Early Warning

He adjusted his hat so that his bald spot was covered, then pressed his finger into the skin of his forearm, checking for sunburn. Claire had to wonder why they had built the swimming pool to begin with. He said, “At the very least, if there is value, it’s important to diversify the investment, so as not to lose it all if the market plunges.”

“The market? The market for what?”

“Farmland has gone up thirty percent each of the last two years. That’s a bubble. Bubbles pop.”

She sat up, set her feet on the concrete, then leaned toward Paul and put her face right up to his, which she knew he hated. She said, “Paul, it’s not yours.”

He pulled back, but he said, “It’s ours. It’s the boys’. Do you think an Ivy League education is cheap? We have to start saving now. There’s no telling what those tuitions are going to be in eight years.”

Claire lay back again. Gray had abandoned the float, and was now bouncing up and down on the end of the diving board — another danger. If Paul had had girls, Claire often thought, he would not have had to make men out of them. She said, “There’s no telling whether they can get in at this point.”

“They can get in,” said Paul, evidently aghast that his sons’ own mother had so little faith in their intellect.

Claire placed her palms together, bent her legs, and put her hands between her knees, telling herself: Say nothing. Say nothing. That Paul made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year in his practice, and that his father, who was seventy-eight, would certainly leave him a nice portfolio, must remain unsaid. That his parents’ six-bedroom English Tudor in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, was worth $150,000 must remain unsaid (though Paul had said this very thing a few weeks earlier). Their own house, with pool and three-car garage, was worth eighty. She adopted a wheedling tone: “Come on, sweetie. You didn’t use to be so interested in money. You knew you weren’t marrying into the landed gentry.”

Paul smiled, but then he said, “I hadn’t met your brother then.”

“Joe is a farmer, not landed gentry.”

“I mean Frank.”

“Frank has plenty of money.” Claire meant that he didn’t need any more, but she saw immediately that what Paul meant was that Frank was to be simultaneously mistrusted and emulated. She sighed. She had come to think that there was a golden mean for money. Around that mean, which Claire estimated to be about five thousand a month, you worried less than if you had too little, and less than if you had too much. There was space in your inner life for other interests.

She was thinking of this because of Eliot. Eliot was older than Paul — fifty-five, he said — and balder, too — his well-shaped pate had a neatly trimmed pepper-and-salt fringe. He talked more than Paul, but he never talked about money, never talked about his children or his ex-wife, never talked about what people should or could be doing that they were not at present doing (one of Paul’s favorite topics). He did not talk about hippies or weather. He talked about books. His favorite phrase was “Did you ever read,” as in “Did you ever read Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’?”; “Did you ever read ‘The Rocking Horse Winner,’ that’s by Lawrence?”; “Say, did you ever read ‘Bitter-Sweet’?” And then, “ ‘Ah, my dear angry Lord, / Since thou dost love, yet strike; / Cast down, yet help afford; / Sure I will do the like.’ ”

She’d known Eliot now for six weeks, since she’d met him at the car wash on Hickman. He’d been carrying a book then, too, reading while waiting for his car to emerge. She’d gotten his attention by saying she’d read that book—The Golden Bowl—though of course she never had. It was by her bed now, however, along with two of his favorites, The Good Soldier and The Plague. Just last night, Paul had said, “Why are you reading those books?”

“They’re supposed to be good.”

“Who says?”

She almost told him.

Now he got up and went over to the thermometer. “Ninety-seven in the shade. Gray should come in. I’m going to close down the house. We need to relax and cool off for half an hour before ingesting any food.”

She was not going to sleep with Eliot — he was much too old and reminded her of teachers she’d had at North Usherton High. Besides, Dr. Sadler had to remain solitary and pristine in his position as her great love. He would be thirty-six now, and according to Paul was married. Another thing to be grateful for — that he had vanished at the apex of his beauty. But she would keep her date for coffee with Eliot tomorrow at ten. She would have the last chapters of The Golden Bowl finished, too, and they would discuss them intelligently, just as if they were in London, or at least in New York City, and not in Des Moines.

Claire picked up her towel. Paul said, “It’s all very well to be sentimental about your family and about the farm, but you have to be realistic, too. You understand that, don’t you?” And then he stepped closer. “Don’t you?” She nodded, the way she always did.

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