The Last Coin Read online

  Rose hesitated a moment, smiled weakly, and admitted that there was, apparently, trouble with ‘possums. Nothing that should concern Mr. Pennyman, though. Andrew had taken steps. It was poor Aunt Naomi that they were worried about. A ‘possum in her room could be the last straw. She had such delicate health.

  Pennyman nodded his head. “I might stop in and see her this morning, in fact. She was understandably upset last night. She quite likely still doesn’t fathom all the clamor.” He paused and picked up Andrew’s empty coffee cup, peering at the trout painted on the front of it. He set it down, frowning. “I’m not sure, now that I think of it, that I entirely understand all the ruckus. Andrew, though, has it all sorted out, I’m certain. He’s a stout lad, Rosannah, a stout lad. You won’t find another like him.” He nodded at her pleasantly. “May I call you Rose, do you think? I feel as if we’ve gotten rather closer in the last month. All this formality wears me out. I’m a simple man, really, with simple ways. That’s why I admire your husband. He’s so—what? Simple, I suppose.” He gestured at the tabletop, at the half-dozen boxes of breakfast cereal: Captain Crunch, Kix, Grapenuts, Wheat Chex. watched her, smiling. He seemed to admire the way she moved—sure, quick, never a wasted gesture. She worked almost like a machine—washing the stove front and wiping down cabinet doors even as she poured coffee. He nodded for no reason at all, except to communicate his admiration.

  “Aah,” he said, sipping the coffee. “Wonderful.” He sloshed it around inside his mouth, making noise, as if he were tasting wine. “Quite a lot of fancy coffee-brewing apparatus, eh? What is that affair there with the tube and valve?”

  “It’s a milk steamer. He’s got three of them, actually. Lord knows why.”

  Pennyman grinned and shook his head slowly. “Rather like a child with toys, I suppose.” He held up a hand as if he anticipated a response. “I don’t mean anything by it. I appreciate that sort of thing, in fact. I’m a fan of—what is it?—eccentricity, I suppose. It’s … charming in its way. That creamer there—the elongated toad with the open mouth, sitting on the stump; that’s it, the one wearing trousers and a cocked hat. I bet that’s something Andrew brought home. Am I right? I knew it. This place has his mark on it. Positively.”

  He grinned again and nodded widely while he looked around, as if he were appreciating the labored artwork of a six-year-old. “He has so much fun when he’s at it. I envy that. I’ve always been a little too serious, I think. Too … well, grown up.” And he said this last bit in a theatrically deep voice, as if to indicate that he saw very clearly through his own shortcomings, and that his seeing through them made them all right after all. He drank his coffee and regarded Rose with the eye of an artist.

  “You’re French,” he said, squinting.

  “On my mother’s side. Originally, anyway. They were—what do you callums?—Huguenots. Always sounds like Hottentots to me. They were filtered through Holland for a few years, though, before transplanting to Iowa.”

  “You can see it in your cheekbones. Very finely chiseled. My own ancestors were French. We’ve a certain amount in common, it seems.”

  Rose smiled at him and pushed a wisp of dark hair out of her eyes, tucking it back in under the scarf that she wore tied across the top of her head. “I‘ve got to get these dishes washed, I’m afraid.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course. Devil of a lot to this business of opening up an inn, isn’t there? I shouldn’t wonder that you were ready half the time to throw it all over. Looks like six months work to me, and here you are struggling to be ready for the public in June. Andrew will fetch it all together, though. He’s quite a character, quite a character. I don’t mean to muscle in, but if this were my inn, I’d throw another coat of paint on the west wall outside. The sun and the ocean will alligator that paint off quick.”

  “Andrew mentioned something of that sort. It’s on his list.”

  “His list! Of course; he’s a man of lists. I should have guessed it. Pity you can’t get a real workman in to do it, though. I have faith in this little venture of yours, Rose. I’ve loaned my books to Andrew; I could loan you the price of a housepainter.“ He held up a hand again to cut off any objections. “I wouldn’t suggest it except that we Huguenots have to rally round. Don’t give me a yes or no. Just remember that the offer stands. I like this place. The ocean air suits me. I shouldn’t wonder that I’ll spend a few years here, God granting me the time. I rather feel as if I have a right to offer.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Pennyman. Andrew has it on his list, though, as I said, and he’s promised to get at the list this afternoon.”

  “Jules, Rose. No more Mr. Pennyman. No backsliding now.”

  “Jules, then.”

  Pennyman touched his forehead and smiled. Then, as if suddenly remembering something, he asked, “Tell me, does Naomi collect coins? She has the look of a person who might—a sort of—what is it?” Rose shrugged and shook her head. “Not at all then? Perhaps when she was a girl, or a young woman? You haven’t heard her talk about such a thing—a particularly valuable coin, perhaps?” Rose said she hadn’t, wondering at Pennyman’s curiosity. Under the right circumstances, she might rather like him for it. He seemed to make such an effort to talk to people. The world needed more of that, when it was genuine. She wondered whether with him it was genuine, or whether he was simply playacting. She watched him stride out, brisk and humming, his shoulders square. In a moment the front door slammed and he walked away down the sidewalk toward Ocean Boulevard, just as he did every morning, tapping along with a stick topped with an ivory sea serpent that curled back around onto itself.

  TWO

  “—Mr. Shandy, my father. Sir, would see nothing in the light in which others placed it;—he placed things in his own light;—he would weigh nothing in common scales.”

  Laurence Sterne

  Tristram Shandy

  ANDREW STOOD IN what had become the bar. He very carefully poured cold coffee into a cup. Beams Pickett watched him. “So I fill it once,” said Andrew, “like this.” He finished, set the coffee down, and picked up the cup. “And I drink half of it, like this.” He drank half of it, then set the cup down. “Now I fill it up again, and, once again, drink it.” He poured the coffee down his throat, finishing it off entirely, then set the cup down once more, with a flourish, like a stage magician. “So this cup has been entirely full of coffee twice. Is that right?”

  Pickett squinted at him for a moment before nodding.

  “And now it’s empty, right?”

  “That’s right. Empty.”

  “And yet,” said Andrew, smiling, “though the cup has been full two whole times, I only drank a cup and a half of coffee, and the cup is empty.” He turned it upside down to illustrate. A single dark drop plunked down onto the countertop.

  “I think I see,” said Pickett, calculating. He touched the first two fingers of his left hand with the index finger of his right, as if working the problem through thoroughly. “My advice to you is to drop it entirely. There’s no profit in it at all. I swear it. Einstein was in ahead of you anyway.”

  “Einstein? He worked with cups of coffee, too?”

  “No, cups of tea I think it was. And it didn’t have anything to do with drinking the tea, either, like yours does. His had something to do with rivers—oxbows, I think. He figured them out.”

  “Did he? Einstein? From reading tea leaves?”

  Pickett shrugged. “That’s what I’ve read.”

  Andrew rather liked that. Science was a satisfactory business all the way around. One of Rose’s cousins had spent years whirling frog brains in a centrifuge, with the vague hope, apparently, of working the experiments into something telling. The papers he’d written were full of the most amazing illustrations. One man whirls frog brains, the other measures coffee in a cup, and one day—what? A man walks on the moon. Another steps into a black hole and disappears. Who could say what might come of it all, for good or ill? That was the wonder of it. “It’s rather like
infinity at first, isn’t it, this vanishing coffee business? Like the notion of endless space. When I was a boy I always imagined that there was a chain-link fence out there somewhere, like on the edge of a schoolyard, where things just ended.”

  “Couldn’t you see through it? Chain-link, after all …”

  “I can’t remember. Coffee?” He held the rest of the cold coffee out toward Pickett and slid a clean cup down toward him. Pickett shook his head. “I love mathematical mysteries,” said Andrew, “especially when you bring them down to earth, to where they apply to cups of coffee and that sort of thing. Not an unprofitable consideration for a restaurant man.”

  Pickett nodded, but looked puzzled. “You know, I don’t think it was filled twice; I think …”

  “Of course,” said Andrew. “Of course. I figured that out myself—last night. It’s a matter of language, isn’t it? What do we mean when we use the word ‘filled’? Do we refer to the empty cup having been filled up twice, or do we mean that it’s merely been topped off? It’s rather like the word ‘window.’ Look that one up in your Webster’s New International. No one on earth can tell you whether ‘window’ refers to the solid business that keeps the wind from blowing in or to the hole in the wall, the hiatus itself. You can close the window and you can climb through it and you can wash it and you can break it. Imagine being able to climb through something solid enough to break.

  “It’s an astonishing business, language, and I’ll tell you that it seemed a lot more astonishing last night after a couple of glasses of scotch. I thought at first that I’d fallen onto the secret of the bottomless cup of coffee, except that it seemed to work against me. I could see straightaway that I couldn’t profit from it. Just the opposite. I pour two cups and the customer only gets a cup and a half out of them. I lose a half a cup for every two I pour. Imagine the loss over the years. What is it? Say two hundred cups a day, two days a week, and half a cup each disappearing due to mathematics—that’s fifty cups a day gone, multiplied by … Will we close this place down on holidays?”

  “And Mondays, maybe. Everything closes down on Mondays.”

  “Yes,” said Andrew. “We weren’t going to be open on Mondays anyway. Now I’ve lost count. Fifty times what?” Andrew shook his head and shrugged. “Anyway, I wanted to show it to you. I’ve written up a brief explanation and mailed it off to the ‘Mr. Wizard’ program, just as a sort of joke. Kids love this sort of thing. Don’t tell Rose, though. She’d think I was wasting time.”

  “I won’t. Don’t worry about that.” Pickett sat on his stool and stared out toward the street, as Andrew sipped at the cold coffee and studied his copy of Grossman’s Guide. “How are people going to find you here, tucked away like this off the highway?”

  Andrew looked up from his work. He was drawing up a list of bar implements—three lists, actually: the necessary, the desirable, and the questionable. He’d rulered the page into three columns and headed each with an N, D, or Q. Neatness was impossible in broad matters, so he made up for it in small ways when he could. The first list covered an entire column and spilled over onto the back of the page; the Q list had only one item on it—flex straws, which it seemed to him were children’s items. He didn’t intend to cater to children, not from the bar anyway.

  “Reputation,” he said.

  “You need to do some footwork. Xeroxed flyers aren’t enough. The best menu in the world isn’t enough.”

  “I rather thought we might slip something into the Herald, with you on the staff part time and all.” Andrew picked up a comical napkin and studied the grinning, pipe-smoking dog on the front of it. “Do you know anyone in advertising?”

  Pickett nodded. “There’s Pringle, but he’s a wash-out. He hates me for the gag letter I printed with his name on it. He’d boasted about being one of the founders of the Pringle Society, but that turned out to be a lie. They wouldn’t even let him in. Anyway, I ribbed him about it and now we can’t stand each other. He’d ruin any ad we ran. I could trust Mary Clark, though. She’s sharp. Has an eye for design. Speaks French, too.”

  “A pity no one else in Seal Beach does. We’d better run it in English, I think.”

  “Of course, of course,” Pickett said, gesturing. “But it should have a Continental air to it. This isn’t going to be a hamburger joint. I’ll draw something up. Leave it to me. Have you worked out a menu yet?”

  “No. I’m still experimenting. Never having worked in the restaurant business is a handicap. I can see that. But I can turn it to advantage, I think. The customer is bound to find something here to surprise him. The Weetabix, for example. Show me another restaurant that serves them. They don’t. All they’ve got are those variety pack cereals—the same everywhere. That’s the truth of it. A man in the business sees nothing but the business; he’s hidebound, blown by the winds of the obvious. A man from outside, though, he’ll take his chance on the peculiar, because he doesn’t know it’s peculiar. Success out of naivete. That’s my motto. Speaking of the Weetabix, when are you driving up to Vancouver?”

  “Day after tomorrow. Are you sure they’re contraband? I can’t fathom the idea of contraband breakfast cereal. Can’t you just order them from some local distributor?“

  “Not a chance of it. And as I was saying, there’s not a restaurant in the continental United States that serves them, not that I’ve heard of. All the best restaurants in England and Canada wouldn’t open up without a supply. Used to be you could get something called Ruskets. These Ruskets weren’t identical to Weetabix, of course, but they were close—flat little biscuits of wheat flakes. Some people broke them up before pouring on the milk and sugar; other people dropped them into the bowl whole, then cut them apart with a spoon. I had a friend who crushed them with his hands first. What’s the use of that, I asked him. Might as well eat anything—Wheaties, bran flakes; it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. That’s the point here, the strategy. Give the customer something out of the ordinary. Make it wholesome, but don’t make it like the competition makes it or you’re good as dead.”

  “But all the way to Canada in the pickup truck?”

  “Don’t use the truck. They’d probably just confiscate the crates of Weetabix at the border—spot them in a second. They’d wonder what in the world a man is doing smuggling Weetabix in an old pickup truck when he’s supposed to be in Vancouver at a convention for writers of columns for the lovelorn. The truck doesn’t run worth a damn anyway. Fill the trunk of your car. That’ll be enough. We’ll make another run somehow in a few months.” He paused for a moment and thought. “I’ll pay for gas.”

  Pickett nodded, as if he trusted Andrew’s weird native genius for this type of thing, for seeing things roundaboutly and inside out and upside down. It was too easy to doubt him, and if there was anything that Beams Pickett distrusted, it was anything that was too easy. Simplicity almost always wore a clever disguise. If he was caught with the Weetabix at the border, he could claim ignorance. “Contraband? Breakfast cereal?” What would they do to him, shoot him?

  “When does the first lovelorn column appear, anyway?” Andrew asked.

  “Friday after next. I’m still putting it together. It’ll run daily in the Herald, but if it’s good enough, I don’t see why I can’t syndicate it sooner or later. Georgia’s helping me with it.”

  “Lots of letters? How does anyone know to write?”

  “I’m making them up, actually, addresses and all. Georgia’s answering them. She’s too bluff, though. Too unkind for my tastes. Her advice to everyone is to dry up. I submitted a letter by a woman in Southgate whose husband had lost interest. ‘Lose weight, get a face lift, and tell him to go to hell,’ that was Georgia’s response. My advice was to buy diaphanous nighties and packets of bath herbs. That’s going to be my standard response, I think.”

  “Bath herbs?”

  Pickett nodded. “You can order them through women’s magazines—little bags of dried apples and rose hips and lavender. You mix them into the tub water alo
ng with bath oils and then climb in, winking at your mate, you know, provocatively. Turns them into sexual dynamos, apparently.”

  “And all this stuff floats on the bathwater? God help us. Isn’t there an easier method?”

  “It’s the rage,” said Pickett. “The word from the public is that they want whatever’s the rage. That’s one reason I’m going up to Vancouver. The convention up there is the cutting edge of the lovelorn business.”

  “That’s where we part company,” said Andrew. “The science of breakfast cereals runs counter to that, and I mean to prove it. To hell with the rage. To hell with the cutting edge. If it were my column I’d advise celibacy. Either that, or go wild in the other direction. Advise them to heap the bed with suggestive fruit—peaches, bananas, split figs, that sort of thing. Call it the Freudian approach, just to give it legitimacy. And use Dr. Pickett as a byline.” Andrew studied his list again, then went after it with his eraser. “I’ve got ice picks, ice tongs, ice scoops, ice shavers, ice buckets, ice molds, and ice dyes. What have I left out?”

  Pickett shook his head. “What kinds of molds?”

  “Mermaids, toads, comical hats, and high-heeled shoes. I’m purposely staying away from gag items. No eyeballs, bugs, or naked women.”

  “Wise,” said Pickett, nodding. “No trash.” He looked over the list. “What’s a muddler?”

  “I don’t know, entirely. I looked it up but there was nothing in the dictionary after muddleheaded. It has something to do with stirring things up, I think.”

  “Couldn’t just use a spoon, then?”

  “Go down to the Potholder if you want spoons. Here we use muddlers. At least I think we do. I’ve got to call down to Walt’s to find out what they are.”