FIVE

With a master touch gained from hours spent working on his computer keyboard, Gary Swenson punched out his home number on his desk telephone, a device cleverly shaped to resemble a Porsche Targa. With the windshield to his ear and the sloping trunk in front of his mouth, the effect would have been worth at least one major conference paper for a Freudian psychologist. As he pictured his wife’s camera cell phone ringing at home, he impatiently wondered why Faye Janice was taking so long to answer. At last he heard a breathless, “The Swenson-Nelson residence.”

“Faye Janice? It’s me. Are you ready? What were you doing?”

“I was in the bathroom, if you must know, and yes, I’ve been ready for some time. You said you wanted to leave at four o’clock and it is now a quarter to five. Are we still planning to go?”

“Of course. I was just running off a little data on how we can improve efficiency by paying off on all claims on two set days of the month instead of the piecemeal way we’ve always done it. I wanted to bring these figures along this weekend and show them to Hofstead. What I was calling about was that I wanted to make sure you packed our ski gear.”

“Our ski gear? You want I should put the skis in the rack?”

“No, no,” Swenson replied, his condescension all too apparent, “we aren’t going downhill skiing. That’s too violent for this crowd. But there is some talk about cross-country skiing and it appears that everyone is going snowmobiling. I just thought that we should have our thermal long-johns and socks packed, and that perhaps a set of aprés-ski wear would be nice if we have any social time in the lounge. What do you think?”

“I’ve already packed our Norwegian sweaters; I thought that would please Hofstead. But I was going to ask if you thought we should take our bathing suits. They do have a pool at that resort, don’t they?”

“To tell you the truth, I doubt it. Swimming is a big thing in the summer, of course, but that is what the lake is for. But I do remember that they mentioned a sauna. When’s the last time we took a sauna together?”

“Not long ago enough. I can never see the charm of sitting there sweating like a butcher and having my makeup run and have all the curl wilt out of my hair.”

“Yah, but look at the bright side. We could get to keep Pek and Iris company, har-har. You can bet he’ll be there. That’s the sort of thing that makes his little Finnish heart go ‘thumpity-thump.’ I wonder if he’d rather sit next to you in your swimsuit than Iris in hers. That thought boggles the mind.”

“It boggles my mind that I would welcome a chance to sit and sweat next to Pek. But anyway, I thought they didn’t wear swim suits in their saunas.”

“Hey, that’s right. Oh boy, a chance to see Iris, that shapeless mound of cellulite, in the altogether. Uffda.” Gary Swenson and Faye Janice Nelson always enjoyed their mutual and shared smugness. They were in their early thirties with no children and were the type of people who had done very nicely from carefully selected tech stocks. They prided themselves on their posture, workout habits, and healthy eating. They had once been introduced to social responsibility in college, and discovered that they just didn’t care for it.

Gary believed that the clothes make the man. It is always easy for nice clothes to look elegant on a mannequin, and Gary was able to adopt the mannequin’s mien as well as its soul. He had pleasant blue eyes that always seemed to shine more than was physically normal. His teeth seemed unnaturally white, his nose unnaturally straight, his blond hair unnaturally coiffed. He wore a tan cashmere topcoat to work, but for his Winter Wonderland Weekend he was planning to change to his informal Eddie Bauer down parka.

Professionally he had done well at Hofstead Hail. It wasn’t that he had a salesman’s personality—many of his policy holders, in fact, rather distrusted his outward perfection—but he did have a cunning sense of when to sell. He studied weather patterns of previous years and previous days and often showed up just after a small hailstorm had frightened the uninsured farmer. Armed with the latest long-range forecasts, he often made a sale where even John Hofstead had failed. And he owed it all to his computer.

Nobody doubted his wizardry at his iMac, and Swenson would make no decision without consulting it. An end-product of his trust in computers was his Saab 9-3. He fed all the information about cars he could find into his computer and it proved to his entire satisfaction that it was the smartest car to buy in terms of value, safety, performance, and versatility. Of course, one might note that he had always wanted a Saab in the first place, so that the type of data he put into the computer may have had something to do with the final results. In fact, one could probably say that about most of the things for which Gary used his computer. But no one said so out loud, at least not around Hofstead Hail, where Gary and his technically advanced super sales kept John in awe and the rest in envy.

Faye Janice was in many ways the female version of Gary. Her collection of exercise videos was the most complete to be found in Minnesota, and they were treated with such reverence that if they had been books, they would have been signed first editions. She did, in fact, have a signed letter from Jane Fonda, which was treasured as though it were an original of Magna Carta.

Ever since her parents had contrived the name it was always “Faye Janice,” with the first name never being used alone. Even in their most intimate moments Gary whispered the entire name. A stranger might wonder why this was so, but once acquaintance was made it became apparent that no other appellation was sufficient. She was obsessed with the subject of body fat, and one would have been hard pressed to find any on her supple, lithe, and athletic body. Her light brown hair, highlighted with a little artificial auburn, was cut so as not to interfere with her workouts and did not really require the ubiquitous headband that always seemed to match her sweat suit. Her facial features were attractive mostly because she knew how to use makeup. In fact, her brown eyes were ordinarily rather dull, so that it was somewhat disconcerting to notice that while her body danced, her eyes didn’t.

She had a part-time job teaching women’s physical education at Fergus Falls State University, a not altogether demanding position that allowed her to keep her home up to the standards that would reflect well on her husband’s climb up the ladder of success in “the insurance industry.” Even now, as she talked to him on the telephone, she was thinking that when Gary became president of Hofstead Hail she would have to redo the living room to make it more presentable to important clients. After all, with Gary’s direction, the number of “insurance products” offered to “customers” was projected to increase significantly.

As she wandered around the house with her telephone, Faye Janice asked, “You don’t think Hofstead was serious when he indicated that all four of you were under real consideration for the presidency of the company, do you?”

Gary flicked a speck of earwax from the windshield of the little Porsche and chuckled, “No, of course not. Can you picture a letterhead proclaiming ‘Myron Pekanen: President’? No way. And I’m sure he was just being nice to Borghild. She’s hardly executive material, and she’s barely mastered the word processor. I figure he might play it safe and pick Clarence for old time’s sake. I think he has a hang-up about young people, and I think he equates us with those tiresome people of the sixties. I mean, Pek is not far removed from that generation, but he doesn’t seem to feel threatened by him. Nevertheless, if he is serious about making money and running the business as it should be run in the twenty-first century, well, I’ve just got a feeling that you’ll be going to bed every night with the president of Hofstead Hail.”

“What if it’s Clarence?”

“In that case, I hope you prefer someone other than the president of Hofstead Hail. Look, I’ll just gather my papers together and I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. We’ll get to the Otter Slide just in time to freshen up for dinner. Ta-ta, love.”

“Ta-ta, love,” Faye Janice echoed.