The Franchiser

1

I took Nate’s hand. “Hey,” Lace said.

“Hay is for horses.”

“Come on, let go. Let go.”

“Spare me your colorful crap, Nate. Save it for the hicks. I’m glad to see you, so I shake your hand. I know all about your handshake.”

“Nothing’s settled.”

“Right. You can have it back when I’m finished. I’m finished. How are you?”

“Nothing’s settled. My handshake’s my contract. I ain’t no greeter.”

“No? This isn’t Las Vegas?”

He had gotten to Harrisburg in the afternoon. He spotted Mopiani from the Caddy as he drove up, the man pneumatic in the cop’s criss-crossed leather that bound Mopiani’s tunic, the thick straps and ammunition loops potted with bullets, the long holster like a weapon, its pistol some bent brute at a waterhole, the trigger like a visible genital, the uniform itself a weapon, the metal blades of Mopiani’s badge, the big key ring with its brass claws, a tunnel of handcuffs doubled on his backside, the weighted, tapered cosh, the sergelike grainy blue hide, the stout black brogans, and the patent-leather bill of his cap like wet ink. He leaned against the blond boards that covered the entrance to the building and smoked a cigarette. In his other hand he held a walkie-talkie.

Flesh lowered the electric window.

“Mopiani.”

“Who’s that?”

“How you doing? How’s private property?”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s Ben Flesh. I’ve come to give myself up. Where’s Nate?”

“I don’t know you.”

“You don’t know shit. What’s the walkie-talkie for, Mopiani? The Big Bands?”

“Get away. The building’s closed. Don’t look for trouble. Move along. Go on. Break it up.”

“What am I, a crowd?”

“Just move along. The building’s shut.”

“You’re impregnable, Mopiani. Look at me.”

“The building’s shut down, I said.”

“That a real walkie-talkie?”

“What’s it look like?”

“Give it here a minute.” He reached out. “Come on, I’ll give it right back.” Mopiani let it go. Flesh pressed a button on the side of the machine. “Nate? You on the other end of this thing? Nate? It’s Ben Flesh.” He released the button.

Nate Lace’s voice came back immediately. “Ben.”

“Tell the police force I’m all right.”

He gave the instrument back to Mopiani. The man turned his back to him and leaned his ear into the machine, though Flesh could hear everything Nate said. Mopiani nodded.

“Mr. Lace says it’s all right. I’m sorry I hassled you. I didn’t recognize you.” Ben followed him to a sort of doorway in the wide wall of boards. He waited while Mopiani unlocked the padlock. He took the key not from the ring but from his pocket. Flesh had to bend to go through.

“Where am I going?”

“1572. It’s the Presidential suite.”

It was a hotel, dark except for the light from an open elevator and a floor lamp by one couch. The Oriental carpets, the furniture, the registration desk and shut shops — all seemed a mysterious, almost extinguished red in the enormous empty lobby. Even the elevator — one of four; he supposed the others weren’t functioning — seemed set on low. He looked around for Mopiani but the man had remained at his post. He pressed the button and sensed himself sucked up through darkness, imagining, though it was day, the darkened mezzanine and black ballrooms, the dark lamps and dark flowers in their dark vases on the dark halved tables pressed against the dark walls of each dark floor, the dark silky stripes on the benches outside the elevators, the dark cigarette butts in the dark sand.

He’d stayed here on business once. The Nittney-Lyon. He’d met Lace in strange places before, but this was the strangest. Imagine their names thrown fifteen floors by Mopiani’s walkie-talkie. “Nate?” “Ben.” Quicker than prayer.

Nate’s floor was lighter than the lobby. He glanced at the ceiling of the long corridor. Here two bulbs burned in their fixtures; there, three were out. There was no pattern. Probably Nate had unscrewed them.

The door to the suite was open, Nate at a desk watching him, his walkie-talkie next to the phone. He grabbed Nate’s hand. “Hail to the Chief,” Flesh said.

“Hey come on, let go. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I’m glad to see you, so I shake your hand.”

“Nothing’s settled.”

“Yeah. Right. You can have it back when I’m finished. So how are you?”

“I ain’t no greeter.”

“No? Ain’t this Las Vegas? Didn’t you used to be Joe Louis?”

“What are you doing here? We didn’t have no appointment.”

“This place is spooky. Come have a drink with me.”

“I’ve eaten. You still driving? I see the Cadillac out front. What is it, you afraid to fly? Do you think you’ll fall on the ground? More people are killed on highways each year than in the airplanes. You should know that. What are you doing here anyway? We don’t have no appointment. Why don’t you fly? It’s more convenient.”

“I’m loyal to the highway.”

“It’s crazy. Loyal to the highway. It’s crazy. How’d you know I was here?”

“I read about the distress sale.”

“You see? If you flew you’d have been here first maybe. Now maybe whatever you wanted I already sold it.”

“I knew Bensinger’s troubles weeks ago. I called him about the the TV’s, but he thought the Sheraton chain would bail him out.”

“Me. I bailed him out.”

“You’re Geronimo, Nate.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? How do you like my new store? Hey? This is really some store I got. TV’s?”

“How much?”

“Sealed bids.”

“What sealed bids? I need a few color TV’s. I’m opening a Travel Inn.”

“I’m sorry. It’s the only way I do business. Sealed bids.”

“What is it with you, you like to get mail? I’ll pay you cash and send it in a letter.”

“I can’t do it, Ben. Listen, I’ll go this far for you. You need TV’s. I’ll give you a price on some black and whites.”

“Black and whites? From the Nittney-Lyon? Eight years ago I stayed in this hotel. They were old then. The white was fading. Even if they were still in their boxes with the silicon pouches I couldn’t use them. I already told you, I need color. It’s in my contract.”

“How big’s your Travel?”

“A hundred fifty.”

“I ain’t got 150 color.”

“The Nittney-Lyon has 360 rooms.”

“Right. Three hundred color’s what I got. All in good condition.”

“Bullshit on your good condition. I figure it’ll cost me a hundred a set over the purchase price to get them in shape.”

“Never. Why do you say a thing like that?”

“It’s cable TV. The guests flip the channels like they’re winding their watches.”

“They’re in good condition.”

“What time is it?”

“Three. I don’t know. Around three. Why?”

“We’ll watch Merv Griffin. If his suntan works for me I’ll give you a hundred twenty-five a set.”

“I have to be truthful, it’s not a bad price. But you’d have to take two hundred.”

“Businessman! All right. I need a hundred and a half. I’ll take two hundred. I’ll use the extra for spare parts.”

Nate smiled. “You’re a tonic, Ben,” he said. “I figure seven weeks I got to be in Harrisburg. With no one to talk to but Mopiani. You know what that Cossack does when he’s not on duty? Army-Navy stores. He window shops Army-Navy stores, checks out all the Army-Navy stores to see if there’s something new he can strap to his belt.” He sighed. “I don’t know. I bought a great hotel. A beautiful store. I think I’m in over my head this time. A million one it cost me. Two weeks going day and night to do an inventory. What am I going to do with this stuff?”

“You know.”

“I don’t. I really don’t. I don’t know.”

“Come on, Nate, you know what to do with the little soaps, the paper shoeshine cloths, the switchboard, the telephones, the dance floor and bandstand. A million one. You’re here two months you’ll clear five hundred thousand. Four Otis elevators you got like Apollo space capsules. When you’ve picked the bones dry, you pay your taxes and sit on the thing till the city condemns. They pay to knock the hotel down and you parcel the property into small lots and sell it off for more than you put up in the first place.”

“Hangers. You need hangers?”

“Richmond sells me hangers.”

“And not television? Richmond don’t make you take their televisions?”

“I’m not a sharecropper, Nathan. It ain’t a company store.”

“The shipping is your responsibility.”

“I haven’t bought anything yet. I haven’t seen the color.”

“Turn it on, turn it on.”

“What? Here? In the Presidential suite, sky-high, where the reception’s like a page from National Geographic, the test pattern like an engraving? No. We’ll go to—309. We’ll watch with interference. I want to see the ghosts, the squiggle Mopiani’s walkie-talkie makes on the screen — the Number 12 bus going by, rush hour, all the city’s tricky electric shit. I want you to take your worst shot. Then, then the shipping’s my responsibility.”

We went to 309. Nate had to get Mopiani to hunt up a key, to scrounge around in the hotel’s cellar for an hour looking for a way to turn the juice on in that part of the building. He had to fetch five more sets from rooms I selected at random and fix plugs he’d taken from lamps to the wires he’d cut behind the TV sets that ran through the walls to the master antenna. The whole thing must have taken four hours. Then we shoved plugs into every socket, stuffing them full, caulking, tuck-pointing the electric slots tight. Putting on different channels, spinning a roulette of network and U.H.F. Channel 6’s closed circuit, the camera panning from a barometer to a dial that showed the speed and direction of the wind, to a clock that told time, to another that gave the temperature, to ads on signs. I guess the Nittney-Lyon was still paid up for the service. It was in black and white but almost the only thing I watched with any interest. On other sets grave Cronkite spilled the beans, Chancellor’s glasses reflected light, Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner sat connected at the shoulder like Siamese twins. After a while Nate left and took his palace guard with him, and I watched the wind speed and direction, the barometer and temperature, keeping my eye peeled for the slightest change.

Nate returned in an hour. “Satisfied?”

I nodded. He put out his hand and I took it. “At last,” I said, “the Nate Lace Special.”

“Listen, I never once went back on a handshake.”

“I know that, Nate.”

“That’s why I jerked my hand back from you before. It wasn’t nothing personal.”

“I know that.”

“I got a handshake it stands up in court.”

“Yes.”

“Your feelings shouldn’t be hurt.”

“My feelings feel fine.”

“Just so you know.”

“You’re colorful, Nate.”

“Well—”

“No. You are. You’re colorful. You got more color than all the TV’s. Me too.”

“I never thought of you as colorful.”

“No, I didn’t used to be. Now I’m colorful too. Partner. Idiosyncratic, Technicolor partner.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Our vaudeville styles, pal. Our personalities like hard acts to follow.”

He was looking at me. “The twenty-five thousand. We’ll arrange an arrangement.”

“Right. I have to organize the sets and figure a way to get them fixed and work it out for a truck to take them to my Travel Inn. Is it all right if I stay here tonight?”

“Yeah, sure. The place is empty. With you I figure I’ve already doubled the occupancy rate.”

“Hey, Nate?”

“What?”

“Do me a favor. I’ll give Mopiani the keys. Get on the walkie-talkie and ask him to put my Cadillac in the garage.”

“You and your cars. If you flew you wouldn’t have to worry about parking.”

2

Forbes would not have heard of him, Fortune wouldn’t. There would be no color photographs of him, sharp as holograph, in high-backed executive leathers, his hand a fist on wide mahogany plateaus of desk, his collar white as an admiral’s against his dark, timeless suits. There would be no tall columns of beautifully justified print apposite full-page ads for spanking new business machines with their queer space-age vintages, their coded analogues to the minting of postage, say, or money — the TermiNet 1200, the Reliant 700, Canon’s L1610, the NCR 399—numbers like license plates on federal limousines or the markings on aircraft.

Though he actually used some of this stuff. G.E. had an answer for his costly data volume traffic; Kodak had found a practical alternative to his paper filing. He had discussed his microform housing needs with Ring King Visibles. He had come into the clean, bright world of Kalvar. A special card turned even a telephone booth into a WATS line. Still, Fortune would do no profile. Signature, the Diners Club magazine, had never shown an interest; T.W.A.’s Ambassador hadn’t. There was no color portrait of him next even to the mail-order double knits and shoes.

Yet, he couldn’t deny it, he’d have enjoyed reading about himself. It would shake them up — all those gray sideburned gents of razor resolution. He could not divorce his memory of their sharply resolved photographs and fine tuned f-stop pusses in the magazines from their fuzzier, more edgeless presences in real life. (He had met some of them in real life, but it was always their pictures in Fortune he carried in his head.) And their biographies — all the high echelon raided, that cadre of the corporate kidnapped swooped down upon like God-marked Greeks; feisty, prodigy tigers, up-shirt-sleeved and magnate tough; and the others: the white-haired wooed, and your pluggers, too, your up-from-the-ground-floor loyalists, and Chairmen of the Board Emeriti who still carried menial memories in their skulls. And the familied inheritors. (Though these you seldom saw: class, class.) Or, even rarer, the holders of the original patents who chaired their own board. What would such men make of him?

What would they make of his having entered the Wharton School of Business on the G.I. Bill in 1946 under the impression that he would learn to type, take shorthand, master the procedures of bookkeeping, of proper business letters — he’d set his sights on an office job, the idea of 9-to-5 as romantic to him and even mystical (the notion of yoga rhythm and routine) as it was antithetical to those who wanted more, who, having learned to kill, could never return to an only ordinary life — to discover instead that economics was a science, money an art form? Or of the remarkable telegram he’d received in his junior year at Wharton, the only telegram he’d ever gotten that wasn’t sung? He knew as he ripped it open that it could not be bad news, his parents having died in an automobile accident while he was still in the army. (Not even a telegram then. Basic training in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Not even, when it came down to it, informed. His sister out of town when it happened, when he called — routinely — that weekend and there had been no answer. And no answer the next weekend either, or the next. And, returning on furlough to Chicago before being sent overseas, no answer at the door. And his key didn’t even fit it anymore, as though basic training had given not only him a different shape but by God everything a different shape, his clothes, even his keys. “Hey, what’s going on?” he’d asked a neighbor. “God, didn’t you know? Didn’t they tell you?” “Tell me what?” “They were killed. Dead a month. Didn’t the Red Cross get in touch with you?” And angered — for the first time in his life really pissed, roaring into the long-distance telephone to his commanding officer: “What the hell is it with you people? I want my compassionate leave or I’ll go A.W.O. fucking L. It isn’t the time off. It’s the principle!” Answering his neighbor’s questions from across the hall, making his answers his argument: “I didn’t fucking know. You didn’t goddamnit tell me. The Red no damn good Cross didn’t get in touch with me.” Wanting, see, his books balanced even then, not looking for something for nothing, only for justice, the principle of the thing. And still no more notion of what he was about than a babe. They gave him the leave. Leave piled on leave while Truman brooded and made his decision to drop the atomic bomb and the war ended, and then getting the government to approve his matriculation at the Wharton School of Business, arguing that if the army had not given him compassionate leave he might have seen active duty, might have been wounded. Unwounded, undisabled, they were getting off cheap.)

He would never forget the telegram, had an image to this day of the uneven lengths of yellow strips of capital letters pasted on the yellow Western Union blank, like a message from kidnappers:

WOULD LIKE SEE YOU BEFORE I DIE. WOULD LIKE DISCUSS AMENDS. REPARATIONS. HAVE BECOME RELIGIOUS IN OLD AGE. WISH TO DO RIGHT BY GOD BY DOING RIGHT BY YOU. HAVE CERTAIN THINGS SPEAK YOU ABOUT. DONT THINK I UNAWARE YOUR EXCELLENT PROGRESS AT WHARTON. BEEN GETTING WONDERFUL REPORTS FROM PROFESSORS. MUCH ENCOURAGED WHAT I HEAR ABOUT YOU SINCE STOPPED PESTERING ADVISER ABOUT SHORTHAND AND TYPEWRITER INSTRUCTION. PLEASE VISIT ME HARKNESS PAVILION SUITE 1407. FARE POCKET MONEY FOLLOW. YOUR GODFATHER JULIUS FINSBERG.

Fare followed, pocket money followed, and he had an impression of sequence, of something suddenly organizing his life, as if somewhere someone had tripped a switch to trigger a mechanism that gave a fillip to events, like a parade, say, at its headwaters, its side street or suburban sources, the horses sorted, the bands and floats and marchers suddenly geometrized by some arbitrary imposition of order, a signal, a whistle.

He recognized Julius Finsberg’s name, knew him to be his god father, though he could not recall ever having seen the man, and knew that till then, till the time of the telegram, the office had been ceremonial only, a sinecure from the days when Finsberg and his father had been partners in a small theatrical costume business in New York, a business just large enough to support one family but not two. It was when Ben was a small boy that the partnership dissolved, amicably as it happened, Julius buying out Al, though it could just as easily have been the other way around. They had, Ben remembered his father telling him, cut cards, the low man having to pay the high. At the time — this was the Depression — his father had considered that he’d won, the three thousand dollars being more than enough to give him a new lease on life in Chicago, though it was not long afterward that he’d begun to brood.

“Who’d have thought,” he’d said, so often that Ben had the speech by heart, “that Cole Porter would come up with all those hit tunes, that Gershwin and Gus Kahn and Irving Berlin and Hammerstein and that other guy, what’s his name, Rodgersenhart, had it in them, that they’d set America’s toes to tapping, that Ethel Merman and Astaire would catch on like that, or that Helen Morgan would sing her way into America’s heartstrings? The Golden Age of Costumes and I sold out my share in what today is the biggest costume business in the country for a mess of pottage! I don’t blame Julius. He didn’t know. I’m not holding him responsible for my bad timing. To tell you the truth, it was only after he gave me the three thousand that I made him your godfather — you were already six. I felt guilty sticking him with the business. Well, what’s done is done. After all we’re not starving. I’ve got a nice shop, but when I think what might have been…” From then on his father ate his heart out whenever he heard — he would permit no radio in the house, no phonograph — someone whistling a popular show tune.

When he was called to New York in the spring of 1950 Ben was twenty-three years old. He went directly from Penn Station to the Harkness Pavilion. It was still early morning. He politely inquired of the head nurse on the fourteenth floor whether Mr. Finsberg was receiving visitors.

“No. Mr. Finsberg is very ill. His condition is grave.”

“Oh,” Ben said.

“Are you a member of the family?”

“Not the immediate family. Mr. Finsberg is my godfather.”

“You’re Ben?”

“You know my name?”

“Go in. It’s 1407. Well, you’d know that from the telegram, wouldn’t you?”

“You know about the telegram?”

“Did you get your pocket money?”

“It’s in my pocket. You know about my pocket money?”

“We shouldn’t delay, Ben. Your godfather is a very sick man.”

They entered the room, Ben feeling a little guilty. Here was someone about to change his life perhaps. If the man had been behindhand in his attentions, Ben had been equally remiss. Their mutual indifference to each other made him feel, if the relationship existed, a sort of godson out-of-wedlock.

The old man lay diminished beneath a giant cellophane wrap, the oxygen tent. Ben could hear the frightful crinkle of his respiration. He sounded as if he were on fire.

“He’s sleeping,” the nurse whispered.

“I can come back.”

“No, no. There might not be time.”

“What does he have?” Ben whispered.

“Everything,” the nurse said.

“I’ll come back later,” he whispered.

“I won’t hear of it,” she whispered back. She went to an enormous cylinder of oxygen and turned some handles. Immediately his godfather began to gasp for breath.

“Uugh — kagh—” his godfather skirled. The tent collapsed.

“What are you doing?” Ben demanded.

“Mr. Finsberg,” the nurse said, “your godson’s arrived.”

“Uugh — Ben? Uurgh. Ben’s here? Arghh. Uughh. Okk.” She turned the oxygen back on and Ben watched the bubble reconstitute itself. “Ben. Is that you, godson?”

“Yes, sir.”

And then the executives would really hear something, poring over Fortune’s profile in their Lear jets or in their all but empty first-class cabins as they sipped captain’s compliments. Would learn — as he’d learned — that there were more ways to the woods than one, that inheritance or self-creation were not the only alternatives in the busy world of finance, that there were all sorts of success stories, qualitative distinctions, that the world was a fairyland still. That he, Ben Flesh, the owner of franchises from one end of the country to the other, was where he was today because—

“Sit down, please, Ben. What I have to say will take some time. As I am old, as I am dying—”

“Oh no, sir, you’re—”

“As I am dying, I have to conserve my energies. Seeing you stand is a drain on those energies; watching you tire tires me. Please, godson. Please sit down.”

He looked around for a chair. Only then did it strike him how curious a place it was. Except for Julius Finsberg’s hospital bed and the oxygen and two hat racks of the medical on either side of his bed, they might have been in a first-class apartment. It was not like a hospital room at all. From his position he could see something of the other rooms in the suite, none of them having the least thing to do with the practice of medicine. There was a living room with a sofa and easy chairs. There were coffee tables and lamps. At the far end of the billiard room was a gaming table with slots for poker chips at each corner. There were oil paintings on the walls and he could see, off the hall, two guest bedrooms, an open bathroom with decanters of bath salts and oils on a ledge beneath the vanity. He could see a kitchen with an automatic dishwasher, a refrigerator with a tap for ice water.

His godfather lay in the dining room. Near his bed a table was set for eight, the crystal and silver and china beautiful against the thick white tablecloth. Napkins were folded like tiny crowns beside each place setting. He removed one of the chairs from the dining-room table and drew it beside his godfather’s bed. He sat at the man’s right beside a stanchion that supported an I.V. upside down in its collar, trying to ignore the clear tubing that led from the bottle of dextrose and was attached by a sort of needle, not unlike those used to pump up basketballs, to his godfather’s wrist. The hand, like a loaf on a breadboard, was taped to a wide brown splint. His other arm, he saw, was receiving plasma, and a catheter ran from beneath the bedclothes to a spittoon. This he noticed only after he had sat down. The spittoon was between his shoes and every once in a while he heard a tiny splash.

“I am privileged,” his godfather began, “as most men are.” It was difficult to hear him, the voice muffled as it was by the great tent and working against the hiss and boil of the oxygen. (Nor was it easy, really, to see him, his face a smear behind the clouded plastic, like features masked by exploded bubble gum.) “You can hardly live in the world and not come under the influence of some advantage. Like golfers, all of us have our little handicap, however measly. So thank your lucky stars, Ben. It itches.” He paused and lifted his dextrose hand, bringing the board up parallel with his nose and rubbing it. “Ouch. Son of a bitch. I think I’ve got a splinter. Nurse. Nurse!” he called. A middle-aged woman in a tweed suit came from the hall.

“My godfather wants the nurse,” Ben said.

“I’m the nurse,” the woman said and went up to the old man.

“Just hold on while I sterilize this sewing needle with this match.”

She turned off the oxygen and his godfather gasped. Terrified, Ben watched the old man thrash about, rolling first on one needle, then the other.

“Uugh — ach — hurry—hurry!”

The nurse burned the needle till it glowed red, wiped the carbon off with Kleenex. She turned the oxygen back on and stuck her head in under the tent with his godfather.

“Gracious,” she said as she tried to get at his godfather’s splinter, “there’s hardly light to see. I shall have to speak to the window washer again. I asked him just yesterday to wash off your tent. You heard me, Mr. Finsberg. You heard me, didn’t you? There, that’s got it.”

She came out from beneath the tent.

“Do you?” his godfather said. Some blood was coming from the side of his nose.

“Do I what?” Ben asked.

“Thank your lucky stars?”

“Well no, sir, not literally.”

“I’m not speaking literally. I was in the theatrical costume business, I’m speaking figuratively.”

“Here,” the nurse said, “will you look at that? You could pick your teeth with it.” She held up the splinter. “Should I keep this to show Mrs. Finsberg?”

“No,” his godfather said. “Give it to the boy.”

The nurse handed Ben the splinter. He took it and slipped it into his wallet with his pocket money and return ticket.

“How crowded is the universe,” his godfather said and moved the plasma arm vaguely. “How stuffed to bursting with its cargo of crap. Consider, Ben. You could have been a pencil or the metal band that holds the eraser to the wood, the wire of lead that runs through it. The black N in ‘Number 2’ stamped along one of its six sides. Or one of its six sides. Or the thin paint on another. You might have been a vowel on a typewriter or a number on a telephone dial or a consonant in books. There are thousands of languages, millions of typewriters, billions of books. You might have been the oxygen I breathe or the air stirred by this sentence. It is a miracle that one is not one of these things, a miracle that one is not a thing at all, that one is animal rather than mineral or vegetable, and a higher animal rather than a lower. You could have been a dot on a die in a child’s Monopoly set. There are twenty-one dots on each die, forty-two in a pair. Good God, Ben, think of all the dice in the world. End to end they’d stretch to the sun. Then there are the rich, the blooded with their red heritage like a thoroughbred’s silks. You might have been a stitch in those silks, a stitch in any of the trillions of vestments, pennants, gloves, blankets, and flags that have existed till now. Let me ask you something. How many people live? Consider the size of their wardrobe over the years. A button you could be, a pocket in pants, a figure on print.

“—I was discussing the rich. There are many wealthy. More than you think. I’m not just talking beneficiaries either, next of kin, in-laws, distant cousins, the King’s mishpocheh, the Emperor’s. But the rich man himself, the wage earner, the founder. Fly in an airplane in a straight line across one state. You couldn’t count the mansions or limousines, you couldn’t count the swimming pools. So many, Ben. You’re not one of them, and not one of the family, and still you exist. I am talking the long shot of existence, the odds no gambler in the world would take, that you would ever come to life as a person, a boy called Ben Flesh.”

He was very excited. He raised himself on the boards taped to his arms and leaned toward me, speaking so close to the oxygen tent that with each word he seemed about to take some of it into his mouth.

“Think of the last of their lines. How many do you suppose have been the last of their lines? Queers, say, or the imperfectly pelvic’d or ball-torn or so wondrously ugly they could never make out and didn’t have the courage or the will to rape? Whatever the reason the last of their lines, end of the road, everybody out. How many? Forty million? Fifty? I don’t have the statistics. — I’m reminded of those rich men again; you could have been the paper for a stock or a bond; you could have been change in somebody’s pocket or a lost dollar nobody found. — But at least fifty million. So great a number, yet you managed to be born, you made it anyway, you wormed your way. And if you happen to be white, that’s a miracle squared. Are you following my argument? White people are a minority, you know. As land is to sea, white is to black, to yellow and mongrel Pak. So we keep compounding the miracle like the interest rate on money never touched.

“It’s incredible really. Amazing. Who could believe it? You weren’t aborted, you didn’t end up in a scum bag. You survived the infant mortality stuff. You made it past measles, polio, mumps. You outwitted whooping cough, typhoid, VD. God bless you, boy, you’re a testament to the impossible! And not just that, but you aren’t broken or damaged, there are no birth defects; you’ve your full complement of fingers, your fair share of toes. Your brains are present and accounted for. You’re literate, you do sums.

The Dean’s list at Wharton. I know, I know. And even without parents you’ve got clothes, shelter, sex, what to eat — you know, the drives, the hydramatics of being, four on the floor and more where that came from. Yes, and you get the point of jokes and have a favorite movie and maybe even the room where you stay is done up in your best color. My God, lad, you’re a fucking celebration!

“And over and beyond everything, your inventory of good fortune like leaves on trees, there’s still some advantage left over. Nurse, Nurse!”

The woman ran back into the room.

“What is it, Mr. Finsberg? Is something the matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I wanted you to see this phenomenon.” He poked his plasma board at the tent and pointed me out.

“You’ll tear the tent, sir.”

He leaned back and closed his eyes. I thought he had passed out. But in a moment he began to speak again.

“The wars,” he said breathlessly, his eyes still shut. “You were drafted. But you lived to tell the tale. In my own lifetime, just in my own country, there’s been the Spanish-American, the First War and Second, plus a little showing the flag here and a little more there. And maneuvers going on all the time. Even as we talk, maneuvers going on, war games, and if plenty buy it in the line of duty, a lot more buy it and it’s only an accident. In car wrecks on highways, your own parents, for example — and may I belatedly say how sorry I am? Al was my partner and Rose my friend, and I miss them dearly, the both. And the houses burned down that you weren’t in — all the chance crap, all the hazard, actuarial rough stuff.”

He opened his eyes. “Am I on the right track?” he asked softly. “Will you leave here singing? Humming the tune?

“What I’m looking for is the argument priests used to give, maybe still do, about how long a time eternity takes. Like if a birdie were to carry one grain of sand in its beak from a beach and fly across the ocean with it and then go back for another grain and shlep it overseas and lay it down by the first and then go back for a third and so on and so forth, and have to do that on all the beaches in the world, one grain at a time, and the same with deserts and all the sand traps in all the golf courses on earth, including miniature, and all the hourglasses and kids’ sandboxes and throw in, too, every grotty piece of sand in tennis shoes from picnics at the beach and the gritty leftovers in all the crotches of jockstraps and bathing suits from all the summer vacations in history and all the winters in Miami and other resorts — and when the birdie did all that, that would be only a fraction of a fraction of just the first second of what’s left of eternity! All right, listen: And say that the heat in Hell at the time our feathered friend makes his first trip is already the boiling point of water, and that it gets one degree hotter every time not just that the goddamn bird completes a trip but every time he flaps his fucking wings, and the pain and hotness of that heat at the end of all those trips would be to ultimate pain only what putting a pair of mittens on the coldest day in the coldest winter in the world would be to the ultimate comfort of your hands. And you could have been any one of those grains of sand, or any one of those seconds of eternity, or any one of those B.T.U. ’s!

“Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulations celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out — all the cousins in from the coast. Wiped out. Rare, yes — who says not? — certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you’ve been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by the earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor — all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.’s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that’s what happens, you see — there’s low motility and torn tails — that’s what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well — am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn’t lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you’d ever make it to this planet!

“So! Still! Against all the odds in the universe you made happy landings! What do you think? Ain’t that delightful? Wait, there’s more. You have not only your existence but your edge, your advantage and privilege. You do, Ben, you do. No? Everybody does. They give congressmen the frank. Golden-agers go cheap to the movies. You work on the railroads they give you a pass. You clerk in a store it’s the 20 percent discount. You’re a dentist your kid’s home free with the orthodontics. Benny, Benny, we got so much edge we could cut diamonds!”

“I have none of these things, Godfather.”

“Oh, listen to him. Everybody gets something wholesale. Everybody.”

The nurse came and gave his godfather some pills.

“I have the G.I. Bill,” Ben said thoughtfully. “They pay my tuition at Wharton.”

“There you go,” his godfather said, smiling, swallowing.

Ben nodded.

He was, of course, a little disappointed. Had it been his godfather’s intention to bring him from Philadelphia just to demonstrate how fortunate he was to be alive? The telegram had spoken of amends, reparations. Having seen the hospital apartment in which the man was to die, he had begun to grasp how much money his godfather had. The taxi had brought him up Broadway. He passed the enormous hoardings, wide as storefronts, read the huge advertisements for plays, musicals, the logos for each familiar, though he rarely went to the theater. (He had seen, he supposed, the emblems and clever trademarks, individual as flags, in magazine ads or above the passengers’ heads on buses in Philadelphia.) But seeing the bright spectacular posters for the plays like a special issue of stamps stuck across Broadway’s complicated packages as he viewed them from his deep, wide seat in the back of the cab, had been very exciting. Why, the musicals alone, he thought now, and tried to recall as many as he could. Arms and the Girl, The Consul, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Great to Be Alive, and Lost in the Stars. Miss Liberty, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific, Texas, Li’l Darlin’, Where’s Charley? They played songs from all these on the radio; he’d whistled them. Nanette Fabray was in one of the shows. Pearl Bailey was. Bambi Lynn, Vivienne Segal. Pinza and Mary Martin. Ray Bolger and Byron Palmer and Doretta Morrow. Kenny Delmar. And how many of these stars wore costumes his godfather had supplied? And that was just the musicals. The circus was in town. Could the man have dressed circus performers? Why not? And the Ice Show—Howdy, Mr. Ice of 1950. And there was a Gilbert and Sullivan festival on and the ballet. Even if he supplied just a tenth of the costumes…God, he thought, if you added them all up and threw in the dramas and all that was going on in Greenwich Village, there were enough people in Manhattan alone wearing costumes — and think of the costume changes! — to dress a small city. That was the kind of action his godfather had. Gee!

“Uugh, agh! Uuch. Awgrh.”

“The tent, Godfather?”

“The bedpan! Get help. Hurry, boy. Where are you going? That’s the guest bedroom. No, that’s the linen closet. Not in there, for God’s sake, that’s the bar! There, that’s right.”

He grabbed a resident — the man wore a stethoscope over his turtleneck — and rushed with him and a nurse back to his godfather’s suite. He remained outside.

The nurse and resident came out in a few minutes. Ben looked at them.

“You didn’t tell me you were Ben,” the resident said.

“How’s the weather in Philly?” the nurse asked.

He could hear his godfather calling his name. “I’d better go in,” Ben said.

The man was sitting, his pillows fluffed up behind him.

“You seem more comfortable,” Ben said.

“Never mind about that,” he said irritably. “I’m a goner. There’s something we have to straighten out.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Here’s the long and short of it,” my godfather said. “I palmed a deuce.”

“Sir?”

“I palmed a deuce. You don’t spend the whole of your working life in the theatrical costume business without picking something up. You know how many magicians’ costumes I’ve turned out over the years? Let me count the ways. Sure, and the magician needing his costume immediately, five minutes after the phone call from his agent. Having to be in Chicago, the Catskills, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. It was always rush rush rush with magicians, and they hang over your shoulder while you work. Magicians! Well, it has to be that way, I suppose. Magicians have special requirements. They have to be there to tell the tailor everything. Well, wouldn’t they?”

“I guess so. I never thought about it.”

“Wake up, for God’s sake!”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, well, anyway, there was this magician and one time I, you know, he was hanging around waiting for his costume to be ready and I, I asked him to teach me to palm a deuce.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Do I have to draw a picture for you? When we cut, your father and I, to see who’d buy out who and low man had to pay the other guy the three thousand bucks — You see, I wanted the business. If your old man had cut a queen or a jack or even a ten I wouldn’t feel so bad, because probably I could have beat him without the palm. But he cut a four. A fair four. I had to cheat. Son of a bitch. It’s been on my conscience for years. Then, your father, he had to go and make me your godfather because he felt he’d stuck me with the business. What a sap. Well, who was the sap? Because I didn’t have any kids of my own then, see? I wasn’t even married. So it meant a lot to me, being your godfather. But I couldn’t face you. What I’d done to you, you know? It was as if I’d taken the bread out of your mouth, my own godson and I’d taken the bread out of his mouth. You’ve got a sister. You don’t see her here, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Because she was never my goddaughter and I don’t give a shit what happens to her. You follow?”

“I think.”

“Because I was a sport in those days. What the hell, I wasn’t married, I had no responsibilities.” He lowered his voice. “I used to go backstage with some of our customers. You follow?”

“I think—”

“So naturally I fell in with this show-biz crowd. Hoofers, singers. And spent less and less time in the shop. I’d tell your dad I was making contacts for us, for our business, and in a way I was. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Well, I—”

“That’s when they took me to Tin Pan Alley.”

“Tin Pan Alley?”

“And there was this kid in Tin Pan Alley. He was always hanging around.”

“I see.”

“And whistling. You follow?”

“I don’t—”

“And everywhere I’d go in Tin Pan Alley there’d be this whistling kid, whistling tunes, Ben, the most beautiful tunes you ever heard. My God, what a whistler he was!”

“I follow.”

“What?”

“I see.”

“That whistler’s name was Jerome Kern!”

“My God!”

“He had a friend. A hummer. And, Ben, if it was possible, the hummer hummed even more beautiful than the whistler whistled.”

“He was—?”

“Richard Rodgers.”

“Wow!”

“And through Kern and Rodgers I got to know another character in Tin Pan Alley. A piano player. I’d listen to him play these incredible songs on his piano and I swear to you I had to catch my breath. It was like I was a sailor boy listening to the sirens.”

“Cole Porter,” Ben said.

“You better believe it.”

“Jesus.”

“So you see? I knew. I had my ear to the ground of Tin Pan Alley and I knew there was going to be a — what do you call it? — a renaissance in the American musical theater. And I saw new beautiful costumes in my sleep and I knew that the theatrical costume business was going to be the talk of the town. That’s when I asked the magician to teach me to palm the deuce. That’s it, that’s the story.”

“Gee.”

“Your father never knew.”

“I’m glad. He would have eaten his heart out.”

“He would have eaten his heart out.”

Ben nodded.

“So,” his godfather said after a while, “we’ve got business. I’m dying and I want to put things right.”

“You don’t owe me—”

“Never mind. This is something I’m doing for myself. You ain’t got nothing to do with it. Never mind what I don’t owe you.”

I sat in my dining-room chair with my feet by the spittoon of pee and waited for him to go on.

“I’m a very wealthy man. Well, look around, you can see I’m going out first class.”

“Please, Godfather.”

“Facts are facts, Ben.”

“All right.”

“I said ‘That’s the story,’ but I left something out. After your father and I dissolved the partnership I married a girl from Tin Pan Alley.”

“Yes?”

“She was a hoofer, but really a trained ballet dancer. She had this incredible pelvis, Ben. Well, you can imagine what twenty years of plié would do to a girl with a fantastic pelvis to begin with. To make a long story short, Ben, Estelle turned out to be very fecund.”

“Oh?”

“Ben, that woman had babies like a mosquito lays eggs. There are eighteen, Ben.”

“Eighteen?”

“Four sets of triplets, three sets of twins.”

I could have been one of the triplets, he thought. I could have been one of the twins.

“I’m rich, Ben, but blood is thicker than water.”

“Oh.”

“I’m rich, yes, but after estate taxes, and — My wife gets about a million outright; the rest is left in trust for my children.”

“I see.”

“What do you see?”

“That this was a deathbed confession. That now you feel better.”

“Is that what you think? No, boy. You’re provided for. I had to provide for my godson. What they’re getting is money, but it won’t come to even a quarter million apiece. I’m leaving you something more valuable.”

He went to the Wharton School of Business. What, he wondered — he multiplied by eighteen, he added a million — was more valuable than five and a half million dollars?

“Don’t you want to know?”

“Well, yes, I—”

“I’m leaving you the prime interest rate.”

“The what?”

“You go to Wharton. The prime rate. The rate of interest a bank charges its best customers. I’ve made out my will. It’s all there. Loans from my bank at the prime rate, whatever it is on the day of my death, and no matter how high it climbs afterward, the loan or loans outstanding never at any time to exceed the value of the money left to any one of my surviving children, the principal and interest to be guaranteed by them on a pro-rated basis up to and until your first bankruptcy. The only restrictive stipulation I’m putting on you is that whatever monies you borrow have to be invested in businesses. No shows. I’ve seen too many angels bust their wings backing the wrong shows. The kids know all about it and they agree. Ben, Godson, that’s your edge. There’s your advantage. The world is all before you, kid. Not money but the use of money! I know you can’t take it all in right now, but let me tell you, it’s the best thing I could have done for you.”

As a matter of fact he did take it all in. It was like a letter of credit. This was the postwar world. Opportunity flourished everywhere. He went to Wharton. He would graduate in a year. Academically at least he would know the ropes. A foundation was being laid here. His eyes were wet with grief for his godfather and with a sense of the significance the man’s gesture meant for himself. Slowly he raised himself from the chair in which he was sitting and slowly gathered pieces of the plastic tent in his hand and bent down and leaned in, pulling it over his head as he would a sweater. He kissed his godfather, Julius Finsberg. The old man’s eyes were wet. Ben felt a draft. It was the oxygen.

“Listen, you son of a bitch,” his godfather said, “you study hard at Wharton. You’re just godblood. I don’t want you sticking my kids with a bankruptcy from some half-assed investment. Study hard. Promise me.”

“I promise,” he said.

Then his godfather said something Ben had difficulty understanding.

“What’s that, Godfather?” he asked gently.

“I said,” his godfather said, “that in that case you have a friend at Chase Manhattan.” And then he died. The prime rate was 1.45 percent on commercial paper on four-to-six-month loans.

Let Forbes and Fortune put that in their pipes and smoke it!

So much, he thought, for those who think I was never innocent, who believe I drive hard bargains, force others to the wall with my bruiser’s gift for what is only business. So much for those who think I always looked older than my age and attribute my tastes to an instinct in me for more and more again and then something extra for the house and afterward a little left over that I must scrounge and have. Who think there was never a time when people had to take my knots out. My father wormed my hooks, too. Listen, what do you think? I razzed Sis and touched her things in the hamper. Mom and Pop died together on a highway I have changed the look of forever. A partnership was dissolved by intrigue, and fate worked like a robin in the intriguer’s head to build a conscience there like a little nest. What bloodlines! I was adopted posthumously and made the one whole number in a family of fractions, of thirds and halves.

Why do they say me when they mean Nate? How easily I gave in to him on the extra televisions. He’s the liquidator, I’m the one who builds and builds. I practically founded this country, for God’s sake. Show a little respect, please.

He imagined Nate in his suite, protected by a sleeping Mopiani in the vast deserted lobby.

It was almost dawn. He had to make arrangements in the morning about the TV’s. He would be out of Harrisburg by lunchtime, catch a bite at a plaza on the turnpike with the comers and the goers. Damn shame he hadn’t slept. It was a going period for him. (He was not unlike Mopiani, actually. He had his rounds, too, his stations.) It was better than two hundred miles to Youngstown. He wouldn’t be there till six-thirty, six at the inside. It would be better not to rush, do his business leisurely and stay over in Harrisburg another night, get a fresh start the day after.

3

Mornings, seven o’clock, seven-thirty, were different. Something alien in mornings, foreign. There were cities — Harrisburg, Syracuse, Peoria, Memphis — which seemed, if you saw them only on spring or summer mornings, as if they were located in distant lands. It had to do with the light, the dewy texture of wide and empty streets, the long caravan of store windows, his view of the mannequins unobstructed, their stolid stances and postures, their frozen forms like royalty asleep a hundred years in fairy tales, struck where they stood motionless in their spelled styles like figures on medals, the disjunctions all the more striking for the clothes they wore from seasons yet to be. That was foreign. Though he’d never been out of the country, not even to Canada.

Or the long narrow galaxy of traffic lights, a stately green aisle of procession, Ben passive in the open-windowed Cadillac behind the wheel, drawn at thirty miles an hour, pulled up the main street like a man on a float, music from the stereo all around his head like water splashing a bobber for apples.

He loved his country — it was America again — at such times, would take up arms to defend it, defend the lifeless, vulnerable models in the windows of the department stores, their smiling paradigm condition. Loved the blonde, tall, wide-eyed smashers and their men, vapid, handsome, white-trousered and superior, goyish, gayish, delicious, their painted smiling lips like ledges for pipes.

“Some of my best friends are mannequins,” he said. “Fellas, girls, it was up to me I’d give you the vote and take it away from real people. Send you to Congress to make good rules. Aiee, aiee,” he said, “I’m a happy man to see such health, such attention paid to grooming.”

He stopped for a hitchhiker and bought the kid breakfast at a plaza. The boy was about nineteen, Levi’d, his denim work shirt covered by a denim vest of a brand called Fresh Produce. He’d seen an ad on Nate’s color TV in Harrisburg.

“That was an odd place to hitch a ride,” he told the kid when they were back on the turnpike.

“No, I look for out-of-state plates. That time of day salesmen come by to get back on the highway.”

“Clever,” Ben said approvingly. “I like to know such things. Other people’s tricks of the trade, the shortcuts and gimmicks they live by, that’s always interesting to me. Cops wear clip-on neckties so they won’t be strangled in fights. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“That’s an interesting thing, isn’t it?”

“Cops aren’t my bag.”

“You’re not into cops.”

“No.”

“There’s where you make your mistake. A boy your age. You should be into everything.”

“I got time.”

“Sure. I’m in franchises. I have about a dozen now. But I’ve had more and I’ve had less. I’m like a producer with several shows running on Broadway at the same time. My businesses take me from place to place. My home is these United States.”

“You’ve got Idaho plates.”

“I buy my machines in Boise. I get a new one every year. You think we need the air conditioning?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll set the thermostat for seventy.” Ben thought the boy was laughing. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing. I was thinking. A drifter in swell threads and a late-model car.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t have the threads and I ain’t got the car.”

“Otherwise we’re the same,” Ben said.

“I haven’t got a dozen businesses.”

“I’ll give you a job. I’ll make you the manager of my Baskin-Robbins in Kansas City.”

“Sure you will.”

“Sure I will.”

“My mom said never take ice cream from strangers,” the kid said. He tried to pass it off as a joke but I could see he was uneasy. Probably he thought I was a fairy. I understand. An aging guy in a Cadillac, a breakfast buyer. Only the knowledge that he could take me kept him from telling me to stop and let him out. He made moves in his mind. He was thinking he could push in the cigar lighter and burn me if I tried something. He was thinking karate chop, the advantage of surprise. Break my arm with the armrest, he was thinking. Get me with his backpack that he held in his lap, that when he wore it in the city where I picked him up it made him look like an astronaut. Actually a kid like this, probably on spring vacation, going to see his girlfriend in South Bend, Indiana, or toying with the idea of dropping out maybe, what good to me was he? Every day I try to be ordinary, routine as the next guy. I drop my diction like an accompanist. Sing, sing your key, I’ll pick you up. But the kid? His assumptions soured the air and I turned on the radio.

“You’re not Baskin-Robbins material,” I told him and could almost smell his relief as I ignored him. And I did what I always do when I’m with healthy good-looking people. I saw myself from his viewpoint, saw my gnashing jaws, a thing I do when I drive and which dentists have pointed out to me, saw my ugly Indian-nickel features, my long coarse sideburns, my pot which seems larger than it is because I have no ass. I felt his physical smugness and could have shot holes in his Frisbee.

“What’s with you? You into meditation?” Ben asked.

“Meditation?”

“It’s twenty-five miles since we spoke.”

“I was listening to the music.”

I turned the radio off and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. “I’ve got to pee,” I said and pulled the keys from the ignition. That was to make him think I was afraid of him and set him at his ease. Even so he could have misinterpreted me, thought the pee a stratagem to get him to pee and thus expose himself to me. I went deeper into the woods than necessary, almost hiding. When I got back he was gone. I drove off. He was hitching about two hundred yards up the road. He spotted me and made to go off into the woods. That made me mad and I stopped. I opened the door and signaled him closer. He looked miserable, shamefaced, but he stood his ground.

“Hey, you,” I said.

“I ain’t riding with you.”

“Never mind you ain’t riding with me. You haven’t thanked me for the ride you already rode with me.”

“Thank you.”

“Let’s hear it for the breakfast.”

“For the breakfast. Thank you.”

“And the lessons I taught you about life.”

“What were those?”

“What, you forgot?”

“You didn’t say much.”

“You weren’t paying attention. What about those twenty-five miles? They were the first lesson. The second was that opportunity strikes once. I want you to know something. Never forget this. You blew it, you fucked up. I was prepared, such was my mood, to make you the manager of my Baskin-Robbins franchise in the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. If you knew shit about locations you’d know that that’s the flagship of the chain in Kansas City, the crème de la crème, we’re making it a flavor. I want you to know I trusted you. I would have given you ice-cream lessons. And here’s the part I hope eats your heart out. I still trust you. I am an equal-opportunity employer, your putzship, and all there was to it was for you to say the word. Not saying the word cost you about $30,000 a year. In the neighborhood of. I want you to know that the word was yes. I want you to know that the word is always ‘yes.’ ”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe what? What don’t you believe?”

“That you’d give a job like that to a stranger.”

“Of course I wouldn’t give a job like that to a stranger. Who mentioned strangers? It was what you said about salesmen having to come up that street. I figured you for a kid with a head on his shoulders.”

He came a little closer.

“No,” I said. “Stay where you are. You’re all washed up in the ice-cream business. You won’t ever understand this next part, but it’s the truth, real as my Cadillac. I’m a benefactee. A benefactee benefacts. That’s the tradition. That’s fitting. I went to Wharton. Books must balance. You could have gotten me off the hook but you blew it. You want a ride? You are no longer in the running upward-mobilitywise, but it’s starting to rain and if you want a ride I’ll give you one.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“In the back seat,” Ben told him. “I don’t care for your dirty aspersions. You’re too suspicious to hitchhike.”

When they were on their way Ben told him about his cousins. He knew what the young man didn’t, that the boy was entitled to the story. Since he had disinherited him, obligations had been created. Legally the kid was entitled to nothing, but Ben felt bad about this. The boy, a guest in his Cadillac, was already out $30,000. Ben owed him something.

“This is the true story,” he began, “of Julius and Estelle Finsberg’s children, my godcousins, or ‘How I Got to Play the Palace.’

“Julius Finsberg was a bachelor almost all his life. He didn’t marry until he was past fifty. He was, at that age, settled, a man of habits deep as grain. As I reconstruct it, nothing ever happened to him. He was that rare being in our go-getting country, a man whose life had never been touched by our public events, whose convictions had never been nudged, shoved neither north by northwest by war nor south by southeast by peace. He would already have been thirty-eight in the First War, too old by a whisker for conscription. And forty-nine in 1929, the prime of life for a man in a small sedentary theatrical costume business, a business almost impossible to wipe out in a Depression, for everyone knows there’s no business like show business and the show must go on. He was a paradigm for a man. I mean, he might have served as a model for the uncontingent life, a man who would probably have got by in any century. And that’s significant, too. Born in one century, he died in another. We think of such men as respectable, responsible. They are the average from whom we get our notions of tone, our ideas of stability. Consider, for example, the year of Finsberg’s birth—1880. By the time he came to awareness photography was an established fact, trains, electric light, the telephone, automobiles. Even radio and aviation were in the air. He lived, that is, in conjunction with the incipiency of things, taking for granted all those objects and ideas that developed as he developed, in neck-and-neck relation to the world, so that he moved, or seemed to, as it moved, creating in him alphas of stability and settlement and an imagination which could take anything the world could dish out. He died in 1950 at threescore and ten, as if God Himself were an actuary.

“I said nothing ever happened to him, but that isn’t the same as saying he took no initiatives. He did. Falling in love in his fifties was an initiative. It must have seemed the oddest event in his life. Yet even then he lived with the incipiency of things. The love songs whistled and hummed and played on the pianos of Tin Pan Alley came into existence even as he overheard them, so living still in his Johnny-on-the-spot connection to the world, to the lyrics and melodies of songs not yet even copyrighted. And this is the point. Such a man, a man for whom there have been no surprises, when such a man is surprised, the surprise has got to be devastating. It gives him the tidal wave and sets him apart from himself, defying all his Geneva conventions. He’d been my father’s partner. My father spoke well of him. When Julius fell in love my father could not understand that Julius’s old loyalties and habits and routines were sabotaged, and never detected Julius Finsberg’s scorched-earth policy against the character and personality of Julius Finsberg. Julius’s love — a girl much younger, a hoofer — giving him ambitions, big ambitions, big ideas. So he cheated my father and went into business for himself. And this was part of his stability and honor, too, your man of fifty being no fool, understanding as well as any detached gossip that he could make no dowry of a body already almost used up, knowing he would have to offer such a girl door prizes of wealth, loss leaders of power and connection.

“Only there are no smooth revolutions. The habits and orthodoxies of a lifetime are not overturned in a minute. It was all very well to will my father harm, but another thing altogether to alter his flesh’s bone structure, its overbite and fingerprint and timbre.

“This is what happened. When he married his hoofer — it took him three years; he was fifty-three — he married self-consciously and slowly. Not only did he intend to take a wife, but to take a mother, to have sons, daughters, earnests to what I have called his orthodoxy, pawns to his respectability, and so I imagine that he fucked to conceive, willing his sperm home, body English on the tip of his prick, bobbing, weaving, dancing his gism up the hoofer’s alley like a bowler. She had triplets — daughters. But Julius wanted a son — a man wants a son; it was Julius who designed the costume for the male lead in Carousel, who, working from Hammerstein’s ‘My Boy Bill’ lyric, invented the big leather belt worn over the loops of the trousers like a rope, the woodsman’s checked shirt and cowboy’s bandanna, inventing all that tender denim swagger, symbols not of masculinity but of responsible tenor fatherhood — and again he fucked to conceive, his concentration in orgasm complete, all encompassing. He had twin boys and now had sons as well as daughters, but triplets, twins, embarrassments finally to a man his age. Where was the single son or individual daughter he had yearned for to make his normal life normal again? So again he took his hoofer to bed and again fucked only to conceive. Triplets. By this time he should have suspected, accepted. But he had been a bachelor for fifty-three years. He was set in his ways. He was passionate to father not crowds but an individual.

“Every time in the first seven years of his marriage he took the hoofer to bed he impregnated her, and every time she yielded triplets or twins. Triplets alternating with twins in the hoofer’s seven fat years. And I don’t think he had voluntarily surrendered his right to an individual son or individual daughter even then. But he was sixty now. It was his body that abandoned Julius Finsberg, not Julius Finsberg his body.

“My father had named him my godfather, yet it wasn’t until he knew he was dying that I heard from him. Nobody gives nothing for nothing. I was to be the individual son he had wanted all his life, so that when he died his eleventh-hour sponsorship of me became his last bid to recover the ordinary. In a way I was more godson to him — I the benefactor, you see, he the beneficiary — than he godfather to me.

“I went to his funeral. It was end of term and I had to ask my professors’ permission to put off my exams. I said my godfather had died. I told the truth. I admitted he was a man I barely knew. They would not recognize the connection. I told them I was in his will. I explained how he had left me the prime interest rate. This was the Wharton School of Business. This they could understand. They comforted me and told me I could take my exams whenever I felt sufficiently recovered.

“I went to the chapel where my godfather was laid out and approached the mourners’ bench. I introduced myself and offered my condolences. This was the first time I had even seen the mother, the hoofer, the first time I had ever seen — what’s the term I’m looking for? — the children? The triplets and twins? My godcousins? Godbrothers and godsisters? The siblings? No, this was a sibship. A Sixth Fleet of family. I think I backed off when I saw them. I know I rubbed my eyes. There were eighteen of them. Eighteen. Yes. Only seven years separated the oldest from the youngest. There were eighteen, nine boys and nine girls. Identical triplets, identical twins. But not just discretely identical, the part in each set identical to the other part or parts of the set, but identical to each other set, too, somehow equal to and collateral with the whole. Each girl slightly favoring the father and each boy the mother, so that even their sexual differences seemed to cancel out the very notion of difference, and they looked, the boys and the girls, like one person. Exactly like, because of the subtle distinctions in their sizes and ages — sixteen years old to ten — a single person caught between two opposing mirrors, each subsequent reflection a shade smaller in perspective.

“It was astonishing. Though I didn’t understand this at the time, I have come to realize that my godfather had indeed been set in his ways, so stubborn in them in fact, so much the immutable bachelor at fifty-three and four and five, and so on, that his very sperm, his verygenes had become like a single minting of dimes, say. Granted strength he could have fucked from now till doomsday and not produced a child unlike the eighteen he had already produced.

“As I came to know them, I saw that their gestures were the same, their mannerisms and tics, their voices. When they spoke together the prayers for the dead, it was like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

“They knew about me. They knew who I was. They loved their father and they loved me. Indeed, they had been told by the old man to look upon me as a sort of stepbrother, and because I was as different from them as they were like each other, they seized upon me, for all the difference in our ages, as small children might attach themselves to an au pair.

“ ‘Look at his brown hair,’ they said. Their own was black. ‘Look how fair his complexion.’ Theirs was dark. ‘See how straight he stands.’ They had a tendency to slouch. Their mother I had not much to do with, but the Finsberg children would not let me out of their sight.”

He was the brother these brothers and sisters had never had. He had a sense even then that they loved him, and when they knew each other better he understood that Julius had talked him up at dinnertime, the godbrother in Chicago they had never seen, had kept them informed of bits of gossip learned about himself in rare letters exchanged with his own father, Julius’s ex-partner. They’d known, for example, that he’d been drafted, knew where he took his basic training, were quite up to date in fact with his comings and goings, even things about his studies at Wharton.

“How could you know stuff like that?” he asked Patty, La Verne, and Maxene. “My father was already dead when I entered college.”

“Your sister,” Cole said.

“That’s right,” said Oscar. “Father corresponded with your sister after your parents were killed in the auto wreck.”

“I don’t understand,” Ben said. “What about my sister? I mean, I know how he wanted a son or a daughter. Why didn’t he take an interest in my sister?”

“That’s easy,” Ethel said, “Dad wasn’t your sister’s godfather.”

“It wasn’t the same,” Lorenz said. “Do you think it was the same, Jerome?”

“No,” said Jerome.

“Neither do we,” said Irving and Noël.

“He used to tell us,” Ethel said, “he didn’t give a shit about your sister.”

“Didn’t you resent me?”

“Not for a minute,” Gertrude said.

“I know I didn’t,” Kitty told him. “When I learned you’d been a serviceman, I hung up a little blue star for you in my bedroom window. This was after you’d already been discharged.”

“There was a Wharton Business School pennant above my dresser,” Lorenz said.

“We wanted what Father wanted,” said Helen.

“A change,” said Sigmund-Rudolf.

“That’s it,” said Mary.

“A different face like,” Moss said.

“You’re one of us now,” Gus-Ira said.

“All for one and one for all,” said Lotte.

They took him up.

The Finsbergs were a close-knit family, and since no car ever built could possibly have held them all, after the war Julius had purchased one of the first new city buses that came off the assembly line. On one side of the bus was a picture of a redbud and, on the other, sprigs of mistletoe. On the rear there was an immense scissor-tailed flycatcher, the representations painted against a background of blue, white, olive, green, wine, and a sort of reddish mud. These were the official emblems and colors of the state of Oklahoma, the show Julius liked to think had paid for it. They kept the bus in the driveway of their large house in Riverdale. Julius had never learned to drive and none of the children was old enough. Only the hoofer — Estelle — could drive it, but now that Julius was dead she no longer had the heart.

One day during the week of mourning Estelle came up to Ben. “After this is over,” she said, “the children would like to go on a trip. They thought you might take them in the bus.”

“I don’t think I can drive a bus.”

“Why not? It’s the same principle as the deuce and a half. You were in the motor pool.”

“You know about the motor pool?”

Ben took them to Jersey.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Ethel said.

“Mother never took us this far,” Cole said.

“We never left the Bronx,” said La Verne.

“Oh, Ben,” said Lotte, “it’s really marvelous. It’s like a picnic. Let’s have a picnic. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“I’d like some ice cream,” said Oscar. “Ben, may we stop for ice cream? Please, let’s.”

“Yes, Ben, yes,” said the others happily. “Oh, Ben, please,” they said.

“Ice cream would be just the thing,” Lorenz said seriously. “We could buy our cones and eat them in the bus.”

For all that he knew how they liked him, he was not really sure where he stood with them. Though they told him they looked on him as one of the family — wasn’t he in Daddy’s will? — the fact was that he had become a sort of factotum to the Finsbergs. He had gone with Estelle to help pick out the casket and had ended up making nearly all the decisions and arrangements for the funeral. (He soon discovered that except for the enormous immediate family Julius had propagated, there was no other, no surviving brother or sister, no cousin or uncle or aunt. Estelle herself was as bereft of relations as Julius.) Now he had become the children’s chauffeur. He felt in camp-counselor nexus to them and the truth was they frightened him a little. Being left the prime interest rate was very complicated and he was unsure of what his guarantors would and would not stand for.

So he took what had been their request for ice cream as a kind of polite command.

“Ice cream, ice cream,” they chanted.

“All right,” Ben said.

He drove west on Route 4 and within five minutes he spotted the bright-orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s. He stopped the bus and the twins and triplets jumped out excitedly. “Oh, isn’t this grand?” they said when they were inside and ordering their cones. They had never seen so many flavors.

“Look, Ben,” Mary said, “it says they have twenty-eight flavors.” The triplets all ordered triple scoops and the twins double. They ordered all the flavors and each had a lick of every flavor. They bought Ben a single scoop of vanilla.

“Oh, look,” said little ten-year-old Sigmund-Rudolf, pointing to the logo on the wide mirror behind the counter, “see the funny man. That’s Simple Simon.”

“Yes,” said Kitty, who was eleven, “and the man in the chef’s hat, he must be the pieman. Is he, Ben? Is he?”

People were staring at the strange group.

“Yes,” Ben said. “Come on, kids, why don’t we finish our cones in the bus like Lorenz said we should?”

They got back into the bus and Ben drove on. They turned off Route 4 and onto Route 17.

“Gosh, Ben,” Oscar said, “look. There’s that same ice-cream parlor. We must be going in circles. Are we lost?” he asked worriedly.

“Are we, Ben?” Patty said.

“No,” Ben said, “that’s just another Howard Johnson’s.”

On the Hamburg Turnpike Gertrude spotted a third and outside Paterson Jerome saw a fourth.

After that they decided that the first one to see the next orange roof and little turquoise tower of a Howard Johnson’s would be the winner and would get a wish. Ben zigzagged through the New Jersey countryside. It was getting late and he started to look for signs to the George Washington Bridge.

He followed Saddle River Road, left it, and came to Route 23. Just after they passed “Two Guys,” Lotte, who was sitting right behind the driver’s seat, jumped up. “I see one, I see one!” she shrieked.

“Where?” screamed Noël.

“Where, where?” Irving shouted.

Ben almost lost control of the bus.

“There. Right there,” Lotte yelled.

“She’s right,” the kids agreed.

“Oh, Ben,” she called in his ear, “I get a wish, I get a wish.”

“Gosh,” they all said as they passed by Howard Johnson’s. “Will you just look at that?” “Golly,” said some of the twins. “Boy,” chorused Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene.

“I get my wish,” Lotte said. “I wish—”

“Don’t tell your wish or it won’t come true,” Ben said.

“But, Ben, I have to. Otherwise it can’t come true.”

“I don’t figure that,” Ben said.

“Well, remember how you told us that Howard Johnson’s was a — what did you say? — a chain?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I wish that you would use your prime interest rate to buy one.”

“But why?” Ben said. “Why are you all so excited about a restaurant? You can have ice cream whenever you want.”

“It isn’t the ice cream,” Jerome said.

“Of course not,” said Noël.

“It isn’t the ice cream, silly,” Helen said.

“No,” said Cole and Ethel.

“Well, what is it then?”

“Don’t you see?” Irving asked. “Don’t you understand?”

“What? Don’t I see what? What don’t I understand?”

“That those places,” Lorenz said,

“they’re—” said Jerome and Mary,

“—all the SAME,” said Sigmund-Rudolf and Gertrude and Moss.

“Just—” Gus-Ira said

“—like us!” said they all.

“And that, Buster, is the true story of how I got into the franchise business,” Ben told the hitchhiker.

“What?” He’d been sleeping.

“I was telling you how the pig got its curly tail. Oh, these origins, my pupick pasts and golden bough beginnings. Sleep, kid, sleep. I was only muttering my mythics and metamythics, godfairies spitting in my cradle, spraying spell, hacking their juicy oysters of fate in my puss.”

He had said “chain.” He had assumed that a man named Howard Johnson made ice creams, an ice-cream scientist, someone with a visionary sweet tooth, a chemist of fruits and candies, a larky alchemist who reduced the tangerine and the mango, the maple and marzipan to their essences, who could, if he wished, divide the flavor of the tomato and the sweet potato from themselves, a tinkerer in nature who might reproduce the savor of gold, the taste of cigarette smoke. He knew there was a Ford, thought there was probably a Buick and a Studebaker. He believed in the existence of a Mr. Westinghouse. Remington, Maytag, Amana, and the Smith brothers were real to him as film stars or the leaders of his country. He could believe, that is, in the existence of millionaires, men with a good thing going, who knew their way around a patent and held on like hell. Indeed, this was one of the things that had determined him to study shorthand and typing and bookkeeping at the Wharton School.He had no good thing of his own and had believed that the best thing for him would be to place himself in the service of those who had. One of the things he could not imagine once he came to understand the inevitability of death — this would have been at around two and a half — was how he would be able to support himself when his father died. He had no skill with the pencil or the needle, and though he tried — summer vacations, Christmas holidays — to apprentice himself to the designer and even the cutter and tailor in his dad’s costume business in Chicago, smaller than even the partnership in New York before its dissolution — they made tutus, leotards for ballet academies, costumes for high-school musicals, and had a tiny share of the public-school graduation-gown market — he was, boss’s son or no boss’s son, always rebuffed, reduced to running errands, delivering merchandise. They had no patience with him. Schmerler, his father’s tailor, thought he was a pain in the ass. “Gay avec,” he’d tell him, “you’re an American. What do you want? Look at my eyeglasses, thick as a slice of bread. Lift them, they weigh a pound. They break pieces off my nose and tear my ears. This is something an American boy should want? Unheard of. Go to the cutter. Ask him to shake hands. Count his fingers.” And one time when he’d been after Schmerler to show him how to use the Singer — he thought there was a Singer — the man had turned on him angrily. “Did you ever? What’s the matter, you got your eye on your own little place in Latvia? Go away, leave me alone, study bubble-gum cards, learn what the different cars look like, do their dances, eat hot dogs at the ball park, drink Coca-Cola, and make a taste in your mouth for beer.” And, when he insisted, Schmerler had handed him a sewing needle. “Stick me,” he said. He held up the forefinger of his left hand.

“What?”

“Stick me here.”

“What for? No.”

“Baby. Pants pisher.” He grabbed the needle from the boy and plunged it into his finger. He drew no blood. “You see? Nothing’s there. The blood’s all gone. My blood knows I’m a tailor. It left for other parts. The finger’s cold, the hand. There’s no more circulation. I wear fur gloves in the summer on the Sixty-third Street beach.” Then he drew the boy to him. “You know what, Benny? I only wish my kids loved me a tenth what you love Dad.”

But it wasn’t what Schmerler thought, and though he loved his father well enough, it was something else entirely which drove him to seek information about the business. It was his knowledge that his father would die. It wasn’t to his father that Ben went, but always to Schmerler or to Kraft, the cutter, or to Mrs. Lenzla, the designer. In the shop he avoided his father as much as possible for fear that he might blurt out why it was so important for him to learn the business, accusing the man of his death, slapping his face with it. And this lonely fear persisted. He simply could not imagine how he would support himself. Even in high school, where he did well, working hard in the hope that something would come up, some talent he had not known about might emerge, articulating itself like a print in the photographer’s bath — the fear of his future persisted. He made good grades, was often on the Honor Roll. He went out for the drama club, won a good part in the school play, was accepted in the chorus, made the football team, worked for the paper, was given a by-line, each success frightful to him, taking no encouragement from any of them because all it meant was that he was equally good in all things, that he had no one calling, and then, realizing this, going the other way, not working hard at all, actually hoping to fail, but still discouraged because though his grades went down they went down uniformly and he was benched the same day that his by-line was taken away and his column assigned to someone else, and within a week to the day that the choral director, Mr. Sansoni, shifted him from the tenor section to the baritone, where his voice might be swallowed up in the greater number.

So he knew he had no calling, no one thing among his talents that he did better than any other one thing, and nothing at all that he did better than others. And worrying constantly about his father’s health, though the man was in good health, had no complaints. To the point where, if Ben got sick, even if it was just a cold, he withdrew to his room, locked it, used bedpans rather than risk encountering his dad in the apartment for fear of giving the man his cold, avoiding as well his mother and sister in case he should pass it on to them, who might pass it on to his father. Waiting until they had left the apartment and only then going to the kitchen, taking his food from cans, which he could then dispose of, from boxes of crackers and cookies — holding the box, he would spill however many he wanted onto the floor and then pick them up — his liquids from paper cups.

“Ben,” his father would say, outside his son’s locked bedroom, “it’s only a cold. Don’t be such a hypochondriac. What are you frightened of?”

Pretending sleep, he wouldn’t answer.

And no reason at Wharton to suppose that the household names of ordinary American life were not living, breathing people, actual as himself, only luckier, better off. There had been classes where when the professor called the roll it was like hearing the listings on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Bendix.”

“Present.”

“Boeing.”

“ Here, sir.”

“Braniff.”

“Here.”

“Burroughs.”

“Yo.”

Carling. Crane. Culligan. Disney. Dow. Du Pont. Elgin. Fedders.

“Flesh.”

Firestone nudged him.

“What? What is it?”

“He called your name.”

“What? Oh. Yes. Here, sir. Yes, sir. Present.”

So there was no lack of contact. Yet — this was before his godfather’s telegram, before, in fact, he came to accept that he would not pick up shorthand — he never actually thought of them as contacts, not in the sense that others used the term. He could not get over the idea that certain men had certain things going for them, that it was in their nature, even in the nature of duty itself, perhaps, to perpetuate it through brothers, sons, some primogenitary circle of the inner that closed upon itself and made a wall. If he had any expectations they were not great so much as marginal. Perhaps Goodrich might write a letter for him someday, open a door — if he could prove himself — to a branch manager or personnel director of one of the more remote plants. All he wanted was what he never believed he could have. All he wanted was a job. Enough money to pay his rent, purchase his food, buy his clothes, to save against the day when he might have enough to make a down payment on an automobile.

So of course he believed in a man named Howard Johnson, and what the twins and triplets had suggested seemed as naive to him as anything he’d ever heard.

It was Lotte, the girl who made the wish, who had looked into it, who found out that for $40,000—this was 1951—he could purchase a Howard Johnson franchise from the headquarters in Boston.

“What? He sells his name? His name?”

“Oh, there are rules, Ben. You have to buy everything direct from the company.”

“The eggs?”

“No, I don’t guess you have to buy the eggs, but the fried clams, the ice cream, the syrups and cones. And you can’t serve after midnight unless you’re on the turnpike or something. There are all kinds of procedures you have to follow.”

“He sells his name?”

“Ben, you graduated from the top business school in the country. Didn’t you learn anything?”

“I made Dean’s list seven times. They didn’t give Shorthand, they didn’t give Franchises.”

“ Oh, Ben.”

Lotte was seventeen. They were standing in the driveway of the house in Riverdale beside the bus.

“He sells his name” was all Ben could say. “His name. Do other people do this, do you know?”

“Oh yes, Ben, lots. Lots do.”

He was excited because he knew that he had something going for him now. He would discover which men’s names were for sale and he would buy them and have that going for him. He would have them at the rate banks gave their favored customers and he would have that going for him, too. He was very excited. He had never been so excited. They stood in the driveway on the left-hand side of the bus and Ben took Lotte in his arms and kissed her beside the sprigs of mistletoe, the painted, official flower of the state of Oklahoma.

4

It was something like the beginning of his fiscal year. His dealings with Nate, his brief stay in Youngstown, his drive with the kid he’d dropped in Chicago, all that was outside of time.

He’d gone to Youngstown to discuss the purchase of the Westinghouse affiliate there. He dealt with Strip and Girded, Cramer’s lawyers. He’d known them for years.

He’d misunderstood. It was a television station.

Not radio?

No, TV.

I’ll be damned, television. Well, how much?

Two and a half million was the asking price.

He’d thought it was radio.

Television.

How could he have gotten something like that mixed up?

Strip didn’t know. Girded asked why he hadn’t called first or written a letter. These things had to be cleared with the FCC. It could take years.

He’d thought it was radio. Well, it was good to see them again anyway. They were his lawyers, too. Did they remember when they’d handled the 7-11 deal for him?

Oh yes.

Well.

He really should have called.

“It’s all right. I’m on my way to Chicago anyway.”

“Chicago!”

His Fred Astaire Dance Studio.

“Oh yes.” How was he feeling? Strip wanted to know.

“Fine.”

That was good, Girded said.

“What are you looking down? Your shoes match. Fine means fine. F-I-N-E.”

Well, that was good.

“Remission.” If he could think radio, they could think remission.

“Really?”

“Knock wood, yes.”

Well, that really was good.

TV. Jesus, he could have sworn radio. Two and a half million for television. “What’s the market?”

“A quarter million.”

Ten bucks a head?

Something like that, yes.

Gee, he’d thought radio.

They took him to lunch and shook hands and he went back to his hotel.

Well, not his fiscal year, his geophysical one, his minute rounds. He patrolled America. In a way Nate was right. He should fly more. He recalled how astonished he had always been watching through the oval windows of airplanes the gradual dissolving of the clouds, America appearing like an image in a crystal ball, and he could look down and see the land, the straight furrows in the plowed ground like justified print, the hard-edged Euclidian geometry of survey and civilization. From his Cadillac he could get just the barest sense of this, a ground-level geophysician.

Mr. Flesh stands tux’d, his formal pants and jacket glowing like a black comb, his patent-leather shoes vaulted smooth and tensionless as perfect architecture. He might be standing in the skin of a ripe bright black apple. He feels, in the inky clothes, showered, springy, bouncy, knows in remissioned tactility around his shins, his clean twin sheathing of tall silk hose, can almost feel the condition of his soles, their shade like Negroes’ palms. He is accessoried.

In his old-fashioned white dress shirt his delicious burgundy studs are as latent with color as the warning lights on a dashboard. Onyx links, round and flat as elevator buttons, seal his cuffs, and dark suspenders lie on him with an increment of weight that suggests the thin holsters of G-men, and indeed there is something governmental in his dress, something maritime, chief-of-staff. The golden fasteners beneath his jacket could be captain’s bars. A black bow tie lies across his throat like a propeller.

The studio is in the Great Northern Building on Randolph Street, in a loft. (Or this is how it seems. He knows there are floors above this one.) He remembers the days when the seventh-floor corridor had been flanked with the branch offices of costume jewelry and watchband firms, a barber shop, lawyers’ offices, his father’s theatrical costume business. Now, except for the barber shop, there is only the studio ballroom and the rooms for private instruction made over from the old lawyers’ suites. A sort of stage is at one end of the large room. He knows it is only his father’s long old cutting tables shoved close together — nailed and covered over with Armstrong vinyl asbestos Chem-tile. He knows that the waterfall of velvet that flows over the lip of the “stage” conceals only the carpenter’s reinforcing scaffold, scaffold like a wine rack; that the flats, flies, tormentors, teasers, and borders that ornament the stage with perspective are only a plywood contact paper studded with a kind of gritty sheen like the surface of a ping-pong paddle.

He knows it is a losing proposition. Yet feels good anyway. Reassured by Randolph Street invisible at his back behind the opaque drapes, by the restaurant, a Henrici’s he can almost feel, the Woods Theater, the Oriental, the novelty jokes and tricks shop he remembers from his youth across the street, the out-of-town-paper stand on the corner, the proliferating porno bookstores he finds so appealing, as all muted lust is appealing to him, bringing out qualities of shyness and the awkward, the peremptory imposition of respected distances, boundaries, the territorial waters of self. Like his students. Wallflowers who bought their courage with their lessons, who came out — as if it were an accredited finishing school — at the parties and balls and galas they threw themselves every few weeks at the end of one session or the getting-to-know-you beginning of the next. Getting to know again and again — the turnover never as great as the recidivism — those they knew from before. He had seen them, expansive as the fathers of brides at the punch table, or stopping the hors d’oeuvres tray as it went past carried by an instructor, demanding that their guests, themselves hosts, eat, drink, at last forcing the instructors themselves into accepting a hospitality that was by its very nature communal, and disguising this by a boisterous, reflexive generosity. Ballroom dancing? They had taught themselves to solo.

Clara was with a private student. She had said that she would turn the student over to Jenny or Hope, but Flesh insisted that she finish the hour. He had left the Office of Admissions and come into the ballroom. He sat down in a straight-back chair — a chair like a chair at a dinner table — near one of the staggered, tall, smoked mirrors that offered the room the illusion of several entrances.

He had not looked at the books but had a pretty good notion of how things were. He could tell from the music — or lack of it — that business was bad. In the old days he could stand in the Office of Admissions and hear fox-trot, bossa nova, cha-cha, waltz, polka, rhumba, and tango rhythms coming from record players in the private instruction studios. It had been like being in a bazaar where many tongues were spoken. Now only the “Carousel Waltz” wafted through the thin wallboard of one of the private instruction studios. After sitting a moment he got up and went back into the Office of Admissions.

“For God’s sake,” he told Luis, his Latin rhythms instructor, who was working the switchboard, “it’s like a morgue in there. Why isn’t there any music in the ballroom?”

“Overhead.”

“Suppose the phone rings? If there were music the caller would hear it in the background. He might think something’s happening here.”

“I got that FM you brung last time. It’s tuned to this all-music station, just like you said. If the phone rings I turn it on.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t a good idea. Suppose there’s a commercial? I think we should go back to the old system.”

“Sure, Mr. Flesh. What do you want to hear?”

“What is it, you do requests? I don’t care. It’s too quiet. Turn on the stereo. Where’s Clara?”

“Clara’s still back there with the waltzer.”

“And Hope and Jenny? Where’s Al?” Al was his other male instructor.

“Jenny and Hope are around somewhere. I think they’re doing each other’s hair for the gala. You want me to get them?”

“No, the phone might ring. How many do we expect at the gala tonight?”

“Gee, Mr. Flesh, I can’t say. There’s the Fishers, they’ll be here. Runley said he was coming. Johnson and—”

“You can name them? My God, you can name them? It’s bad as that? That’s terrible.”

Luis nodded.

“Where’s Al?”

“Al went to get cookies for the gala.”

“Cookies.”

“It’s pretty quiet, Mr. Flesh. The old people stay in their condominiums. Those buildings got social directors who teach them the steps. A lot are afraid to come downtown. It’s different times, Mr. Flesh.”

Flesh nodded. “Here,” he said. He took his Diners Club card out of his wallet. “Run down to Fritzel’s. Have them make up a tray of sliced turkey. Get roast beef, too. Rare. Tell them rare. Make it so we can serve at least fifty people.”

“There won’t be no fifty people, Mr. Flesh,” Luis said.

“They can take what’s left over in fucking doggy bags!” Flesh roared. “I’m feeding fifty people! The gala’s at nine, right?”

“Nine, yes, sir. Nine.”

“It’s not yet eight. All right, give the guy ten bucks. Let him bring the stuff over and set it up for us. When you’re through at Fritzel’s, cross over to Don the Beachcomber and have them do us some hot hors d’oeuvres. They deliver?”

“No, sir, and Don the Beachcomber ain’t no take-out joint either, Mr. Flesh.”

“Luis,” Flesh said, “I got five people working for me — you, Clara, Al, Jenny, and Hope. One is off somewhere buying cookies and two are having their hair done. Now if a busy guy like me with a hot commercial property like the Fred Astaire Dance Studio can let his personnel crap around on company time, Mr. Beachcomber can send someone in a rickshaw with the hors d’oeuvres. Here, give him twenty bucks. I want the stuff at nine-thirty. Liquor, what about liquor?”

“We ain’t licensed, Mr. Flesh.”

“I ain’t selling, Trini, I’m giving it away. Martinis. Scotch. Bourbon. And plenty of ice. I don’t want to run out of ice.”

“Jesus,” Luis said. “Holy shit.”

“Goddamn,” said Flesh, “that’s brilliant, Babaloo. Can you lay your hands on some pot?”

“Pot?”

“Pot, yes, some nice good grass. For me. And good stuff. Go into a head shop and have them roll it. Custom. Stitches were taken here once. They followed each other like teeth in zippers.”

“Yeah, well, but like those cats don’t take Diners Club.”

Ben peeled off about a hundred dollars and shoved it into Luis’s hand. He had not been this excited in a long while. “Here, take this. If anything else looks good to you. We’re going first class.”

“First class?”

“All right, I won’t mince words. We’re going down first class. Go now, Desi. Run, boy. Fetch the goose. If you see Al, send him up with the cookies. If they’re stale I’ll have him grind them up on the stage for a sand dance. Is that in our curriculum, Pancho? Can you tell me that, Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria? Wait, before you go — the sound system. Turn on the bubble machine. Hit the lights, please, Cisco.”

Luis went into the ballroom and turned on their big Wurlitzer equipment. Music poured from the ballroom like an element. Flesh rubbed his hands and went to the small room where Clara was giving her student private instruction in the waltz. He rapped on the door. “Five minutes, Miss Clara,” he said softly, and opened the door. “The Blue Danube” was playing on the portable phonograph. A black man only a little younger than himself held Clara in his arms. One hand was up her behind.

“Hoy,” Flesh said.

“Who the dude?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Clara said.

“Who the dude?”

Flesh pointed his finger at the man. “I am your preceptor. Fred Astaire sent me. I give the Waltz Exam.” He lifted the tone arm off the record and set it down at the beginning. “Ready, begin — da da da da da, da da!”

“What’s this shit going down?”

“Waltz!” Flesh commanded.

“Hey, fuck, you crazy?”

“You, Bojangles, waltz!”

“Please, Mr. Flesh,” Clara said.

“I want to see turns and rolls,” Flesh said. “I want to see three-quarter time with a strong accent on the first beat.”

“Beat? I’ll beat your ass, cocksuck.”

“I’m telling Fred.”

“Mr. Flesh.”

“No, Clara, Fred has to know these things.” He turned off the record player. “Listen, boy,” he said to the black man, “I understand. Miss Clara tried to bring you along too fast. These things take time. She had you dancing above your station. Miss Clara, dear, get Tom the tom-tom.”

“I’ll kill this honky turd,” the man said quietly.

Flesh turned to Clara. “What is it here, a massage parlor?”

“You don’t understand, Mr. Flesh.”

“I understand, I understand. They’ve taken up shuffleboard, nine-hole golf. My dancers sit on seats like catchers’ mitts on big tricycles in St. Petersburg, Florida. They swim laps and play bridge in the clubhouse. They’re into macramé and decoupage and they fold paper to make yellow-bellied sapsuckers and even the ladies have fishing licenses. I understand. Where are you going?” He had turned to the Negro.

“I want my money back.”

Flesh nodded and moved toward Clara. He reached his hand down into her brassiere and plucked out two five-dollar bills. He handed the man the cash. “She cheated you,” he said. “You’ll stay for the gala.”

“Suck my comb, honky.”

“Doesn’t he know about the gala?”

“It’s a party,” Clara said. “It’s for the students enrolled in the public session.”

“I don’t need no funky party.”

“It’s on the house. Five dollars a tit? Good God, man, are you nuts?” Ben shook his head.

“They white tits,” the man said.

“Like hell,” Flesh said, “they’re black and blue.”

Clara was crying. Flesh put his arm around her. “The gala,” he said softly. “Get yourself ready. If I’m not back by nine, start without me.”

He stood by the Oriental when the show broke. He spoke softly to people as they came out of the theater, careful not to frighten them. He wrote the time and address down for them on slips of paper and folded the slips gently into their hands. He made it sound as reasonable as he could, hinting, though not stating outright, that it was a business proposition. If people thought it would cost them a dollar or two, they were more likely to trust you. He was very careful about whom he approached. Some he asked to go on ahead and others he asked to wait with him, telling them he would be fifteen more minutes at most.

They came into the lobby of the Great Northern. They held their shopping bags from Stop and Shop and their green parcels from Marshall Field’s.

“You let in the ones with the slips, didn’t you, Henry?” he asked the night man.

“Yes, sir,” Henry said.

“Good,” Flesh said. “I’ll be responsible for these folks,” he told the man. He turned to his group. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I think we’re going to have to use all three elevators tonight. Henry, would you unlock the other two, please?”

Henry did as he was asked and Ben carefully directed people to specific elevators. “I’ll ride up,” he said to those he had not assigned an elevator, “with you people.” He was the last one in. “That’s all right,” he said, “smoke if you got ’em.”

The people from the other elevators were waiting for him on the seventh floor. “Good,” he said, greeting them. “Can you hear it? It’s just as I said.” He cocked his head down the corridor in the direction of the ballroom. “Please,” he said, “follow me.” They went in single file toward the music. “Already,” he said, calling back to them over his shoulder as they passed the barber shop, “we’re a sort of conga line. That’s the spirit.” He kicked back with his right leg. He held the ballroom doors open for them.

The spherical chandelier with its adhesive strips of seamed mirrors spun slow as a device in a planetarium, throwing its romantic galaxies against the walls and ceiling and on the seven or eight pairs of dancers on the big dance floor — focusing purples, greens, yellows, blues, and reds, sliding across shoes, jackets, gowns, and arms, and dilating to wider, indescribable colors. Revolving discs of light around the room lasered the chandelier. Clara danced with a serviceman, Al, Hope, and Jenny with regulars Flesh remembered from his last visit. Three older couples moved expertly to “The Night Was Made for Love.” They were like the surprisingly graceful, aged ice skaters one sees on public rinks. He wondered if they had learned their stuff here. Several people sat along the walls in chairs near the high columns of smoked mirrors. Luis and the Fritzel’s and Don the Beachcomber men were fussing over the meats and hors d’oeuvres at a long linen-covered table. A man Flesh could not account for tended bar.

The song ended and Clara turned toward the stage, where the sound system was, and led the applause. “Very good,” she said over the applause. “It may seem ridiculous to applaud a recording, but I want you all to get into the habit of clapping for the band, so that when we go on our outings to Pewaukee or the Café of Tomorrow and a real band is playing, you’ll just do it automatically. It’s very important actually. Musicians are human and if they know you appreciate what they’re doing, they’ll put that much more liveliness and effort into their playing. Remember, people, a dancer is only as good as his accompaniment. You people on the chairs,” she said, “now even though you sat out the last dance I want to hear you applaud also.”

“Why’s that?” one of the seated women asked.

“That’s a very good question, Mrs. Gringer,” Clara said. “Do any of you students know the answer to that? Mr. Clone?”

“To show you’re polite?”

“Well,” Clara said, “it shows that, too, of course, but there’s an even more important reason — Mrs. Lamboso?”

“Well, if you’re sitting down while everyone else is dancing, they might think you’re a wallflower or too shy when maybe all it is is that nobody has asked you. This way, if you applaud, prospective partners will see that you take an interest and maybe you’ll get asked to dance.”

“Very good,” Clara said.

“It is very good,” Flesh said, “but I thought Mr. Clone had a good point.”

“Oh, Mr. Flesh; ladies and gentlemen, this gentleman is our host for tonight’s very special gala — Mr. Ben Flesh.”

They applauded and Ben nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve brought some guests to join us tonight.” He turned to his group. “The food and drink is over there. Why don’t you all put your parcels on the stage where they’ll be safe. Then you can join the festivities.”

“Maestro,” Clara said. Jenny left her partner, came to the stage, and put on more records. She played “Night and Day,” “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You,” “September Song,” “Two Sleepy People,” “Falling in Love with Love,” “Get Out of Town,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “Blue Moon,” “Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block,” “Love Thy Neighbor,” “Moonglow,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me.”

Flesh smoked the joint Luis had brought him and listened to the beautiful music. The last tingling left his hand. He was suddenly caught up in a complex and true and magnificent idea. He would have to tell them, but could not bear to break into the music or the gorgeous motions of the dancers. One of the people he had brought with him — a woman in her mid-fifties — was dancing with a golden-ager. Her left hand lay gently on his right shoulder. Flesh was touched by the shopping bag she still carried. In her dreamy mood she held the bag by only one beautiful handle and a bottle of ketchup dropped from it, making a lovely splash on the floor. Their shoes looked so vulnerable as the dancers guided each other through the sticky stuff that Ben wanted to cry. Lai-op, lai-op, lai-op. They smeared the ballroom floor with a jelly of ketchup. It was beautiful, the pasty, tomato-y brushstrokes like single-hued rainbows. The high heels of the women smashed explosively against the broken glass adding to the percussive effect of the music. Everything was rhythm. He climbed on the stage and gulped when he looked down and saw the splendid red evidence of the dance. Studying the floor, he perceived from the various footprints, the rough male rectangles and female exclamation points, where each couple had been, their progress, where they had occupied space others had occupied before them, the intensity of color recapturing the actual measure, the music made visible. From these and other signals he felt he understood why what they did was called the “conversation step.” It was a conversation of spatial displacement, the ebb and flow of presence, invasions, and polite withdrawals as each couple moved in to take the place other couples had abandoned. A minuet of hitherings and yonnings, the lovely close-order drill of ordinary life. So civilized. So gentle were men. He explained this to them over the loudspeaker, explained how it was possible to re-create from the ordinary shmutz of a broken ketchup bottle, not just where the dancers had stood, but where they had stood in time, that movement was nothing more than multiple exposure. Perhaps, were he musical — he felt musical, as musical as Terpsichore; wasn’t she the Goddess of Dance? who would be the Muse of Song? muse, music, ah yes, music; there were no accidents, idiom was fundamental as gravity; who would be the Goddess of Song? it was on the tip of his tongue; oh yes, it had to be…it had to be—Orchestra! — he could, by reading their glide, even have told them the song that had been playing at the time. There was more. As he studied the dancers he realized that not only — if you knew how to read the signs — did movement remain, a testimony lingering like scent that men had been by, but that it was impossible to teach what all already knew. Everyone could dance. Every motion snuggled to every rhythm, to any rhythm. It had something to do, he explained, with the tides, with the universal alphas, with pulse itself. And he tied in menstruation and the throbs and ripples of orgasm. It was beautiful, but they weren’t listening.

He fumbled with the amplifier and found the button that cut off the power, and he stood on his father’s old cutting tables and spoke to them from his heart.

“My dearest ladies,” he said, “my most charming gentlemen. Please, this is very important. What’s sacred is important. You don’t know this, you’ll not be able to follow it all. Try not to blame yourselves. There’s no blame here. We are all swell people. Do you know what’s happening here? (Don’t sidetrack me, God; let me stick to the point, oh, Lord.) Everyone concentrate. I am going to link the world for you. I am going to have it make sense, but you must concentrate. Same here.

“All right. What am I talking about? How, if I’m to link the world, can I get sidetracked? Not possible. It’s all relevant. Be patient. Everything will come clear. Then — Who has water? I’m very dry. Luis, pleeth. Jenny, any?

“I stand on my father’s long old cutting tables. Bolts of graduation cloth unwound here like spools of film, the texture of the trim like oil slicks. Costumes were made for ballerinas. We are in a room with a musical tradition. Yes, and what made this possible, this room, this night, our gala, were the selfsame songs you danced to earlier, written by pals of my godfather, who was able to leave me the prime rate of interest because of those songs. You see? We dance to the prime rate of interest itself. We compound it. Nothing is lost. Follow? That’s one circle. Earlier I spoke of the rhythms, motion. Ah, God, we thank Thee for Thy do-si-dos, our hithers and yons, the wondrous cake walk and hopfrog of reality. We thank Thee for dressage and our Lippizaner life. Clara, you understand, don’t you?”

“No,” Clara said.

“I does,” the black man said.

“Yes, but that’s not my point. Do you know how good the world is? Listen, it’s better than you think and better even than it has to be. I go with Clone. Politeness, gratuitous as flowers, counts. It structures life like scaffolding. Under this stage is scaffolding, the carpenter’s hundred wooden X ’s. Would a man do that for money? The care, the nails like a driving rain. For money? Good Christ, friends, the man built to hold us all, to let us jump.” He jumped. “I believe the amazing world of Kreskin is amazing, and who could invent a card trick or make up a good joke? The lady who dropped the ketchup—”

“That was an accident,” she said.

“No, no, there are no accidents. The lady who dropped the ketchup — I saw into her shopping bag. There are Hefties there, liners for garbage cans. How civilized! Maybe all that distinguishes man from the beasts is that man had the consideration to invent garbage can liners. What a convenience! We die, yes, but are compensated by a million conveniences. Hefties are just the beginning. We perfect ourselves, we reach toward grace — I foresee a time when there will be flowered sheets and pillowcases in motel rooms. This is a deflection to convenience and the magnitude of the human spirit, the leap to comfort. The chemical creams,” he said excitedly, “the chemical creams. You know, the little sacks of powder you put in your coffee. I foresee a day — someone may be working on this right now — when non-dairy creamers shall be mixed with saccharine in the same packet! There you go: convenience! And do you think for one minute that the man now waiting for this great idea’s time to come will have thought it up for mere money? No. Unthinkable. It will hit him on an airliner like an inspiration, for the grace of the thing, only that, for the convenience it would make, and if he profits by his idea, why the money will be only another convenience. Someday a visionary shall come among us. He will lobby Congress to legalize pot on the principle that it would be a terrific boon to the snack-food industry! Oh, friends, the quality of all our lives shall rise like yeast. I love this world, this comfortable, convenient world, its pillow condition.” He was breathless. But he had more to tell them. Mystery was on the tip of his tongue. He studied them, watched them watching him.

“I come,” he said, “from Fred Astaire! I bring Ginger Rogers’ spicy ‘Hi.’ Fred says tell them. He says make them understand. He says when you see Miss Clara, Miss Jenny, and Miss Hope, when you see Mr. Luis and Mr. Al, when you get to Chicago and stand on the cutting tables on the evening of the Nineteenth Annual Fiscal Year Gala, when you hang suspended from your suspenders in the convenient clothes of romance, your uniform of cruise and ceremony, suspended in them, your feet barely touching your hose, your hose your shoes, your shoes your pop’s cutting tables, your pop’s cutting tables your planet, let them know that our work, the work we do, is important, that to walk is good but to dance is better, that what we do here is the ultimate leap; to go behind gravity’s back and spit in the face of the heavy. Hah? Heh?

“Listen, Fred didn’t say about this part, this part’s mine — Fred ain’t in it — but I want to give you some notion of the world we live in. I drive the road. I go up and down it. I stay in motels and watch the local eyewitness news at ten. Murders are done, town councils don’t know what to do about porno flicks, everywhere the cops have blue flu, farmers nose-dive from threshers, supply and demand don’t work the way they used to, and even our President’s at a loss and his advisers divided. The left hand don’t know what the right is doing and only the weather report touches us all. The time and the temperature. What we have for community. Only that. The barometer adjusted to sea level, the heat wave, the drought, the cold front stalled over Wisconsin, today’s low and if it’s the record. And the fuss that’s made! My God, the fuss that’s made and only because it’s what the local eyewitness news thinks holds us together. Some view of us it has, pals. As if we lived in the wind under the same umbrella. I see this. City after city and state after state. And, oh yes, something else, the good will and chatter, the hard-news guy lying down with the sports one, the jigaboo weatherman with the lady reporter. We should take over the stations and put out the real news. For everyone murdered a million unscathed, for every fallen farmer so many upright. We would put it out. Bulletin: Prisoners use sugar in their coffee! Do you see the sweet significance? We argue the death penalty and even convicts eat dessert. The cooks do the best they can. They have their eye out for the good fruit and the green vegetables. Oh, the astonishing manifestations of love! Rainbows wouldn’t melt in our mouths! The state’s bark always worse than its bite, brothers, and goodness living in the pores of the System, and Convenience, thank you, God, the measure of mankind. Nobody, nobody, nobody ever had it so good. Take heed. A franchiser tells you.

“Smile, you fuckers, laugh, you shitlings. I come from Fred Astaire, everybody dance!”

He jerked a record from its sleeve and slapped it on the machine. He turned the volume up and shrieked into the microphone. “Business is bad but we do a big volume.” He turned the sound down some. They had gathered beneath him at the foot of his tiny stage to watch him and listen. He swayed above them. He might have been a band singer in the forties. The music was “Dance, Ballerina, Dance.”

“Do it,” he commanded. “Dance, dance.” He made spiraling gestures with his fingers. Some of the people he had brought with him began to shuffle aimlessly. A few eyed each other, seeking partners. “That’s right, mother,” he told an old woman who held her arms out to Luis. He climbed down from the stage and began to move people around like a chess master playing several games at once. He pulled them to him in pairs, holding them by their wrists as if he would force them to shake, like a peacemaker, he thought, like love’s policeman.

“Fred Astaire sent me,” he whispered. “I’m this social traffic cop.” He moved among them and started them dancing like a spinner of plates on sticks in nightclubs. “Good,” he said, “good, good.”

He scrambled back up on the stage, powdering his tuxedo trousers with paw prints of dust. He loosened his tie. “Caveat emptor,” he crooned. “This is only the fabulous introductory offer. It’s going to cost you. What, you think it’s cheap to throw the sheets over modern times while the owners are away? You think illusion is free, buddies? This shipboard ideal we make here, this Queen Mary ambience? I got a shine on my shoes it cost me two dollars. You want to see real stars, go to the country, look up, get a stiff neck. Ours have six points and you can reach out and touch them on the walls — convenience, convenience — like the astronomy decor in airplanes. Come, come, we’ll lie together in the time machine. When 1933 comes we’ll Carioca down Main Street, everybody do the Varsity Drag. We’ll Beer-Barrel Polka in the high-rent district and nobody leaves till he does the Continental!”

He explained the rates to them. The music was “Fascinating Rhythm.” He told them it would cost them thirty dollars an hour and that they had to sign up for a minimum of twenty-five hours. Calmly he explained that it was cheaper than psychoanalysis. They were dancing now. The song was “But Beautiful,” then “Dancing in the Dark.” If they thought the thirty an hour was stiff, he said, they should understand that a lot of the fee went into outings and galas like this one and that, if they chose, they could take up to ten of their hours with a private instructor, with Luis or Al, with Miss Jenny, Miss Hope, or Miss Clara.

“These aren’t bimbos,” he said while the stereo played “Dream.” “These are accredited people. Most of my people trained with Alex Moore’s International Society of Dance Instructors. Al and Miss Clara are two-time winners of the New York Daily News Harvest Moon Ball, the third jewel in dancing’s triple crown.”

The song was “Flat Foot Floogie” and several dropped out. They chewed his sandwiches and he made them a solemn promise. It was a tradition in ballroom instruction that an hour was only fifty minutes. Fred had authorized him to throw back the missing ten minutes into each hour. Did they have any idea, he wondered, how much of a leg up — he laughed delicately at his joke — that would give them on the Arthur Murray people? That was four hours and ten minutes of additional instruction. If they applied themselves they would run the Arthur Murray people off the floor. It was better than a hundred-and-twenty-dollar rebate. He didn’t understand how Fred could do it, but there it was. They danced to “Happy Days Are Here Again” and ate egg rolls from Don the Beachcomber. They moved over fallen hors d’oeuvres, stepping on the soft crusts and squashing them like bugs. Bits of pork and rice, of shrimp, chunks of chicken exploded like delicious gut under their weight. Dark sauces thick as blood stained the dance floor. He told them about “Recreation, companionship, instruction, and therapy.” That was their motto, he said. He told them they must understand that there was nothing authoritarian in the word “instruction.” If others he could name didn’t, the Fred Astaire people believed in freedom of individual expression. He saw, he said, in the movements of his black friend, a potential for the strong, masculine rhythms of Chassidic dancing. If that’s where the man’s talents lay he knew a rabbi in Skokie — They were dancing now with their drinks in their hands. The song was “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” and as the men dipped the ladies, liquor spilled from their plastic glasses onto the dance floor. He tried to explain how the dance field was like karate in a way. Oh, it wasn’t combative, of course, the reverse if anything, a karate of the inside out. He meant that just as there were degrees, levels of competence in karate, white belts, brown, green, he thought, and black, there were the same sorts of measurements in dance. There had to be. One had to know where one stood. Someone had placed a plastic glass on the floor with a cigarette in it that was still burning. Ben watched the hole, outlined like a filament in a light bulb as it grew wider and wider. The song was “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” What was he saying? Oh yes, karate. In ballroom dancing it worked differently. They didn’t get belts. Medals. There were bronze, silver, and gold medals. One could earn these, though of course there was no guarantee. You had to know where you stood, but there had to be standards. Some people made silver at the end of the twenty-five-hour course, but he’d be frank, this was the exception. Usually it didn’t happen until forty hours and often, he had to be frank, he wanted them to know what they were getting into, seventy-five, sometimes not then. Gold medalists were rare. He had a feeling they were born. Independent judges were brought in. Incorruptible men who couldn’t be bought. If you got a medal you knew you’d earned it.

“Like the Olympics,” he said. “Swing, waltz, fox trot, cha-cha, and tango. All the high stepper’s catchy pentathlon.”

Were they necking? Necking?

“Is everybody happy?” he asked softly. “I come from Fred Astaire. He looks forty-eight. All old movie stars look forty-eight.” For some reason he was on the verge of tears. “Why,” he wondered aloud, “were there never any black streakers?” The song was “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” He was winding down. Who was he, fucking Cinderella? Would he cry in front of them? Snap out of it.

“Hey,” he said, “they found tuna fish on Mercury!”

It was “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You.”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll give it to you straight. I saw Fred Astaire one time at a franchise convention. He seemed embarrassed. You want to know the truth? I don’t dance, don’t ask me, and the outings I was talking about, you know where we take you? To places where they rewrite the lyrics and do special material. You know? Like at summer camp. That’s the gala. The band plays these show tunes and Al changes the lyrics to whatever’s topical or institutional. The bronze medalists get their name in a song and we boost the outfit and ain’t that something? Jesus.

“Listen,” he said, “I have this Cadillac. I’m a dancer. I go north in it and west. I do all the directions and turn corners and stay in my lane and trace the cloverleaf and cross the bridges. Good God, am I a dancer! America’s my ballroom. It’s my eats, listen to me! Something’s happening. I’ll tell you a secret. This dancing. I think it may be evil. As comedy is evil. I don’t think salvation has either a sense of humor or a sense of rhythm. Life is the conversion of the individual. God’s piecework. A custom-tailor God, every attention paid to details, the slant of the pocket and come back Tuesday. I think I may be doing evil with my franchises.”

“Hey, Mr. Flesh,” Luis said.

“There may be something genuinely evil in the idea of an N.F.L. Maybe the Miami Dolphins is an evil concept, the Houston Astros, Burger King, the American League. Franchises like some screwy version of Manifest Destiny.”

“Mr. Flesh.”

He heard his name called and made Hope out in the queerly lighted room, Band-Aids of blue and purple, of yellow and red sliding across her face and bare arms as the revolving mirrored ball punched out refracted messages of spectrum. She was shaking her head.

“Yes, Hope,” Flesh said. “I come from Fred Astaire. Everybody dance.”

He turned from the microphone and placed another recording on the turntable, setting the volume high as he could.

“The free dance lesson!” he announced, roaring into the microphone and clapping his hands — the right hand had begun to tingle again — in time to the music. “Left foot forward, right foot back. Basic left turn, right box turn. Butterfly, serpentine, advance right turn. Lilt left fleckerl, quarter turn right. Left rock, right rock, chassé swing step, three step cross. Pony trot and pony circle, Cinderella grapevine, fallaway grapevine, arch turn, breakaway, loop turn, she go, he go, right spot turn. Tuck-in, arch turn, change of place with right-hand lead. Right-hand loop, right-hand loop and change of hands. Push spin, rhumb square, promenade, pivot; Cuban walk and backward rock. Walk across basic, hinge and tuck-in, golf step, airplane, promenade twist. Side basic, swivel basic, shoulder to shoulder, and tap and point. Outside now and fan and corte, open left turn with outside finish, gauche turn, corkscrew, strike and samba. Choo choo, choo choo, boto fogos. Paddle turn, right turn, merengue chassé. Wheel. Arch. Step time, mark time, march time; promenade twist and wheel and cape. Right turn, left turn, left change, right change — everybody hold!”

They were staring at him.

“Well,” he said. “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” he said. He was out of breath. “Good night, ladies, g’night, ladies, it’s ti’ t’say g’night. Gala’s over. Fred thanks you. Out. Beat it.”

His guests moved off.

“Excuse me,” a woman said.

“What?”

“Excuse me.”

“What do you want?”

“You’re standing on my shopping bag.” Ben moved his foot. She gathered her parcels and left.

Al and Jenny, Luis and Hope had disappeared.

Flesh sat on the edge of the stage, “Some stage,” he said. “I can touch the floor with my feet.”

“I never heard anything like it. What the hell was that all about?” It was Clara’s voice. She must have been sitting in one of the wallflower chairs. The room was lighted by the small colored spots.

“It’s like living in a jukebox,” Flesh said. “A pinball machine. I can’t see a thing. Turn that crap off. Let’s have some light.” He heard the rustle of Clara’s gown, her hand flick a switch. They were momentarily in complete darkness.

“That better?”

“Turn the lights on. Let’s see the damage.” The lights came on. “Jesus,” Flesh said. “After the ball is over. Oh boy. Look at my floor. It’s like a giant pizza.” There were crushed egg rolls, butterfly shrimp with their wings torn off, here and there barbecued ribs like tiny picket fences. Slabs of white turkey like the wood beneath bark. Rounds of roast beef floated in puddles of spilled Scotch, spilled bourbon.

“Al’ll get it in the morning.”

“Yeah. How’d we do?”

“Nobody signed up.”

Flesh nodded. “Good.”

“Good?”

“We can’t accept any new applicants.”

“Why?”

“Why. They’re cutting down on federal aid to education. I don’t want to lower our high standards.”

“You shutting us down, Mr. Flesh?”

“Yeah, we’re closing out of town. We ain’t taking it to Broadway.”

“Then what was that pitch all about?”

“In the morning I want you to call Nate Lace. He’s at the Nittney-Lyon Hotel in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”

“Who’s Nate Lace?”

“No one. A liquidator. An old pal. When’s the session over? When’s graduation?”

“Chibka has two more private lessons. The group session goes another three weeks.”

“Three weeks, yeah. Get Lace. I want him for Commencement speaker.”

“Mr. Flesh?”

“Look at me in this suit. You ever see anything so ridiculous?”

“What’s going to happen to us?”

“Yeah. Well, to tell you the truth, I think I can find a spot in the Follies for Luis, but you don’t fit into the big picture. If you really love him, let the lug go.”

“What are we going to do, Mr. Flesh?”

“We’re going to liquidate. Fire sale. Everything must go. We’re closing down the Carioca.” She would be forty in maybe three years. Her figure was nice. He liked the long line of her legs, her flat chest and tough prettiness. “Listen,” he said, “you know how lonely it’s supposed to be at the top? Let me tell you, it’s lots lonelier at the bottom. I don’t know what you’re going to do, Clara. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Al or to Jenny or to Hope or Luis. Is that really his name? Shit, sister, there are shopping centers in Niles, in Buffalo Grove, La Grange, Glencoe. Bring your taps. Teach ballet to six-year-old Jewish kids.” She was crying. “Come on,” he said. “Clara, don’t. What are you doing? Hey. Stop.” He moved closer to her, and not knowing what would happen he held his arms open to her. She came toward the middle-aged man. He held her unsteadily. “I come from Fred Astaire,” he said softly, “everybody dance.”

He tried to lead, and when he slipped from time to time on the puddings of scattered food or in the liquor, she caught him and held him up. He made a low hum in his throat as they danced. He liked the sound. He sang to her from his guttural hum. “I’m taking off my top hat, I’m taking off my topcoat, I’m taking off my tails.”

“What was that stuff?” she asked. “That speech you made?”

“Who knows? My father’s spirit’s in this room. I feel it.”

“Your father?”

“Yes. He’d be, what, seventy-five years old now. Hey, Daddy, you see how things change? This here’s Clara.”

“Hi, Mr. Flesh,” Clara said.

“Did you see how they spilled things? Boy, I tell you,” he said, “the public. Hey, Papa. You know something? I broke the law. I’m a possessor. I could be put in jail. Almost fifty fucking years old and I could be put in jail. I bet you never broke a law.” He let Clara go. “I’m sorry, Papa.” He was crying, shaken so hard by his sobs it was difficult for him to breathe. “I’m sorry you died in a crash,” he sobbed, “I’m sorry to have taken Fred Astaire’s name in vain, sorry my dancers live in a time when no one wants to learn the steps, sorry to God for a freedom which I helped shape by accepting all the credit cards — the Diners Club and Master Charge and BankAmericard and Carte Blanche and all the oil company things. Sorry for my rotten health of body and heart. Ah shit, Papa, it’s a hell of a way to start a fiscal year.”

“Are you all right?” Clara asked.

“No,” he cried, “no. No. I’m not.” He wiped his eyes and began again to dance with her. When he let her go he put his hand into the pocket of his tuxedo jacket. “Here,” he said.

“What?”

“Your money. The two fives I took from you earlier.”

“You gave that back to him.”

“I did? Then what’s this I’m holding?”

“What’s what you’re holding? Where?”