23.

One day when Jim was visiting the new plant in Toronto, he noticed boxes on the floor of Marvin’s office. Jim was intrigued and pulled out a dozen old books. They were literary classics. Fitzgerald, Mann, Poe, Balzac, Baudelaire, Milton, Tolstoy. Jim hadn’t heard of these writers and was surprised Marvin was doing so much reading. He mentioned the books to his partner, who shrugged and turned the conversation to business.

In 1977, Marvin was focused on foreign markets. His desk was crowded with brochures, periodicals, and financial data about third-world countries, along with novels. He was always studying, making remarks to Jim about crop yields, water tables, foreign tariffs. This was the year that Marvin established two shadow companies in England that saved the partners millions in taxes.

Marvin worked at his desk coming up with unusual applications for his shed and designing add-on features such as a forced-air cooling system for desert applications. Often he called for his secretary, Pat, PAT, PAT, like the house was burning down, though all he wanted was a cup of coffee or an envelope. His face grew flushed from shouting and you could hear him all the way down the hall. But Jim also observed moments when Marvin seemed to lift out of himself and became cordial or concerned. He asked his secretary about her husband or listened when a salesman complained about his home life.

Many days Jim and Marvin hosted customers from around the world, Englishmen, Nigerians, secular businessmen from Iran: supporters of the Shah who dreamed of golden palaces amid aged cypress and aspens on the outskirts of Tehran. There were also Islamic fundamentalists who loathed the Shah’s Western leanings and were trying to raise millions to unseat him. Jim didn’t know where Marvin found these contacts. By the same token, Jim hadn’t a clue about how or why Marvin developed his impressive reading list. One afternoon Jim walked into Marvin’s office and he was reading a book called Death in Venice. He closed it abruptly, as if he had been caught at something unclean.

Gesler Sheds was becoming an international player. This kept Jim away from Toronto more than ever, which was bad for Ava. He knew that, but he was closing the biggest jobs of his life. In the new company jet, Jim flew to Nigeria, Morocco, and frequently the Middle East, tiptoeing through social upheaval while working on contracts that Marvin initiated.

Jim was Marvin’s eyes. He came back to the factory describing their galvanized storage sheds dotting the lush storied countryside outside Cambridge and Sheffield. He reported clusters of doughty sheds replacing the rotting dockside storage buildings of the Nigerian port cities of Lagos and Calabar. Africans favored them for keeping rice, beans, and various grains. You could store anything in these structures powerful enough to stand against the steady blast of a typhoon. Marvin dreamed of his sheds rising like cities in the desert. Already there were more than two hundred thousand of them spread across the verdant fields of rural Canada.

*   *   *

Marvin spent long stretches in his swivel chair reading financial journals, or after the office closed he hunkered over a first-edition volume of poetry or a novel. For Marvin, who grew less inclined to take walks and drives with Jim, the office in Toronto became his world—except his reading took him to places he could never have imagined. He became a night stalker through works of Nabokov, Kafka, Gide, Greene. He favored stories about obsessed men who explored side roads and dark pleasures. Marvin identified with many of the characters and became emotional reading tales of unusual personal discovery.

Marvin enjoyed sex in the late morning, when he was most energetic, sometimes sitting up in his chair. His third girlfriend taught him how to be a lover and Marvin cherished her. He gave Francine fancy gifts and all the money she wanted. It didn’t matter to him. After a year he bought her a home just outside the city. She was tender with him and had become a source of inspiration and energy. Marvin’s thinking had never been sharper. In a way she had replaced Jim.

Marvin conducted business meetings from the same chair, or he talked to Jim, who was putting on salesmen in Paris and Tel Aviv. Marvin liked the familiar office smells of his cigars and fast food. He often slept on the sofa. He fell asleep listening to classical music while considering ways to refine the steel arch of his shed for additional strength or how to beat the government out of taxes—he didn’t want to pay a single tax dollar and believed this was possible.

The mystery of the books began to irritate Jim, who could not connect Marvin to poetry. How had Jim missed this side of his partner? Soon there were oil paintings coming into the office, Degas, Renoir, Chagall, and a few contemporary abstract canvases, although Marvin favored the impressionists, particularly delicate line drawings of women or lovers. Marvin was as brusque about fine art as he had been about the literary classics.

Jim was comfortable with the Marvin he knew and was slow to recognize that his partner was changing. Many of us are like this, making boxes for the ones we love, stuffing them back inside. Jim wasn’t a reader and could not imagine the pleasure Marvin took from books, nor the depth of Marvin’s discoveries and how they turned his head.

At this remarkable period in their business lives, Marvin was growing impatient with Jim. There was no shared language to express Marvin’s late-night reading delights and it felt unclean to describe the romantic feelings that inspired his days, so Marvin cut Jim off in mid-sentence or occasionally showed him the same old Marvin or an even more uncouth and dissolute Marvin.

*   *   *

Marvin recognized that his new English and Nigerian accounts were puny relative to the marketing opportunities in Iran. Despite its inhospitable climate and vast stretches of desert, Iran had near-limitless potential for farming growth, according to Marvin, because of its ingenious underground system of ancient channels, or qanats, that conveyed water from aquifers in the highlands to the lower levels by gravity. There were 170,000 miles of these channels crisscrossing the country like an underground sprinkler system. Marvin became obsessed with Iran. He said to Jim that with improved affordable crop storage the Shah would push for a modern farm industry and the desert country would soon bloom into a farming colossus ready to exploit nearby export markets. Our sheds will be everywhere, Marvin predicted.

Jim traveled to Iran. For six weeks he introduced himself to bureaucrats and businesspeople; one new friend led to another who was better situated or knew just the person Jim needed. Eventually, he gained an introduction to Ahmadi Mashid, Minister of Agriculture, an international figure in his own right and an intimate of the Shah. Jim made his case for the easily assembled Gesler Sheds as a sturdy cost-efficient storage solution for small farming communities in the desert. Soon, Jim had established a more personal connection and the men began meeting for drinks and dinner. It was Mashid who introduced Jim to Tehran’s unusual nightlife. By the time Jim returned to the States, he had brokered an order for an astonishing five thousand steel sheds.