What He's Poised to Do: Stories by Ben Greenman

that despite all that she had meant to me, I just could not see around the corner.
    A few days later, I met you. It was at an open house for one of my properties. Usually I don’t attend them myself, but it was a weekend filled with bad weather, and I needed somewhere to go. I let Janice, the agent, off the hook, and told her I would cover it myself. “Thank you, Mr. Ramirez,” she said. She yawned and stretched. Janice has always had a thing for me, and she’s beautiful, but I was never the type to run around. When I started off in business, they used to call me “Play-It-Safe Paco,” though in fact usually I did not play it at all. I held my residential properties for years, let their value grow slowly, like a tree rather than a flower—there was not always as much beauty in the process as there could have been, but there was a thick trunk and there were roots. I behaved similarly in my dealings with women. When Janice yawned and stretched, when she pressed her body against the fabric of her clothes, I cannot face.
    Janice left. I stayed. The apartment was a small two-bedroom with a bath and a half. The master bedroom was big and had one large walk-in closet. The kitchen had just been redone with a beautiful marble counter. The fireplace didn’t work, but the detailing on it was exquisite. I showed the place to a gay couple, then a straight couple, then to a man who was in the middle of a divorce. He was the most interested, and also the most interesting—he touched everything and shook his head, as if he were trying to rouse himself from a fog. He thought he’d put in an offer. “I just wish I knew what direction things were going to take,” he said. “I am ninety percent sure that I’m going to need to buy my own place, but that ten percent really weighs on me.” I wished him luck. I was sitting on a folding chair I had brought, reading a Blood-Horse magazine—since I was a little boy, I have always wanted to own thorough-breds, though now that I have the money to do so I realize that I don’t know nearly enough about it, and I am always trying to bring myself to the point where I feel, if not confident, at least competent enough to make a purchase. I collect art instead, because I know a little about it, because it gives me pleasure.
    A knock came at the door.
    A small woman was standing in the hallway. It was you. As you came into the room, I revised my first impression. You were short, certainly, but you were not skinny, and you had a presence, partly as a result of your beautiful arms and partly because of your enormous eyes. Neither was adventitious. “Karen Lewis,” you said, and extended your hand.
    “Francisco Ramirez,” I said.
    “That’s a very grand name,” you said.
    “Well, I am a nobleman,” I said.
    “Really?”
    “No,” I said. “Only a rich man.”
    You laughed. Perhaps you thought I was joking, I realized later. You had no way of knowing that I owned not only this apartment but nearly two thousand others. You had no way of knowing that I was worth ten thousand times as much as when I first came to the United States, fresh from a short but not entirely unsuccessful career as a waiter and restaurant manager, or that earlier in that career I was so poor that I sometimes had to steal from customers. I would like to say that the stealing was infrequent. The truth was that it was nearly constant. When I told my wife about it, she stared off into the middle distance and then returned with a vocabulary lesson. “Stealing and robbery are different,” she said. “Stealing is related to words like ‘stealthy.’ When you steal, you’re trying to escape detection. Robbery’s very different. That’s when you confront someone and take something by force.” I’m sure she was right, or mostly right. At the very least, I could not argue with her. English was not my first language. If I had told you about my early transgressions, I do not think that you would have come back at me with