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DANIEL KLEIN is co-author of The New York Times and international best- seller, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar—Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.. A graduate of Harvard in philosophy, Klein has also written numerous thrillers and mysteries.

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THE HISTORY OF NOW

By Daniel Klein

The Permanent Press

Copyright © 2009 Daniel Klein
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57962-181-0

Chapter One

Next to the Phoenix Theater on the century-old, brick-and-marble Melville Block, is a shop where no fewer than thirty-two tradesmen have run and subsequently closed their businesses since 1901. The store, Write Now, sells newspapers, magazines, greeting cards, cigarettes, cigars, and candy, and is owned and operated by one of Grandville's most attractive natives, thirty-seven-year-old Francis deVries. Easily half of Franny's patrons drop by the shop just to chat with her and each other, buying a pack of Wrigley's gum or a cardboard cup of coffee by way of rent for their brief daily occupancy. And virtually every one of these visitors walks in the door telling Franny how lovely she looks today.

As anyone in Grandville will tell you, the town has been blessed with a disproportionate number of good-looking women. A visiting Los Angeles film executive is rumored to have quipped that he spotted more knockouts passing by the corner of Melville and Main than on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Some attribute this phenomenon to the recently-arrived colony of Rudolf Steiner devotees whose macrobiotic diet and eurhythmic exercises appear to promote glowing, unblemished cheeks. A better bet is the even more recently arrived group of blue-eyed, blonde Ukrainian girls who waitress in the new, toney restaurants that dot Main Street. But the older folks in town insist that the top beauties are homegrown, the result of the blend of old Berkshire people and the immigrants, by which they mean the cross-pollination of the original, moneyed, cream-skinned, Anglo-Saxon families with succeeding waves of strong-featured Polish, Irish, and Italian mill workers. Yet this genetic concoction hardly distinguishes Grandville from most towns in the Northeast, plus, in most cases, it is out of date by at least two generations-the local mixes have mixed and mixed again with all manner of stock.

The theory both Franny and her dad jokingly subscribe to is that it is something in the water-all this Grandville pulchritude is generated by a rare, unidentified mineral that percolates into Great Pond Reservoir. "If either of us had a head for business, we'd bottle the stuff and sell it to all those New York harpies that come up here," Wendell deVries likes to say.

But even in this context, Franny deVries looks good-damned good, and not just for her age. She is long-limbed, smooth-skinned, and shapely, with wide-set, Delft-blue eyes from the deVries side, and pronounced, high-angled cheekbones from the Cosgrove line. Her face has always been lively and expressive, and became even more so after her three years studying drama at Ithaca College. Those years also contribute to Franny's theatrical flair for dress. Often she selects the day's outfit, hairdo, and make-up with an eye on a role, an aspect of her personality that she wants to bring to the fore for the day, usually just for her own amusement, though sometimes she has a few half-rehearsed lines in mind to go with her costume.

On this cool, September morning, Franny is standing at the window of Write Now in a pair of snug-fitting, Calvin Klein jeans and a tie-dyed, '60s vintage T-shirt that features the peace symbol. The prongs of the inverted 'Y' of the symbol seem to point straight to the tips of her breasts and Franny is well aware of that. It is just such touches that sell unorthodox ideas. Today, Franny is selling an end to the war in Iraq.

She smiles as two early-morning regulars approach the shop door: Archie Morris, the soon-to-retire fire chief, and Michael Dowd, one of the half-dozen second-homers who moved up to Grandville to live full time after 9/11.

"You're too sexy for your shirt," Morris says to her, holding the door open for Dowd. Although Morris is the same age as Franny's father-they graduated together in Grandville High's class of '56-he likes to keep up with what he believes is current lingo, and no one, least of all Franny, would think of telling him that his 'too sexy for your shirt' line is a good ten years out of date.

"Looks good to me," Dowd says, flashing Franny a peace sign. Like most New York transplants, Dowd arrived here with a preconceived portrait of small town life and his role in it. Certainly some of this picture comes from his summer vacations and winter ski weekends in Grandville, but much of it is an amalgam of books he has read (Spoon River Anthology was a favorite of his in prep school) and films he has seen (he owns the DVD of It's A Wonderful Life), plus a kaleidoscope of images torn from L.L.Bean catalogues. Spoon River accounts for the sepia-toned naivet with which he imbues even the most wily Grandville natives, Bean for the red, clip-on suspenders that hold up his corduroy trousers this morning.

"Car bomb in Baghdad," Franny says, handing Dowd his reserved New York Times and Wall Street Journal. "Seven dead."

"How's the coffee today?" Morris asks.

"About the same as yesterday's, only a day older," Franny replies, sliding behind the counter to pour him a cup.

"How many of them were American?" Michael Dowd asks.

"None."

"Thank God for that," Morris says.

"Unless you happen to be Iraqi," Franny says, handing the fire chief his coffee.

Morris grins. "Too early in the day for politics, Franny," he says.

"It's the middle of the afternoon in Baghdad," Dowd says. Although Michael Dowd is in his mid-forties, he has never completely shed his earnest, smartest-boy-in-the-class manner.

"Didn't say it was too early in the day for them to talk politics," Morris retorts.

Franny cannot help but appreciate Archie Morris's effortless one-upmanship, the wisest wise guy in the class. Still, she wishes he would consider this awfulness in Iraq more seriously. "I just hate to see innocent people die for no good reason," she says.

Morris sips his coffee, says nothing for a moment, then, "Wendell going to get that new Angelina Jolie movie?"

"Hope not," Franny says. "I hear it stinks."

"Not if it's got close-ups of her lips," Dowd pipes up. "Pillows. They look like silk pillows." Dowd is clearly trying to regain some traction in the conversation with some man talk, and indeed, Archie Morris favors him with a knowing smirk. So much for the mayhem in Baghdad.

Dowd selects a Triple Threat Caramel Peanut Fusion PowerBar, pays up, and heads back for the door. "Babs is really looking forward to tonight," he calls to Franny before he leaves.

Michael Dowd will now make his way to the third floor of the Melville Block, then down the corridor to his three-room office containing eight computers, two fax machines, and a specially-wired phone system with five separate numbers, including two with a Manhattan prefix that relays to Grandville via 'call forwarding.' Here, with the assistance of two locally born young women, he manages the mutual fund he founded in New York, but with an overhead of less than twenty percent of his former office there. For this reason alone, Dowd blesses the day that he and Babs decided to leave Manhattan's Upper East Side for Grandville.

Archie Morris leaves the shop moments after him, taking a second cup of Franny's coffee with him. He will stroll past the Phoenix to the firehouse on its other side, the consequence of some curious, 1910 town planning that has pitted sirens and bells against singers and soundtracks for close to a century. There, as the only paid member of...