A Bad Man

14

Elegant Feldman, mandarin-robed, tasseled, the silken fringes of his belt like a very soft cat-o’-nine-tails—“To beat down grime. To punish all ordinary life’s shabby shit”—came up to the satinwood sideboard—“Get me breakfast, Innkeeper. See to the horses. Feed the postern, feed the coachman. Wenches, farewell. Here’s your health. Hey, nonny, nonny, with a hi and a ho and the rain it raineth every day”—and raised heavy silver lids; ladled, as if giving breakfast a downbeat, from the still-steaming chafing dish, goldenly scrambled eggs onto a thin white plate, smooth to the touch as cake icing. He picked, to go with the eggs, a sprig of lush mint, like a flower for a loved one, or a ceremonial herb for the gown of a bride, and carved a slice of ham, ruddy, scorched beneath its luscious glaze. He poured his coffee — black, for he admired the way it looked in the light cup, and loved to see the way it set off the steam. He brought his prizes to the table, already laid, and set them beside a napkin furled in its ring. He returned to the sideboard and hefted the viscous cocktails of jam and crystals of bright sweet jellies. He chose his toast, dark brown and crisp as bark, and took up a dish of butter pats jammed in a frozen choke of crushed ice. He lifted down a halved melon in its silver ring, its green meat pale as money.

Seated in the high white leather chair, squat as a jolly king in the polished-lensy side of one bright brim-to-cloth goblet, he tucked himself into the broad twilled napkin and smoothed his damasked lap, comfy as a man in a deck chair. Beside his plate, in three smart folds, Lilly, as she did every day, had placed the front section of the New York Times (air-mailed, but more than a day old anyway. Wednesday’s paper mailed Tuesday night and read Thursday morning, so that he had come to think of all facts as tentative, subject to change, already changed, all bulletins stale, all remarks by all spokesmen revised by now or framed in clearer contexts, all outbursts toned down, apologized for, corky with loophole — so that gradually he conceived of most truth as of something even the air could change, set to spoil like standing milk or the browning oxidized flesh of halved apples, and learned to view the world and everything in it with a comfortable hindsight, and thought of wars and strikes and uprisings as fictions).

Feldman loved his solitary breakfasts, loved his own corpulent sense of them, and enjoyed, in the dark smoked mirror, seeing himself eating them, turning the pages of his paper, tapping at egg in the corners of his mouth with a thick, linen-wrapped finger, lighting cigarettes. Although he usually ate alone, Lilly — in an old beltless raincoat she used as a bathrobe, in damaged high heels, the counters broken — sometimes came in while he drank a second cup of coffee (in this one he took cream, two spoons of sugar, high, rounded as dunes).

He finished and scraped his nail absently on a piece of toast. He allowed himself to think of the store, and his mood changed. He did not even remember to enjoy the opulent ruin of his breakfast — the dark toast crumbs on the thick table linen, the stains of coffee and the greased plates and smudged tumblers and the jellied, sticky handles of the silver, the tiny bits of stiffened egg in the creases of his napkin like clots of rheumy eye matter. The store is not doing well, he thought. Things must pick up, he thought; they must.

He didn’t grieve for his condition so much as for the effort it would take to improve his condition. This he dreaded, as he dreaded all revision. He had discovered long ago that he did not enjoy competition, or even “business.” The truth was Feldman had no feel for patterns. Trends bored him. He hated even to be controlled by the seasons, the holidays, thought of Christmas as a violation of free enterprise, of the climate — summers, say, when he sold no skis — as a restraint of trade. He endured the nation’s economic crises impatiently, was indifferent to predictions of boom and angered by warnings of bust. He scorned even the empty optimisms of designers about a certain color or a length of skirt. Yet adopting an attitude toward the competition that was vaguely laissez-faire, coming, as it were, to Christmas as he came to the obsolete news in his thirty-six-hours-old newspaper — his store did the biggest volume in the state in post-Christmas selling — he had prospered, acquiring over the years a reputation for flair which had less to do with deliberation perhaps than with a certain looseness of timing. And of course he demanded good salesmen. Many of his people were old pitchmen, who — behind their counters, talking with their hands; their voices slightly raised, faintly nasal in high pressure’s elliptic twang; pointing, quick and graceful as men doing card tricks, to the features of a shirt — knew how to “build a tip.” (“You know, Leo,” one of them once said, “half us guys ain’t used to working indoors yet.”) A handful of men in departments like Furniture or Housewares had once sold on television. Others had sold over the telephone or door to door. There were barkers, men who’d owned shooting galleries or Pitch-a-Penny booths in carnivals.

What hurt him now was a shift in the structure of the city: the decay of old neighborhoods and proliferation of suburbs, the incursions of Negroes, the lousy parking and all the rest. Feldman’s city had held its shape into the postwar years, and he had not had to face the problem of discount houses, or — to show the flag — had to build, shopping center for shopping center, the murderous big branch stores. (It was the new Diaspora, the Diaspora of fat cats, the whole middle class in flight.) Now, belatedly, he had to do something. He had been paralyzed by conservatism — not fear, not even caution — just a strange Feldmanic inertia when it came to expending any energy on the merely remedial and makeshift. It was as if he were impatient with time itself, forbidding flux as he might have forbidden, if he knew it was happening and he had the power, a change in the structure of his cell tissue.

He heard Lilly before he saw her, the timid clack-clack of her heels and the lungy, wheezy chuffing of her feet as they moved over the broken counters and deeper into her shoes. “My dear?” he said, not looking up.

“Billy needs a tutor, Leo.” She carried a bowl of cold oatmeal in one hand and half a hardened fried egg on a plate in the other. It was their son’s unfinished breakfast. She would sit down now and finish it, wiping the egg into her mouth with Billy’s discarded crusts. Feldman appraised her. In her open raincoat she looked like a disaster victim. Lilly, the mailman’s treat, he thought, the paper boy’s first young love. “Billy should have a tutor, Leo. You saw last night.”

He had. A revelation. They had gone to “open house” at Billy’s school, and Billy’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Blane, who looked to Feldman like an aging whore — it was the trenchcoat draped over the top of her desk; he knew those trenchcoats: $45.95, a big item with the singers in piano bars — had tried to give them an orange card with the words “Billy F.’s Father” printed across it. He had no intention of pinning the thing to his suit. (Billy F.’s mother already wore hers. Billy F.’s mother would pin on anything anyone gave her. She regarded her breasts as a sort of vast field bordering the highways and byways of her lapels and collars, the superhighway that was her cleavage. Around all this she would hang great shining pins like the blazing signs of motels.) Trampy Mrs. Blane’s own bosom was bare except for the pointy warheads of her nipples puckering her sweater. Feldman shoved the card into his pocket, pricking his finger on the pin.

“Goddamnit,” he said.

Mrs. Blane, who liked that kind of talk, smiled broadly and stroked her trenchcoat. A whore certainly, Feldman thought, and had an idea. Why not a sort of Show Biz Board, something like the board of college girls he used in the store during the summer? He could aim it at “26” Girls, Go Go dancers, burlesque queens, waitresses behind the bars in bowling alleys, the wives of army sergeants. A whole new line: satin stretch pants, brassieres like spider webs, half-bras like the pouches of kangaroos, panties with a quilted male finger at the crotch; rubber butts, foam tits; gratuitous garters. Marvelous, he thought.

Lilly had found Billy’s desk and was reading a note he had left for them on the top of his workbooks. “Leo,” she called, “look.” He took the sheet of paper from her and read:

dear mothat nad fothar, Hi. Lok arand my room hav a nice tiem. your Son billy F.

There were two words on the other side: “Lok taebl.” Feldman didn’t understand all of it, but since he hadn’t known his son had started to learn to write he was rather pleased by the note. He gave it back to Lilly and smiled. “Not bad,” he said. Then he noticed that there were notes on all the children’s desks, and he leaned over to read them. “Welcome to our open house,” the note on the next desk said. “We have been working hard all week on the projects you see tonight. I hope you enjoy everything. Please look at my workbook before you leave and be sure to see the ‘city’ the class has been building on the table at the back of the room. It should amuse you. Certainly it has been a lot of fun to make. I made the fire station. I love you both and will see you at breakfast tomorrow before Dad goes to work. Your son, Oliver.”

Feldman looked around the room for Oliver’s parents. Standing next to a striking woman in tweed, he saw a tall, handsome, successful-looking man wearing a card that said “Oliver B.’s Father.” He didn’t like their looks.

“Leo,” Lilly said, “look at this one. These are really charming.”

Feldman bent over the tiny desk and stared at the paper.

Dear Mom, Dear Dad,

Your being here makes me glad.

Please look around and see our work,

I hope you like it,

Your son, Burke.

“Beautiful,” Feldman said, and glowered at Burke’s mother. He read all the notes, sneaking up to seats only moments after a parent had vacated them.

“You’ll eat your heart out, Leo,” Lilly said.

“Not at all, not at all,” Feldman said, waving her off. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, sweetheart, was there much idiocy in your family?” He went back to Billy’s desk and opened one of the workbooks. “Why,” asked the box beneath the story, “did Tim’s grandfather make Tim promise to keep the calf a secret until Sue’s birthday?” Below there was a sentence with the last word left blank: “Tim’s grandfather wanted the calf to be a—.” Billy had printed the word “apple” in the blank space. Feldman closed the book.

He went to the table at the back of the room and looked at the city the class had made. There was a water tower made from half a Quaker Oats box painted silver. It was supported by four black pencils stuck into the bottom. There were cigar-box schools and skyscrapers fashioned out of cereal boxes. Tiny windows had been cut into the cardboard and glazed with Scotch tape. There was an elaborate City Hall, a jail, a railroad station. The names of the builders had been worked into their buildings, and Feldman stared glumly at Oliver B.’s cunning little firehouse with its shiny brass peashooter for a fireman’s pole. He tried to find his son’s contribution but couldn’t see it anywhere. Then, behind the city, he noticed a small vague area with two crumpled-up wads of paper and a few loose pieces of gravel and clumps of dirt. He smoothed out one of the pieces of paper. “Grabage dunp. Billy F.,” it said.

Furious, he looked around for Lilly and saw her talking with Mrs. Blane. The teacher nodded and compressed her lips sympathetically. He watched them bitterly. He was going to march up there and pull his wife away from the woman, but his eye was caught suddenly by a series of charts and graphs tacked to the walls. Examining them, he saw that thinly disguised as games and contests, they indicated a kid’s standing in a particular subject. There were charts for spelling, reading, arithmetic, social studies, science — other things. By the name of each child was a tiny paper automobile pinned to a mapped track that led toward towns on a kind of West Coast called things like “Scholarsville” or “Goodstudentberg.” On the spelling chart Billy’s car had never even left its garage, and he had barely made it to the city limits on the reading and penmanship charts. On the arithmetic chart Billy had no automobile at all.

Next to these charts were others that were more advanced: arithmetic became mathematics, reading became literature, penmanship art, and so on. Only those children who had made it to the West Coast were represented on these new charts. Here they boarded little paper steamers and began a journey that led out through the Gulf of Graduation and took them across the University Ocean, past places like the Savant Islands and Curriculum Reef to seek port in the Bay of the Doctorate. Many of the children were just getting seaborne, although several were fairly far out, and some, like Oliver B., were already breasting the international date line. Feldman could find Billy’s name only on the good-citizenship chart, but he couldn’t locate the boat that went with it. Probably it had sunk. He shook his head and stared sadly at a series of launching pads that bloomed along the width of a blackboard. Feldman guessed that the rockets, in various stages of loft, represented the grand prospectus of each child’s achievements in the class. Billy’s hovered weakly over its launching pad like a thin flame just above its wick.

“It looks like the goddamned Stock Exchange in here,” he told Maurianna Q.’s mother, standing beside him. “Like the goddamned Big Board.”

“Are you one of the fathers?” the lady asked. “I don’t see your card.”

He looked quickly around the room and turned back to the woman. “I’m little Oliver B.’s daddy,” he told her softly…

Feldman tapped at his mouth one last time with his napkin and pushed back his chair. “Get him a tutor, Lilly,” he said. “Finish your oatmeal, Lil, and get him a tutor, kid. Money’s no object. None of your three-buck-an-hour graduate students, honeybunch. Get him a Nobel Prize winner. If he doesn’t shape up soon, we may have to institutionalize him.”

Because he couldn’t bear to enter an empty store, Feldman always tried to wait until twenty or thirty minutes after the doors opened before going to work. Sometimes, if he was early, he would stand outside, feeling ceremonial, beside the big brass plaque that bore his name and the date of the store’s founding. Seeing the plaque, and on it the solid, memorial letters of his name, he often had a sense — though the store, in an old building once a warehouse, had not yet been in existence twenty-five years — of ancestors, a family business, and had to remind himself forcibly that he was Feldman.

He pushed the big revolving doors, feeling, as he always did, heavier, and waiting, as he shoved slowly on the door’s metal rung to feel himself thicken with opulence, to become wider, gravid. The door spun him out onto the main floor, and he smelled at once the perfumes and face powders, the mascaras and polishes bright as sodas. By the high glass cases he knew himself some glamour mogul; by the lipstick cartridges like golden bullets a grand armorer, love’s field marshal among those shiny warheads. Art, art, thought Feldman, impresario of deep disks of rich rouge, pastel as flesh, of fine-grained dusting powders like soft, fantastic sand, of big plush puffs and cunning brushes. He stood by lotions in bottles, by cylinders of deodorant in a female climate of balmy aromatics, in a scent of white gardens, thinking of dreamy debauches in palatial bathrooms, of comic blows, cutie-pie spankings with the big fluffy puffs. Here, where other men might have felt intimidated, Persian Feldman lingered, feeling the very texture of his wealth, his soft, sissy riches, the unctuous, creamy, dreamy dollars.

I am the master of all I purvey.

(In the old days, new to ownership, he would take things from counters, filling his pockets with toys, wrist watches, cuff links, pulling a tie that had attracted him, stuffing it into his jacket; more attracted by his merchandise than any customer, unreluctant as an assured guest at a feast, and feeling just that, his own reflexive hospitality — knowing ultimate freedom, the last man on earth, nimbused with luck. There had been complaints, his own people had not known him, thought him a thief, a madman; some customers even, driven by an abstract loyalty to the ceremony of sale, daring to pull against him in ludicrous tug of war, to collar him, to call a cop. But it had not been these fools who had been able to stop his raids, nor even the complex decorum of inventory. Bookkeeping could not deal with him; it knew profit and loss, credit and debit, and made allowance even for pilferage that struck as malice or arrived as need. But it was helpless to explain what he did. There was no place on the ledger, no word for it, unless it was this: “Feldman.” It wasn’t any objection at last but his own: not surfeit finally, but surfeit’s mild adjunct, superfluity, his idea, grown to a principle, that things—all things—were just gewgaws, and that nothing, nothing could ever excuse a disturbed profit. A lost sale was lost forever, something gone out of his life. So he doubled the guard, was ruthless with shoplifters, prosecuted until it cost him thousands and the word got out: that his place was no place to get away with anything, that you might as well try to hold up a bank. And all this, the expense of prosecution, of tight security, was reflected at last in the books. Meanwhile, he had packed in six big boxes and stored in his garage all those things he had taken during the enthusiastic year of his spree, a monument — an objects lesson — that nothing, nothing, nothing was ever lost, that all was recoverable and advantage lay where advantage lay: everywhere, available as atmosphere. And one day he sent a truck to take it out, to bring it all back to the shelves and bins and counters to be sold this time, only keeping one thing back, a wallet, to remind him.)

Now he moved past the cosmetics and began his morning tour — he had not outgrown this — of the main floor, his reviving stroll through an acre of artifact. No one dared address him. They thought it business, some trick or formula he had, some private, infallible rule of thumb. “Nothing gets past that one,” they told each other. Nothing did, but he walked there only because it was refreshing, because the department store’s ground floor offered a panorama of his possibilities. For it was thus that he had come to view his merchandise: as possibility, chance, turned risk, all of it latent with purchase and profit. But it was dreadful too: dreadful to see the high heaps, an infinity of the on-hand, dreadful to know that there was more on the floor above, and more on the floor above that, on up the full six floors, more, more — and across town, more in warehouses, more in trucks even now arriving in the city or just starting out from a dozen distant cities, more in railroad cars and more in the holds of ships and bellies of planes. Feeling the full responsibility of the risks he took for profit, terrified by the threat of ruin, of there not being customers enough in the city or time enough left in his life to sell it all, but made bold by his very fright, comforted by the magnitude of his terror and the slimness of his chances.

He was obsessed by it, the merchandise laid out like a city, patterned, zoned as neighborhood, and missed nothing on the fluorescently tubed yellow wood and glass horseshoe counters. He knew without touching them the feel of the glass, greasy as plastic from the precious contact of shoppers, their leaned, open-palmed surrenders on the countertops, smudged from their groped investigations, their excited jabs at the glass: “There, there—next to the white one.” (The counters, washed each night, bore a now intrinsic blur, ineffaceable as the cloud on an old watch crystal.) And could almost have told which belts had been sold from the tiers mounted like coiled snakes in their clear oblong boxes. And even which ties, perhaps, hanging thick as a curtain before some gay vaudeville.

He stopped to look at the big brown cash registers, complicated as console organs, and to peer at the figures in the windows at their tops, seeing sadly against the broad black strip that ran from one side of the register to the other the rows of white, thick, squarish zeros, the icy decimals big as hailstones. He was released by the sound of the bell registering a sale, and moved on, restored as a prince in a legend.

Trailing his hand comfortlessly through the heaped, dark piles of socks, he looked out over the open rectangles of distant counters and cases and racks, and went toward Men’s Ready to Wear to stand among the mountains of slacks, aware as always of the faint, sweet, oily smell of the massed cloth. He pulled at a rack of suits built into a wall, dollying it effortlessly forward on its big tracks, turning it soundlessly on its thick, greased shaft. He drew in one last deep lungful of the pleasant odor and moved on, the tweeds and herringbones giving him, as he glanced at them in passing, a faint illusion of speed.

In the broad center aisle, between vast counters, he paused before a display table covered with a red moiré satin, grainy as wood, on which expensive gifts had been arranged at random: a captain’s cabin barometer at Fair and Very Dry, the pressure 31.01 and rising; an enormous obscure brush with bristles the color of aluminum; a black leather casket with four drawers like a jeweler’s trays. He scratched at a drawer but failed to open it, and could not locate the key which fit into the bloated, classic keyholes. He handled a carelessly spread tent of printed silk which looked like the master sheet from which ascots were cut. Considering it, Feldman had a sense that it had been there forever, that it would be there always in its wicked obsolescence. He left the table.

Passing counters high with prim stacks of ladies’ blouses — it occurred to him that he was probably losing money on the men; fitfully he regretted their larger bodies, the additional cloth that went into their clothes and ate up profits — he came to an area of domestic, personal hardware (A MONTH O’ SUNDRIES, the sign said) and moved among cigarette cases, boxed wallets like open books, ganglia of leather key rings, lighters, umbrellas, zippered sewing kits, the bright aligned spools of thread like fantasy ammunition. In the aisles were pastry carts of handbags. (Maze, he thought, the tempting obstacles of possession.) There were tables of slippers, step-ins, bootie socks, sequined moccasins, scuffs, woolen hip-length stockings. There were ladies’ belts rising on successively diminished wheels, sweaters and white blouses you could blow your nose in, sheerish scarves as rough to the touch as a human heel, chandeliers of hats, stoles like folded flags, monogramed sachets, crocheted shawls, muliebrial hospital bed jackets that made a ploy even of death. He bent to examine a display case of men’s coinlike jewelry, fashion’s mintage, the small change of cuff links and tieclasps and studs. And peered closely at the stacked octagonal hatboxes, Dickensian, Bond Streety, the grayish cardboard shaggy, linty as money.

Entering Yard Goods, he had to pick his way past bright throw pillows like big candies. There were reels of ribbons, cards of lace, buttons, piping, upright bolts of flannel, wool, silk, horizontal rolls of cloth, packages of zippers, big pattern books thicker than telephone directories. (He was excited by the clutter here, and in the luggage department next to it, the big grips and steamer trunks thickening space as in a crowded customs.

In the Specialty Shop he briefly rummaged among the wicker baskets with their foreign chocolates and hams and sardines, their dry, queer pods and briny rinds. He paused to read the legends on the colored tins of biscuits and the Balkan, closely printed labels — medaled, decorated as some prince’s chest — on the bottles of dark steak sauces. He stared at the jars of caviar and salad dressing, at the curious bottled gems of pimentos, artichoke hearts like preserved organs. He browsed the anthologies of strange cheeses and the glasses of rare jellies with their suspended slivers of fruit like motes in thick light, and thought hungrily of all turned, vexed appetites, soured and satiated by the normal vegetable and the ordinary meat, lusting himself to taste the canned worms and chocolate ants, to savor the snake, coiled as twine in the clear jar, to gorge himself on grasshoppers and make a feast of the lizards’ tongues, tender, sinewless as fish.

He crossed to the large glass tanks of candy, staring at them as at treasure: the mint lentils and nonpareils, the dollhouse bricks of jelly and licorice boats, the chocolate stars and strings of pectin marjels, wafers, candy canes, the huge almond-pitted blocks of scored chocolate — all the sweet, hard crystals, all the fondants. He placed his fingers in the trough of a scale and lifted out a sugary residue, a kind of candy gravel, succulent dust.

And this is only the first floor of it, he thought.

He turned, stumbling, passionate, and got onto the enormous chiseled X of the sculpted escalator, having more than a king had, having everything. Rising slowly above the plains of goods, seeing it all at once now, the customers ringed and lost in his wilderness of product. Desperate with his unreliable risk, his inventory heavy as the planet. This was the last time he would see it today, and though he wished he might never see it again he knew that tomorrow morning he would have to look once more.

By the time he had risen two or three more floors, however, he was an altered man. His spirits, oppressed on the main floor, became higher the higher he rose. This often happened. There was something hospitable in danger. He began impatiently to climb the moving stairs. Barely glancing around him, he rose above China, above Appliances, above the children’s department, the men’s, the women’s, climbing toward levels of the store which were insular and half deserted. Here’s where the real trading’s done, he thought, standing in the furniture department among its scatter of dining- and living- and bedroom suites. He saw a woman testing a chair, a man at a desk, pretending to type and making imaginary compensations for the height of his typewriter, an engaged couple sitting aggressively on a bed. They all seemed unconscious neighbors in some odd, enormous house. Feldman was undiscouraged by the quiet here. If it had been noisier below, much of the stir had been aimless, a buzz of browsers, a falsetto, idling rasp of wills in abeyance. Here, though, he sensed purpose, the pious silences preceding high purchase, almost a condition of privilege when money changed hands, like those moments a family has alone with its dead before the coffin is closed. (In these regions he had sometimes fired people on the spot if they lost a sale. “If they get this far,” he said, “they want it.”) Now he paused, caught by something sanctified, basilican. He sniffed the air. A sale — the man at the desk. Observing him, Feldman saw the ceremonial poses, the last bemused, executive glance into the empty drawer. (“Have them try it on,” he told his salesmen. “Whatever it is. Have them act it out. Pull them to the mirrors. Let men who’ve never hunted see themselves with guns in their hands.”) The sale would be made; it was money in the bank. He smelled decision, impulse — the guilt that went with every yielding. (There were days when the store stank of all the accreted, powerful discharges of submitted-to temptation; other days when the place smelled of resistance as of stone.)

Feldman did not wait for the salesman to write up the order, but rushed away, almost as if he needed to be unaware of something good happening to him so that when it came to his attention later, it would carry a special increment for having been delayed. He rarely thought of his character, but took a certain comfort from such measures, seeing them as respectable evidences of his soundness, a willed humbling that qualified him for fortune.

In his effort to hurry away, Feldman took a wrong turn and found himself on a descending escalator. Feeling exactly like one drifting earthward in a parachute, he saw the looming women’s-wear department and was seized by an old idea.

There had been, in his adolescence, a spate of films about department stores — comedies about stern old merchants who found it difficult to understand their carefree rakish sons. Sometimes it was the fathers with the eccentric good will and the sons who were serious. These films had been Feldman’s literature. They embraced, he thought, everything that was possible in human character, and watching them, he had glimpsed the irreducible polar concepts of human existence — stodge and lark, duty and holiday, will and sense. Inclined to the one or the other, he was sympathetic to both, the good arguments of reality and the good jokes of hedonism. He saw that life could betray decent men and that beauty took beatings. The comedies were turned into torments for him. In the darkened theaters, biting his nails, seeing the tragic implications of either alternative, he felt himself the most vulnerable human in America. His own father was obliterated; his own self was. (It sometimes occurred to him that in modeling himself in those old days on those characters’ character, he may have slipped his own. Perhaps, he thought, Feldman was all artifact now, supposititious, and the real Feldman, meant for one fate, had found another.)

With puberty, however — Feldman’s puberty had been late, his drives unserious; perhaps in serving two personalities, he had actually stalled biological time — he discovered something else: that the conflict between the father and the son had been only a natural irritation, the personality of the one demanding the personality of the other, imposing a petty distance that wrote no one out of anyone’s will and generated no avenging codicils; discovered, well, the girl. And because the people he had become loved her, he loved her too. Loved her helplessly.

He had never seen anyone like her and never would perhaps, but it was enough, as it would have been enough for some knight of old time, for him simply to have an idea of her. Now he named all those girls Jean Arthur, and he loved her still, looked for her still, listened for her funny squeaky voice, seeking her feisty intensity. (He recalled her as a girl Communist, someone trying to organize the help in the store; other times he saw her in a Salvation Army bonnet, adorable with her cheeks in mumpy, musical pout, filled to bursting with trumpet geschrei. He loved her tics, remembered how cute she was in men’s pajamas, or when she was drunk and mispronounced words. He loved all her irrelevant passions, her tough — cutest of all when making a tiny fist, throwing things, huffing and puffing, her hair in her mouth — working girl’s integrity.) She defined innocence for him at a stage in his life when everyone else his age was falling from grace into a despair, so that for Feldman, who had come from a despair — his years as his father’s captive, his inability when embracing the style of the one son to annihilate ultimately the style of the other — it was like awakening to a grace, like an infant angel smothered in his crib. In this way his timing had been thrown off, and he left moony and smitten — not catching the joke, actually believing such women existed — and all love was love fallen short of itself, doomed through his credulity, and himself given over to an unwilled but permanent adultry, made to serve like the forced slave of Amazons.

Perhaps the department store itself — the real one, the one he owned, that terrified him — was only a sort of the creating of the conditions in which his dream might be realized, a fatuous placation like that of the New Guinea cargo cults which constructed bamboo airplanes on the tops of hills in the hope that they would attract real planes with their heaven-launched gifts. Idiot! Lovestruck! he thought. So this is what lies at the source of my will. So this is what my profit motive rests on. He felt like a sucker, comic as a cuckold. In fact he was a cuckold: where is she anyway? who has her? “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” he thought, “I wonder who’s showing her how.” But despite what he knew to be the reality, he held on to a helpless hope that he might yet find her.

“Somewhere I’ll find you,” he sang in his head. “Someday my prince will come,” his heart answered. (That was another thing: even his ballads were old-fashioned. Most of them came from operettas. He didn’t even adjust the lyrics to his condition, but hermaphroditically sang for both sexes. It was a vestige of the old schism in him between the stuffed shirt and the prodigal.) “I am calling you — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh,” he sang mutely, soul seeking soul, love’s sonar. “Someday he’ll come along,” he rendered, “the man I love.”

Now, looking for Jean Arthur in earnest, he roamed the store, loped it — Feldman striding, darting, squinting, peering. There was a labored, frantic quality now (“Through the dark of night,” his head sang, “I’ve got to go where you are”), exactly like one partner to a comic appointment just missing the other in a revolving door, or losing her behind a pillar or a potted fern. “Some enchanted evening,” he warbled silently, “you will meet a stranger.”

He sat down to catch his breath in front of a tiny vanity table in Ladies’ Hats. He had not made his search in several months and he was rusty, unused to the strain.

He looked at himself in the table’s oval mirror. The tricky glass — hat sales up fourteen percent since it was installed — gave back a thinned, lengthened Feldman. Aware of the ruse (he had commissioned optical specialists in Baltimore to do his mirrors), he compensated by filling his cheeks with air. Too much, he thought, and let out a little. There, that’s what I look like. But he couldn’t be sure (only the mirrors in the employees’ toilets were accurate), and he stood up and gave himself half an hour to find his true love.

Picking girls who wouldn’t know him, he approached their counters in disguise. Now he was one sort of son, now the other. In Ladies’ Nightgowns he grinned shyly at the young woman behind the counter. By holding his breath for a minute and a quarter, he was able to bring a blush to his face.

“It’s a shower gift for my secretary,” he gulped. “She’s just about your size, ma’am. I guess I could get a better idea if you could sort of hold it up to your — to your — if you could sort of hold it up to yourself. Gee,” he said, “wow. I mean that’s very beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Its washable,” she said wearily, “it’s wrinkle-resistant. It won’t stain.” She took up her order pad. Feldman hesitated. “You throw it in the washer same as you would a bedsheet. It’s one of our sexiest items,” she said, looking at a point somewhere above his left shoulder. “Is that a charge, dearie?”

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“I do not,” she said.

“I’m Leo Feldman, and you’re fired.”

“I need this job,” she recited. “I’ve got to have an operation on my internal female organs. I’m saving up.”

“Out, dearie,” he told her. “You’re washed up, same as you would a bedsheet.”

He went to the toy department — he should have looked there first; hung up on kids, she’d be, the darlin’ angelface — where he spotted a gentle-looking blonde with a cute, snub little nose he associated with figure-skaters. The girl he had in mind would be soft-spirited, her female internal organs ripe and luscious as the top strawberries in a basket. He hung back a moment to form a plan, then went up to her.

“I need about a hundred toys,” he began. “They’re for an orphanage. These kids have had tough lives; most of their parents are in prisons or asylums. A lot are from broken homes where neither the mother nor the father was deemed morally fit to retain custody. Many of these children were with their folks when they were killed in auto accidents and train wrecks or burned to death in fires. You can imagine what it’s like for them.”

“Yessireee,” she said flatly. “Have you seen our new war line? WW Two?” She scooped up some metal tanks and pieces of artillery and placed them on the countertop. “Everything’s scale,” she said. “There’s a bomber that drops artificial napalm. We’ve got a model of the atomic bomb exactly like the one that killed seventy-four thousand people in Nagasaki.”

Feldman tipped his hat.

“There’s a terrific special on rubber knives.”

“I’m Leo Feldman,” he said.

“This is interesting,” she said, and lifted down a sort of chemistry set. “It’s the new germ-warfare kit. It’s perfectly harmless, but if you dust this powder on a wood, stone or metal surface, it grows a fungus. There are gases too. They don’t do any damage, but the smell is terrible.”

“You’re transferred to Lingerie,” he said curtly.

Mooncalf, he accused himself. Stargoose! Cometshmuck! He walked away, shaking himself to remember who he was. But by this time he knew, and what he looked like without a mirror. Not the wiseguy, not the dullard; he was the old man himself, the stern paterfamilias of damn fools and creeps — the loveless grump of the world.

In this mood, in his office, Feldman read his messages and opened his mail.

There was the usual number of charities. At his level they did not always ask for contributions but invited him to join committees. He set these aside for Miss Lane to reject with the excuse that while time did not permit, etc., etc., they could use his name on their letterhead (although to a few he had her fire off righteous declarations of opposition in principle). On one letter he recognized his name on the list of sponsors printed down the side of the stationery. My second notice, he thought, and threw it in the wastebasket.

He had become a sort of public spirit. So prominent was his name on so many letterheads that the real community leaders had no idea of how little he actually did. They embraced him, welcomed him warmly to their executive class, and once they had almost made him Man of the Year. Where, Feldman wondered, was the vaunted anti-Semitism in the upper reaches of his society; where was the famous aloofness and coolness he had counted on? He couldn’t, he supposed, rise to the presidency of an insurance company, a railroad, a steel mill, a utility, and there was no real future for him in Detroit, none in the north woods — he worked in softer fabrics — but the gray-haired ranks of all philanthropists remained ready to open for him. Money talked: it talked to money. There wasn’t a country club in the state — not a hunt club, not a horse club or a talk club or a fuck club — that was closed to him. He could drink bourbon over ice in any of them. He could part his hair in the middle, and no one would laugh. He could wear a vest, a pocket watch, retire behind steel frames. But there was something tame and flat in wealth. He knew there was nothing he could buy, except his comfort, that would please him. He knew more: there was nothing he could give. The thought of sponsoring museums where people came to look six seconds at a given work of art and took home a deeper impression not of beauty but of all the things in the world that did not belong to them depressed him. It spoke ill for wealth if all that one could usefully do with it was give it away. There was something repressive in money finally, something inhibiting. Rich men used it as a lesson to poor men, dispensed it — whatever the sums; he had seen the restrictive clauses in those grants, the ironclad regulations — cautious and painstaking as chemists doling out the proportions of a boring formula.

An executive — what was that? That was nothing to be. He had no heart for empire; only for the day to day, hand-to-hand, rough-and-tumble of imperialism, of which, sadly, empire was the single issue. But already, failing the Diaspora, he was dug in. Poor little rich boy, he mocked himself. Don’t mock me, he stormed. Only the damn miser counts his blessings. Pain has degrees. There are numbers on thermometers. Gloom isn’t staved with reasons. Look, he thought, clinching it, at that department on the fourth floor, for God’s sake, with its gifts for the man who has everything: personalized cue balls, solid gold zippers, framed thousand-dollar bills. Why, that, in his life, was what he had been reduced to: gestures gestured by the man who has gestured everything. He got by on joyless joie de vivre and forced life force.

Last week he had made a speech in his book department, introducing Vice-Admiral Marlow (“Sea Power”) Bellingstone, USN Ret. He had read the man’s autobiography and wired his publisher, promising to split expenses if he could get the Admiral for an autographing party. He took out a half-page ad and called the local naval-recruiting office for a color guard. (The Navy would have nothing to do with the Vice-Admiral, and Feldman had had to settle for Billy in a sailor suit.) Standing on a raised platform draped with bunting, Feldman had addressed the crowd.

“It is my high privilege,” he told them, “to pipe Admiral Bellingstone here aboard the Feldman. Many of his provocative views are familiar to you. His idea about extending the twelve-mile limit until sea mass exactly displaces land mass and each nation has its mirror image in the water — do I read you right, Admiral?” The Admiral saluted. “—is already known to most Americans. His career-long fight with the Pentagon to recognize Britain, rather than Communism, as the real threat to this nation is equally well known. So, too, are the Admiral’s efforts to restore our country once again to its rightful place as leader in the world’s whaling community. ‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ as the Admiral puts it in his book, ‘to let foreign Denmark put one over on us in this department.’”

Feldman lifted one of the Admiral’s books off a tall stack. “An admirable work, Admiral,” he said, and touched his forehead in salute. The Admiral saluted back, and Feldman turned again to the crowd. “Less familiar, perhaps, but gone into here in careful detail is the Admiral’s fascinating proposal to form a team of naval historians and sea geographers to try to establish once and for all the historicity of Davy Jones’s locker. The Admiral’s belief that if we find it we’ll probably also rediscover the lost city of Atlantis could be one of the brilliant serendipities of the twentieth century.” (Even as he spoke, Feldman took the measure of his own outrageousness and disapproved. There was a lot of talk about the poor man hanging while the rich man got off scot-free, but there were other inequities. How much nonsense a rich man could speak!) “I am reminded, as just in passing I peruse the Admiral’s useful index, of his frightening warning about the danger of salt leakage from the ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway. In the Admiral’s phrase, we are ‘bleeding the Atlantic’ In just seventy billion years — do I have these figures right, Admiral? — the Great Lakes will turn saline. What are we supposed to do then?

“Friends,” he said in conclusion, “I don’t want to keep the Admiral too long from his pensées, so I’ll turn him over to you right now, but I must just mention one more of his ideas that was particularly exciting to me. I’m talking about his research regarding the dangerous integration of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Panama Canal, what the Admiral calls ‘The Mongrelization of the High Seas.’ Maybe he’ll tell us a little more about that one himself. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome aboard Vice-Admiral Retired Harlow ‘Sea Power’ Bellingstone, USN.”

The madman blinked, talked crazily for twenty minutes about his theory on mermaids — they were not good swimmers — and Feldman sold three hundred books.

Or the bananas. From time to time Feldman had noticed news stories about merchants who, through misplaced decimals and literally interpreted metaphors in incautious ads, had been forced to part with valuable merchandise. A woman in Hartford bought a used car for four hundred potatoes. In Idaho a furniture store had to let a dining-room set go for “only a very little lettuce.” It was always big, good-humored news, and worth a picture even on the front page: a housewife, bent, smiling under a one-hundred-pound sack of potatoes; a gag photo of the Boise furniture man staring glumly—“That’s one on me”—at a shriveled garden lettuce, one browning, crumpled leaf of which protruded from his lips; a woman with her mouth open, and a beefy fellow with his hands over his ears who had just sold an air-conditioning unit for a song. It was as if a real bargain, things being what they are, were a blow for the underdog, from which all might take heart. The lucky seemed to give the unlucky hope, cheer, a belly laugh.

A year before, Feldman had given his TV salesman a day off and run an ad for a floor-sample color television set with a twenty-five-inch screen. The price was three hundred and fifty bananas, and he had arranged for someone from his photography department to stand by with a camera. When the store opened, Feldman was behind the counter, waiting. In ten minutes there was a man before him, holding his ad. “You advertise the sale on the twenty-five-inch color TV?” the man asked.

Feldman looked at the ad closely. “Yes sir,” he said, “but that’s just a floor sample.”

“I know that,” the man said.

“Yes sir,” Feldman said.

“You still got that set?”

“Yes sir.”

“I want to buy it.”

“Don’t you want to see it demonstrated first?” Feldman asked. “The first color show doesn’t come on until ten this morning.”

“No, that’s all right. It’s guaranteed, ain’t it?”

“Yes sir,” Feldman said.

“That’s good enough for me,” the man said. “Three hundred fifty, right?” he asked cagily.

Feldman smiled. “That’s right.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Feldman said. “Let’s have them.”

“It’s a charge,” the man said.

“A charge?”

“Here’s my charge plate.”

“What is this, buddy?” Feldman demanded. “Are you trying to get away with something? That ad says bananas!”

In the end he had to let the set go for three hundred and fifty dollars, but the photograph of him making out the sales slip was uninspiring.

A month later he tried again. In a prominent ad in the Sunday papers he promised to sell an electric typewriter for “peanuts.” He was shooting for the wire services, and in fact it was a reporter and his photographer who showed up first. The reporter claimed the machine and handed Feldman the peanuts.

“What,” Feldman said, extending the peanuts in his outstretched palm and turning toward the photographer, “peanuts? Where are the lawyers? Will this stand up in court? Well, well, that’s one on me.”

His heart wasn’t in it. But he did it.

As he did everything. “That Feldman,” anyone might have said, “there’s a man who’s alive.” As if eccentricity and a will set to scheme like a bomb to go off had anything to do with life. As if aggression and the maneuvered circumstances did.

Look at him, his ringed, framed concentration like a kid seeking a lost ball in high grass. An aesthetic of disappointment, a life of wanting things found wanting, calling out for the uncalled for. But the shout down from the mountain was always the same — that the view wasn’t worth the climb. It was what one heard: “War is hell,” says the General. The movie star quoted: “All those retakes. Always on a diet. The lies about you in the columns. The crank mail.” Or the truth about spies: “People don’t realize. Mostly it’s just boring legwork. It’s dull, routine. I don’t even carry a gun.” And the loneliness of the Presidency, and the endless ceremonial obligations of the King, and the brief, doomed flare of the athlete’s prime, and all the small-print, thick-claused rest. People didn’t realize. That it wasn’t who one was, or even what one was, or if one made an effort or only took what came. What counted, finally, was whether you were lucky or not, whether the gods, the stars in their ornate sequences, had given you timing. There were lucky men. How often — this seemed strange now — had he had occasion to say, “I am one. I am.”

So he kept up his ersatz enthusiasms and redoubled all efforts, like some gambler letting it ride, and just yesterday he had called all his stock boys and shipping clerks and maintenance men together for a meeting in the back of the store.

He smelled glue and string and rope and wrappings and postage and saucered sponges the color of erasers on pencils. In the shipping room he felt a physical disgust. He heard scales click, whir, a solid, metallic tattoo of postage meter. He saw the open rate books, the thumbed, greasy timetables. A telephone was out of its cradle. He lifted the receiver to his ear. “That you, Simon?” a woman’s voice said. “I see you tonight, honey. I tell my husband Mrs. Shicker want me for a dinner party she giving.” He hung up. Oppressed, he saw the pink third copies of bills of lading and wandered through a maze of senseless shipments with crayoned messages: “#7 of 10,” “3 of 9,” “1 of #4.” He felt a thick sense of half-point signatures, a smudged, bewildering spiral of unfamiliar initials and names: R. L. and J. H. and Herman Shaw. (They were his proxies. They signed for him. Who were they?)

He opened a heavy door. A man lay sleeping on a wide loading platform. Feldman saw his shoes — thick, high-topped, like blunt weapons. He closed the door and continued through a warehouse whorl of bagged lunch and paper cups of gray coffee. Everywhere were the smooth, dark cardboard rails of open packages of candy. (He made a profit on the machines: here a profit, there a profit, everywhere a profit profit.) He saw the safety signs, the conserve-electricity signs, the turn-off-faucet signs, the absenteeism signs: all the crazy placard pep talk of management to labor. It was the landscape of time clock, and he plunged still deeper into it. He breathed the whelming dinge, the hostile, grimy fallout.

They were all waiting for him in the locker room. There were high school boys in tan linen jackets and women in the blue uniform of maids in hotel corridors. A few of the men wore the thick wool of lumberjacks, or wide bright ties down the front of their denim shirts. Feldman paused beside a young boy and held his elbow. “There’s a man sleeping on one of the loading platforms. Get him.”

He climbed up on a long bench. “I like it back here,” he told them. “You’re the backbone. The fortunes of this store rise and fall because of what you do here. Listen, just because you don’t get the medals and the hurrahs of the crowd, that doesn’t mean you’re not appreciated. You’re behind the scenes, you folks on the bench, you understudies. You’re unsung. Permit me to sing you.” They looked up at him, and he saw their pastiness, the abiding solemnity or causeless joy beneath their waxy pallor. Suddenly he had a sense of his own presence and was touched, seeing himself not as someone beyond them, out of their lives, but as someone close. He whiffed their hatred and sensed himself their caricature, demonized by them, stuffed into monogramed white-on-white shirts, dappered for them, given a thin mustache, his fingers fattened, pinkened, softened, remembered as one who wore rings. (Looking around, he recognized a boy who had delivered a package to his office once, while he was having his hair cut. What a story that must have made: “Fat-assed Feldman in a Big Silk Sheet.” And the hair on the sheet — stiff, curled shavings, the association made forever in the kid’s mind with ruthlessness, strength. Passionate hair. Showy, shiny sprigs of it, waved, tufted, patent-leather clumps of it by the large pink ears — a dancer’s tufts, a pitchman’s, Mr. Big’s.) He imagined their projections of his green felty drawers of clothes, their lustful thoughts of the cedary scents, the smooth piping on his handkerchiefs, of where he kept his cuff links, his Broadway agent’s jewels. He was part of them now, food for all their false anecdote. Adding up his curt hellos, his Jew’s indifference. How dare they? he thought. How dare they?

“Who straightens stock on five?” he asked suddenly.

There was a greasy flash of a pompadour as a young boy looked up.

“It’s a pigpen,” Feldman said. “The fucking suits are out of line. Nothing is sized. I counted nine jackets loose on the cases.” The boy stared down at his shoes. “All right,” he demanded, “what’s holding up the deliveries? Why can’t the orders go out faster? Customers are calling up for their merchandise and I see half-empty trucks going out.” They shifted uneasily. “What’s the matter with you? Do I have to get new people back here? I will, goddamnit. Your union isn’t worth boo, and I can hire and fire till the cows come home. You’re breaking things. We’re getting too many returns.”

A man in a red-checked shirt put up his hand.

“What is it?”

“Sir,” he said, “we never have enough excelsior.”

“Balls,” Feldman shouted back. “Excelsior’s twenty-five dollars the ton. Bring newspapers from home. Use the goddamn candy wrappers, the paper cups. Do I have to tell you everything?” He harangued them this way for twenty minutes while they shifted under his gaze. “You’ve been using the postage meter for personal mail,” he said. “That’s stealing stamps. I’ll prosecute, I swear it. I’ll be back to see you in two months. If things aren’t shaped up by then, I’ll fire your asses all the hell out of here.”

They turned to leave, and something in the soft, bewildered shrug of their shoulders suddenly moved him. “Wait,” he called. “Wait a moment.” They turned back, and he descended from the bench. “Life is not terrible,” he said. “It isn’t. I affirm life. Life is not terrible.” They stared at him. “Get back to your duties,” he said roughly.

Ah, but how tired he was of his spurious oomph, of all eccentric plunge and push and his chutzpa only skin-deep, that wouldn’t stand up in court. “I like your spirit, boy,” the skinflint says, surprised by brashness. “I need a man like you in Paris.” Feldman didn’t. He was exhausted by his own acts of empty energy. Unambushable he was, seeing slush at spirit’s source, reflex and hollow hope in all the duncy dances of the driven. He was helpless, however. He had been born without a taste for the available. “No more looking askance at reality” had been his fervent prayer. But ah, ah, there was no God.

It occurred to him that he ought to knock off and go to a cocktail lounge and sulk. He could drink liquor and listen to the jazz they piped in. It might be pleasant. But then, he thought, he couldn’t hear the melodies without thinking also of the words, the college-kid love poems. Not for him. For him there should be new songs, new lyrics. “I got the downtown merchant’s blues,” he sang softly. “My heart is lower than my bargain basement — all alone at the January White Sale.” Stirred, he buzzed for Miss Lane. “Will green be the color this season?” he sang.

Victman was in Feldman’s office with him. He was excited. Eight years ago Feldman had been proud of Victman — his New York man, his Macy’s man. (Today everybody had his Neiman-Marcus man, his May Company man, but Victman was the first.) He had been a hot shot, in department-store circles a wonder merchant. (He had invented the shopping center, and the suburban branch store, and was in on the discussions when the charge plate was only in the talking stages — in department-store circles a household word.) Now Feldman could not look at him without wincing. He looked at him and winced for his $287,000, winced for his failed campaign. (Three columns and a picture in Woman’s Wear Daily when he came with Feldman, articles in the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.)

“Leo,” Victman said, “you ought to listen to this.”

Feldman’s irritation was such that he began to scratch himself. (If he could get just some of his money back, it would be goodbye Victman.)

“Please, Leo,” Victman said.

Feldman looked at him. He winced and said, “Victman, where you going to command a salary like the one I pay you?”

Victman groaned and Feldman winced again.

“Where, Victman?”

“You ruined me, Leo,” Victman said.

“Ruin is relative,” Feldman said. (A picture of this man had been in Fortune.)

“You ruined me, Leo,” Victman said again.

“I’m the more injured party,” Feldman said. “I can’t look at you without wincing.”

“Yes. I meant to say something about that,” Victman said. “I wish you’d try to control that, Leo. It embarrasses me.”

Yet he was sorry for Victman. He had ruined him. If he left tomorrow, though it was impossible that any major store would have him now, there would be nothing in the Times, nothing in the Wall Street Journal. Mum would be the word from Woman’s Wear Daily. Looking at him, Feldman was often reminded of those “Where are they now?” features in magazines. Question: “Whatever happened to Norman Victman?” Answer: “He’s with Feldman. He’s sitting on his ass for many thousands of dollars a year.”

“Victman started talking again, but Feldman wasn’t listening. Victman stared at him. “You can’t stop thinking about it, can you?” he asked.

“You’re on my shitty list,” Feldman said weakly.

Eight years ago Feldman’s fortunes had been at their apogee. He had come up and up, the upstart, and in the last few years had outtraded and outdealt all of them, his store neck and neck with the largest ones in the state. Movie stars in town for personal appearances carried home his shopping bags on airplanes.

And his demon told him that it couldn’t last, that prosperity was short-lived deception, that at last Red China and The Bomb and Civil Rights and The Russians would take their toll: that the world was turning a corner, the blue sky was falling. He saw a terrible fight for survival in which America — white men everywhere — backed against a final wall, would have to scrap its style. (Hadn’t he been there himself, a passionate Jewish guerrilla fighter on the beachheads of the Diaspora? Hadn’t he, the little terrorist, thrown his bombs and Molotov cocktails, and didn’t he understand ardor, zeal, impatience, all the harassing, importuning passions? Wasn’t he, by analogy then, an expert on the little yellow men, the little brown ones, the big black ones?) He foreknew the failing markets and the finished fads, anticipated in some sweeping, dark, Malthusic vision America’s throes, this very city’s — saw it choking on its fat. When others spoke warmly of progress Feldman kept his troubled peace, but he knew they were wrong.

Then he saw Victman’s picture in Fortune and read his articles: “The Suburbs: America’s New Market Towns.”

He made the phone calls, sent the wires. Then the flights to New York and the wining and the dining and the feeling him out, and finally the secret meeting between the two men in the motel outside Chicago. “What can you expect from Macy’s, Mr. Victman? You know their setup. Their echelons. Think of those echelons. Think of your distance from the king. How many princes and dukes and archdukes and barons and counts stand between you and the throne?” “That’s true,” Victman said, “that’s true.” “America is West, Mr. Victman. The whole world is, the whole universe is. Dare to dream. I’m talking future with you tonight — empire, dynasty, destiny. Neiman-Marcus, Norman. Consider, conjure. Soon Hawaii will be a state. Guam. The Philippines. Dare I suggest it? Come closer. Formosa. Quemoy. Matsu. Quemoy — keen; Matsu — mmnn. Shh. Shh. Are you the passionate man I think you are? Did you mean what you said in ‘The Suburbs: America’s New Market Towns’? Then get in on the ground floor. This is foundations, first principles. Make a wish on the stars, on the blue horizon. Climb every mountain, Mr. Victman. Pioneers, O pioneers, sir. Come West, young Victman.”

He came, Feldman talking so fast Victman didn’t know what was happening. Of course he came. Expecting perhaps to find mud streets, plank sidewalks, boomtown — assay offices, burlap sacks of nugget and dust, old-timers leading packmules. Finding instead only Feldman’s somber city, a place of half a million looking older and more settled than New York. Then held in check: allowed to fiddle, seek sites, arrange for surveys, market-research reports; consult till the cows came home sociologists, city planners; even consulting architects at some predecision, top-of-the-tablecloth level, positioning goblets, inclining forks. Seen everywhere, overheard everywhere, egged on by Feldman himself, spilling his dreams in restaurants near the tables of men Feldman recognized as competitors and he didn’t. His enthusiasm daily primed, each scheme encouraged, Feldman himself squaring his plans, complicating, flourishing, until the man thought he dealt with some merchant Midas and that on this rock would be founded some new commercial Rome. Until the casual chitchat of millions made even this city slicker’s head spin: “Invest at a hundred dollars a man. That’s the best rule of thumb, I think.” “But that’s fifty-five and a half million dollars!” “Today. I don’t mean today. What were those population projections you got from the university? Let me see them, please. But this is only for two generations. It’s a mistake to plan for under three. That’s house-of-cards thinking, pigs who build with straw and sticks.” “Wow!” “Wow indeed. Indeed wow.”

Only gradually disappointed, held off for eight months by Feldman’s ploys: Feldman dutifully inspecting Victman’s sites. “You know your business, Victman, or you wouldn’t be working with me, but I thought we were speaking about three generations. Can you see this place in even two generations?” (They were standing in a green pasture eight miles from town.) “It’ll be a slum. Women unsafe on the street after eight o’clock at night, men unsafe after nine.” Held off some more by his ploys for backing (“We don’t want our capital from American sources”). Sent once to India, another time to Dutch Guiana (“That’s where the money is, Norman, in your underdeveloped nations. Among those old Dutch planters”). And one time actually coming back with a pledge for twenty million from a man in Mexico (“No, Norman, I want thirty million from him. Either he’s willing to show some good faith in this or we don’t want to have anything to do with him”).

And then, in a year, the disappointment growing in leaps and bounds: “I don’t understand, Leo. Let’s not sit on this. It’s been eighteen months. We should break ground this winter so we can start building in the spring. The competition has its sites already.” “Give them their rope, Norman, please.” And then, later, after he had obtained additional pledges and pushed the Mexican up to thirty million: “Leo, we could have the capital investment tomorrow if we wanted. Let’s move already.” “‘Let’s move already’? We have moved. We have moved, Norman, you silly man. What else do you think we’ve been doing for two years? And don’t talk to me about having the capital investments tomorrow, when I have them today, when I’ve had them for two years. You’re the capital investments, Norman. Don’t you see what’s happening? They’ve taken the bait! They’re overextending! Those stores will be open in a year. Built in the sticks. Who’ll go? Who’ll go? And not just the double maintenance, but the double staff, the double advertising, the double trouble. We’ve thinned them out, we’ve spread them thin. You did, Norman. With your table talk, your reputation, your picture and the three columns in Woman’s Wear Daily. You believe in progress? Progress is irreligious. Read your Bible. Seven fat years. Seven lean. And the seven lean shall be seven times leaner than the seven fat are fat. Seven lean, Norman, and all it takes is two — say three. No, Norman, no, they’re tough, these guys. Say four. Say five, and have a margin of two. So don’t speak to me about capital investment, nor prattle of progress. Checkmate is the name of the game. Not moving forward: standing pat when all about you are losing theirs.”

“Don’t you believe in progress?” Victman asked, shocked, shattered, who had based his life and staked his reputation on that principle.

“I believe,” said Feldman softly, for they were in a restaurant now too, and he recognized faces and the walls had ears, “I believe in smearing the competition, survival of the fittest, cartel by default. I believe in the disappointed expectation and the harpooned hope, and that the best-laid plans of mice and men often gang astray. The tire with the plumpest tread has never moved an inch. Norman, Norman, consider the man in the club chair. That bulk comes from exercise’s opposite: if you’d increase, decrease and desist. The proud falsetto of the castrate, the fat lap of the dowager, the banker’s big ass — seats of power, Victman. I believe in ploy and stratagem and maneuver and conspiracy. I believe in espionage, the coup d’état, assassination, the palace revolt, guerrilla attacks and the cheaper revolutions. No more parades, sir. No more expensive reviews and costly May Day brags. No more shopping centers, no more sites, no more branch stores. Think me up commando schemes!”

He’d been had, poor man. When the other stores had their grand openings Feldman would have fired him, but he had invested $150,000 in him in the past two years and could not consider the deal closed until the stores had gone under. In the third year, having thoroughly discredited him, he lowered his salary to a more wieldy $30,000. (Two years, and not one coup to add to his score. No one knew, of course, how Feldman used him.) And the next year his salary was lowered again, by five thousand dollars. “The laborer is worth his hire,” Feldman told him. “That’s the best rule of thumb, I think.”

Only one thing. And Feldman now considered it.

The stores had not gone under. There had not been seven fat years and seven lean ones, but fourteen fat. Disastrously, there had been no disaster. Red China had not laid a finger on the competition. “If you’re so smart,” he sang, “why ain’t you rich?”

“They’re taking us off the charge plate, Leo,” Victman said.

“They’re what?”

“What they threatened. When the new plates come out in the fall, we won’t be on them.” Feldman stared at him. “We haven’t kept pace,” Victman said shyly.

“Why? How can they do that?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you. There isn’t any one reason — pressure from the retail clerks’ union.”

“I pay a straight commission.”

“Hiring policy—”

“The first store in the state to hire a Negro?”

“Token, Leo.”

“Tahkee token,” Feldman said.

“They claim we run phony sales.”

“Phony sales? Phony?”

“Who celebrates Arbor Day today?” Victman asked tragically. He was inconsolable.

“Some irony, hey, kid? It must be tough for you. You practically invented the charge plate.”

“I was in on the discussions.”

“Sure you were,” Feldman said. “Come on, Victman, cheer up. It’s not so bad. Smile once for me. Grin and bear it. Say ‘cheese.’ We’ve been there before, you and me. Back to the wall. Listen, try to look at it this way. You’ve had your back to the wall ever since you came here. I put you there. I made you stand in the corner with your back to the wall. What, you’ve forgotten all the lousy tricks I’ve played on you? The underhanded deals, the way I’ve used you, all the dirt I’ve made you eat? I’ve been hacking away at your salary for years. Why let a little thing like this get to you? I know. It’s symbolic, your being in on the discussions and all, but frig them, I say. Listen to me. Please take heart. You’ve got Feldman back there against the wall with you now. That’s my territory, the landscape I know and love.

“So they’ve taken us off the charge plate, have they? Well, who needs them? Say that with me. ‘Who needs them?’ The charge plate is new-fangled anyway. It’s against nature. We’ll put out our own charge plate. We’ll do better. We’ll make the customer bring a note from home. Come on, we’ll show them, Victman. Are you with me on this? The ammo’s running out and winter’s coming and there’s nothing between an enemy bent on rape and our helpless, sleeping women and children but you, me and the token niggers. Never say die, I tell you. Rally round the flag, pal. Stomach in, chest out. Five, six, pick up sticks and beat hell out of them. What do you say? Never say die. What do you say?”

“Leo, the property I told you about — why don’t you look at it? Won’t you look at it now? This is no joke. Our volume is down. We haven’t kept pace. Come this afternoon. I’ll get the developer to meet us. What do you say?”

“I say die.”

“It’s a beautiful site, Leo. When the projects go up, there’ll be ten thousand middle-income families within a twelve-block radius.”

“Die,” Feldman said.

“Parking for fifteen thousand cars. At least talk to the developer.”

“Die.”

“You can’t avoid it any longer. The handwriting’s on the wall. Leo, I warned you a year ago. It’s no joke, being dropped from the group charge plate. It’s a slap in the face. What do you keep me for if you don’t listen to me? I don’t sell for you, I don’t wrap packages or wait on trade. I’m an idea man, Leo, a merchandising-concepts man. I see ways to bring this all off. We can get financing. My home-shopper plan, Leo—”

“Die,” Feldman said. “I say die.”

“It could be terrific. We put the customer’s size on IBM tape, we code his tastes, his needs, then we keep him advised what we have for him and send it to his house. They’ll go for this big, Leo.”

“Die.”

“Leo, you don’t listen. My franchise plan. What was wrong with my franchise plan? It’s only logic. If the little name can’t absorb the big name, let the big name absorb the little name. Merge, Leo.”

“Die? You say die?”

“All right, forget that, but at least look at the site I have in mind. This charge-plate business is only a first step. If the big stores put on the pressure, the papers won’t accept our advertising. It could happen. It happened in Mobile to Blum’s. Our volume is down eight percent. We let go sixteen people this year. Gerard Brothers took on fifty, Llewelyn’s thirty-seven. At least look at the site.”

“All right,” Feldman said, “I’ll see the sites. Die. Die.”

“Listen to what the developer tells you. It’s important.”

“Die,” Feldman said.

Feldman with his buyers — there were more men than women now (the war over and no more shortages, it being everywhere a nineteenth or even twentieth fat year, Feldman’s girls had been replaced, no longer traded away in his name their ultimate quiff pro quo, happily married for years, raising kids; really, he thought, it was astonishing how many of them had married the very men who had once been their clients, the boys stirred to sacrament by the premise of unvirtue). They were in a private dining room of the best hotel for the Quarterly Lunch. Back from the Coasts, returned from the factories and showrooms and warehouses for the ceremony, they felt, he supposed, in what was after all their home base, somehow even further than the miles they had traveled, because they were all there together, like correspondents returned from the fronts, knowing some special sense of colleague that lent distance. Specialists, authorities, one big happy family with private knowledge of the skies over Texas, Twin Cities’ economy, what’s moving in Portland. Today their mysterious brotherhood even deepened by a still unconfirmed report of a brother downed, Chester Credit of Furniture, alleged to be aboard a plane that had crashed outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. One of our aircraft is missing.

Feldman taps the cut-glass water goblet with the edge of his butter knife, rises to speak, their gloomed attention making him cozy, snuggish, solemn-comfy in the orderly business reality, actually at home, and them too — you couldn’t tell him otherwise — in the reserved room, reassured by the deep brown walls and the dark carpets and the white tablecloths and black waiters and, oh yes, this too, even Credit’s empty chair. He waves off the white sleeve of a waiter offering a dish of ice cream. He speaks to him in a soft voice, making an arrangement. “Don’t bother with that now, Waiter, please. I have to speak to these people.” The waiter looks at him. “If it melts, it melts, pal, okay? My responsibility. Thank you very much.” He clears his throat, a joy rising in it with the phlegm. He loves saying something important. “Ladies and gentlemen, my dear associates,” he begins formally, pleased as always by the rhetoric he brings to these occasions (his Secretary of State diction, as he thinks of it). “In private conversations just prior to this luncheon, I have already given some cursory briefing to a few of you regarding the absence of Chester Credit. I did not intend that my unfortunate news be imparted to some rather than all, and if I may be permitted a rather bitter paradox, it pleases me to see all of you so solemn. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, least of all myself, and I take it that the seriousness of your composure is an indication that you have all been apprised of my fears for Chester.

“Regarding the crash itself, I have very little additional to report at this time. During salad I was in telephone contact with our Miss Lane, and she tells me the situation in Charlotte is still indefinite. Let me emphasize that there has still been no official confirmation of the crash — repeat — there has still been no official confirmation of the crash. All we know for certain is that a check with the tower in Pittsburgh indicates that Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven is seven hours overdue. My informants tell me that an airliner’s instrumentation, and that would include its radio apparatus, frequently kicks out during the traumatic jar of a forced landing. But this ought not to comfort us very much, as none of the control towers between Charlotte and Pittsburgh report having had any communication with Flight Number Eighty-seven. The reflex s.o.p. for a pilot forced to bring his ship down is first to declare his intent over a special emergency frequency. Additionally, the weather throughout the East has been almost preternaturally clear for the past eighteen hours with an unlimited ceiling. Thus, unfavorable climatological murk can have nothing to do with the plane’s disappearance. For all these reasons, we can only conclude that the ‘fireball’ reportedly discerned by the two farmers fifty miles from Charlotte probably was Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven. I can extend no reasonable hope that these men may have been mistaken.

“Half an hour ago, during meat, Charlotte Airport was still unwilling to release its passenger manifest for Flight Eighty-seven. Coast Airlines was quite as adamant. I’m not blaming them for their reticence. Indeed, as I understand it, they are bound by law to maintain silence until it is positively ascertained that there has been a crash. Frankly, they have been most cooperative, and I for one am proud as hell of both of them. I’ve obtained their promise to release the manifest to us as soon as it’s made available, even before the agonizing rituals of positive identification and notification of next of kin, which, strictly speaking, they are obliged by law, though not, I gather, so stringent a one as the other, to observe. Their cooperation here could save us literally days of anxiety, and so, even under the oppression of our feelings, I don’t think we ought to let this occasion of still another instance of the mutual courtesy and respect between one American industry and another go by without acknowledging it. Whatever happens, I am tomorrow sending my personal letter of appreciation both to the executives of the Charlotte Airport and the executives of Coast Airlines.

“I want at this time to commend, too, Mrs. Beatrice P. Lisbon, secretary to Herbert Kronenberger of Dixie Chair, for her untiring efforts during this crisis. Not everyone knows this, but it has been chiefly Mrs. Lisbon with whom we have been in communication in Charlotte, and Miss Lane apprises me that the woman has been unstinting in her efforts to keep on top of the situation. I understand that she has put in numerous calls to the Coast Airlines people and the C.A.B. people and the Charlotte tower people, some of them during her lunch hour at perhaps her own expense. From what Miss Lane tells me, I am thoroughly satisfied that we could not have had a more selfless anchor man in Charlotte, and I mean at some not too distant date to formalize our appreciation with a small token from one of our departments.

“Now I don’t mean to extend to you here something which might ultimately turn out to be a deluded hope. We’re adults, and we must accommodate ourselves to adult reality. However, I would be finessing my responsibilities and would perhaps irretrievably undercut any future claim to candor, or claims on your candor, did I not acknowledge now one tiny morsel of possibility that Chester may not in fact have been aboard Coast Airlines’—let’s face it — FATAL Flight Number Eighty-seven at all.” Feldman paused. “Would you close the doors please, Waiter? Very good. Thank you very much.” He leaned forward. “What I am about to tell you must go no further, ladies and gentlemen. Should it turn out to all our infinite relief that Flight Number Eighty-seven did not crash, or that it did crash but that Chester was not aboard it, the information I shall impart must remain privileged. I wouldn’t bring it up at all, save that in matters of life and death, those concerned, even only peripherally concerned, are entitled to all the facts, that they might more intelligently apprehend the dangers. Not even Chester himself — if he’s alive — must ever know you know this…Very well, then. Here’s the situation.

“On first hearing reports of the alleged crash, I had Miss Codlish in Payroll research Mr. Credit’s expense sheets. This was a routine measure, intended merely to provide us with the name of Chester’s Charlotte hotel. Many things can happen, people oversleep, people miss planes. I wanted it confimed that Chester had or had not checked out. Well — and this struck me as peculiar — there just is no record of a Charlotte hotel, not a single voucher for the last five years. I had Miss Codlish double-check — with the same result. His dinners are accounted for, mind you, his lunches are, and there were even some significantly costly breakfasts, but not a single hotel or motel bill. It was upon discovering this that I first contacted Mrs. Lisbon, or rather had Miss Lane contact her, to find out if Chester had divulged his plans for the evening. You all travel. You know the small talk that goes on between a buyer and a secretary. Evidently she at first denied any access to Chester’s confidences, but from a certain tone she took, Miss Lane suspected she was concealing something. She pressed her on this, and several things came out. It seems that on one of Chester’s Charlotte trips five years ago Mr. Kronenberger gave a party. I know Herbert Kronenberger and have always found him to be a gracious, hospitable man, not one to stand idly by while a lonely buyer fends for himself in a strange city. He would invite Chester to his party. It would be a typical Kronenberger gesture. Mrs. Lisbon was at the party too — perhaps as innocent company for Chester; that part isn’t clear. What is clear is that evidently Chester had quite a lot to drink. Let’s not mince words: Chester was drunk. Rather than let him go back to his hotel by himself, one of the guests—not Mrs. Lisbon, and it’s chiefly this which leads me to suspect that Mrs. Lisbon had been invited to the party earlier and not merely as the extra woman to Chester’s extra man — volunteered to take him back. He left with a Mrs. Charlote DeMille, a prominent Charlotte divorcée, and there is some reason to believe he spent the night with her. What happened, evidently, is that in the car on the way home, Chester vomited all over himself. (Many of you will remember his behavior during the store’s tenth-anniversary celebration some years ago.) You can appreciate Charlotte DeMille’s position. She could not enter the hotel with him, and he was in no condition to negotiate the lobby by himself. Even to discharge him into the custody of a doorman would be to compromise herself irrevocably. (Charlotte is not the biggest city in the world, and this woman is, as I say, a prominent person there.) All evidence points to the probability that she drove him directly to her own home. There, from what I can gather from Miss Lane, who pieced it together from the discreet Mrs. Lisbon, Mrs. DeMille helped the helpless Chester to the bathroom next to her master bedroom, there being only a half-bath on the main floor, and a tub, in which she must have feared he might drown, in the guest bathroom on the second floor — helped Chester to the bathroom next her master bedroom, and undressed him and put him under the shower. Then, perhaps seeing that he was still helpless and that the vomit was not coming off, she found it necessary to lather him herself, and one thing led to another and she began to lather his penis and testicles. (Mrs. DeMille is a healthy woman, ladies and gentlemen, a healthy divorcée with the appetites and needs — I say needs—of any healthy woman.) All indications are that the warm water, the creamy lather, the concupiscent silences and darknesses of the divorce-lonely house created in Chester an erection a foot and a half long, and to make a long story short — no pun intended — Chester and Mrs. DeMille have been lovers for the past five years.

“Now, I had Miss Lane urge Mrs. Lisbon to call Mrs. DeMille to check about Chester’s sleeping arrangements last night, and although she manifested some reluctance, as they are no longer friends and such a question breaches the proprieties of estrangement, she did at last agree to have Mr. Kronenberger himself make the call. I have every confidence in Mr. Kronenberger’s delicacy in such an affair, but the fact is that Mrs. DeMille hung up on him, and we know no more now — unless one interprets outrage as guilt — than we did before. Even if Chester lives, I feel that a permanent strain may have been put on the Kronenberger / DeMille relationship. But I say this. I hope he lives. Although I better understand the real justification for those exorbitant breakfasts I have been paying for for the last five years, and although he was committed to return to our Quarterly Lunch, and although in the light of these developments we must soon undergo a searching reexamination of our furniture requirements — I must say that up to now I have never fully understood Chester’s insistence on using the products of North Carolina when other, cheaper merchandise is available elsewhere — I hope he lives. I hope, in sum, that it was a lovers’ quarrel, or some happy passion, some newly discovered refinement of shower love, that has kept him from us. And while I am not of course in a position to guarantee his job, I hold his life of value.”

At this point the maître d’ approached Feldman and whispered in his ear. Feldman straightened. “Thank you very much Maître d’,” he said. “See what else you can find out, please.” He turned back to the table. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned, “I have just been informed by the maître d’ that Charlotte has confirmed the crash. Fragments of the plane and the main fuselage have been discovered in a woods thirty-five miles from the airport.” Again the maître d’ approached the table, and Feldman heard what he had to say. “Yes,” he said, “I see. Thank you.” He sighed. “A headless body that fits Chester Credit’s description, and in the suit pockets of which have been discovered some singed identification papers belonging to him, was one of the first recovered. Under the circumstances, I have suggested to the maître d’ that we probably don’t want dessert, but if I have been unduly presumptive in speaking for all of you, I would want at once to be told about it, and in that case we could call the fellow back.”

The developer turned out to be little Oliver B.’s father.

Feldman went with him to the site, an ovoid valley three miles from the western edge of the city, where the developer tried to explain what the scarred, bulldozer-bruised area would look like in a few months, with its facilities in — the spanking planes of cement and intricate ramps and the cunning approach of the access road from the new interstate. But Feldman, who had no imagination in these affairs — he could not read blueprints or conceive how furniture would look rearranged — and for whom there was a terrible inertia in things, had difficulty following the developer’s explanations.

Instead, he found himself fascinated by the man, saw something terribly virtuous in him. For all the developer’s slim, distinguished appearance, his large eyes scholarly behind glasses, and odd, ruminative quality as he talked, the muscular mounds of cheek rising and falling comfortably with his words, Feldman sensed in him a fearful, optimistic energy, and found himself resenting what he knew would be the man’s good luck with machines — he was positive the developer got better mileage than he did — and skill with nature. He looked into the developer’s white, fierce teeth and knew at once that they were teeth that had sucked blubber and jerky — is that jerky on his breath now? he wondered — as easily as his own had scraped the pulp from an artichoke. He had a mouth that had saved lives. Feldman imagined its ardent kiss on a snakebite, or slipping over the blue lips of a man dragged from the sea. Listening to him, Feldman grew oddly comfortable, easy, and found that he had to move about to shake out the warm sensation in his extremities, the sense he was beginning to feel of melting into the universe.

Frequently, as Feldman spoke, the developer smiled, inclining his head in an attitude of listening and judgment, his mood not of attention but of nostalgic concentration and courtesy and patience. At these times Feldman looked over the teeth and into the mouth and throat at the healthiest tongue he had ever seen, choice and red as a prime cut. You could drink his bright juices, his saliva clear as a trout stream. He could feel the man’s immense, beaming tolerance, concentrated as heat from a sun lamp, and had actually to shuffle his feet to dodge bolts of the chipper good will.

Then the developer, making a point, smiled a wide one, the biggest Feldman had yet seen, and Feldman stared deep down the man’s eyes, past good wishes, deeper than good hope, past faith itself to the sourcy bedrock of the developer’s vision, where he thought he saw the basic mix — the roily vats of molassesy premise that worked the circuits of his phoenixy will and gave him his feel for reclaimed land, for swamp and ashpit and trashy field where rats lurked and mice skittered. Feldman had seen enough. He interrupted him. “Excuse me, but that’s some smile you’ve got there.”

“I beg your pardon?” the developer said.

“You make jumping rabbits for Oliver out of an ordinary pocket handkerchief. Am I right?”

“Well, yes — but…”

“Sure,” Feldman said. “You do an admiral’s hat and a paper airplane from the war news. You make a tree from rolled-up newspapers, and forest animals from the shadows of your fists. Right?”

“The developer nodded slowly.

“I know. And a flute from a reed, and a kite from the wrappings around your shirts from the laundry.”

“What about the property?” the developer asked coolly.

“The property? I don’t want it.”

“Mr. Victman said—”

“I don’t want it,” Feldman said. He was very excited. “I won’t have it. Fuck your virgin land.” He looked at him narrowly. “We’re in the homestretch of a race: your energy against my entropy. The universe is running down, Mr. Developer. It’s bucking and filling. It’s yawing and pitching and rolling and falling. The smart money’s in vaults. Caution. Look both ways. Look up and down.” He picked up a beer can one of the workers had discarded. “Here,” he said, pushing the can toward him, “get yourself a string and another can. But don’t call me, I’ll call you!”