The Dream Merchant Read Online Free Page B

questions about Brazil—a hundred times we had vowed to go back there together.
    Instead, I ask him, Jim, what will you do when there’s no more money?
    In six weeks we’ll be ready to put the Wow Card in stores, he answers smartly. There is nothing in the world like the Wow Card. Did I explain the marketing plan? We’ll sell millions of cards; actually, we’ll give them away. That’s the beauty of it. Hold one in your hand and it looks like any other debit card, but it throws off a hefty residual income for the rest of your life. Let me show you some numbers—he still has ardor for the hunt despite a run of failed deals and the specter of oblivion, which he greets as a new and beguiling acquaintance. Jim has never been reluctant to experience new tastes, to walk new paths, even now while he walks the plank. This seems like the final chapter for my friend, but who knows? Jim has crashed before.
    Even now, living with the girl, who feels like my enemy, he pulls me back in. I am enticed by his scheme, maybe “connected” is more accurate, preposterous and gaudy though it is. This has nothing to do with logic. Jim’s ideas are the dreams of my own father.
    Jim lays out the terrain: stacks of Wow Cards piled high in stores across America. He’ll put them in topless bars, gas stations, and eventually they’ll go into supermarkets. The Wow Card is a debit card that works in ATM machines, but its primary purpose is to allow a buyer to rent pornography anonymously at steeply discounted prices. Jim talks a little about the value of pornography while the girl smiles as if he’s preparing to open a flower shop. My friend can turn a deal on its side and make it seem adventurous or cozy or sexy or the very answer to a life of pain and wanting. I’ve seen him do it many times. For me his pitch is a child’s song.
    We’ll soon buy a big fishing boat together, he says to me, a sixty footer. We’ll cruise the islands in style.
    She listens to each word and seems to adore him.
    He’s laughing. The gap from his missing front tooth looks ridiculous. There’s no money for a cap, but having nothing, starting again, unhampered, is so much sweeter than standing pat and being mediocre. The greatest thrill for a gambler, he’d told me years before, is losing a fortune and bottoming out. And now he’s flat broke, never been this low since he was a child growing up on the outskirts of Edmonton. And he feels content watching her clean their little place and listening to the yammer of her Israeli children, or turning on Frank Sinatra.
    She smiles. She loves him. I don’t know. Maybe she loves him.

 
    3.
    When the girl frets or feels idle or homesick, he uses the past like roses and chocolates. Jim has described to her the houses: the last condo he and Phyllis lived in had seven bathrooms, the girl was amused about the bathrooms, never having had more than one herself, and the river of money, for years everything he touched turned to money. She squirms when he talks about high times, his two new Rolls-Royces parked in front of the cavernous modern house Jim had built on a peninsula for his second wife, Ava. There were two smaller houses on the property for the servants. Some called it the finest estate in Canada. In the morning, Jim chose between the white convertible and the silver sedan depending on his mood or whom he was meeting for lunch. He told Mara about the night Tony Bennett crooned from speakers in Jim’s Learjet “Fly Me to the Moon” while Jim and Ava screwed face-to-face in his buttery leather recliner, screwed and laughed, and then he pointed to a glowing full moon blasting through the oval window as the plane descended from thirty thousand feet into Vegas. That was when Jim was at the very top. I heard Jim describe the moment at parties in the big condo on Brickell Avenue above the Intracoastal where he often entertained with