A Bad Man

16

Feldman invented the basement by accident, a great serendipity. But afterwards nothing was an accident. He meant every word, every move. So, in a way, the flukishness could be written off. It can almost be said there was nothing accidental about it.

When he had rejected the developer, that kind guy, that gentle jerk and nonbarbarian, he was pretty blue there for a while. He didn’t know where to turn. Very low. Rock-bottom. Feldman, the felled man. Who found himself — what, so down was he, was accidental about this? — in the basement of his store. On holy chthonic ground. And there one day in the record department, scolding a kid who had undone the perfect plastic envelope in which the album had been sealed, he was approached by a nervous young man in a tweed overcoat. “Excuse me,” said the young man. “I’m looking for a record.”

Feldman was about to tell him to ask the clerk — do you see how low, how miserable? — when something about the young man made him stop. His manner, apparently halting, was not really timid at all. It was as if his shyness had been assumed as a courtesy. Feldman listened. “Do you have the records of Mildred Eve?” he asked. Was that all? Feldman wondered. He went to the catalog to look her up, but she wasn’t listed. “She wouldn’t be in the catalog,” the young man said. “She sings party songs.”

Feldman called his distributor. “Why haven’t you been sending me the Mildred Eve records? Do you know how many sales I’ve lost because I don’t have them?”

“Mildred Eve?” the distributor said. “She sings filth. Her stuff is sold under the counter.”

Feldman ordered all her releases and put them on top of the counter. He had the records played on the stereo equipment so that they could be heard all over the basement.

A strange thing happened. Whether because of the music or for some other reason, the tone of the store gradually changed. This was his sense of it, at any rate. There began to appear in the basement certain listless men who seemed to be on lunch breaks, well dressed enough, and carrying briefcases, many of them, but giving off an impression of loitering. There were boys too, wiry and underweight, who seemed to have stepped from morning movies at the downtown theaters. They strolled the aisles of his basement, the rolled sleeves of their tee shirts making pockets for their cigarettes, and dropped their butts without stepping on them. The women seemed to have changed too, to have become faintly aimless, like people killing time in bus stations.

His first thought was sales. He kept a careful check on the figures, lest the new music — he attributed the changes to this — should wind up costing him money. His research, however, did not indicate that the basement was doing less business, although, and this might be something to look into, the kinds of things that people bought seemed to have changed considerably. Formerly, his basement had done a substantial business in family dry goods. The back-to-school sales and the volume in sportswear (a little out-moded, perhaps, the basement of Feldman’s store being a place where a sort of mercantile sediment tended to collect; it was, for example, one of the few places left in America where a man might still purchase hobby jeans, or fur-collared car coats) had been among the most impressive operations in the city, and almost by themselves brought in enough profit to justify the existence of the basement. Now, however, domestic clothing gradually ceased to move at all, and housewares fell off. But these losses were made up for by a sharp increase in the sale of fetishistic automobile accessories, stereo phonographs, color television, transistor radios and, in the basement’s small Toy department, those miniature roulette wheels and baccarat decks and dice cages that had once done little but collect dust. His personnel were hard put to maintain supplies, and Feldman had, over the long-distance telephone, to wheedle and lean heavily on old relationships, reminding more than one jobber of forgotten favors. The record department itself was apparently unaffected. Mildred Eve’s records did well, of course, once people learned that Feldman was offering them at list price — a fiction, since there was no list on her recordings — but fell off a little when the other stores began to feature them.

Feldman could not get over the feeling that the basement had metamorphosed. This was all the more dramatic when he realized that in the main store nothing had changed at all. That is, business there continued to fall off, but at a rate so imperceptible that apparently nothing could be done. Feldman wrote it off as his personal lean years and had no energy — audacity? it took audacity to go against the whim of God — to try to change it. Instead, he concentrated on the basement: what could be made of the strange changes he sensed? how could he capitalize? he wondered, staring at the people down there, observing each with a commanding curiosity as if they were foreigners wrapped in saris or the queer robes of chieftains.

One of the strangest things he noticed was the peculiar decorum of his personnel. Perhaps it was owing to his frequent presence (something was up, they may have thought, and been put on their guard), but their dignity — they could have been salesmen in Tiffany’s — was jarring when contrasted to the rather blowsy bearing of the customers. He played with the idea of finding more lively types elsewhere in the store to change places with them, and experimentally he brought down some glad-hander from his hardware department. But observing the fellow in action, he was astonished that his presence was somehow even more jarring than that of the solemn salesman he had replaced. Hurriedly he had the hearty, peppy Hardware man reexchange places with the solemn salesman. Somehow, discrepancy or no, the serious man seemed more at home, better for the counter and more appropriate, than the flashy fellow from upstairs.

He was convinced there was a clue here, but try as he might, he could get nowhere with it. Increasingly he sent for sales figures—sent for them, not daring to leave his vantage point near the solemn salesman, pulling salespeople from behind their counters to get almost hourly totals from the various departments in the basement. These he checked against yesterday’s figures, looking for clues and, because he found none, to see at least if the trends had held. Only two weeks had passed since the young man had asked for the recording, yet he was convinced the trends were genuine, and he had the feeling that here in the basement was the true pulse of the store, the true pulse, perhaps, of the economy itself.

Preoccupied, he had no time for any monkey business at home, and for the first time since his marriage to Lilly, their relationship took on at least the appearance of a normal one. He picked no quarrels, played no games, and at night, exhausted from the day’s labors, simply forgot to invent his lusts. He even lay more easily in the bed, shifting his limbs when they cramped, unrestrictedly turning his pillow, and occasionally rolling over to make an accidental contact with his wife, unthinkable before — and even, occasionally, maintaining it.

Lilly, meanwhile, mistaking distraction for détente, became more natural too: that is, more unnatural, for her attitude, except for those few times when she openly resisted his domestic games, had always been solicitous and conciliatory. But under the influence of his own apparent relaxation, she too changed. Though she did not fight with him, she became more peckish, expressing her discontents, as if now it might be safe to do so. On the occasion of one of Feldman’s neutral rolls to her side of the bed, she misread his intentions, and thinking he wanted to make love, declined gently. “No, Leo,” she said, “not tonight.” It was the first time she had ever turned down a fuck. Later she herself, dreaming whatever dreams she dreamt, maneuvered herself into his arms, and it was the first time she had ever initiated one. Still preoccupied, he accepted.

The solemn salesman began to appear regularly in his dreams, conducting his transactions (Feldman could not tell what merchandise he sold, though in real life he sold loose cutlery, odd-lot glassware, tumblers and small sets of Melmac such as bachelors buy) with that nonsense dignity Feldman had noticed in the store, at subdued odds with the uneasy, shifty customers.

Still he was unable to account for his effectiveness, until one day — was this only the Thursday after the Monday that he had first noticed the man? was that possible? — happening to be in the old bus depot near his store, where he sometimes ate a solitary lunch at the fountain, he passed through the arcade. A woman was playing a pinball game; another was buying a horoscope from a vending machine. A teen-ager had his driver’s license laminated in plastic, and a Negro with a stocking over his forehead recorded his voice. A soldier took four snapshots of himself for a quarter; and another man peered through a thick, greasy collarlike device at a one-minute dime movie of some ancient stripper. The man at the booth, leaning down from a high stool to dispense change, reminded Feldman of his own salesman. Of course, he thought, recognizing the expression at once. And requesting change for his dollar just so he could obtain a closer look, he perceived in himself the same shy shamble, the same odd, crablike sidling of the customers. He felt the two-mindedness of a delicate shame, the ambivalence of a regretted decision freshly made, and thought he sensed what the customers sensed — an uneasy submission of embarrassment to desire. (But what were their reasons? What were his? Just being there? Having to submit to a kind of moral muster before this distant, disapproving godlike man? Of course! And since the music, they had not come in any honorable, aggressive pursuit of bargains. Money was no object. It was as if their needs had been subverted, and they had now the aspect of people who knew they had been worked but could not help themselves.)

Feldman installed Foot-Eze machines in the basement. He had heard somewhere about vibrating contour chairs and ordered one. He had a coin device attached — fifteen cents — and learned a great deal from studying the guilty, rapt faces of the women and men who sat in it. He did more than ever with vending machines, positioning a whole bank of them against the unused spaces between his elevators. Here could be bought condoms, combs, lucky coins, magnetic dogs, leaded capsules that behaved like jumping beans — all those nervous little purchases of the lonely and poor. Elsewhere there were scales that told your weight for a penny and your fortune for a dime, and a special machine where you signed your name and wrote key words (“wealth,” “death,” “sex” and “God”) on a sensitized IBM card. For fifty cents the card was processed, and a printed letter analyzed your handwriting and your character. There were machines dispensing term insurance covering every imaginable contingency. (Women bought as much protection as men, children as much as adults.) He installed soundproof booths were people could record their voices, but added a new wrinkle. Inside the booth a phonograph played a one-minute-fifty-second instrumental version of “Golden Earrings.” The words were framed on the wall just above the microphone, and for a dollar the customer could activate the phonograph and sing with the orchestra. (Many, he noticed, spent five, six or even ten dollars rehearsing.) This machine was so successful that almost at once he had to add another and then a third.

There was a contrivance that created abstract paintings by centrifugal force, but Feldman removed it after only a few days. A certain larky kind of exhibitionism attached to it. Crowds gathered about the artist/customer to observe him squeeze his paints from the bright plastic ketchup and mustard containers. Inevitably he would perform, cheering them with clowned genius or the burlesque grace of some master chef dispensing herbs. Who needed that?

There were devices of petty torture. For a quarter you could send a small charge of electricity through the rubbery, bell-wire toes of a chicken. (It was too easy to think of the next step, intensifying the charge and allowing the shoppers actually to electrocute the chicken. That would have brought the cops perhaps, but more, it would too blatantly have advertised what was going on down there. The small, “harmless”—and so labeled — charge was quite enough to sour the ambience.)

Meanwhile, the songs of Mildred Eve filled the air. (Feldman wondered what she looked like; her album covers, which were flat statements of the sinful primary colors, contained no picture of her.) Her voice, once one got past the lyrics — lust anthems and the throaty hums of orgasms — was good. For all the low profundities of supper-club sensuality, she had a robust, sexual flair, and Feldman was reminded of the young girl lifeguard at the pool where he and Lilly had rented a cabana. A superb, broad-shouldered, powerfully legged girl in a white bathing suit, the dark vertical of her behind just visible under the wet white suit like the vein in jumbo shrimp. Once he had witnessed several of these girls rehearse a water ballet, horny in the chaise lounge at the flashing flex of rump, his heart pounding at the full pull of their strokes and skipping a beat at the last gratuitous twirl of their wrists and fond slap-spank of their hands on the water. It was all gestures like these, caricatured flourishes of style, faintly military — gunfighters fanning the hammers of their guns, commandos shooting from their hips, the smart exchanges of crack drill teams, and the airborne deep knee bends of drum majorettes — that Mildred Eve’s voice called to mind. It was stirring as a bright enormous flag, and Feldman yearned. Mama, he thought, erotic and primed, red-hot, low-down, wild-hipped, fat-titty-juiced mama.

Yet all this was beside the point. The machines were beside the point; so was the daily more tawdry shooting-gallery atmosphere of the basement, and Feldman had a sense of baited traps set by an explorer in some jungle no white man had ever penetrated. What monsters would come? he wondered. Looking at the shoppers, he thought he could perceive tracks, gored remains of meals eaten hurriedly, the bent-twigged, crushed-leaved evidence of violated water holes. (And indeed, he had just this sense of doing time in the wilderness, the waiting and nervous patience he exercised a preparatory ordeal.) All he knew was that he was on the threshold of something big, and the basement might have been some secret subterranean laboratory where ultimate weapons came into being. He would not even discuss it with Victman, who repeatedly pressed him for information.

It was odd though, wasn’t it, that what was going to happen — and he knew, didn’t he, though he hadn’t yet phrased it? — would come about, could only come about through the intercession of these same shady customers, cautious, crabbed from dispossession, whose unfrocked presence was the very essence of the shabby. Feldman imagined, when he looked at them, successive routs, long histories of trials and errors. It was the absence of the romantic, or of anything having to do with the romantic, that betrayed them chiefly. Unfrocked perhaps, but never drummed out of any corps, never failed rich men, or prodigies burned out at puberty, or writers on a lifelong binge of block. Their failures somehow precluded their successes. Looking at the women, he imagined they all had names like “Marietta Johnson” or “Juanita Davis,” the irresolute monikers of practical nurses.

What was strange was that they never went above the basement. Despite their characteristic air of loitering, the pressure Feldman sensed in them of a piecemeal, building nerve, like that of lovers unsure of their influence, they came there directly and stayed there. Feldman waited for them to make their move.

Lilly, who had no notion of what was going on, who tested her husband’s intentions with a growing irascibleness, as if could she but have his indulgence she could have anything, continued to flex her will. Liver, which Feldman abhorred, appeared on the table. Whole-wheat toast, which had been forbidden in their house, found its way onto the napkin-covered salver at each breakfast. She threw margarine into the fray, and he drank skim milk in his coffee. Saccharin and the diet colas became staples. In a way, she was like someone who had just lost her orthodoxy and, in the first flush of independence, serves only the forbidden fruits. Feldman knew she must be feeling guilty, and wordlessly spread his margarine on his whole-wheat toast, poured skim milk into his Sanka and stirred the saccharin in it with the same single spoon she had given him for his grapefruit.

Billy, on whom these domestic shifts had not failed to make an impression, laid low. He couldn’t read and he couldn’t count; he couldn’t tie his shoes or tell time (he used his own incomprehensibly complex system: “It’s fifteen minutes,” he would say, always rounding off the odd minutes, dropping them out of his life to the next convenient lower number, “before twenty-five minutes past six o’clock…It’s ten minutes past five minutes before twenty minutes after fifteen minutes to eight o’clock”). He had always been a very Indian in the forest of their household moods, but now he was clearly scared stiff, and it was he — who had thrived on ersatz foods, who would rather eat a handful of barbecued corn chips or a slice of flecked luncheon meat than a piece of pie or a bit of beef — who could not touch his food. He did not trust his father. Obviously, Feldman thought, as close to paternal pride as he had ever ventured, he’s a lot smarter than that great rough pig his mama.

The thoughts he allowed his family were vagrant, however. He resented them; they diverted his attention from the store. It was odd. In the past, since, that is, the time that his department store had become prosperous, he had been indifferent to its success. Not corresponding to the myth sometimes associated with businessmen, Feldman had not lived for his work — had not lived as much for it, for example, as some of his own employees may have for theirs. He had, despite his having written them all off, sought his life at home, with his family. Not a devoted man, and largely bored by his wife and son, he nevertheless found it unique to be so closely associated with other beings. They took car trips together, Lilly sharing the driving. It never failed to astonish him, as she showed her credit card and signed the slip the attendant handed her when she bought gas, that they would send him the bill and that he would have to pay it.

Similarly, Billy’s report card, which either parent was authorized to sign, always went back with Feldman’s signature. The notion of his son’s accountability to him, and his — in the state’s eyes, at any rate, since they accepted his signature — to his son, was stunning. That he had been so long a bachelor might have explained it, but he had long been a married man too, and had never accustomed himself to what other men take for granted. He could not get over the feeling that he had gotten hooked up with strangers, and it was just this sense of things — that he would have felt closer to cousins if he’d had them — that permitted his abuse of them. For he was not, damn it, a cruel man — just, like others on the Diaspora, a xenophobic one. Even his bedtime fantasies about other women were understandable if one granted that Lilly was essentially a stranger somehow, only temporarily linked to him. (Well, they would both die someday. It was as if, through the prospect of their deaths, they were already divorced.) But these were thoughts which he scarcely had time for now. Until he got this other thing straightened out, his family would remain submerged and he would be mild, benign, whatever courtesies it cost, let them read into it whatever incipient affection they wished.

For some while Feldman had considered that the time was ripe. He was unwilling to install any more machines or to make any additional shiftings of stock (he had had brought down to the basement certain items of sybaritic indulgence: rich levantine garments luxurious as the costumes of despots; gigantic celebrational cakes so painstakingly sculpted that their showy frosting could no longer be eaten; jeweled, tropically feathered fishermen’s flies on platinum mountings), afraid that he had achieved an ecological balance so exquisite that any further adjustment would destroy it. Thinking ahead to the time when whatever was to happen would have happened, he congratulated himself. (Accident? What accident? Opportunity knocks. I’m prepared. Feldman’s prepared. I know it will come. I make it come.) So he watched and listened and waited, unexposed even as he paced the basement, primed as a gent in a blind or some bad man in ambush.

Then one day a man stopped him in the aisle. Wealth, death, sex and God, Feldman thought. He knew it had happened.

“I want,” said the man, “to buy a gun.”

He meant, Feldman knew, a rifle, some antiqued walnut thing, sporty as its trophy prey. But seeing the man — he had observed him before: the dark orbit of his felt brim pitched low, crowding an eyebrow in wrought, posed suspiciousness, the thin murderous nose as though pressed by swimmer’s clamps, the pearl-mooned buttons like the medals of gangsters, and gray powerless hands that had choreographed their own goofy, spooky rituals — he understood that the rifle would never be used for sport, save that fancied one of this fool’s imagination. And why did it have to begin with a madman, some jeopardizing clown who would purchase the rifle as he must have purchased each item in his costume (the fedora, the long dark coat with the pearl buttons, the white silk scarf), as he would buy the next (the black leather gloves, if he could just give up the fancy handwork or convince himself that it was even more threatening in wraps), one thing at a time, like a collector? Why did it have to be such a person? Because it had to be. Because the time was only mildly ripe. Because in any new enterprise it is the madmen who step up first. Watching him, Feldman knew that the man had not yet selected a victim. The hatred in his eyes was unspecified, in love with its own posture, an emotion seeking itself in mirrors behind Feldman’s head. One day it might focus, but perhaps not. If it didn’t, it would do its damage anyway, but with its heart not in it.

“I want,” the man repeated, “to buy a gun.”

“Yes sir!” said Feldman.

He let the word get out that he wanted to see all persons with strange or unusual requests, explaining to his personnel that the only way anyone in charge of an operation like this could develop new markets or make intelligent suggestions to the designers and manufacturers was through experience in the field. He wanted no one turned away, he said, no matter how exotic or even out of the question the inquiry might be. These, he underscored, were particularly the people he wanted to see.

He had his carpenters build a small office for him near the basement stairwell; a desk and two chairs were moved in and a telephone installed. He established fixed office hours, selecting an hour in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and one in the afternoon on the other days. On Monday evenings, when the store was open late, he let it be known that he would be in his office from seven P.M. until closing.

He began a discreet advertising campaign — small, vaguely worded notices in the Personals column of the morning and evening newspapers. He phoned the ads in himself and told the girl that they were to run beneath those ads that sounded like trouble; in fact, they were not to appear at all on days when the paper did not carry these condensed telegrams of grief. Similarly, he had signs put up in the rest rooms of cheap hotels. A sign with the same vague message, but larger than the others and more decorative, appeared in the bus depot and the penny arcade. All right, Feldman thought, call me sentimental, say I’m a softy, but that’s where it all started.

The first ad ran on a Saturday, and there were already people outside his door when he came in on Monday morning. If the people he had watched in his basement seemed reluctant or shy, these were direct, as if they had long since taken a professional attitude toward their troubles. Like sinners proclaiming their salvation or drug addicts their cure, they spoke of their weaknesses proudly.

“I come up pregnant,” this high school girl told him, “the first time I ever let a boy. It’s my blood. It’s my big pelvis. A womb like a hothouse, my ma says. But that don’t mean I want to have his kid. I need to be cut or whatever they do.”

Feldman nodded agreeably, and while she was still sitting there, called Freedman, already, even as he dialed, giving the small signals and high signs of success, the winks of private joke and communed confidence which even on this first outing he had adopted as his cheery style, letting the sun in on sin and discovering something useful to do with his hands.

“Freedman? Feldman. How you doing? Listen, Doc, I need a favor. I won’t beat around the bush. Time, essence, and what are friends for? The name of a specialist, please…I’m looking for an abortionist…I say an abortionist doctor, Doctor…That’s right. Nobody scabby, no dirty rubber-gloved drunk. Somebody who shaves. No names, please — too shameful at this juncture, but trust me. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need this favor…Okay, all right, check. Spare me the righteousness…Okay, all right, check. I appreciate your reluctance. All I can say is I’ll never implicate you. That’s a promise, kid…All right, my back’s to the wall. It’s Lilly…That’s right. She’s been unfaithful. It’s hard for me to say this, Doc, even to you. A schvoogy, a schvartz…Well, hell, maybe some of it’s my fault, but I can’t stand by and accept some pickaninny bastard…Right. You will?” Here (to the girl) a Morse code, both eyes blinking like signals at a railroad crossing, the arm going down like a gate, the mouth and tongue in elaborate, exaggerated silent conversation that had nothing to do with Freedman. “You will? What are friends for, indeed? And, Doctor, I hope to God in Heaven above that Medicare is wiped out. That’s what I think of you, sweetheart. Wait, let me get a pencil.” (One was already in his hand.) “Is that last letter an m? Is it an m, I say, or an n?” (He had already written down the name.) “An m as in ‘miscarriage,’ or an n as in ‘niggerbaby’?…What’s that? Must be this connection…An m as in ‘miscarriage.’ Doctor, I gotcha. I’ll never forget. This is what they mean when they talk about the relationship between a doc and his patients. You don’t get this sort of thing in England. Listen, Freedman, listen to me. I want you to come into the store and pick out a suit…No, I mean it. Promise me, promise me now. Is that a promise?…Right, good. I'll look for you, Doctor.”

Feldman gave the girl the name of the abortionist but would accept no money. “It’s a service of the store,” he explained. “We’re building good will.” He allowed her to fill out an application for a charge account.

Although he had many opportunities to use the abortionist’s name during those first weeks — later he would ask Freedman for the names of others, it being a matter of curiosity, as he would frankly tell him — something about his new business was disturbing to him. The world had begun to smell pregnant to him, spermy. He came to distrust all virginal appearance and thought of himself as love’s piker. Love was everywhere. It was June in January, April in May. Before long, he thought nervously, he would begin to make passes at the prim little fuckers himself. (Prim, they were prim, white-gloved, white-shod, their gynecological beings underscored by the graduation-dress packages in which they wrapped themselves, like gift-wrapped horrors in boxed practical jokes.) Indeed, he felt they expected his advances, that in their eyes his profitless continence made him more perverse, and he was careful not to touch any of their tokens, refusing even their fountain pens when he had to write down a name or a direction, calling them back to retrieve the forgotten purse, never touching it himself or daring to smell the cloudy, steamy face-powder-cum-chewing-gum odors of their open bags. To protect himself, he was short with them, scornful, encouraged them to think of him as of an agent, an advance man, someone who would later be cut in by the abortionist himself.

He went further, and by stripping his office even of memo pads and desk calendars and blotters and paper clips, he managed to create an atmosphere of the guarded discussion, a place where deals were made while no tangible product, even money, was ever allowed to show; there was an overall impression of records self-consciously not kept and of a deliberate, guilty respectability. Still, he regretted his celibacy and found himself with a developing predilection that fed on his copious sense of the availability of these one-time losers. He was in love with their country-girl, milkmaid — in a way, they were already mothers — underdog sexuality, and with their flat-chested, smooth-thighed, stick-limbed, straight-assed boyish bearing. He was in love with adolescence, in love not with the blatant statements of brassiered and pantied organs, but with all the invisible code machinery of their insides, the clear, young, clean-as-a-whistle tunnels of their bodies. As smitten by their invisible treasures as any dirty old man his gray heel bending the counter of a lady’s shoe and a garter band trebled around his wrist, with the cheats of fetish.

It was no joke: for the first time in years Feldman had a mixed feeling — anxious for excitement, thrilled and annoyed when it came, irritated and relieved when it didn’t. Finding no one there when he came for his office hour, he would shrug fitfully. Nothing ventured, he would think, and nothing gained, and only quits at that.

Beyond this, something else bothered him. It hadn’t ever been profit that had driven him, but the idea of the sale itself, his way of bearing down on the world. Now, however, he had become a mere order-filler, no better than the kind of salesman he had always despised. He strove to counter this. “You seem oversexed,” he told one pregnant teenager, “hot-blooded. Come here. I’ll show you something.” He blew the fair, fine hairs along her arm. He put his mouth next to her ear, and without touching it or moving his lips, kept it there until she squirmed. He kissed the back of her neck softly. She sighed. Her flesh rose in goose bumps. “You see? You’ll always have trouble with that,” he told her. “Five minutes of this treatment and I’d be inside your blouse, ten more and my fingers would be strumming your crotch. In a quarter of an hour we’d be screwing. And mind you, I’m a stranger — fat, homely, older than your pa. You’ve pronounced erogenous zones, sweetheart. One out of a hundred suffers. Sure suffers, certainly suffers. Are you Catholic? No, not even Catholic. Then why pay for some biological quirk not your responsibility? Fertility goes with your disease like night with day. You can’t help it. There’s sex cells on your pores thick as peanut butter. I tasted them when I kissed your neck. Listen. I say go ahead with your plans, have your abortion. But afterwards — listen to me — afterwards have this operation. Be spayed. Come on, who winces at a scientific term? Be made infertile then, become sterile. Whatever you want to call it. A small love knot in the Fallopian tubes.” It was the sort of terminology which made him lustful, though now he used it dispassionately, throwing it in to make his case. “We can’t operate on desire yet, dearie. The lust glands are contiguous with the synaptic neurons. Excuse my talking dirty to you, miss, but we’re both adult, n’est pas? It we destroyed your neurons it would be too dangerous. You wouldn’t feel pleasure, but you wouldn’t feel pain either. A neuronectomy is out. I couldn’t permit it. You’ll have to be sterilized. I’ll bring in the biggest man. As if you were my own daughter. Could I say fairer? Wait, where are you going? Sit down, where are you going? All right, smartie,” he shouted after her, “it’s your funeral.”

He was wringing wet when he sat down again. Have I gone crazy? he thought. He closed the office, canceled the appointments of two people and did not come in at all for a few days.

It was only that he had been overanxious to make the sale, he was able at last to reassure himself. He had to accept it: abortions were closed circuits, dead ends. Though it was stimulating to do business with anyone with a private shame, he was coming to resent the distinctly medical emphasis of sin. The doctors had a cartel, he saw; businessmen were just their errand boys. But, he thought, what can I do? Love makes the world go round, damnit.

He had five full weeks of this. Only then did he realize that he never saw a man in his office unless he was there with the girl, or by himself on the girl’s business.

He began to wonder about the fellow to whom he had sold the rifle. Had he killed anyone yet?

Then he had a break. A young man came in alone one day. Feldman expected that it was more of the same and greeted him without interest. The man’s uneasiness — usually these fellows were as matter-of-fact as himself — might have provided a clue to his difference, and perhaps it was an indication of his flagging faith that it didn’t. He accepted the boy’s halting quality as sincerity, and told himself that it was refreshing to come upon a fellow so unused to the feel of his compromise. To make it easier for him to begin, he said, “You’re not married?”

“No sir.”

“Not in a position to marry, I suppose?”

“No sir.”

“Though it sticks in your craw to do something like this, you see no alternative.”

“I’m sorry?” the young man said.

The customer’s bashfulness was a waste of time, but Feldman understood it. To the man he must have seemed someone unlicensed or lightly so, like a tip-off man to the cops perhaps, paid with taxpayers’ money, or a prostitute, or the man who sells fireworks out on the highway.

“I say you see no alternative to the abortion.”

“I’m sorry?” the young man repeated.

Then he realized that they were speaking at cross-purposes. (Ah, it was no piece of cake. The customer was always right in this business.) He held his tongue and let the young man tell it, ignoring his own last statements as if they had been part of the room’s packed silences.

“I saw your ad in the P-Personals column—” he began falteringly. (My, the dignity, Feldman observed, as though truth required an imperfect delivery, the boy’s faint stutter like the riddling of an oracle.) “I didn’t know. I mean — about this p-place. I’ve come by. I’ve s-seen the g-girls outside. They seemed f-frightened to me. Then I rec-recognized one from my b-block who got into trouble with a guy. I s-saw her here.” Feldman enjoyed the cave style; he actually folded his hands at one point. There could have been diplomas behind him on the walls; he could smell the diced breath that comes through the grills of confessionals. His face fixed in a mask of stern encouragement. But when would he get to it? Were there no gestures? The boy was too coltish, yet he dared not risk a single sepulchral “Yes?” “I thought you could h-help me.” A good sign. You could see light with a good sign like that. (These people actually have to want to be helped.) Soon they would both be all over the kid’s needs, taking their greedy draughts, travelers at a well.

“I’m not an addict,” the boy blurted. “I don’t even have a habit.” Now the rush of his speech muffled his impediment. Feldman wondered where it had gone, then tuned in on the spurious, jazzy scat of his tumbling speech. The kid could be a fake.

Feldman interrupted him. “What is this? What are you pulling here? What do you mean you’re not an addict? What’s all this? What’s going on? What are you driving at?”

“Oh,” the boy said, “oh. I’m sorry. Maybe I had the wrong idea about this setup.”

“Setup?”

“I heard talk.”

“Talk? What talk?”

“That you do f-favors.”

“Yes?”

“That you d-do favors. I need something. I’m too listless. I need a prescription.”

“A prescription? What prescription?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know the name of the stuff. But I had it once and it h-helped.”

Feldman picked up the phone and began to dial at random. The young man jumped. It was all the test he would ever take, Feldman thought prophetically, seeing his alarm as the sign of his legitimacy, that single reflex the springing of his addiction. He remembered for him what the boy would forget: that instinct did him in, that he had been hooked at such and such a time on such and such a date by nothing more palpable than his brief alarm. “Busy,” he said curtly. “I’ll try again in a minute.” The boy settled back, and in a moment Feldman dialed Freedman’s number.

“Freedman? Feldman. What do you say, Freedman?…Listen, I meant to thank you about Lilly, but I’ve been a little queasy about the whole thing…Well, it’s a bad business all around…No. Lilly’s all right. He was a first-rate man. But what I called you about — well, she’s depressed. I forgave her, but the whole thing still doesn’t sit right with her. I tell her a thousand times a day, ‘Lilly, it’s all right. Everybody makes mistakes.’ I’ve even confessed to fictive infidelities of my own, but the girl’s ridden with guilt…Tranquilizers?” He looked at the boy in the chair; the young man shook his head. “No, Doctor, she’s been on tranquilizers, and they just don’t seem to do the job. As a matter of fact, your man prescribed them himself as a precaution. I’d call him back to ask for something stronger, but Lilly doesn’t want to have anything more to do with him. Too ashamed. She ripped his name off the label first thing. I’ve never seen anything like that girl’s shame. You know Lilly, she’s a ball of fire when she’s herself…Won’t stir out of the house, doesn’t even want to get out of bed. I wanted to bring her over to see you, but she doesn’t know you gave me that fellow’s name, and she’s afraid she’d blurt out the whole story in the consultation room. She’s in terrible shape, Doctor. I’m really worried this time. I’m thinking maybe I should have let her have the kid. She’s so listless. I’ll tell you the truth — I’m afraid she’s going to start seeing him again…Him. The nigger. Well, he’s our dry-cleaning man. Big black brute he is. I think of that nigger’s cock in my Lilly’s pussy, and I want to cry. I need some help on this, Doc…Her bowels? How are her bowels?” The boy nodded agreeably. “One thing, Doc, her bowels are right as rain…A fever?” He looked at the young man. “No. No fever.” The boy imitated a sleeper. “It’s just this listlessness. Sleeps around the clock…What? What’s that? The superamphetamines?…What they give the advanced catatonics, you say?” He looked at the beaming boy. “Well, that sounds all right to me. Why don’t we just try that? Tell you what, call the pharmacist in your building, and I’ll send my boy over to pick it up. And say, Doc, I want you to come by for that suit. Hear?…I mean that…Much obleeged. Really, Doc, much obleeged to you.”

He scribbled an address and handed it to the young man. “If you run out we can have it renewed,” he said.

And still he was at their mercy, riding passenger to their driver’s seat. He undertook to teach himself the pharmacopoeia — much as, weeks before, he had pored over the illustrations in medical texts, learning the uterus like the parts of speech — and in a week had a junkie’s knowledge of all soft anodynes, and thought in ampules and capsules and decimaled grain. The pusher, he thought, there’s a salesman. But it was hopeless, he reflected bitterly, with a wishful pitch, like the acceptance speech of a dark horse, already half formed in his head. “Shit! Shit for sale! Shit for shooting, for snuffing and smoking. Swallow it with water from the tap or stir it in lemonade sweetened to taste. Imported shit shipments. Domestic shit grown in our own vacant lots. Airplane glue for the kiddies and Dad’s war-earned morphine and Demarol for Grandma. Psychedelics for the whole family. (The family that prays together stays together.) Why toss and turn another moment? Throw away those sleepless nights. Shit here. Shit for pain and shit for pep, shit for languor, shit for gloom. (Thank you, and will there be anything else, sir? A hypodermic, sir, a syringe? Needles? Have you thought of everything?)” Too bad he would never make it. To wheel and deal in ultimate products: ah! oh! me oh my! Hangmen’s rope, warheads, heavy water and the life of Christ. (Judas, there was a salesman!) Damn, he thought. Damn the ICC, damn Food and Drugs and SEC. Damn the board of health and the FCC and the fire and boxing commissions. Damn all rulings of the Supreme Court in restraint of trade, and the laws that keep my help from going naked in the aisles. Damn the timers of the stoplights, and those who license, and those who make the rules for the safety checks of airplanes. Curse the up-to-snuff thickness of rails that support such and such a weight at such and such a temperature. Damn, too, the snoops who oversee the construction of bridges and insist on precautions before letting a single worker go into a mine or a tunnel. Damn that measly conspiracy of the civilized that puts safety before profit and makes hazard illegal, and damn finally, then, those at the top who would extend longevity by requiring dullness and who this morning reduced almost to absolute zero the possibility that when I left my house after a handsome breakfast that followed an eight-hour restoring sleep, I would see one man come after another man with a knife.

That’s that, he sighed, a realist who surrendered quarter where it was due and would never be a pusher, but merely sin’s friend downtown, a doer of favors, crime’s wardheeler, transgressions’s lousy legman, wrong’s cop and felony’s cabbie giving directions to the conventioneers.

But seeking to cover all markets, he needed to know the names of the pushers. He dialed Freedman. “It’s me, Doctor…Not good, Doc, not good. Sad and downhearted. Got the blues you know, old time, sunk-spirit funk. The fantods, Physician…No no, nothing you could call a new wrinkle. It’s Lilly again. We hooked her, Doc. Lilly’s hooked. She come up a dope fiend. Flaming, raging addict, Lilly is. She’d kill for the stuff, Doc. Yes sir, she’d lie and steal and murder and cavort. We did it this time. Freedman. We sure did a job on old Lilly. Good thing I’m rich, a habit like she’s got. Only thing keeps her off the street this minute’s my money, I guess. Have to appreciate small blessings, way I look at it. But Lilly, well sir, Lilly’s got a monkey on her back like King Kong…No, no. You know Lilly, her character. A cure’s out of the question. Only way to make her stop is tie her up and sit on top of her. A cure’s out. Lilly’s system just couldn’t stand up to cold turkey. No, Doc, I look down that lonesome road, and all I can see is doom in that direction. We’re just going to have to accept it, I’m afraid, and that’s why I had to call my family physician…No, hell, I understand your position. I know that as a medical man you can’t just go on prescribing these drugs for her…I know about your Hippocratic oath, and I want to tell you I respect you for it…. Absolutely not, out of the question, I appreciate that. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. But still and all, Doctor, you’re the one got her into this, ruined her health with an abortion, then prescribed narcotics to bring her round again…No, of course I’m not blaming you. Of course not. You did what you thought necessary. But, well sir, we’re decent people, Lilly and me. What do we know about the underworld and the syndicate and those plug-uglies? I was hoping I could get the names of some pushers from you so’s I could keep Lilly supplied, so’s the cupboard’s never bare…Sure, positively, that’s all I want…How’s that?…You will? Well, I appreciate it. Here, just let me get a pencil and a sheet of paper. Okey-dokey, I’m ready…Uh huh. Uh huh. Him? Tch tch…Uh huh. Uh huh. Fine, I got it all down. Thank you…But I do have a bone to pick with you, Dr. Freedman. Can you guess what it is?…That’s right, the suit…All right, now that’s a promise. That’s a promise from a man that’s under the Hippocratic oath.”

Replacing the phone, he thought: That Freedman is dangerous. He ought to be locked up.

With his heavy abortion trade, relieved now and then by the public’s incipient interest in drugs, Feldman managed to remain fairly equable for a while. It was still true, of course, that he was at their mercy and had not yet found any way to deflect their specific demands. Once, when he was still naïve, he might have settled for just these conditions, all sin subsumed in the body’s joy, the nervous system’s reasons, but he had begun to discover in the victims — he could not say his victims — a sense of prior submission, of simple yielded-to, statutory plight. Here were no fearful presences to justify either pistol in drawer or alarm button under the rug to bring help — he felt no real harm in them, and he was annoyed by their indulgence, bothered by the absence of driving pride, the firmer greeds. The truth was, he was haunted by the ghosts of those who had gotten to them first. Jealous as some taken-in bridegroom, he heard the lies still whispering above their heads, the wily lines of truckers in bars, cousins at parties, guests under their fathers’ roofs. Also, he recognized what they did not, that their need of him hung on an ignorance. Why did they need him? What did they use him for? He was merely a distraction for them, his function a ritual, a ceremonial fiction, as though their troubles and their solutions needed channels and red tape to legitimize them.

In the meantime, he was kept busy with referrals from his salesmen, listening to old ladies with some determined memory of a particular pair of house slippers long out of stock or some fly-by-night gadget seen at a friend’s. He could have whiled away the time running some of these down, or even had what he would once have considered fun switching their ardor to some other object, but he dismissed them as quickly as he could, getting them out of the way for the next white-gloved, goofy-hatted girl in trouble — with whose insides, despite himself, he was still in love.

A man came into Feldman’s office, a tall, stern, raw-boned, sinister fellow in his fifties, his hair graying at his temples but black everywhere else. His features were sharp, all angles and bas-relieved bones, the unrecoverable Eskimo or Mongol just under his skin now Anglicized and windburned Christian. He reminded Feldman of conductors on commuter railroads, whose solemn aspect had made him fearful, or of ace pilots now alocholic, or of investors embittered by businessmen, and of businessmen themselves as they were sometimes shown in movies — hard and ruthless and cynical, soft only on their daughters. Feldman thought of the gun he did not keep in the secret drawer he did not have.

“Are you Feldman?”

“Yes,” he said. The man remained standing by his desk, his courtesy a warning. “Please be seated.” The man looked at the chair suspiciously, then back at Feldman, and sat down as though defying some trap. “Yes?” Feldman said. “Yes sir?”

The man scrutinized him, and Feldman thought Cops even as he dismissed the idea. There was something too fastidious about the man’s anger. The father of some girl dead on the abortionist’s table, the sore old man of a kid junkie. But this too seemed unlikely. Something about his bearing was uncommitted, as though he were checking not for some bad quality he knew Feldman had, but for some good quality he was afraid he might have. Waiting him out, Feldman could feel himself posing. He gave him tough, gave him bold, gave him patient, gave him poker, gave him a dozen patent bravuras he did not feel, and was aware that his face was as frozen as his visitor’s, that not a muscle had moved nor a hair stirred. Indeed, it might still have expressed the question of his “Yes sir?” and he settled for that.

There were several buttons pinned to the man’s lapel. As he shifted in his chair he seemed to propel them forward. Noticing them for the first time, Feldman thought impertinently of all strange feats of belief, so many causes inscribed on the head of a pin. On one was an American flag, on another a sort of contemporary minuteman, for which some younger version of the man himself might have served as the model. The rest were the acronyms of unfamiliar organizations. A last badge read: “WDSG.” (“Wealth, Death, Sex and God?” Feldman wondered. Impossible.)

Still the man had not spoken, though Feldman understood that showing him the pins had been a gentle act, a shy feeler like the inexpert flourish of some schoolgirl’s engagement ring. He was inexplicably touched.

Finally the stranger spoke. “Feldman,” he said speculatively. His voice was as arrogant as ever, as if there had been no soft overture from the lapel; indeed, that had somehow been retracted. “Feldman,” he said again, turning the name over with his tongue as if it had been some gunned hood’s suspicious last effect in the hand of a policeman.

“What’s up?” Feldman made himself ask.

“There are some merchants,” the man said, though it was clear, from the tone of rehearsal that he brought to his speech, that they had not entered conversation, “I’ve heard about who, not Jews themselves, affect Jewishness. They do it superstitiously, much as a smithy hangs his first horseshoe above his door or the owner of a tavern frames his beginning dollar. Are you such a merchant, Feldman? Such as I’ve described, trading on your Christian credit to appease some Rothschild Cash and Carry Immanence?”

In a panic Feldman tried to remember Freedman’s telephone number and couldn’t.

“I’ve asked if you’re Jewish, Feldman.”

“Half Jewish,” he said, projecting a disparagement of the Jewish half.

“Oh,” the man said, disappointed, and once more was silent. But the buttons had come out again. Observing the man closely, Feldman saw that as he shifted he raised one shoulder slightly, swelling only half his chest. It was a puzzling, schizophrenic business, and he was not sure what to make of it, save that he knew he preferred the ingenious shoulder to the rigid, brooding one. He had to make the stranger keep the badges forward.

On a hunch he boldly put out his hand and fingered one of the tin buttons, the one with the American flag. “Old Glory,” Feldman said.

The man sat uneasily under Feldman’s touch but did not pull back.

Feldman’s finger moved to another button. “AFSAF,” he said. “FAFAC.” He opened his drawer and rummaged in it for a moment. “Here it is. I knew I had it,” he said, handing his find to the stranger.

“This is a paper clip,” the man said.

Feldman winked and took it back. “So,” he said expansively, something settled between them. “So!” He nodded forcefully. He had an idea now why the man had come: for a contribution. He leaned forward and glared at him. Then, inspired, he turned to the other lapel, the one without the buttons, and stared at it fixedly. After a moment the man moved his arm across his chest in a long, slow diagonal like some mystic fraternal salute, and taking the edge of the lapel, he turned it inside out. A hidden button was revealed.

“RAFAPACALFAF,” he said.

“How long,” Feldman asked, “have you been, ah…interested?”

“I haven’t seen yours,” the man said.

“I don’t belong,” Feldman said. “I don’t approve of their methods.” A pain swept over the man’s face. “Have you heard about my labor policies?” Feldman asked quickly. “I’m off the charge plate, did you know that?” Then he leaned forward, brushing the buttons contemptuously with the back of his hand. “I’m more comfortable with the renegade than I am with the convert. There are good words that can be said for confessed former Communists. I won’t deny it, but there’s something embarrassing in a new passion. Give me men who keep their instincts. The Northern racist, give me him, whose best argument is his prickling skin, his crawling flesh, his abhorrence fingerprinted in his cells. Give me snarlers who bare their teeth at the soul’s traif. Phooey on the isometric heart, the soul like a cleft palate or unequal feet. Am I taking a chance with you? Am I?” he challenged.

The man was silent. Then, “They’re getting away with murder,” he said softly.

“Am I taking a chance with you?” Feldman insisted. The man looked confused. “The buttons. Your buttons. So many eggs, so many baskets. I know what those cost you, you. The garish orchestration of your politics, a tune for turncoats, fa la la. First one thing and then another.”

“They’re getting away with murder,” the man said again.

“We agree in principle,” Feldman said sharply.

“They have to be stopped,” the man said, and his face went through an extraordinary change, a relaxation, giving way to a kind of gravity he had been resisting. Feldman understood that his brief rhetoric had been rehearsed. Now there was something fervid as falling about him. He might have been dropping through the air in a parachute.

“We agree in principle. Go on,” Feldman commanded.

“There are movements afoot,” the man said with the same blank passion. “A conspiracy.” His voice achieved the word. “The nationhood threatened,” he said so feelingly that he seemed close to tears. “Rioters. Looting. So-called civil rights.” As if these phrases had triggered his message, he began to talk rapidly now. Kennedy’s assassination. A signal. Their call to arms. A blood sacrifice — theirs. The Mistaken’s. Pervasive moral collapse. Municipal swimming pools and city parks systems usurped, national parks next. Muggings in the Grand Canyon, rape in Yellowstone. The debilitating effect of modern music: jungle rhythms, chaos. Basements tactics of the so-called Black Muslims. Trouble in so-called Asia. Prayer in schools, together with other decisions of the so-called Supreme Court. In a blueprint — he personally had seen the blueprint.

“You’ve seen the blueprint?”

“Yes. I’ve seen it.”

“Go on.”

The Mistaken were actually three and a half months ahead of schedule, and gaining at a rate of thirty-eight minutes a day. An hour and a half on the Sabbath while the nation slept. “Wake up, America!” he finished. “Oh, for God’s sake, wake up before it’s too late!” Then, as if to reassure himself that it wasn’t, he looked at his watch.

“Guns,” Feldman said quietly. “You want guns. And ammo. Plenty of ammo.”

“What?”

“Be quiet,” Feldman said. “Let me think. Who’s with you?”

The man blinked at him.

“Who’s with you? What’s your membership? The usual smattering of retired generals, I suppose, old ladies with cat hairs on their shawls, one of two sore losers from Cuba and Budapest. Is that the element?”

“I want—”

“You want, you want. I know what you want. You want a radio ministry. Fifteen minutes a day at six-fifteen in the morning. ‘Wake up, America,’ indeed. Do you know who listens to those programs? Shut-ins. People on turnpikes who drive all night to save on motels. I know what you want. You want pamphlets in bus stations and flags for the poor. Sit still. Sit still. This is important. Arm.”

“What?”

“Arm, goddamn it! The so-called British are coming. Arm! But the American way — with American weapons. Do you know what I see? A militia of deer hunters in red-checkered vests. A calvary of coon hounds. An arsenal of sporting goods and bombs in Cokes. A Winchester in every golf bag. Poisoned fishhooks and hangmen’s line. Wake up, American! Force! How much money you got?”

“I don’t see how—”

“How much money you got?” He waved his hand at the man’s lapel. “Don’t tell me that jewelry comes cheap. Don’t jew around with me. We’ll need sleeping bags, canteens, plenty of canvas tents and first aid kits. Don’t expect to get away without casualties. If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. We’ll need Sterno, charcoal grills, paper plates, walkie-talkies. And don’t forget the transistor batteries for the walkie-talkies.”

Whoopee, Feldman thought. Whoopee yi o ki yay. This is it. This is. “Tear-gas fountain pens,” he said. “Cattle prods. And flags, plenty of flags. Let them know who we are. And the rifles! And the ammo for the rifles! Forty thousand dollars. I can equip an outfit of two hundred men and put them in the field for forty thousand dollars. You got forty thousand dollars?”

“Do you?” Feldman demanded.

The man was blinking steadily now, licking his lips.

“Come on, come on, it’s near closing. They have three and a half months, six minutes on us.”

“What about uniforms?” the man asked. “You didn’t say anything about uniforms.”

“Bowling shirts, yachting caps,” Feldman said sharply. “Do you have the money?”

“My savings,” the stranger said. His decision made, he seemed relieved. “And you’re right about these”—he pointed to his lapel—“just a lot of talk.”

“All right,” Feldman said, scribbling an order as he spoke, “take this to Sporting Goods. And I’m giving you this at cost, so I want to go into your political background to make sure the stuff isn’t falling into the wrong hands.”

The man nodded and extended his card. He acted as if something quite familiar were happening to him.

This encounter taught Feldman a valuable lesson: that everyone had already been tempted, that everyone had already succumbed, had had those things happen to him which he wanted to have happen, and was looking for them to happen again. Seduction was routine; yielding was; everyone had a yes to spend and spent it. And there was about them all some soft, run-to-fat quality not of knowledge but of consent and peace, the puffy eyes of the heart.

He felt better, relieved of his responsibility to satanize the world.

In the next few weeks Feldman did a land-office business in a wide variety of favors. He arranged an orgy for some conventioneers (a call to Freedman: “Lilly wants to go into a whorehouse, Doc. Figures she belongs in one after what she’s done to the family. Physicians keep tabs on this sort of thing. You know a place with a healthy bunch of girls? After all, I still have to sleep with her”). He helped out a woman who wanted to fix a judge (“Doc, Lilly was run in last night. What can you tell me about Judge Meader?”). He did some business with a homosexual, fixed up a childless couple with a black-market baby, and was generally content. It still nagged at him occasionally that he was not really responsible for his clients’ needs, but this was partially offset by an incident that occurred shortly after the visit of the right-winger.

A fellow came into the office but couldn’t say what he wanted.

“Girls?” Feldman asked.

“No. I don’t know.”

“Fellas then. I could put you on to some swingers. My personal physician treats them for the biggest families.”

“Not interested.”

“You drive? There’s this guy needs a wheelman for a bank job he’s planning.”

“I’m no crook.”

“Say, you don’t know what you want, do you?”

“Sure don’t.” The fellow sat spraddle-legged.

“All right,” Feldman said finally, “I’ve got it. I’ve been waiting for someone to try it out on. It’s new, an experiment. Not a bit risky, but very unusual and a lot of kicks.”

“Yeah?”

“Guaranteed, but it would cost you seven hundred bucks.”

“That’s a little more than I’d planned—”

“Okay, then it’s not for you. Forget it.”

“What is it?”

“Forget it. It’s not for you.”

“Well, you can tell me what it is.”

“No, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t want to cut corners on this project. We’ll think of something else.”

“Well, just tell me what it is. If it sounds worthwhile—”

“You’d do it?”

“Well, if I thought it was okay—”

“All right,” Feldman said. “You’ve got to go to Cleveland. You wear disguises.”

“What?”

“You wear disguises in Cleveland. I’ll send you to a place where they rent costumes.”

“Jesus.”

“You stay in a hotel, and every day you put on a different costume: fireman, baseball player, intern — that sort of thing.”

“Well, what’s so hot about that?”

“Sure. Forget it.”

“Well, what’s so hot about it?”

“Have you tried it?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then how do you know? Habit — everything’s habit. Tell me, what do you do when you hear a funny story?”

“Well, I laugh.”

“Exactly. That’s what I mean. Why not hold your right arm up instead? Look, do me a favor. Go to Cleveland. See what you think.”

He went, and a week later Feldman got a postcard saying it was the best seven hundred dollars he’d ever spent and that next year the man thought he would try it in Worcester, Mass.

Now things ran smoothly. Each day brought new challenges, and he derived a certain joy from the balanced schizophrenic nature of his store: the aboveboard floors, with their conventional commerce, and the queer open secret of his basement. He was even able to take more interest in the main store, discovering, now that he could again pay attention to it, that in the last months it had prospered. He reconsidered his plans for building a suburban branch, and while he had not actually made his mind up to go ahead with the project, he deemed it a serious future possibility. Though he still believed in the lean years to come, he wondered whether he might not have exaggerated their imminence.

At home his relations with his family had entered a new phase. He neither tormented Lilly nor avoided her with his neutrality. Billy, who was out of school for the summer, was by the grace of his vacation able to obscure some of his intellectual clumsiness. Lean years would come for Billy, Feldman knew, but for now he was perfectly willing to pretend that there was not much wrong with his son. Though everyday he pursued Billy with questions about why he was the last kid chosen for a team, sometimes he allowed a tone of joking to give a good-natured dimension to his scorn.

It was against this background that he found himself one night on Lilly’s side of the bed. They had been watching television together, and Feldman, who always determined which programs they would watch, permitted her a movie. The grateful Lilly couldn’t do enough for him.

“Play with my back,” he murmured. He lay on his side and pulled his pajama tops up around his shoulders. “Use your other hand,” he said. “I feel your callus.” It was pleasant to lie there in the dark with his eyes closed, listening to the movie. “Lower,” he said, “a little lower. Yes. There.” Lilly didn’t have any idea when she had overworked an area. “Keep moving around,” he told her. “Try to remember where you’ve been. That’s it.” For a few minutes it was much better, but every so often she would become engrossed in the movie. Then her hand would falter and stop, and he would have to shake his shoulders to get her attention again. During commercials, however, the hand came alive by itself and fluttered hither and yon with an almost geisha attention. During the next commercial Feldman removed his bottoms, and even after the movie came on Lilly’s fingers still moved expertly.

“I’m going to turn the set off, Leo,” she said in a few minutes. In the dark she groped her way back to the bed. “Play with the backs of my legs,” he said. “Play with my kneecaps. Play with the nape of my neck.”

She reached across his body and drew her fingers up his thighs. “Let’s make love,” she whispered.

“No. Play with my back again.”

“Please, Leo.”

“I can’t.”

“I’ll make you. Shall I try to make you, Leo?”

“All right,” he said, “try to make me.” He lay on his back, and she took his penis in her left hand. The callus irritated him. She rubbed him this way for a few minutes and then began to thrash about against him.

She put her breast on his nose. “Do you have a hard-on, Leo?” she asked sweetly.

“I have a soft-off.”

She put her hand back on his penis. “Take my ear in your mouth,” he said. She took his ear in her mouth. “Don’t suck it, for Christ’s sake — you’ll break the eardrum.” She became gentler.

“Can you now, Leo?” she asked in a little while. “Will you try?”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll try.” He rolled on top of her. “It doesn’t fit.”

“Here,” she said.

“I’m not in.”

“Sure you are.”

He moved back and forth a few times. “I’m slipping out.”

“Ahh. Ahh. Oh, Leo.”

“You’re too dry.”

“Ahhgghhrr,” she shuddered.

“Play with my back,” he said.

“Leo, come back. Leo? All right,” she said, “I know. Let’s stand up.” They stood up.

“Stop. You’re breaking it off.”

“Let’s sit on the side of the bed.”

“No. The color television.”

“Leo, we’ll break it — and the tubes get too hot. Let’s stand on the dresser.”

“Let’s sit in the chest of drawers.”

“Leo, what are you doing?”

“Where’s the air-conditioning vent?”

“The air-conditioning vent?”

“Where is it?”

“There, on the floor. Near the chair. What are you doing?”

“I’m sitting down. Ohh,” he said. “Oh boy, Arghhrr.”

“Let me try.”

“Wait till I’m through. Ahhghh. Wow.”

“Leo, you’ll catch cold. Nothing’s worse than a summer cold. Leo?”

“Oh boy.”

“Leo, please, let’s get in bed.” She pulled him up and they got into bed. Feldman turned onto his stomach. “Leo,” she said after playing with his back for a few minutes, “try to catch me.”

“All right.”

“Close your eyes.” He heard her get out of the bed. “Count to fifty.”

“All right.”

“Don’t start counting until I tell you.” Her voice came from across the room; she was sitting on the air conditioning. “You can start counting now, Leo. Leo? Are you counting?”

“What?”

“Are you counting?”

“You woke me up.”

“Oh, Leo!”

She got back into bed. “You’re hard now, Leo. Come in me.”

“All right.”

“Oh, Leo, you’re so hard now.”

“I have to pee.”

“Oh, Leo. Oh. Oh. Oh, that’s wonderful, Leo. Oh.”

“Where’s the Kleenex?”

“Oh. Oh.”

“There’s only three left. How can you let the Kleenex get so low?”

“Oh, I love you, Leo. I love you.”

“All right.”

“I did something, Leo. It’s the first time. It was wonderful.”

“Been quite a night for you. First your own program on the TV and now this.”

“You do something too, Leo. You do something now too.”

He flipped out of her and rolled off. “Can’t cut the mustard,” he said philosophically, putting his hands behind his head.

“I’m sorry, dear,” Lilly said. “It’s been wonderful these last months. You’ve been marvelous to us. To Billy and me. So relaxed.”

“Yes.”

“Things must be going well at the store.”

“Very nicely.”

“See? It doesn’t do any good to worry.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Leo?”

“Yes?”

“Did you know that I’ve been worried lately?”

“No. I didn’t know that.”

“I tried not to show it.”

“Well, it worked.”

“But it’s all right. I found out today it’s all right.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s my callus. I went to see Freedman about it.”

“Best not to play around with these things — Freedman?”

“Yes, and do you know, Leo, that man looked at me in the queerest way.”

“You took your callus to Freedman?”

“It was absolutely embarrassing, Leo. He tested me for syphilis.”

“He tested you for — oh no — he t-test — tee hee — tested you for syph-ha-ha-lis?”

“You’d think he never saw a callus before.”

“She saw Freedman. She took her callus to Freedman.” Feldman laughed. He roared. He threw his right hand up in the air and laughed harder.

“Leo, what is it?”

“F-F-Freedman,” he sputtered. “Freedman,” he guffawed. “Freeeeeedman,” he sniggered. He tittered and giggled and snickered and chuckled and cackled and chortled. “F-F-Freeeedman!” He couldn’t stop laughing, and as he laughed his erection grew. It became enormous. It was the biggest hard-on he had ever had. Lilly, astonished, pulled him on top of her greedily. Laughing, he rocked and shook himself into an orgasm.

The next morning he still had to laugh every time he thought about it. His eyes teared and his nose ran. Once, during a sales conference, he actually slapped his knee in his mirth like a vaudeville farmer. It was the best laugh of his life, persistent as the symptom of a cold. When he tried to work, the thought of Freedman and Lilly kept getting in the way and he had to lay aside whatever he was doing. The people around him, Miss Lane and some of the executives and buyers, had never seen him this way, but his laughter was so infectious that they had to join him, laughing the harder because they didn’t know the joke. Possessed by his laughter, he made a decision — he would remember this laughter and try always to be happy.

Then, riding the escalator up to the third floor when he returned from lunch, he saw something that made him stop laughing. A girl he had sent to the abortionist was mulling over some handkerchiefs at a counter. And as he peered through the crowd he recognized others he had seen in his basement.

“Oh, hi,” a young man said to him on the fourth floor. It was the lad for whom he had obtained the prescription.

On a sofa in the furniture department, sitting there as if the thing already belonged to her, was a lady for whom he had obtained a black-market baby. She nodded to him as he went by and fumbled with her pocketbook as if she meant to show him a picture of the child. He hurried to an elevator to take him the rest of the way up to his regular office. How had they come up? He wondered. Why weren’t they in the basement? What were they doing this high in his store?

Sure enough, when he stepped into the elevator, there was the man he had sent to the queers.