“What do you do, Harold?” Belinda asks, still the good sport.
“Oh, nothing much,” Harold says.
Belinda smiles, but she’s thinking, “Nothing much?” Why do you say that? Why are you acting like this? Do you want me to think you do something you can’t talk about? Or are you just trying to make yourself “interesting”? You are, aren’t you? That’s the reason for the ridiculous clothes you’re wearing, isn’t it? You want to look like an eccentric. You’re probably fifty years old, but when you take your wife out to dinner — her birthday dinner, for God’s sake — you wear a tweed jacket and corduroy pants, the kind of outfit you wore in college when you had to throw on a jacket and tie to get fed in the dining hall. I get it. We’re supposed to say, “That Harold, what an individual!” And your wife. She looks as if she hasn’t bought any clothes in years. Something’s all wrong with her. Maybe she’s crazy. Haven’t you noticed, you asshole? Why else would she laugh so much at everything you say? And why can’t you stop trying to be funny? You’re trying so hard, and you’re really nothing but a bore, Harold, just a bore.
“Harold is an engineer,” Matthew says. “He does the engineering work on our toys.” Harold says nothing, but there’s such hunger in his eyes that Matthew, for the briefest instant, sees Harold as he must have been as a boy. He can see the face of the little Harold, fat, like the little Matthew, a boy without playmates, hungry for a friendly word, and he feels a sudden compassion for him. “Frankly,” Matthew says, “he’s a genius. He came up with a brilliant design for this brick maker I’m presenting in a couple of weeks — ”
“Now really, it was your idea, Matthew.”
“Oh, but it was just an idea. You made it work. And with a design of — well — elegant simplicity.”
“I stole it.”
Matthew stops breathing. He has certain hopes pinned on the success of this toy. This is stunning news. “What?” he asks.
“It’s nothing we’re going to get into any trouble for. I took it from — the truth is, I took it from a comic book.”
Blank looks.
“When I was in the Peace Corps — ”
“You were in the Peace Corps?” asks Matthew.
“Yes indeed. I built housing; that is, I taught people how to build housing. Rammed-earth housing. We had wordless comic books that showed how to build a ram to make mud bricks and then build a house out of the bricks. Your sandcastle brick maker is the grandchild of that ram.”
“It makes bricks out of sand,” Matthew says to Gwen, who seems never to have heard anything about it before. “I thought I invented it. Or came up with the idea for it, anyway.”
“Oh, ours is much better than the Peace Corps version,” says Harold. “The bricks interlock, for one thing. And you can make six different shapes. Much better.”
Matthew’s enthusiasm for the brick maker has suffered a blow. So has his self-esteem. He turns to his menu. “The food is supposed to be extraordinary here,” he says.
“I can’t decide what to have,” says Gwen. “What are you leaning toward, Harold?”
Harold inclines a little toward his right. “I’m leaning a little toward the right,” he says.
Gwen laughs and says, “Oh, Harold.”
Matthew chuckles to be polite. The moment of compassion has passed; he hates Harold for having sabotaged his brick maker, for having diminished the value of his idea. Belinda smiles, but she too has come to despise these people; for a moment she considers simply getting up and asking Matthew to take her home, but their waiter returns.
[to be continued]
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🎧 470: “What do you . . .”