Read Online The Dream Merchant by Fred Waitzkin - Free Book Online

couldn’t pay attention to his wife for more than a minute or two. The enormity of what he had done, what he was going to do, paralyzed him. He couldn’t think of how to explain the end of their long marriage.
    But mostly, he didn’t think about Phyllis at all, though she rarely left the room. She watched him sitting by the window and figured out the general drift before he said a word about the girl. He was afraid Mara would change her mind, wouldn’t travel here to begin their new life. He shook his head like a victim. Jim was trying to keep their dialogue alive inside. Sitting in his chair, he tried to summon her smell, her taste. He didn’t want to be interrupted. He couldn’t bear the violation of Phyllis’s voice or her long stretches of crying once she fully understood his intention.
    Jim had no energy for his marketing business. Of course he needed money, but he was obsessed with Mara (it would take her nearly two months to settle her affairs and join him in Florida), and he couldn’t bear the grind of travel and attending meetings, listening to endless sad-sack stories that were at the heart of signing new recruits. Suddenly these group sessions seemed to mirror an inner deadness. Their inflated promises and coarseness were inconsistent with the new feelings that stirred his being.
    His former best buddies, the top guys in his organization, were bewildered by Jim’s reticence to soldier on. They offered him a new product line with a guaranteed income and still Jim didn’t return their calls. Top executives, distributors, casual friends, his grown daughter, his wife, the lot of them had been swept aside by improbable love.
    *   *   *
    When Jim and Mara are window-shopping the glamour stores in downtown Miami and happen to run into one of his salesmen or good buddies from the old days, and there have been many, he usually greets the man as “bub.” It is hard to imagine the surfeit of dreams and shared aspirations that have suddenly and tragically drained into this tiny dismissive noun. Whenever I hear him use it I feel embarrassed for the friend, though at the same time I feel pleased to retain a place in Jim’s much-diminished circle. It has become a circle of three, but only because I cling to him like a pilot fish. I feel like calling back to the spurned stranger, Wait, just wait! I still believe (or want to believe) Jim’s infatuation will pass and he’ll return to the old days with Phyllis.
    She would take him back, even now.

 
    7.
    Why does he want to be with her? Phyllis asked me. She’s a terrorist.
    One night I was with Jim and Mara, and the next I visited Phyllis in the dimly lit one bedroom where she had waited for Jim when he was in Israel.
    She has him hypnotized, hypnotized. Phyllis repeated this word slowly while looking at my face to see if she’d gotten it right. Phyllis has often annoyed me with her choice of words, not exactly wrong but not right either. I was tempted to say to her, Captivated, enthralled, fascinated. But I didn’t. I was barely listening.
    While Jim was in Israel for months loving Mara, it never once occurred to Phyllis that he wouldn’t stand by her. They had been married nearly three decades and Jim was her lion. Like many of us, Phyllis resisted the image in the mirror. She didn’t notice her dappled, bulging thighs, her spreading hips and pudgy face; she still lovingly patted on her morning makeup, slipped into a short skirt, and showed a plunging neckline. It was the way he had coached her to dress. Then she walked to the supermarket in the dreamy style of Jim’s young lover, in Toronto, twenty years his junior, when she still had a tiny waist, thrilling hips, and a rolling Marilyn Monroe walk through paradise.
    They met one night in a club in Toronto. She had been sitting at a table with a few friends and he sent over a bottle of champagne. Jim introduced himself and they