"STORY PROBLEM"
by Greg Farnum

He opened the paper and was surprised to see the name of
"his" bookstore, the one he stopped at several times a week.
It was an election story.  Two ladies who regularly meet  at
the  bookstore's  coffee  shop  have  no  trouble  picking a
favorite coffee, but  with  politicians it's different.  And
so many issues...  Mildly  bitter  but  with  a  full,  rich
aroma...    Surprising,  too,  to  see  a  story  about  the
newspaper strike.  The Detroit  newspaper  strike is over, a
visiting Wall Street analyst had told a local audience.  The
strikers don't yet realize it but the strike is over.   They
lost.   He says that the "people that matter" have made that
decision.  The people that matter are back on Wall Street.

He turned to the book page but found there was none.  He
was warm and comfortable sitting cross-legged on  the  couch
with  the  afghan  on  his  lap and the autumn sun streaming
through the window and a  cup  of coffee on the little table
in front of him.  And  then  the  little  creatures  in  his
bloodstream  began  to  stretch  their  limbs  in their slow
irritable way.   They  were  waking  up  and  they  were not
amused.  In his mind's eye he could see the scowls on  their
cartoon-like  faces  as  they stretched their limbs, seeking
but not finding.  They stretched like feudal lords waking at
the tail end of  a  banquet,  knocking  goblets to the floor
when they found that the goblets were  empty.   He  had  the
feeling  that  a  toothache  had been buried deep within his
body and forgotten,  and  he  was  only now remembering.  As
they stretched and  searched  the  toothache  became  worse.
They  wanted  nicotine.   He wanted a cigarette.  There were
some cigarettes in the  glove  compartment of Kathy's car...
no, not right now.  He thought of the quote by  that  famous
and  well  respected businessman -- Cigarettes are the ideal
product: make 'em for  a  penny,  sell 'em for buck, they've
got great brand loyalty and they're  addictive.   He  rubbed
his  face  and  let  the  little  creatures scurry painfully
through his veins.

"Surreal," said Kathy as  she  joined  him on the couch,
curling her legs up beneath her robe.  "Yes?" "The way Henry
said 'I'll show you where the good stuff is' yesterday  when
we  went  into  Abercrombie  &  Fitch." She reached down and
grabbed a large  slab  of  the  Sunday  paper off the floor;
$300,000 houses sprawled over her lap as he said "Yeah?" "We
walk in there past all these high  quality  clothes  and  he
says  'Not here, I'll show you where the good stuff is,' and
we go to the second  floor  past  all these nice clothes and
into the teenage department.  Cheap gaudy stuff.  The  place
mothers  take their teenage daughters to when they insist on
buying something sleazy." "Yeah?" "Yeah, the kind of stuff a
middle-aged  guy   would   buy   his   seventeen   year  old
girlfriend." Henry had a seventeen year old girlfriend.

That day had begun with  a phone call.  Henry had wanted
to meet for coffee.  They'd decided on the  Barnes  &  Noble
just down Rochester Road.  Like most of the superstores this
book  store  had a cafe.  An ample cafe.  You could skate in
it.

"Different values," Henry  said.   Three  cups of coffee
and several books were between them.  "I don't know if  it's
genetic  or what." He was talking about his two sons and his
former wife, Mary.  Henry  and  Tom  recapped in an allusive
way the stories about Mary's family  and  its  relationships
with  things  and  money that they had told before, stopping
occasionally to provide a  fuller,  less cryptic version for
Kathy.  "When Mary and her  brothers  were  young  and  they
needed  new  shoes," said Tom, "their dad used to march them
into Sears and have them all try on shoes, then say 'Come on
kids, let's go,' and march  them  all out again with the new
shoes on." "Really?"  "Yeah,"  corroborated  Henry,  "they'd
steal the shoes.  That's the kind of guy their dad was."

Henry  and  Tom  savored  that  story,  Henry because it
seemed to make his point, Tom because it was so dramatic, so
surprising.   It  was  the  center  around  which  the other
stories about money and honor seemed to revolve like  atomic
particles  around  the  nucleus  of an atom.  And once these
particles were set  in  motion  other  particles were called
into being.  Some of these  new  particles  were  individual
stories,  others  were  formed  from  several stories linked
together, all related to  the  nuclear story by an emotional
gravity.

There was the $300 he'd loaned         There was the car
to Dan to help Dan out of that         that Paul had
jam he'd gotten into in the Army       borrowed from Dee,
down in North Carolina. The loan       Henry's love child
that was never paid back, never        daughter, and her
mentioned.                             husband, the one
                                       they had loaned to
                                       help Paul out, and
                                       all the tickets Paul
                                       had gotten and never
                                       mentioned and never
                                       paid.

There were the hundreds of dollars in phone  calls  that
Dan  and  his fiancee had charged up and never mentioned and
never paid.  Then  there  was  the  $750  in taxes and title
charge on Paul's car.  How much of that $750 have you saved?
None.  Henry paid the $750.

"Values," said Henry.  "Take and never give.   Did  they
learn  this  or were they born with it?" "All you care about
is money.  You're a money  grubbing old bastard." That's the
part that came next.  Those were Mary's words, repeated many
times before she left for Florida with her lesbian lover  to
open a hot dog stand.

"I  don't  think  that's true," said Henry, "it's just a
question of reciprocity.  You  know,  all  take and no give.
Like when Paul first came to me for the $750  for  his  car.
He  got  Dee  to  co-sign for the entire $8,000 so he didn't
have to pay a thing except $750 tax and title, and I said to
him how much have you  saved  and  he said none.  Not a damn
thing.  So I said to him call your mother  down  in  Florida
and  get  half  of  it  from her and I'll give you the other
half.  So he comes to me  later and says his mother can't do
it because all her money is tied up in  the  restaurant  and
she  doesn't have a cent because she's still making payments
on the car.   I  said  what?   She  told  you that?  She got
$20,000 out of the sale of the house and then I took  $4,000
out  of  my share and paid off her car.  She's not paying on
that god damned car."

"She said that?" asked Kathy.  Her response was  like  a
bell  calling the table to attention.  The inadvertent force
of Henry's last few words  was greater than even Henry cared
for.  "Well, sometimes Paul gets things mixed up," he  said.
"For  all  I  know  he  might have misheard.  It's possible.
But..." Half an hour  later  they  were  at the mall.  Henry
said he needed to pick up a new hat and some winter  gloves.
"This  was in all the papers when I first moved up here from
Cincinnati, before you and the  kids joined me," said Tom as
he and Kathy walked toward the large  granite  ball  in  the
center  of  the  place,  Henry slightly ahead of them.  "All
about how fancy this place  was  going to be when it opened.
The papers quoted some woman who was here  on  opening  day:
'This   is  the  greatest  experience  in  Detroit  shopping
history.'" "Jesus."

They  passed the ball: 4,250 pounds of granite, said the
plaque, and it revolved on a stream of water.  It struck Tom
as dangerous.  It came  from  Finland.  They went to various
stores.  Henry had recently purchased things  from  many  of
them.  Nowadays Henry liked to shop.  Since Mary left he had
money  to  burn.  The last store they visited seemed to sell
nothing but  leather  bound  notebooks.   Henry  said he had
purchased one for his young girlfriend.  Tom picked one  up,
looked  at  the  price tag inside the back cover: $45.  They
ended with coffee.

"I bought  three  pairs  of  pants  there,"  said Henry,
stirring his coffee.  "They cost  $50  a  pair  compared  to
Dockers  which only cost $38, but these are made from better
material and they last  longer  than  Dockers.  You get what
you pay for."

Tom had been starring at a little scrap of  paper  since
he'd  returned from the bathroom a couple of minutes before.
He pushed the paper toward the  center of the table so Kathy
and Henry could see.  On it was written: 3.8 Lpf/1.0 gpf Tom
smiled.  "I  finally  know  what  that  means."  Across  the
courtyard   the   ball   revolved   slowly.   "I  find  that
threatening,"   said   Kathy.     "You   do?"   asked   Tom,
straightening  his  bathrobe  and  glancing  down  at   Dole
registers  gains  among  Oakland County voters.  "Yeah, as a
middle-aged woman I do.   He  talks  about  how Mary and the
kids were always after his money then he gets  rid  of  Mary
and  goes out and buys himself all new everything and gets a
seventeen year old  girlfriend.   So,  like that's what guys
are supposed to do when they get to be his age?" Tom's  age.
Forty-seven.   Tom didn't even want to touch that subject or
the odd pact that now constituted his friendship with Henry;
instead his mind flashed back  to  the numbers, each of them
having a tangible mass and weight which held all the stories
and emotions that had attached themselves  to  that  number.
Singly, they were graspable; in the aggregate they were like
one  of  those  complex story problems that you'd get at the
end of  math  class  in  junior  high.   "Extra credit!" the
teacher would say...

$300
$750
$8,000
$20,000
$4,000
4,250 lb
$45
$50
$38
3.8 Lpf/1.0 gpf
47


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