Beginner's Greek Read online

  It was a breakfast-cereal box.

  Peter was unsure of what to say. There didn’t seem to be many alternatives. “A breakfast-cereal box?”

  “Ha!” McClernand said. “Not a wrong answer. But not the right one either. Look again. Tell me what you see.”

  What Peter saw was a breakfast-cereal box.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” he said. He smiled. He was a good sport! “I give up!” he said brightly.

  McClernand nodded. “I’ll tell you what that is,” he said. And then he leaned forward, fixed his eyes on Peter, and said in a low voice, “It’s money.” Then he leaned back in his chair again, still looking at Peter but now with his former devilish grin.

  Money. Right. Yet there was nothing to do but carry on. “Money?” Peter asked. “How so?”

  “Pick up the box and tell me what it says on the top flap.”

  Peter picked up the box. “ ‘May fight heart disease.’ ”

  “No! Not that! Further over on the side.”

  “Well, there’s a thing here. It says that the company will give your school ten cents for every one of these coupons you send in.”

  “Very good,” said McClernand. He stood up and began to pace behind his desk. “I suppose I would be correct in saying that in many cases you can send the cereal manufacturer some box tops and receive a toy in return, wouldn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent. Peter, let’s think a little about that coupon. It’s just a piece of paper, isn’t it? Now, what —”

  “Cardboard, actually.”

  “All right, cardboard,” McClernand said with a look of annoyance. “Now, what happens when you send this piece of cardboard to the cereal manufacturer? The manufacturer gives something of value to you, or rather, in certain cases, to a third party as directed by you. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Tell me, the piece of paper — or rather, cardboard — does it have any intrinsic value?”

  “No.”

  “But it represents a claim on an asset, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what does that sound like?” McClernand, still pacing, was taking great pleasure in this use of the Socratic method.

  “A stock certificate, a bond, any security, really.”

  “Bingo!” McClernand said. “Just think, Peter, there are millions upon millions of boxes of cereal sitting in kitchen cupboards or closets or on kitchen counters at this very moment, each one with a top — a top that is not doing anything for anybody. People don’t want to bother to redeem their box tops. They don’t want the toy, or they don’t care enough about their school.

  “What if those very same box tops could be sold for cash? Eh? Do you see where I’m going? If someone could sell a ten-cent box top for five cents, and a school could buy it for five cents and redeem it for ten cents, wouldn’t everyone come out ahead? Or if you needed twelve box tops for a toy, you could buy them for cash, rather than spending the money to buy the extra cereal boxes. You see, don’t you?

  “But first, there has to be a box-top market. To create that market somebody has to act as an intermediary. And do you know who that’s going to be? Beeche and Company. And then, once the market is launched and flourishing, the paper will begin to trade on its own, as an investment or speculation. Think of the volume! With the firm taking a little bit on either side, the profits will be phenomenal!

  “Of course, there are all sorts of challenges and uncertainties — the Internet auction people; taxes; regs; there’s an option aspect, since most cereal box tops expire; and so forth. But that’s where you come in, laddie.” McClernand smiled at Peter with pride and affection. Then his expression slowly changed to one of mystical transport.

  “So,” he said quietly, “that’s the idea. But we aren’t stopping there. No. No. We aren’t stopping there.”

  Peter had had a feeling that they weren’t stopping there. The worst thing about all this, he thought, was that he must have sounded just like McClernand to everyone at Thropp’s meeting. Maybe they did belong together.

  “It won’t be long,” McClernand was saying, “before banks start to accept cereal box tops for deposit and to make loans accordingly. Securities firms will allow you to write checks based on your holdings. The same way people used discounted paper in the past as money, they’ll start using box tops. You know what will happen, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “The Fed isn’t going to stand back and lose control of the money supply. So they’ll want to step in.” McClernand smiled quiveringly at Peter and continued in almost a whisper.

  “It’s only a matter of time before the dollar goes completely in the tank. Everybody knows that the euro is a piece of crap. So you see? You see? The world is going to need a new reserve currency. Gold?” He let out a braying laugh and exclaimed, “Gold? Pathetic! No. No! The cereal box top!”

  Then his voice grew soft again and even more intense. “All this time, while we are making a market in them, we are slowly accumulating and accumulating and accumulating, so when it all comes together, who will have amassed holdings of cereal box tops that are greater than even those of the United States government? Us, Peter, us! Beeche and Company!” McClernand closed his eyes for a moment of silent meditation, then popped them open with a big grin. “Quite a play, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Peter.

  3

  Having depressed the appropriate keys and pedals with all his strength, the organist suddenly removed, respectively, his fingers and his feet from them, and his instrument fell mute. The last fortissimo chord of the prelude expanded and refracted in every direction, overlapping itself, shifting its shape and color, until it finally decayed into silence, a silence so deep that it seemed as if the mighty blast had permanently driven all sound from the church. Yet, to Peter, at least, standing in the transept, that silence itself reverberated with one low tone, the sound of one’s own existence, of a windless wood, of the Marabar Caves.

  Within seconds, the organ would begin to play again, and the bridesmaids and ushers, and then the flower girls, and finally the bride and her father, would begin their slow march, out of time and out of step, and approach Peter more and more closely. Then they would arrange themselves on either side, and her father would hand Charlotte off. Then they would have the ceremony. And then it would be over. Peter was about to take the most important action of his life. Staring down the aisle, with Charlotte’s and his families and all their friends fuzzily crowding his peripheral vision, he tried to smile, as he thought he ought to do.

  The ceremony was taking place on the North Shore of Long Island. The day was muggy; the church was hot. Peter felt uncomfortable in his rented cutaway, pants, waistcoat, tie, and shoes. His discomfort was both physical and mental. The costume was silly, he thought. Rented, it was by definition a contrivance. Rented shoes! He was participating in this most personally profound event while wearing rented shoes? Meanwhile, the shirtsleeves were too short. In dignity and dress, Peter believed he compared quite unfavorably to the officiant, who stood to his right. Reverend Mickle- thwaite looked awfully good in his surplice and gold-embroidered stole. He was a handsome, robust man in his sixties with a full head of steel gray hair and weathered hands. From what Peter had gathered during premarital counseling, it was pretty clear that Reverend Micklethwaite had spent a good deal more time thinking about the gauge of his spinnaker sheets than about the doctrine of the Real Presence. He stood there beaming, aglow with vitality and optimism.

  Then, on Peter’s other side, stood Jonathan. He wore his own morning coat and almost gaudy waistcoat, bought, he had explained, because he had been going to so many weddings in England. If Peter had worn that waistcoat, he would have looked moronic, but on Jonathan it had flair. The coat hung beautifully on Jonathan’s long frame, and it was very smart. Jonathan managed to look both more trig and less stiff than Peter. So attired and with his long brown curls brushed but still giving the hint of dis
order, Jonathan might have been the hero of a nineteenth-century romance.

  As Peter stared down the aisle, he was aware of one blurry dot on his left, but he was determined not to look over there. Earlier, he had noted Holly’s place, three rows back on the groom’s side. He had studied her while pretending to aimlessly survey the congregation. But he would not look again. He would not! Especially at this of all moments. Of course, his effort at self-control failed. He could not help himself, and he slid his eyes over for one last glance. She was looking at him and smiling. A thousand suns. In her smile there was affection and a tiny mock suggestion of pity. Peter could not help but think that of all the people in the church, including the members of the Holy Trinity, the two who were in closest communion were Holly and he. Today, with her hair up and wearing more makeup than usual — her red lipstick was a darker shade and more thickly laid on, as was appropriate for a formal, “lipsticky” occasion — and with the added color induced by the drama of a wedding and in the handsome setting, which became her, she looked especially beautiful. Yet this was as nothing compared with the beauty of her soul. Balanced, graceful, funny, and kind. If there was a Holy Trinity, Peter was quite sure that as they looked down on her they sighed with approbation. He loved her. He loved her. But she would never be his. But she would never be his.

  The organ sounded. Peter felt Jonathan’s hand on his back.

  “Here we go,” Jonathan whispered. “Whatever you do, don’t laugh.” Hearing this, Peter laughed.

  The bridesmaids and ushers began their approach, the former galumphing and the latter shambling like hungover zombies. Here were the flower girls, dropping petals with solemn care. They made Peter smile. After them, the bride herself, on her father’s arm. She was beaming and her face was flushed. She wore a simple dress; it had some kind of beads on it. She was very, very happy. A woman on her wedding day. Peter thought she really did look wonderful. Her father released her and stepped back. She looked at Peter with excitement, joy, love, and . . . what? Trust: she was safe. He smiled at her, and there was love in that smile. It would be fine.

  “We are gathered here in the sight of God,” Reverend Mickle-thwaite proclaimed in his luscious baritone.

  It would be fine.

  As he led his daughter down the aisle, Dick Montague had reason to feel well pleased with himself, not that he ever really needed a reason. He had had a new morning coat built for the occasion, and he did look very fine. He was about six feet tall, and he had a face that was ruddy with health and prosperity and thick light brown hair that he held aloft like a pennon. He was paying for the wedding and everything was being done just right, without ostentation but with evident expense. In fact, he had had nothing to do with the planning — his former wife handled all that — except to upgrade the wines, but the effect would redound to him.

  It would be a better dinner than the one the night before, given by the groom’s parents. They had hired out at a restaurant, quite a nice restaurant, but the waiters were a little too evangelistic with the water pitchers and they scraped food onto plates as they were clearing. Indifferent food, and as for wine, borderline plonk. Of course, the Russells were at a disadvantage, as parents of the groom always are when they are from a different town. They were nice, nondescript people. The father was an executive with a big company, Dick could not remember which one. While not particularly old, he had thinned-out white hair and a face with lots of lines going in different directions. The wife was very pleasant; today she wore a coral suit. Dick’s toast had gone off well, rather better than anyone else’s, in fact (somehow, in thanking the Russells for the dinner, Dick had managed to work in his own ancestors). He and his wife, Julia, had gone back to the city for the night and returned this afternoon.

  That had caused some friction with Charlotte’s mother, Janet, who was annoyed that he would not be “on hand.” As he looked up the aisle, he could see Janet sitting thirty inches away from his current wife. In her pale blue dress, Janet looked thick around the shoulder blades, but it thrilled Dick to see the back of Julia’s neck. Julia never gave any trouble over this sort of thing, and Janet had too much pride to make a fuss, so there had been immediate agreement on where the stepmother would sit, but Dick knew that sharing the pew with Julia, as was customary, would make Janet livid. Of course, it was often difficult dealing with his ex-wife, and an occasion like this wedding — the first of any of their children — meant they had to reconstitute the family like some ersatz beef product. There was tension. The divorce had all been very painful for everyone. Or anyway, that’s what Dick said to himself. He had simply not been able to feel too bad about it either at the time or later. Julia had played an instrumental part in the breakup.

  As awkward as it sometimes was, when Dick had to talk to his former wife or see her or hear about her, it usually gave him satisfaction. Every time that she tried to get the better of him or hold her own or stand on her dignity, he secretly gloated. The same was true when he heard about her divorcée life, the interior decorating and trips with friends (the fjords, St. Petersburg). She had thick, green, leaf-shaped objects in her divorcée house. How did these things appear, like mushrooms after a thunderstorm? There were occasional “boyfriends.” How basically pathetic to be a grown-up woman and to have to have “boyfriends” and worry about the phone ringing. She made some false starts at marrying again, and each one ended in a mild humiliation. It was quite simple: Dick had won.

  As for his children, he had vanquished them, too. In addition to Charlotte, there were two others, both younger, David and Deirdre. David was a groomsman, and Charlotte had dutifully made Deirdre her maid of honor. Dick had not crushed them completely, but it was understood that he could. Each one felt like a mouse caught in his fist. At bottom, he liked that too. Charlotte was a bit tiresome. In fact, she bored him to tears. She was the kind of person who wanted to win over her stepmother, instead of saying, “That harlot destroyed my family (such as it was), I despise her, if I see her I will spit upon her.” No, Charlotte thought she should be worldly about it all and that she and Julia should be “friends.” So she would invite Julia to lunch. Julia was a good sport and had lunch with her now and then, and they were “friends.” They would talk about clothes — Charlotte went through phases at overreaching to be chic — and Julia liked clothes, but Charlotte would talk about them in such a charmless, methodical way that, as Julia put it, she sounded as if she were preparing for her A levels.

  There was the son, David. Drugs. The terror and work associated with this fell almost entirely to Janet. The worry about the call in the middle of the night was hers, the visits to the emergency room, all the lies. The scenes in the kitchen — the smell of sautéed garlic (Janet was something of a cook) and Janet’s screaming, “How could you do this?!” Oh, how she loved her son, though, and how he could make her laugh, and how much better company he was than her daughters. She had seen the scabs, bruises, and thick purple lines running down his arms. This was on the hairless inner side of the arms, the soft pale paths her fingers had walked up when he was a little boy. What could she do? How could she stop him? What did they say in those meetings? She couldn’t stop him. It was his self-esteem, and the divorce . . . But to Dick, in an odd way, David seemed most vital in his pursuit of his drug avocation. He had never been particularly focused or accomplished, had never had very much drive; he was a bookish, indolent, dreamy, nervous boy who drew girls to him but who was unfit and a poor athlete. He certainly had drive now. Still, the fact remained that David was a fairly pointless piece of protoplasm. This gave Dick subconscious satisfaction: he had won. It was all very well for men to talk about how eager they were for their sons to make a success of themselves, how much more it meant than their own success, how tickled they were by the idea of a son entering the firm. Bullshit. Wives and sons: they were the ones who would plot against you, either separately or in treacherous alliance, and if they did, they must be put down, ruthlessly if necessary, all the villages burnt.

/>   Finally, Deirdre. She had freckles and a round face, but she was quite pretty (of all the siblings, David was the best-looking). Deirdre had always had trouble in school. She was dyslexic, and even though they were always reassured that dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence and that lots of kids who suffer from it are superbright, Dick was always amazed at her ignorance and primitive methods of analysis. Her mind seemed like a map with vast areas left blank. “Pearl Harbor — that was World War I, right?” She loved animals and had a knack for working with horses and dogs, which her parents hoped would turn into something. Dick liked her more than his other children, quite a bit more. She wasn’t like Charlotte, bringing her tiresome friends from Paris to his house in the countryside, speaking her pedantic idiomatic French and always trying to act so grown-up; or like David, with his problems and sarcasm. “Hi, Dad,” Deirdre would say, whereas Charlotte called him “Father” or “Papa” with the accent on the second syllable and David didn’t call him anything.

  Dick was now married to a woman nineteen years younger than he. She was much prettier than his first wife had ever been, and she was very clever about — about everything, really, but particularly about clothes and furniture and silver and so on. His wife made him happy. That morning they had almost made love, but there hadn’t been enough time. Then they had had a good early lunch in town with some friends. Dick could still taste the wine and the crispy artichokes. In the afternoon, when they arrived in their suite at the club where the reception would be held, he suddenly became ravenous and ordered a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, some coffee, and chocolates. In his dressing gown, he ate his sandwich, which was delicious (the frizzled crusty corners tucked up in just the right nooks of his belly), and drank the coffee; he ate some chocolate. His wife drank coffee and nibbled on a piece of chocolate. She was wearing a slip, and Dick thought how nice it would be to work his fingers up her inner thigh. Grasping her slender forearm, he drew her to him; but once again there was no time; she had to attend to her hair.