What's The Worst That Could Happen?

“Same thing,” Dortmunder said, “happened to a guy I know, making watches. He called them Rolez.”

“These things happen,” A.K.A. said, “and you’d expect a little understanding from the competition, mistakes can come along to anybody, but there you are.”

“Uh huh,” Dortmunder said. “Where am I?”

“Lester’s out,” A.K.A. told him. “Got out a year or so ago.”

“I’m glad,” Dortmunder said.

“Moved out west for his health,” A.K.A. said. “Moved to a place in Nevada called Henderson, near Vegas.”

We might be getting to it now, Dortmunder thought, and said, “Oh, yeah?”

“Has a little factory there.”

“Back in the luggage business?”

“No no, he’s in the household cleaner business now,” A.K.A. said. “Little stuff to make the house look shiny and nice.”

“Spic and Span,” Dortmunder suggested.

“Well, I think his is Spin and Span,” A.K.A. said. “Same color box, though. But his big seller is Clorex.”

“Ah,” said Dortmunder.

“Sells pretty well there in the southwest,” A.K.A. said, “across the border into Mexico, down along the Caribbee. One way and another, you know, he undercuts the competition pretty good.”

“I bet he does.”

“I could give him a call,” A.K.A. suggested, “tell him you might drop by.”

“Yeah?”

“The thing is,” A.K.A. said, “Lester’s got employees, he’s got buildings, he’s got trucks, it could be he could be of use to you, you know what I mean? A lot more than if I came along, even if I could. I mean, what do I know about out west?”

A sudden boulder in the stream, right there. And another. And another. This is a new idea, it uses all those volunteers keep calling on the phone. Dortmunder, remembering an interesting fact about Las Vegas, said, “This business, your friend, this is chemicals, am I right?”

“Cleaning products,” A.K.A. said. “We’re not talking drugs here, John, controlled substances, nothing like that.”

“No, I understand,” Dortmunder said. “And maybe I will get in touch with your friend. You wa

A.K.A. did, and said, “I’ll call him now, say you’re on the way.”

“A guy like this,” Dortmunder said, “the business he’s in, he’s probably got industrial gas, wouldn’t he?”

“You could ask him,” A.K.A. said, “but I should think probably, yeah. All that Tex-Mex stuff they eat down there, I should think they all got industrial gas.”

41

It was an unexpected complication for Andy Kelp when it turned out A

“Never been there in my life,” she assured him. “Politics was all the gambling we ever did in my family.”

This conversation was taking place in a cab headed uptown, late Wednesday afternoon. They’d had lunch with Gus and Gus’s friend Tillie, and then they’d taken in a movie down in the Village, and now they were on their way back uptown to what until recently had been Kelp’s apartment but which was now rapidly becoming “their” apartment, and here it turned out A

Over the years, Andy Kelp had had a number of relationships with persons of the opposite sex, some of them solemnized by the authorities in various rites and rituals, others not. He didn’t divide these relationships by the degree of their solemnity, however, but by their length, and in his experience there tended to be two kinds of interpersonal intergender relationships: (1) short and sweet, and (2) long and bitter.

Kelp knew this wasn’t everybody’s experience. John and May, for instance, and others he could think of. But for himself, up until now, it had always been true that every new pairing started off on a happy high, which gradually ebbed, like the tide. Short relationships, therefore, tended to leave a residue of nostalgia, a semihappy glow in which the rough spots were gauzed over and the highlights highlighted, while longer relationships tended to come to a close with bitterness and recrimination, bruised egos and unresolvable disputes, so that only the wens and warts remained outstanding in the memory.

So the question he had to ask himself, Kelp thought, riding there in the taxi beside the expectant A

On the other hand, he had to admit, he was somehow finding it difficult to think about life after saying good-bye to A

And that, so far as Kelp was concerned, was unique. Every other woman he’d ever met, when she wasn’t being worried about her appearance, was being worried about what was going to happen next. They were all of them fixated on the future, they all wanted assurance and reassurance and something in writing and a plan. For Kelp, who lived his life with the philosophy that every day was another opportunity to triumph over the unexpected—or at least not get steamrollered by the unexpected—this urgency to nail down tomorrow was completely inexplicable. His reaction was: Say, you know, it isn’t even that easy to nail down today.

(Of course, that this very philosophy might be the cause of the nervousness in his woman friends that made them fret more than they otherwise might about events to come, had not as yet occurred to him. However, since all his days were brand new, since he wasn’t stuck to a predetermined pattern, it was a thought that could still occur; nothing is precluded.)

Still, the point was, A

The cab was approaching their apartment. A

“If you came along,” he said, knowing that even to start a sentence with the word if was an acknowledgment that she was going to get her way, “if you did, what would you do with yourself?”

She beamed. “I’ll think of something,” she said. “We’ll think of something together.”