Like Socrates (Julia assured him), Rafe was a creature of dialectic, of the spoken give and take of the pursuit of truth.
He wanted her to explain what Plato meant by love and what Spinoza meant by God and why logic and metaphysics had so much trouble talking to each other. Sometimes, after Julia left, Rafe felt as if his head was exploding. What did William James mean by a pluralistic universe? Why would somebody as smart as Aristotle think slavery was okay? Could a person really be an Ubermensch, or was that merely big talk, the kind he heard at the Next Door Bar when a fellow had too much to drink?
Truth to tell, Julia enjoyed these fish house seminars, as she called them. They gave her a chance to try out ideas before she had to expose them in Professor Andreesen's class. They stimulated her thinking. They sharpened her mind.
As winter dragged itself frigidly on, Rafe found himself, despite his better judgment, succumbing to an escalating appetite. It was as if, deprived for so many years, an overwhelming hunger had been created, and it seemed to be insatiable. He was not satisfied with her breast. He was impatient with her hand, expert though it was. Her oral solicitations satisfied him only momentarily. Intercourse became old hat.
He drew money out of his savings account. He started going for the Grand Slam Special. He asked for things that weren't on the card. He took out a loan. He wanted her to come twice a day.
Julia had seen addiction before, with Justin and alcohol, with her father and alcohol. She realized Rafe had gone off the deep end. She hadn't worried about it at first. She assumed he had plenty of money, until he mentioned one day that he'd tried to mortgage his house but needed his wife's signature and of course that was a problem. Still, she thought things would wind down soon. The weather was warming up, and the houses would have to be off the ice before long.
Not so. Rafe wanted her to come to his house. Or he would visit her in her dorm room. Or maybe he could buy a trailer somewhere in the woods. He could withdraw money from his retirement account. It was a sure source of income, but Julia had principles. The question was, how to help Rafe with his unforeseen addiction? Cut him off, cold turkey? Or find a suitable rehab—which would bring unwanted notoriety, and perhaps marital discord?
What Julia failed to realize was that even though Rafe could admit that he was in the thrall of an addiction, he was also convinced that he was -- well, there was no other word for it -- he was in love. The trouble had begun, Rafe realized, and Julia concurred, when Rafe started asking her about herself. When they started talking about philosophy. When it became clear to Rafe that no matter what a fellow set out to do, he could make a convincing argument for it. And why shouldn't he, after all these years, feel the energizing visceral implosion of love?
Sure, Socrates thought love should be only in the head, but hadn't Lucretius written an entire book singing Love's praises? Didn't Pericles think enough of Aspasia, the most famous courtesan of all, to love her and marry her?
"But Rafe," Julia had to sadly admit, "I don't love you."
Rafe didn't care. He said all he wanted was to keep feeling the overwhelming love he felt for her, experience the hot thrill pumping through his veins. He had never felt this alive, he said. He'd even been to the doctor, and his arthritis was gone and his cholesterol was down. She didn't have to reciprocate. Not with love, anyway. And he would continue to pay her, just as before. He had gotten several credit cards in the mail in the past few weeks, and he was activating all of them. He would get cash advances. He would do anything, but he loved her, and he had to have her.
Which made Julia wonder what difference there was, really, between an addiction and love.
The next day was Sunday, when many of her clients were in church and, later, watching the Vikings on TV. She went out anyway, not for business but to clear her head, to try to find a way to cure poor Rafe's addiction, or love, if there was a difference between the two. She skied straight out, skirting the houses, some of which had already been removed. She skied until she found herself shivering, a sudden chill wind whipping snow off the ice and pelting her face. She headed for the one solitary fish house that was nearby. She didn't see a vehicle parked outside, so she assumed the house was empty. She would go in and warm up and wait out the storm. She unstrapped her skis, pulled the door open, and stepped into the dim, seemingly airless, refuge.
"Professor Andreesen?"
Jens Andreesen sat hunched over the square opening in the ice, the water casting an eerie green glow on his face. Julia thought it was merely the strange light that made his face look so anguished. Then she saw that he was holding, not a spear or a line, but a rifle. Was he shooting at the fish? That was illegal, of course, as well as pointless. But he was holding the barrel toward his face, not the hole.
"What are you doing?" she demanded.
"Julia?"
"Give me the gun."
"You don't understand."
She understood enough. Besides, she was cold, and she was tired, and, she just realized, she was tired of her small business. She was tired of the men who hadn't bathed or brushed their teeth, who smelled of beer and cigarettes and fish and old socks, men with rough hands and stubbled faces and rude words, men whom she had told herself were likable, or unfortunate, or not well brought up but who were actually oafs and creeps and insensitive slobs, except for Rafe, and she didn't know what she was going to do about Rafe. So all she could think to say to Professor Andreesen was not something understanding and sympathetic, as her psychology course had taught her, but, "I'm counting on an A in your class. If you blow your head off now, what's going to happen to my grade point? Don't you think of anybody but yourself?"
"Julia --"
"No, really, I'm out here on the ice every day working my way through school, and all you can do is—what is it? Did you reread Nausea? The Stranger? Heidegger? You can't take that stuff seriously. I mean—don't you have children? What will they think?"
She reached for the rifle. He let her take it. She unloaded it and set it against the corner. It was cold in the house. She could see their breaths. She lit the propane stove. He put his face in his hands and began to weep.
She watched him. Really, she was out of sympathy for men. She hadn't realized it before. It must have been the long hours, the interminable winter, the unrelenting cold, the pressure of studying, everything piling up, like the snow outside. All she said, as he continued to sniffle, was, "Oh, stop it. Really."
She had to admit, she was surprised to see this side of Professor Andreesen. But she wasn't surprised that he had this side. All winter she had listened to self-pitying confessions, to paroxysms of guilt, to tales of inexhaustible unhappiness. She knew that even professors were human. She understood that philosophy had its uses, but it didn't cure everything, at least not for most people.
"You don't understand," Jens Andreesen sniffled.
"Blow your nose."
She handed him a tissue from her pocket. He blew. He stared into the luminescent water. "My God," he said. "You --" He looked at her. "You're the answer to my unspoken prayers. You're a gift. A miracle. An angel."
"Don't be silly."
"What other answer is there?"
"Luck. Coincidence. Extrasensory perception."
"I was so sure," he said, gazing again into the cold water.
"Of what?"
"Nothingness. The abyss."
"You get used to it." She cupped her cold hands and blew into them.
"You, too?" he asked, looking at her. "You stared into the abyss?"
"It's not pretty." She rubbed her hands together.
"But how do you -- ?"
"Go on?"
He nodded.
"One day," she said, "I noticed that the abyss was staring back at me. It was laughing at me."
"The abyss?"
"It was one of these holes in the ice."
He glanced at the water, then looked away quickly.
She slipped her hands between her thighs. "It looked like a cartoon face. It was laughing at me for taking it so seriously."
"A cartoon face?"
"It looked like…Sartre."
"Sartre?"
"It had that funny eye he has, that looks off to the side, as if he's looking at both sides of a question at once."
"Sartre laughed at you?"
"He said it was all a joke."
"Life?"
"Everything. The whole caboodle."
Jens Andreesen glared at the water. "It's a bad joke then," he muttered. He glanced at the rifle.
"Sartre was laughing," Julia went on, "and then he started singing. It's an old song. You probably know it." She began to sing.
Andreesen stared at her, as if she were crazy. She kept on singing, not really paying any attention to him. He started humming. He sang along with her. They sang together, over and over, until they were both laughing, laughing so hard they couldn't stop, and Julia was thinking that Rafe would just have to go cold turkey and learn that life was hard, she might send him a copy of Epictetus to help him over the rough spots, she couldn't be everything to everybody, she had her own life to live, and they sang and laughed, and she tossed the bullets from the rifle into the abyss, and she tossed the rifle into the abyss, and she tossed her appointment book into the abyss.
Copyright 2005, William Borden nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program
at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.