Chapter 88

It was the next morning, after everyone else had left the house, when I asked Eddie to join me in my home office. From the way she had already been waiting for me in the living room, I assumed that Joyce and Dale had alerted her to the fact that I was planning on having a talk with her.

"Eddie, Joyce and I were talking about some things last night. Joyce thinks that you and I needed to have another talk about what your plans are for the future."

Eddie seemed worried about something. Just the fact that she hesitated before saying anything to me should have told me a lot. I already knew that Joyce and Dale had been talking to her, every chance they had, to try to get her to think differently about what she wanted.

"I don't really have any plans yet, Kenny. Part of me wants to stay here, just like things are now, but the rest of me knows I can't just hang around here doing nothing for the rest of my life."

"Nobody is trying to push you into doing anything. Well, I guess I should say I'm not trying to push you into anything. I'm sure Dale and Joyce have been trying to get you to do whatever they want."

"They talk to me about things. Joyce still thinks you'll change your mind about me if I stay here and don't do anything to cause anyone any problems. Dee is worried about what happens if I decide to leave here again. It doesn't seem to me that you want anything to change from how it is now between us. Nothing is changing for us as near as I can tell."

"Tell me again what you would like to see happen with us."

"I can't really say what I want. When I tell you what I want, we end up having a big fight."

"Basically, what you're telling me is you still would like to be a part of our family, but able to go off and pursue other interests when and if you ever decide to?"

"I don't see what your problem is with that. We're doing that right now, except for the sex part. I'm here, and nothing else is going on. If I leave here and go somewhere else, I don't think I should need to account to anyone else for what I'm doing when I'm away from all of you. If I did find someone else, I could understand you not wanting to treat me like all the others. What I can't understand is why you want to treat me like you do when I'm not doing anything now with anyone else?"

"I don't treat you badly, Eddie. I treat you like a good friend. I haven't tried to interfere with your relationships with Dale or the other wives. I don't treat you like my wife, because we no longer have that same bond that we once had. It wouldn't bother me if you had someone else that you loved, I'd be happy for you. I can't let you do that though, and still remain living here and being the part of all our lives you say you want to be. I'm talking about the sex part, with the wives."

"You don't see where that leaves me? Now you're forcing me to decide to give up everything if I choose to go out and have a normal life like anyone else. Why do you get to control what those other wives can do? Why not let each of them decide for themselves how they want to treat me?"

"I haven't interfered at all with how any of them are treating you. I did tell you, right from the beginning, that there were certain rules we all had to obey. Some of you broke those rules, but I forgave you. If the circumstances had been different, I wouldn't have forgiven any of you. The rules haven't changed though. We can't be married unless we're committed only to each other. You aren't committed."

"I'm as committed as you are, Kenny. You just don't want to be fair. I'm not the only woman here that would like things to be more fair than they are. I'm just the only one who's willing to come right out and tell you what I want."

"Eddie, we're back to where we were the last time, and the time before that. I promised Joyce that I'd have another talk with you. Well, we've talked, and we both know nothing has changed from before. I don't want to keep going and end up with the two of us being mad at each other. You're welcome to stay here as our guest, and you're free to leave whenever you're ready to. From now on, you'll always be considered just a guest here though. If you were hoping for more than that, then I'm sorry."

"Does that mean what I think it means? Are you going to try to prevent me from being with Dee and all the other wives?"

"No. I'm not going to try to prevent you from being with them. I'll let all of them make their own decisions about that. What I should have said was you're going to be just a guest to me."

That night there were a lot of meetings going on within the household. After dinner, Joyce sought me out and asked me what had happened when Eddie and I had our talk. I told her my side of it, already knowing that Eddie would have told Joyce and Dale her side.

"So, that's it then? You won't change your mind about taking her back?"

"Joyce, she doesn't want me to take her back. She wants me to make an exception for her. I won't do that. Eddie thinks you'd all like to be free to run around and do whatever you feel like doing. I don't believe that. I sure hope it isn't true."

"I think we need to have a meeting, Kenny. I love Eddie, but I know we have to have rules in order to keep things working. She had to know that we couldn't allow her to just come and go like she said she wanted to. If she hasn't stopped wanting that though, why did she come back and stay here for such a long visit?"

"I think she saw how we were able to work things out with Emily and Brenda. Maybe she thought we were so interested in getting things back to how they were before that we'd be willing to modify some of our rules in order to accommodate her. She doesn't really understand how things got put back together. I don't want to be at this meeting you're talking about having. I think it should just be the wives meeting with Eddie."

Joyce thought about what I was suggesting before nodding her head to me. When she left me alone in my home office to go back to the living room, I was pretty sure that Eddie would soon be in for a little surprise.

I stayed in my office until after ten o'clock. I had been trying to work on an idea I'd had for expanding my trading activities. Frank Clooney had been talking to me about that private placement he'd helped arrange so we could buy up those smaller independent bakeries. He was telling me that the investor's were pleased with the return they were getting, and had been asking him to find another opportunity for them to invest in.

There was a lot of capital chasing investment returns, and some yields were really low. Anything that returned a halfway respectable yield, while still having decent underlying assets as security, could be packaged and funded without any problems. Frank had asked me if I could come up with something for him to package.

The idea of trading other people's money appealed to me. This was even more true if I could manage to get my hands on this capital without having to give up much in the way of the profits I thought I could generate by having access to it.

Over the last couple of years, more and more speculators had entered into the commodities markets. They liked the leverage opportunities available, and, for most, it was pure gambling. There was simply too much money out there, and a lot of gullible people were putting it in places where they had no business even being. Financial instruments, currencies, commodities, and precious metals were just a few of the places where money was flowing unchecked.

I'd been making money trading by then for more than ten years. Over that span of time, I'd taken my own natural talent and improved it with my experience, and all that I'd managed to learn by studying the different trading venues. Trading is similar to playing a musical instrument, or a series of different instruments. After awhile, playing becomes easier for you, and you develop a real feel for how to make music. Trading was like that for me. I could detect tradeable patterns now with almost no effort on my part. Just as musical notes have a predictable pattern, trading has repeating signals. I was becoming something of a virtuoso at 'playing' the markets.

While I waited for the wives to conclude their meeting with Eddie, I was putting together a proposal for a private placement for Frank Clooney to solicit funds for. I had decided to try to borrow three hundred million dollars for five years, promising an eight percent annual yield, all secured by a second position lien on the long term company note from my main trust, and another second position lien on the grain trading company's assets. I had no idea if these investor's would settle for secondary liens, but Frank had told me that the people he'd spoken with were very hungry for yields greater than what they were getting from other financial institutions. I figured I'd let Frank shop my idea around and deal with whatever counter offers or proposals this might provide me.

At ten o'clock, I was finishing up my notes on the loan proposal when Cindy came into my office to get me for bed. We went upstairs, and I was very careful not to ask any questions about what had taken place in the living room earlier. I assumed that Joyce would fill me in the next day at the office. We were in my bedroom before Cindy spoke to me.

"Eddie is leaving in the morning, Kenny. We all talked about what she wanted to have happen. When she was finished talking, all of us told her we didn't want the same things she did. Even Dale told her she couldn't want that and still expect to be allowed to be a part of our family. Eddie said we all wanted the same things she did. She said we were too afraid of how you'd react if you ever found out that we wanted it too. No one else wanted what she said. I don't know how she ever got the idea that we did. Even Emily didn't want us to have such a loose connection to each other. Before tonight, most of us just didn't understand what Eddie was asking for. Now that we do understand though, we also realize what you meant before when you told her it couldn't ever be like that. Most of us thought she was just having problems with the way you were treating her."

"How did Eddie take it when she found out no one else thought about these things the same way she did?"

"She got mad. Mostly at Dale and Joyce. She accused both of them of being hypocrites. Dale told her that she was having another baby, and then she said she was perfectly happy living just like she was. Joyce told her that there was more to living than being able to hop in and out of bed with lots of different people. After that though, everyone wanted to talk about Dale being pregnant again. I need to get pregnant again too. This time I need a boy."

"You understand that one more is all you're going to get though, right? Twenty children is enough for any man. Boy or a girl, after this one, there won't be any more."

We made love slowly. I was thinking about Eddie afterwards. I blamed myself for a lot of what had happened between us. If I were going to be honest, I'd admit that Eddie and I were more about sexual fun and playing than about real love. Somehow, we'd never made that full emotional connection that I'd had with the other wives. I didn't think Eddie had ever changed her values. If circumstances hadn't changed after I got sick, I still believe we might have had the time to connect better emotionally. I felt as responsible as she was for what had happened to us.

Joyce and Dale took Eddie to the airport the next morning before coming into the office. I didn't see either of them until lunch time. Joyce, when she saw me, came over to get herself a hug. She looked very sad, and I comforted her as much as I could. I knew Joyce, and I knew she hadn't really given up on Eddie. It was comforting to me that she now understood why I had made the decisions I did. As long as we both understood things the same way, I was confident that both Joyce and I would insist on Eddie needing to change before we could even entertain any changes to our family situation.

At two that afternoon I took a call from Frank Clooney. He had gotten the notes I'd dropped off at his office on my way in to work. He asked a few questions, mostly to clarify what I wanted, as far as interest payments being structured, and whether the funds would be segregated in a separate trading account.

It only took two weeks before we were fully subscribed in our offering. The only real substantive change I needed to make was with having the investor's retaining the right to call in their loan in the event the account balance ever fell below the one hundred fifty million dollar mark. If I managed to lose half the money, they could call in the loan. Other than that one concession, I was free to invest the money as soon as all the proper legal paperwork was filed with the State of Kansas.

My father was very pleased that I'd increased my trading capital. Business had been improving, and we had need for more grain than ever before. Now that I'd expanded the number and types of products I traded, the grain trading itself was somewhat secondary to my overall trading posture. I now traded whatever happened to show promise of being a profitable trading situation. I still stuck to currencies, metals and grains, but an increasing number of my actual trades didn't include any grains. I did more than enough to insure having sufficient grains to meet my grain delivery commitments, but I was now trading solely for the profitability of the trades. As often as not, one sector would open up for a whole host of trades while one or two others didn't offer too much trading potential.

Generally, there was a price relationship between currencies, metals and grains. Because of this, I was able to use each of them when I was creating a trading box. That way, I was able to buy and sell on smaller price movements inside the trading boxes. Over the course of a one cent price movement in corn, I might end up making thirty quarter cent trades in the corn, knowing that corn's price movement was hedged by my positions in the Japanese Yen and platinum futures. If I ended up on the wrong side of corn, I'd make most or all of it back from my offsetting profits in the Yen. I was trading on price relationships, not on smaller price movements in any one particular trading vehicle.

The end result of my trading was steady profits. Not every trade was a winner, but the great majority of them were. Week after week, the trading showed excellent profitability. I kept the trading profits from the private placement inside the trading account I'd created with the funds I'd borrowed. The only distribution from it was the quarterly interest I was paying out. Within three months, the three hundred million had grown into four hundred million.

In November, all of us traveled out to the Palm Springs area to spend our winter. Joyce and Mama had found us a large property in Palm Desert. It was a compound that included one very large home and five smaller homes, all enclosed within a gated area. It was sold from the estate of a famous industrialist who had died the year before. Joyce and I had the whole downstairs portion of the smallest of the compound houses for our work offices. The upstairs area of the house, we were using for storage. I purchased three family country club memberships, also from the estate.