“His name’s Vincent,” Lucas told me, squinting through a cloud of purplish smoke that he exhaled across my desk in my direction. “He’s a building contractor. His company did some work on my house last summer, and he pestered me to find out who my accountant was until he got your name out of me.”
I nodded in my usual friendly manner, wondering why Lucas might have been reluctant to recommend me to someone.
“See, this is the thing,” Lucas went on. “The guy’s strange. Kind of a rough type. Makes a good living, I’m sure, but I didn’t know if you wanted to be associated with someone like that. Feel free to turn him down. It wouldn’t bother me at all.”
I fretted all that night about whether or not Lucas was telling the truth, and whether my turning down his contractor would indeed be something to which he wouldn’t take offense. In the process I rendered Sam Vincent, in my mind, into a slavering, drooling werewolf of a man, baying and clawing at my door with bone-sharpened claws.
Vincent showed up at my office the next day without calling ahead to make an appointment. He was no werewolf, but neither was he without certain fear-inspiring qualities. He was wearing a golf shirt, and its armbands strained against his considerable biceps. Under what I took to be a golf visor, his tanned face had frown lines where other people were wrinkled from smiling. His hair was so black that I figured he must have had it dyed. I wondered where vain rich men went to do such things—were there salons where intimidating building contractors were secretly buffed and pampered, their sun-damaged dermis lovingly tended to by smiling, silent young women?
“So can you do it?” he asked me.
“Beg pardon?” I said.
He shot me a look that implied people seldom dared drift off during his expositions. Somehow we had made it back to my office, where he was sitting in my chair, at my desk, and I was standing by my Twins 1987 World Series commemorative plaque.
“Nice plaque,” he said, in a fashion that made it impossible to discern whether he was joking or not.
“I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
Vincent had some tax problems, nothing major, but he didn’t care for his accountant and wanted someone to look over his tax returns from the last few years to see if he’d gotten a good break. He spoke of his accountant with the same disapproving regret one might reserve for a mouse that one had stepped on in one’s apartment, a rodent that had run from under the sofa to an unfortunate end.
I examined Vincent’s tax returns and saw that his accountant had indeed made a hash of them. There were all sorts of deductions missed and loopholes left unexploited. I got in touch with the I.R.S. on Sam’s behalf, and within days he went from being a debtor to the government, to a man with a clean slate. Vincent was ecstatic, and the next day a case of single-malt scotch arrived at my office.
Two days later Vincent was back, partaking of the scotch that he had so generously bought for me and outlining the details of our grand future together. He had made a lot of money and invested wisely, he informed me, and henceforth I would manage his wealth and, in the process of seeing to it that he paid as little tax as possible, I would be the beneficiary of his well-known generosity and largesse. And if I ever needed a new room put on the side of my house, it was mine for the cost of the materials.
It is true that, for some time, I had entertained notions of a hardwood den with antique leaded-glass windows. I had plenty of space since Barbara left me, though I hadn’t entirely given up on the idea that I might one day find another woman with whom I was compatible and who might one day share the home with me. There was, for instance, a secretary at my dentist’s office who always brightened when I came to endure the latest installment of my painful and protracted gum work. She was quite a bit younger than me, but seemed to view me as likeable in a paternal sort of way.
I told Vincent I would do it. I wasn’t wanting for work— my practice was doing very well—but I had to admit that dealing with Vincent brought a certain amount of excitement to my predictably stable professional life. He enjoyed telling me about his adventures, tales replete with withering impersonations of the “morons” and “assholes” he dealt with in the building trade. He told me about his girlfriends, and his wife, and his two sons who were evidently in a heated competition to see who could display the most appallingly antisocial qualities at the earliest age.
