The Moviegoer

be filed. Now we usually mail our customers a lot of booklets and charts and whatnot to help them with their returns. This year we’re going to do something different. I’m going to go through each portfolio myself, give the tax status of each transaction and make specific recommendations to every customer in a personal letter, recommendations about capital gains, and losses, stock rights and warrants, dates of involuntary conversions, stock dividends and so on. You’d be amazed how many otherwise shrewd businessmen will take long term gains and losses the same year.”
    She listens closely, her yellow eyes snapping with intelligence.
    â€œNow I’m already familiar with the accounts, so that’s no problem. But it’s going to mean a lot of letters. And we don’t have much time.” Why I must have been crazy; this girl is a good little sister.
    â€œWhen would we start?”
    â€œCan you work an hour later this afternoon and Saturday morning?”
    â€œI’d like to make a phone call,” she says in the brusque-kindly manner of country folk who grant favors with an angry willingness.
    A moment later she is standing at my desk stroking the beige plastic with two scarlet nails.
    â€œIs it all right for someone to pick me up at five for a few minutes?”
    Someone. How ancient is her wisdom. I am nothing to her, yet by the surest of instincts she labels her date a neuter person. She knows I do not believe there is such a person. But she knows what she does. Despite myself I believe a someone will pick her up, a shadowy and inconsequential person of neuter gender.
    â€œI hope I’m not interfering with anything too serious.”
    â€œAre you kidding?”
    â€œWhy no.”
    She surprises me. I said “serious” ambiguously and perhaps purposely so. But she is quick to give it its courtship meaning.
    Here is an unexpected advantage. It could be useful to me to see what sort of fellow her friend is. But I needn’t worry about managing a glimpse of him. A few minutes before five he walks right into the office. He is much to my liking—I could throw my arms around him. A sharp character—no youth as I feared—a Faubourg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour of wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all. I nod at him with the warmest feelings, and he appears to nod at me but keeps on nodding, nods past me and at the office as if he were appraising it. Now and then his lip draws back along his teeth admitting a suck of air as sharp as a steam blast. As he waits for Sharon, he swings his fist into an open hand and snaps his knee back and forth inside his wide pants.
    The Faubourg Marigny fellow leaves at last and we work steadily until seven. I dictate some very sincere letters. Dear Mr Hebert: I happened to be looking over your portfolio this morning and it occurred to me that you might realize a substantial tax saving by unloading your holding of Studebaker-Packard. Naturally I am not acquainted with your overall tax picture, but if you do have a problem taxwise, I suggest taking a capital loss for the following reasons …
    It is good to have both Mr Hebert and Sharon on my mind. To be thinking of only one of them would make me nervous.
    We work hard and as comrades, swept along by a partnership so strong that the smallest overture of love would be brushed aside by either of us as foolishness. Peyton Place would embarrass both of us now.
    By six o’clock I become aware that it is time to modulate the key ever so slightly. From now on everything I do must exhibit a certain value in her eyes, a value, moreover, which she must begin to recognize.
    Thus we send out for sandwiches and drink coffee as we work. Already the silences between us have changed in character, become easier. It is possible to stand at the window, loosen my collar and rub the back of my neck like Dana Andrews. And to become irritable with her: “No no no no, Kincaid, that’s not what I meant to say. Take five.” I go to the cooler, take two aspirins, crumple the paper cup. Her friend, old “someone,” turns out to be invaluable. In my every tactic he is the known quantity. He is my triangulation point. I am all business to his monkey business.
    Already she has rolled a fresh sheet into the platen.