A few things. First off…I’m going to step away from my blog for a bit. Nothing new about that, I know, but I want to be considerate of my fellow bloogers/longtime readers for a change.
I want you to know–and you know who you are–that I value your talent and your friendship. I’ll be stopping in on your blogs from time for inspiration and to see what your up to, Lord willing.
Secondly…well, not really secondly, but you know what I mean…I have a blog on reddit (they call it a sub(reddit) that I’ve been neglecting. It’s called Living with Jesus. I’m going to provide the link to it case any of you want to stop by and check it out, or visit with me there.
And lastly…I was cleaning up my categories list the other day and I ran across this post from 2018, about the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman film Adaptation. So I started reading it and I remembered that throughout this post I had committed the arch sin of anyone who considers themselves a writer…Dun dun duuun!…
The malapropism.
Now, admittedly, this isn’t the first time I’ve committed this grave error (yes, I know you are shocked). Nor, assuredly, is it the last time. (I did it the other day, catching it just in the nick of time.)
Nonetheless, I found it quite funny. And I thought it’d be an appropriate “see ya later” post.
Plus, aside from the malapropism, I think it’s pretty good…😊
I live in a relatively small, inconspicuous ranch style house. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely, small inconspicuous ranch style house that I’m very thankful for. It’s quite comfortable and–although the kitchen is smaller than I would like–I have no desire to move.
My home’s signature design feature is its wide open living room with vaulted ceiling; that and a especially large master bedroom that we use as an office. So, yeah, there are those things…and our yard.
In fact, I would say that our yard–the backyard in particular–is the loveliest thing about our home. That’s because my husband has a fondness for flowers and a green thumb to go along with that fondness. It’s his hobby.
People take pictures of our yard. People that we don’t even know. (We also have security cameras. So…)
Anyway, despite my husband’s talented thumb, we’ve never had any luck with orchids. Every orchid we’ve ever had (five of them to be exact) has died. And that sucks.
Orchids are expensive. Even the ones you get at Home Depot.
The film Adaption is about orchids. It’s also about compulsion. And obsession. Lack of confidence. The attraction of opposites. Illegal drug manufacturing. Screenwriting. Filmmaking. Writer’s block and…Whew!
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention twins. It’s about twins. So, yeah, back to Whew! And I’m just getting started.
Charlie Kaufman is a screenwriter. For real. He wrote the screenplay to Spike Jonez’s acclaimed 1999 film Being John Malkovich and to Michel Gondry’s 2004 comedy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He also directed the much lauded Synecdoche, New York.
Charlie Kaufman is also the protagonist (portrayed by Nicolas Cage) in his own screenplay Adaption. Confused? I’m just getting started.
The movie begins with Charlie, fresh off his success with Being John Malkovich, embroiled in the funk of…well, being Charlie Kaufman. Despite his obvious talent and intellect–or maybe because of it–Charlie has zero self-esteem. Compulsively analytical, he is pleased with nothing, and upset with everything.
But don’t misunderstand–he isn’t misanthropic. He longs for the companionship of a woman, for the sexual bond, to engage in the give and take of a relationship, but because he thinks of himself so hideously–he is paunchy, he slumps and his hair, what is left of it, is frizzy–he can’t imagine anyone of the female persuasion being attracted to him even though his smart and pretty friend Amelia (Cara Seymour) is clearly just that. She finds the disheveled writer fascinating and charming; she practically throws herself at him, albeit in a very ladylike way. He is oblivious to it.
Commissioned to write the screenplay adaption to writer Susan Orlean’s best selling non-fiction book about Florida orchid poacher John Laroche, (again, Laroche and Orlean are real people) Charlie suffers a debilitating case of writer’s block–in the movie and in real life.
In real life, try as he might, Kaufman could not figure out how to make a commercially successful and artistically viable adaption of Orlean’s book. So he wrote the screenplay Adaption inspired by his writer’s block instead. He used Orlean and Laroche as characters in the screenplay and wrote in appearances by actors John Malkovich, Catherine Keener and John Cusack who had starred in Being John Malkovich. To that stew he added real life screenwriting guru Robert McKee as a character and fictional twin brother, Donald Kaufman.
Johnathan Demme was slated to direct The Orchid Thief but bowed out of the project. His production partner Ed Saxon stayed on board as the producer and Spike Jonez agreed to team up with Kaufman again and direct. Likewise Susan Orlean and John Laroche agreed to Kaufman’s extreme embellishment of their biographies and, alas, Adaption was born.
In the movie, Charlie is none too happy that his congenial, happy-go-lucky twin brother Donald (also portrayed by Nicolas Cage, magnificently I might add) has moved in with him. Donald is paunchy too, and he has the same frizzy, thinning hair, but unlike Charlie, he is completely comfortable in his own skin so he dresses better, takes better care of himself, is friendlier and, consequently, has way better luck with the ladies. This baffles Charlie.
On top of that, Donald decides that he too wants to be a screenwriter and that pisses Charlie off. Donald is like Charlie’s irritating little brother who wants to copy everything big brother does only, of course, they are twins and Charlie can’t figure out why Donald likes him or why he likes himself, for that matter. Plus, Donald wants to churn out a cookie cutter thriller screenplay and “cash in on it”. To that end he buys some of Robert McKee’s ‘how to write a screenplay’ DVDs and signs up for his seminars. He suggests his brother check out the DVDs to help his writer’s block. This disgusts Charlie to no end.
Meanwhile, Charlie immerses himself in the book he is supposed to adapt, The Orchid Thief. True to his tendencies, he becomes obsessed with the book’s author, Susan Orlean (gloriously portrayed by Meryl Streep). He convinces himself that if he could just meet her, his writer’s block would break.
To this gorgeous, convoluted mashup Kaufman adds a parallel story–actually more of a faux documentary–about Orlean and “the orchid thief” himself, John Laroche (Chris Cooper in an Academy Award winning performance).
In real life John Laroche is a tall, elegant horticulturist who managed to poach/pilfer an extremely rare and elusive species of orchid from a nature preserve in the Florida Everglades. In Adaption, he is a sweaty, scraggly, toothless (he is only missing his two front teeth, but you get the picture) swashbuckling, near vagrant, self taught horticulturist tooling around in a rickety cargo van who manages to poach/pilfer an extremely rare and elusive species of orchid…Whew! You get the picture.
In the movie, Orlean becomes enamored with Laroche’s passion and intoxicated by his curious sexual potency. They begin a passionate affair that is enhanced by a drug, illegally extracted from the orchids by Laroche and his Seminole Indian confederates.
Charlie and Donald become aware of this drug conspiracy because they have been following Orlean, ostensibly for research, and in reality because of Charlie’s compulsive infatuation. This knowledge puts the twins in the crosshairs of the clandestine lovers who are desperate and willing to do anything–yes, even commit murder–to keep their passion alive.
Adaption is the most original, creative film I have ever seen. For years I avoided it. I didn’t think I would like it. Too convoluted. Too gimmicky. Too cute, I thought. Then I saw it. And I was right. It is everything I thought it would be. And it is wonderful. It very well may replace Magnolia as my tenth favorite movie of all time.
And that’s high praise from me. I love Magnolia almost as much as I love my cat Stryper–and I think magnolias are much more beautiful than orchids.
Joan Crawford was about forty-five years old when she starred in Sudden Fear (1952). I use the qualifier about because no one (including the late Ms. Crawford) is sure of the actual date of her birth. Somewhere between 1904 and 1908 is the general consensus.
Though it might seem a silly obfuscation for the sake of vanity, it wasn’t considering birth certificates weren’t mandated until around 1902. And since her father abandoned the family when Crawford was an infant and her impoverished mother viewed her daughter as a hardship instead of a blessing, it stands to reason that the day of her birth was neither documented or celebrated.
In her later years, Crawford shrugged off the controversy. “I’m four hundred years old!” she quipped. “The most I can do is look three hundred.”
The quip was a close as she’d come to making a public statement about her age or birthday; the ambiguity of it shaped more from a neglect than conceit.
And while today’s forty-five may be the new thirty-five, in 1952 there was nothing new about it. It was just old.
Especially if you were a woman.
But Joan Crawford wasn’t the type to go quietly into the cell of a has been. Far from it; she rammed headlong into its bars instead, acting on instinct and the resilience of the survivor she’d always been. And in Sudden Fear, a more modest vehicle than she was accustomed, but one she accessorized to the hilt nonetheless, she made, perhaps, her most daring escape.
A Foray Into Independent Film
Dissatisfied with what she considered lackluster roles and less than exuberant representation, Crawford left Warner Bros in 1952, much the same way (and for the same reasons–namely they were interested in younger talent) that she left MGM nine years earlier. Finding herself an orphan without a studio home for the first time since she was a chorus girl, she learned that independent film producer Joseph Kaufman had purchased the film rights to the Edna Sherry’s pulp thriller Sudden Fear.
Crawford read the novel and envisioned herself as the protagonist Myra Hudson, a smart, successful playwright who falls for a younger man and becomes involved in a in a sordid and ultimately violent love triangle with her paramour and his former girlfriend…just the sort of role that had made her a superstar in Mildred Pierce. Nothing if not opportunistic, she approached Kaufman about staring in the film.
From purely an opportunistic perspective, she seemingly met her match with Kaufman. Not wanting to insult the notoriously egocentric star with a contract he could actually afford, he offered her a percentage of its proceeds instead–on the face of it, a shrewd move, almost unheard of at the time.
Here, however, he may have underestimated Crawford’s business acumen and/or powers of persuasion–an understandable miscalculation given her tendency to flaunt a lavish lifestyle.
Whatever the case, Crawford walked away with an astonishing forty-three percent ownership and her fingerprints all over the film.
Using her considerable clout, she hired director David Miller, an old hand technician who needed a hit as much as she did. And though known as problematic and strong willed in her her own right, Crawford campaigned for the seminal, scene stealing siren Gloria Graham to star as the…seminal, man stealing siren (man-eating is more like it) Irene Neves.
For her character’s love interest and nemesis, Lester Blaine, she settled for Miller’s choice of ex-boxer and up-and-coming method actor Jack Palance when former lover and close friend Clark Gable turned down the role.
Arguably, Crawford’s best hire was the esteemed, academy award winning cinematographer Charles Lang, who she had known since their silent film days.
Together they constructed a beautiful and brilliant celluloid anomaly of contrasting styles in acting–method verses technical, and in genre–gritty noir masquerading as a lush melodrama, gloriously shot on a modest budget.
But contrast inspired not only creativity, it bred friction too, as was so often the case with projects involving Ms. Crawford.
Trouble On The Set
Though she could be generous, loyal and unexpectedly kind, Crawford was a no nonsense taskmaster when it came to filmmaking–and she expected everyone else to be as rigidly punctual and hardworking as she was. On the other hand she loved to play the grande dame, traveling to the set with an entourage and making a big show of greeting each member of the crew; all of which irked Palance as much as his method acting exercises and chauvinism irked her.
It was Gloria Grahame, though, who really got under Crawford’s skin.
Vain, whip smart, but emotionally vulnerable, she was also talented (professionally trained since childhood by her stage actor/acting coach mother). Grahame had been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in Crossfire (1947) in which she appeared in all of two scenes as a world-wise working girl–a performance that Crawford openly admired.
The admiration did not impress Grahame, however. Nor did she acquiesce to Crawford’s “set rules.” Consequently the grande dame labeled her unprofessional and went about undermining her in petty ways, such as deploying the silent treatment and insisting that Graham’s wardrobe come off the rack, whereas her own strained the independent film’s budget.
But it was Grahame’s affair with Palance that pushed passive aggression to outright shove.
Initially Crawford was appalled by Miller’s choice for leading man. The actor’s famously jagged face had been disfigured from his bouts as a prizefighter and from burns he suffered as a WWII pilot.
“How can you do this to a queen?” Miller recalled her moaning when he stood his ground on Palance. “Don’t you realize that I have played opposite the biggest stars in film? Gable, Tracy, Taylor, Cooper! He’s the ugliest man alive!”
Nonetheless she came to consider his aloofness a challenge to her feminine wiles. The two even went on a couple of dates.
But Palance was more attracted to the much younger Grahame. And, of course, that infuriated Crawford.
The last straw came when Grahame snuck onto the set–she had been banned when Crawford was filming closeups–and loudly sucked on a lollipop.
Crawford lost it. She attacked Grahame and fistacuffs ensued before they were pulled apart by the all male crew.
Still, they soldiered on–not that any of them ever seriously considered doing anything else; Palance and Grahame were relative newcomers to Hollywood, both of them still skirting serious stardom. They sought to parlay bigger and better roles off the success of Sudden Fear.
And the word quit wasn’t in Crawford’s vocabulary.
All of them…director David Miller, producer Joseph Kaufman, cinematographer Charles Lang…the actors and crew…RKO Studios…and Joan Crawford, especially, needed a big hit.
From that day until the film was wrapped, Crawford stayed away from Palance and Grahame whenever possible…and they stayed away from her.
She channeled her rage and resentment into her role instead.
Sudden Fear was a box office success, netting Joan Crawford over a million dollars and her third Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
Moreover, the success of the film parlayed her return to MGM and her reemergence as a grande dame of Hollywood.
Crawford’s nemesis, Bette Davis was also nominated the same year (1953) for her role in The Star. They lost to Shirley Booth in Come Back Little Sheba.
Jack Palance was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Lester Blaine in Sudden Fear. He parlayed his nomination into the role of the villain in the landmark Western Shane. It was the role that made him famous.
While Gloria Grahame was not nominated for her performance in Sudden Fear she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress the same year (1953) for her role in The Bad and The Beautiful. For years she held the record for shortest appearance–all of nine minutes–in an Oscar winning role.
Charles Lang and Sheila O’Brian capped off the Sudden Fear Oscar accolades with their nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design respectively.
In addition to Sudden Fear, Charles Lang was nominated for the Best Cinematography Oscar an astonishing seventeen times, including his win for A Farewell To Arms (1932).
Sudden Fear was producer Joseph Kaufman’s biggest hit. It’s financial and critical success bankrolled his subsequent film endeavors until his death in 1961.
Despite surviving years of disastrous mismanagement by Howard Hughes, RKO continued to have cinematic gems under its belt, Sudden Fear being one of many. But their stable of hits during this period did not move the needle on the bottom line. In order to stay afloat, RKO ceased nearly all of its production, becoming merely a distributing house of independent film.
Though David Miller was overlooked by the Academy, Sudden Fear is considered by many historians as the director’s crowning achievement.
It was Miller’s ability to meld the genres of noir, melodrama and suspense into a cohesive unit that gave the film the foundation to build on; not to mention his steady hand holding the whole thing together when his volatile stars threatened to pull it apart that ensured there would be a film in the first place.
Yet, for all of this, it was the fostering of his aging star’s talent–yes, his willingness to build around Crawford’s theatrical idiosyncrasies (without being overcome by them) that elevateda potentially ordinary noir to an extraordinary classic:
the facial expressions perfected during the silent era that she never moved away from
her penchant for backless gowns and insistence on showing off the dancer’s legs she had sculpted as a flapper
her fanatical obsession with exercise that manifested in overt on screen physicality
the ability to take the actors “business,” e.g., tapping of a pencil on a desk, lighting a cigarette, twirling a telephone cord between her fingers to an almost uncanny level
“There is not a shot in this film that isn’t necessary to its dramatic progression. Not a shot, either, that isn’t fascinating and doesn’t make us think it’s a masterpiece of cinema.”
Randall watched his father select sugar cubes with engraved Georgian tongs, an heirloom since the days of his great, great, grandmother who had lived in the 1700s. That was the story, anyway.
He bristled as the elder Randall dropped three of them, surgically, one at a time, into the teacup, also old, but not Georgian old.
“More cream, Mother?” his father asked.
The old woman flicked her wrist across her space at the table and grunted. It was her way of saying no.
She lifted the teacup with a tremulous hand.
“Dad…she’s going to spill it,” Randall grumbled.
His father wiped his sloping mustache and goatee with a napkin and then laid it carefully on the left side of his plate.
“No she’s not.”
The old woman, barely containing the tempest in the teacup, finally brought it to her lips and sipped. She did not spill.
“You were saying?”
Randall managed to get out ‘Hotel Le Blanc’ and ‘Manhattan,’ but just barely before Bess, the resident cook and cleaner, burst through the dining room door. The broad woman, skirting forty-five to sixty, hustled up his father’s and grandmother’s plates before pausing by his side, the hefty girth of her hip brushed against his sleeved arm.
“Mr. Randall, you barely touched your scones and eggs,” she scolded.
“He says he’s not hungry, Bess,” his father interrupted. “But, I guarantee he’ll stop at a drive through as soon as he leaves. He loves grease.”
Bess scooped up the plate, perspiration glinting above her lip and on her brow.
“Is there anything else I can get you, ma’am?”
The old woman flicked her wrist and grunted.
“How about you Mr. Carr?”
“No. Thank you Bess.”
“Mr. Randall?”
“No.”
Bess bustled back through the dining room door.
“Why do you insist on belittling me in front of her?” Randall snapped.
His father chuckled.
“I embarrassed you?”
“Yes. You did.”
“Then it’s your fault for being a slob, number…”
“A slob?” Randall protested.
“Yes. A slob.”
“So slobs wear Perry Ellis?”
“Slobs eat slop. Hamburgers. Pizza. French fries. It doesn’t matter whose name is on their collars.”
His father sipped from his teacup. It was almost a slurp, but not quite.To Randall it was fingernails on a chalkboard.
“Number two, you shouldn’t care what Bess thinks. She’s the help. How many times must we have these conversations?”
“Conversations? This is what you call conversation?”
“Yes. You were talking about your vanity project in Manhattan. The one you want me to pay for.”
“It’s not a vanity project, Dad. It’s a legacy project. For us. For Carr Corporation,” he insisted.
“Legacy?” his father scoffed. “You might as well donate all of my money to charity. Because that’s what legacy is. A money sieve!”
Randall pursed his lips as he was prone to do when displeased.
“You don’t get it, Dad. And I shouldn’t expect you to. Because you’re small time. A small time slumlord.”
He raised an index finger to his defiant but recessed chin.
“That’s your legacy. But, I want better.”
The elder Randall stared at his son, his unblinking blue eyes turned black, his face mottled red.
“Why you ungrateful piece of …”
“That’s enough!” the old lady shrieked, startling them both.
They were her first words in months.
Then, as they watched stupefied, the matriarch summoned the dehydrated revisors of bygone vigor and rose from her chair like a cumbersome phantom, pulling on the tablecloth, her teacup and saucer crashing, shattering, while the rippling fabric carried her son’s teacup and saucer to the floor as well.
“Mother!” her son cried, his stupor broken, as she slipped through his outthrust arms and landed awkwardly on her hip, entangled in the overturned chair.
There was a building on the northside outskirts of my hometown, a typical structure for the locale, haphazardly constructed, its roof low in pitch, its exterior a beige peaked stucco with curious pink undertones, that had housed almost every type of club: biker, kicker, stripper, swinger, regular and gay.
Every Texas town of five thousand or more has such a building, beige or grey, I suppose.
This one had a blacked out picture window, just slightly off centered, that betrayed a more homogenized origin.
“It used to be a cafe back when I would visit your Aunt Ida during the summer,” my mother told me. “They had really good breakfast.”
Be that as it may, none of its more contemporary iterations seemed particularly successful from the look of the parking lot, which was never even half full, though, admittedly, I rarely got out that way. Aside from oilfield supply and scrap yards there was nothing there and no reason for me to.
No good reason, anyway.
But that changed (from my perspective, anyway) when the student program director from our college radio station gave me a couple of tickets to an “invitation only” punk rock concert at the Mint Lounge.
“Where’s that?” I asked.
He told me and then added, “no rednecks.”
Well, naturally, I was offended.
” Duh. Why’re you telling me that?”
“I’m telling everybody that. No fights. No shit. These guys are already having enough trouble with the cops opening the club as it is.”
I shrugged it off and got my best friend Dana to go with me.
When we pulled up nothing much about the place had changed except the stucco was now a faint mint green and the parking lot was marginally full. I found a spot in the back of the lot where we could see the main driveway and the one off the side street.
Dana lit a joint and I cracked the window. The air was heavy with caliche dust and the muddled staccato thud of the bass and kick of the drums. Neither of us had been to a punk concert before.
A bronze colored pickup on stilts barreled into the parking lot. We recognized it immediately. The driver pulled into the spot next to me, his radio blaring Rush’s Temples of Syrinx. Our friend Joey, hopped down from the passenger seat. He wore a Sammy Hagar concert t-shirt and faded Wranglers. I rolled the window down.
“Hey, ladies,” he swaggered. “You gonna share that?”
“We share if you share,” Dana said.
Joey lifted his t-shirt so that we glimpsed his toned torso as he reached into the waistband of his Wranglers and fished out a plastic baggie folded many times over. Pinching the corner between his thumb and forefinger, he held the baggie up to his boyish face framed with blonde feathered hair.
“Redhaired sinse,” he boasted with a toothy smile.
“Y’all hop in,” I said.
Non Compos Mentis or NCM as they were more commonly known were a first wave punk band from Dallas, Texas. A tight, raucous trio, that didn’t give the finger to melody, innovation or musicianship, i.e., surgical blade new-wave before there was such a thing. NCM was one of the few “brave” punk bands to play Odessa, Texas, a notoriously tough (redneck) west Texas enclave of just over 100,000, which also happened to be my hometown.
Just a brief disclaimer…I had to free up storage space on my computer. Unfortunately that means I had to indiscriminately unsubscribe to a lot sites, as I am reluctant to buy more storage.
And so, if you become aware that I’ve unsubscribed, please know that it is nothing personal. I will continue to follow those that I always do and will resubscribe as I am able. 😊
I’m not a usually a big fan of jam bands, but (and this is a Nicki Minaj, Joe Camel butt of a but) when they’re locked and loaded with the peddle to the floor, like Mr. Wonder said, “your destination is the brightest star.”
Thrumming, humming, keeping pace, don’t get fooled by the super twang. The bridge ain’t out; wait for it, wait.
Keep those wheels a rollin’ cowboy. Hope youfeel the same.
Of course the widow didn’t spend every red cent of her husband’s earnings on building the apartment homes. But she came close.
Naturally, things were tight at first.
So she relied on her son to help stretch the ends. And he did. And that was a great comfort to her.
Not that she doubted him, for he was able and it was expected. But it was the way he did it, nobly, and with aplomb, that she especially appreciated.
Some mothers in her position worried constantly about their sons. Street gangs circled them like unscrupulous men circled her. Headlines blared the terrible things these boys did…and the terrible things that happened to them.
But not her son.
He was as steady as her resolve was hard. Together they made quite the team, her baking pies and taking in laundry, him handy with hammer, nails and paintbrush.
On the occasion when she detected resentment (a click of the tongue, the excessive straightening of a collar or cuff) she let it go.
He loved her. Of this she knew and never waivered.
It was only natural that he wanted her hands to be soft and her mind to be uncluttered. It was only natural for her to trust him. And for him to trust her. When he turned over his earnings, she never inquired; they always exceeded her calculations.
And so when he turned up for dinner one evening in a new shirttail and trousers–with his shoes resoled, no less–she didn’t inquire about that either.
But, from then on, she never bought him another thing. No, not even a present for his birthday. Or Christmas.
There once was a young man born of a wealthy father. The young man wanted to make his father proud, as most young men do. And that was a difficult task.
The father was an industrious type with callousness more prominent than his bushy eyebrows, and disdain more distinct than the amber streak in his coffee-black hair. Strong of will, laconic, he nevertheless constantly reminded his son that he had tough growing up, whereas the son did not.
Then again, everyone had it tough in those days for it was an age of disproportionate wealth inequality. Still the father’s youth was better than most, especially since he had lost his own father to the great flu epidemic.
These details were not lost to the son.
Still, according to the son, the family’s wealth was due to the father’s resourcefulness and work ethic. And that was true–as far as it went.
The father did all sorts of jobs that boys did at the time: delivery boy, curb washer, caddy, newsie. He worked hard by the standards of the day, but so did everyone else. And many, yes, even most, worked harder.
That was because his own father–the young man’s grandfather–left his mother in relative financial stability. Oddly, one rarely heard this caveat from the father and almost never from the son.
One might think this was due to the grandfather’s investment in brothels–and, unquestionably, that revenue stream had something to do with it. But the main reason the father and the son were so tight lipped about their generational wealth was because of the grandfather’s wife, who incidentally–by their standards, anyway–was also the mother and the grandmother.
Once again, one might think this secrecy might coincide with something scandalous. It did not.
At least not in the traditional sense.
The widow had a good head on her rather comely shoulders. Consequently her husband talked to her about his business at times, and when he didn’t, she listened to him talk about it to others. One evening she heard him bragging about some empty lots he had acquired and planned to sell to a builder acquaintance for a hefty profit.
So after the husband died, she waited for the acquaintance show up and he did, with hat in hand, ever so remorseful for her loss, enquiring about the lots, which she expected and subtlety (or so he thought) nudging her toward an affair, which she also expected. Naturally he was quite taken aback when he was rebuffed.
Even more so when he found out why.
She found him uncouth.
Beyond that, according to his banker, her plan was to invest every red cent of her husband’s money into building apartment homes on the lots.
All Things Thriller 