The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “Will there be a card?”

  “Yes. A card.” She handed him a small white envelope and a card. He wrote Kitty’s name on the envelope, tore up the blank she had given him, and enclosed his Sunoco credit card.

  “It’s sentimental. This used to be honored at Best Western motels.”

  The saleswoman looked at him.

  “Among so many conventioneers—I represent only myself this trip—I am seized by the spirit. I am taken with a frenzy for the old days, you follow? My heart leaps up. You follow my heart leaping up?”

  She smiled weakly and he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t drunk. And he wasn’t.

  But he could tell no one anything anymore. His tears embarrassed them. The kid hitchhiker a few days ago was something else. That story had been one from old times. He went up to his room.

  What reminded him, what started the whole damn thing, was the sight of all those businessmen. In Miami Beach—that would have been just four years ago, the prime rate had been 7½ percent—he’d attended two conventions at once, K-O-A and One Hour Martinizing.

  Dr. Wolfe.

  A pallid wafery man with thinning hair that seemed to grow out from a tuft of widow’s peak and stretch back over his head, growing uphill but somehow the dark individual strands like the ribs of a fan that covered almost all his scalp. A head of hair like a magic trick. Flesh with more was balder. A quiet man who spoke in a low monotonous voice. Dr. Wolfe. In order to hear him Ben found himself leaning into Wolfe’s speech, as if shouldering a stiff wind, heavy weather. With his head bent toward his host’s conversation, there was an odd nautical quality to his step. Flesh felt like a sailor rolling along beside him. They might have been walking upwind on a deck. The faint praise was faint. Dr. Wolfe. “Have lunch with me.” It was more command than invitation. The man was a bore. Ben could not rebuff bores, regarded their conversation as down payment on his own.

  “Those K-O-A’ers needed to hear that.”

  “Well—”

  “It was interesting. But I’m not sure you were correct.”

  “I’m new in the business. It was simply an outsider’s first impression.”

  “No no, it was stimulating. But what would the presence of motorcycle packs do to our family trade?”

  “I didn’t really say anything about motorcycle packs. I wasn’t thinking of opening up the campsites to Hell’s Angels.”

  “Once the word got around they’d come, though. They could come singly, or in pairs. They might not seem motorcycle packs, but then, when they were all together, you’d see what you had.”

  He didn’t care to argue the point. It was just something that had occurred to him during the open meeting and that he’d offered in the packed Fontainebleau Hospitality Suite during “Give and Take Hour.” “I thought you said you liked the idea.”

  “I said it was interesting. It needs to be discussed.”

  Ben didn’t care to discuss it.

  “We’ll go outside the hotel. I’ve been eating in that pharmacy up Collins Avenue. The prices they charge here are ridiculous.”

  “Listen, I’m a little rushed. I’m supposed to be with One Hour Martinizing in an hour.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m giving a talk on the subject ‘Come Back Thursday.’ ” Wolfe didn’t smile.

  “It’s just up Collins Avenue. By the time we got seats in the coffee shop we’d have to gobble our sandwiches.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “K-O-A’s a family trade,” Wolfe said when they were seated at the counter in the drugstore eating their egg-salad sandwiches. (Wolfe had ordered for them both.)

  “What about hostelers?”

  “Hostelers are people’s children. They’re decent.”

  “Oh.” Flesh had begun to hate the man.

  “It’s all very well,” Wolfe said, “for you absentee landlords, but I have to live at the campsite. We’re in Boca Raton. If your proposal went through, if it got in our bylaws, I’d be the one to suffer, I’d be the one subjected to the terror.”

  “I didn’t put it as a proposal.”

  “There’d be dope, fights. We’d be kept up half the night. My wife can’t take that.”

  “It would be up to the individual, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes? It would be the Public Accommodations Act all over again. Civil rights. If I wasn’t in compliance, I’d lose my license.”

  “Well, I didn’t put it as a proposal.”

  “It was warmly received. And that other. What was it—serve beer on the premises?”

  “All I said was that if K-O-A had a small retail food and beverage outlet—”

  “That’d be beer. You’d have a problem with the hostelers. A lot of those kids are under age. There’d be false I.D.’s. I see nothing but trouble. For a few shekels. Is that all that matters to you, shekels?”

  “Look, Mr. Wolfe—”

  “I don’t say I couldn’t use the money. Lord knows I could. But I got enough grief as it is.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about me. They asked for ideas. It was all off the top of my head.”

  “My wife’s bedfast.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Sixteen years. She’s bedfast. She’s incontinent. She wears a diaper.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Ben said.

  “And all those steroids. Her bones are so soft I can’t use nothing but down. Down pillows, a down mattress I gave seven hundred shekels for. Doctor wants her to sit up some each day. Had to get her a down chair. Swan’s down. Special made. My wife sits down on down,” he muttered. “She isn’t old enough yet for Medicare. I have to pay for those steroids out of my own pocket. They keep changing her medications but it’s all steroids. This is the first convention I’ve been to since she come down bedfast. Only reason I could get away is it’s in Florida and my sister-in-law said she’d take care of my wife. She lives in Miami. I use her apartment. Don’t even get to stay in the hotel.”

  Flesh nodded. “I was on steroids once,” he said. He offered the information as a way of reaching some accord with the man, but he was astonished at Wolfe’s reaction.

  “You? You were? Yes? Tell me.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a big deal really. I don’t think I could have been on them more than two weeks, but at the time it scared hell out of me.”

  “Yes? Yes? What?”

  “I went blind in my left eye.”

  “Oh yes,” Wolfe said. He was grinning.

  “I say ‘blind,’ but it was, I don’t know, white. As if I had my eye open in a glass of milk.”

  “Hah,” Wolfe said.

  “It didn’t last long. At first I thought I had a tumor. That’s what scared me. I went to an ophthalmologist and he referred me to a neurologist and the neurologist put me in the hospital for observation.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it wasn’t a tumor.”

  “No.”

  “And the doctor put me on steroids and the blindness cleared up in, I don’t know, it was almost ten years ago, three, maybe four days.”

  “A retrobulbar optic neuritis.”

  “That’s right,” Flesh said. “How would you know that?”

  Wolfe laughed. “It’s how it starts. Ten years ago, eh? What were you—thirty, thirty-two?”

  “I don’t know. About thirty-two. It’s how what starts? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the nation’s leading crippler of young adults, sonny. You’ve got multiple sclerosis, same as my sixteen-year-bedfast wife.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t have multiple sclerosis. It was retrobulbar optic neuritis.”

  “That’s right. That’s it. That’s how it starts.”

  “It was ten years ago.”

  “Sure. You’re in remission.”

  “I don’t have multiple sclerosis.”

  “No? Wait one or two years. You’re in remission, that’s all. I know more about the nation’s leading crippler of young adults than any neurolo
gist in the country. I read all the literature. It was the British proved that anybody gets optic neuritis winds up with M.S. Didn’t your doctor tell you that?”

  “No,” Flesh said.

  “Course not. It’s a stress disease. You could be in remission another five years, but you’ve got it, neighbor. It’s progressive and it’s degenerative and it eats your nerves like moths in the closet. Lay in down and don’t be so sure you want the hippies and them kids with their choppers and drugs. You need rest.”

  “Fuck you,” Flesh said.

  “That’s all right, I’ll get the check. My treat.”

  Ben moved off. “Lay in down,” Wolfe called. “Get insurance. Lay in down, foam rubber, creams and unguents for the bedroom, for your abrasive big-shot ways.” He could hear Wolfe’s laughter behind him as the man trailed him back to the hotel.

  Dr. Wolfe.

  He had been blind. He had been a blind man. And once he’d had a heart attack. Later, he tried to explain it to Gertrude.

  “You were only half blind, you could see white. Me, I’ve got bones like monkey wrenches and the Guess-Your-Age-and-Weight man at the fair doesn’t know what to make of me.”

  Just as he didn’t know what to make—before he knew what the blindness meant, before Dr. Wolfe told him—of himself.

  “In the old days, yes,” he’d told Mary, “in the days when I was between twenty-one and thirty-eight and coming down with my character like a disease. Before I got to be whatever it is I’ve turned out to be. When I was turning out to be it. I didn’t know what to make of me. Except it seemed significant that I’d been in World War II. I didn’t ever see action, but that was part of the pattern, can you understand this? I was in the world war but I didn’t see action, I was blind but only in one eye and just for a few days, and even your sister reminded me that I could see light, that the visible somehow translated itself in my brain to pure energy—to white, to light. And, oh yes, that I was an orphan, but late-blooming, orphaned only after I’d turned twenty. Already a man. Which didn’t make me Oliver Twist. And I had a godfather. More cushion. And an inheritance. And even that mitigated. We’re not talking about lump sums—not even as much as my piddling severance pay when I left the army of MacArthur and Eisenhower, just this mitigated, administered inheritance, not money but the interest on money, the privilege of borrowing dough. And a college graduate, but even that, my education, off center somehow, me not knowing what I was getting into at Wharton, odd man out in that scioned, silver-spooned set, maybe the only person there not preparing to step into someone else’s shoes, not in training for a life laid out like clean clothes on the bedgevant. And a heart-attack victim, too, don’t forget, when I was thirty-eight. But not a victim. I didn’t die, didn’t see that action either. Just let off the hook with what the doctor called a ‘warning.’ He meant I should change my life. But how can I change what I don’t understand? The blindness that was not real blindness and the orphan lad who was no lad. A soldier in the biggest war in history who never got close to combat. And the heart attack that went away. All this pulled-punch catastrophe that has been my life. The phony inheritance and mixed blessing. I don’t understand this stuff.”

  “What about me?” La Verne asked when he attempted to speak to her about it. “What about me with my askew architecture, my organs with their faulty wiring, my insides like left-hand drive? As if I were a bridge built by racketeers.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. You’re unique.”

  “Unique. Terrific. Unique. Death’s Special Introductory Offer.”

  “What, am I discounting your risk? Is that what you think? No no. Who am I to cut anyone’s losses? That isn’t the point. All these things—they’ve got me programmed for an Everyman. A little of this, a little of that. My smorgasbord life.”

  “You’ll dance on our graves.”

  “That ain’t it.”

  She turned away from him in bed. Her nightgown had ridden up her backside. “It ain’t? That’s it.”

  He called Irving.

  “Yes,” he said, “in St. Louis…Oh, I don’t know, about an hour ago…No, at the Chase-Park…Because I don’t like to impose…All right, come on, Irving, what ‘offended,’ what ‘hurt’? You know my habits. The truth is, I hate making beds. Sometimes I shoot right in the sheets. Why should Frances lean over my laundry?…No, certainly not. Your sister isn’t with me…No. No…Call the desk. See if I’m registered with anyone. Come over, search the room. As a matter of fact, that’s a good idea. Bring Fran. I’ll take you both to dinner at the Tenderloin Room. You’ll cut up my meat for me…Yeah. Hah hah, yourself…No, Chicago. I’m going on to Kansas City…Yeah, right, Irving, it’s a surprise audit on the One Hour Martinizing. I got word you been skimming the first six minutes on me…So tell me, Irving, how’s business?…What? The niggers again?…All the way out to Overland? Irving, I already closed up the Delmar location. You wanted west county, I gave you west county. What is it, you Daniel Boone, you got a manifest destiny? Irving, darling, the niggers are going to push you into the sea…Into the Pacific, yes. What good is a dry-cleaning service in the ocean? Saltwater’s bad for the material…No, I’m not making jokes at your expense…I appreciate it’s a sickness with you…Really, have dinner with me. Yeah, I understand. Right. Sure…Certainly I understand. You don’t like to come into the inner city…Irving, give Frances a kiss, I’ll see you both at the plant in the morning. Bring the books.”

  2

  He loved the shop, the smells of the naphthas and benzenes, the ammonias, all the alkalis and fats, all the solvents and gritty lavas, the silken detergents and ultimate soaps, like the smells, he decided, of flesh itself, of release, the disparate chemistries of pore and sweat—a sweat shop—the strange woolly-smelling acids that collected in armpits and atmosphered pubic hair, the nameless combustion of urine and gabardine mixing together to create all the body’s petty suggestive alimentary toxins. The sexuality of it. The men’s garments one kind, the women’s another, confused, deflected, masked by residual powders, by the oily invisible resins of deodorant and perfume, by the concocted flower and the imagined fruit—by all fabricated flavor. And hanging in the air, too—where would they go?—dirt, the thin, exiguous human clays, divots, ash and soils, dust devils of being.

  “Irving, add water, We’ll make a man.”

  His godcousin looked up from the presser. “What color?”

  “Hello, Ben,” Frances said. She was her husband’s countergirl.

  “Frances, how are you?” Ben leaned across the counter and kissed her. “Did you bring the books?” he asked Irving.

  “Please, Ben,” Irving said, “not in front of the shvartzeh.”

  “Irving, she’s your wife.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, “it’s a sickness.”

  Frances was black. Marrying her had been a sort of experiment in social vaccination. He had reasoned that if polio, measles, and smallpox could be defrayed by actually contracting them, then perhaps he might be able to cure his racial prejudice by marrying a black woman. The blacks he knew in New York—Irving, still living in Riverdale, had attended Columbia University, where he majored in anthropology, and commuted to and from the campus in rolled-window, locked-door cabs—were, except for their color, indistinguishable from most of the whites he knew. They spoke with New York accents, something the anthropologist could never really get over. It was his idea to leave the city to seek a bride. Afraid to go South, where, at the time of his contemplated courtship, the prohibitions against miscegenation were either still on the books or, if technically legal, enforced by the vaudevilles of Klansmen, he chose St. Louis, neutral territory, a place where blacks still sounded like blacks, where, though their civil liberties were underwritten by law and municipal ordinance, they still lived in ghettos and did the dirty work when they could find it.

  In the days when his tortured godcousin, then an M.A. candidate in anthropology—a subject he studied for the same reason he would choose a br
ide—had first hit upon the idea for his cure, Ben had again and again been subjected to Irving’s rhetoric, speeches that might, with certain alterations, have been memorized from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

  “I know what I’m doing, Ben, I’m not going into this thing with my eyes closed. I know what people will think. Oh, my friends will be very ‘polite’ of course. They’ll come to the wedding and bring gifts. They’ll drink our health and say, ‘It’s marvelous what Irving’s done. What courage! What courage on both their parts!’ But they’ll never get used to it. They’ll never adapt. There’ll be unintended snubs, invitations not sent, embarrassing silences when me and the jigaboo run into them on the street, pregnant pauses, or, even worse, circumlocutions. They won’t really know how to handle it. We’ll make them uncomfortable. And some of my ‘good’ friends—oh, they’ll mean well, I suppose—will try to warn me of the dangers and consequences. ‘All right,’ they’ll say, ‘so you want to run off and be an idealist. Terrific. Wonderful. Hurrah for Martin Luther Finsberg, but aren’t you forgetting something? What about the children? What will they have to pay for your idealism?’ They’ll reason that if I want to marry dark meat that’s my business, that I’m free, white, and twenty-one, but it’s unfair to our little nignogs.”

  Flesh had given him his job, had made him manager of the franchise in St. Louis. He was the only one of the Finsbergs still connected with any of the franchises.

  Ben moved behind the counter and plunged in and out of the ranks of garments suspended from the conveyor in their polyethylene bags like FBI silhouettes, police-force torso targets. “Out of my way, Hart, Schaffner and Marx. Watch it, you Brooks brothers. I’m coming through, Kuppenheimer. Straighten up, chest out, tummy in, Hickey. How many times do I have to tell you? Lookin’ good there, Freeman. Ah, madam. Itchy-kitchy Gucci, Pucci.”

  The girls at the creaser and topper machines laughed. Flesh walked up to the Suzy, an adjustable dress form on which men’s and ladies’ garments could be hung for special attention—spot cleaning, alterations. Nothing was hanging on it at the moment. “Shameless,” Flesh said and gave it a feel. The shirt folder rocked with laughter. She was a huge black woman in a short skirt and, because of the heat, a man’s ribbed undershirt. Ben looked at the woman and pointed to her chest. “Hey, that’s cute, sweetheart. You got some tits on you, momma.”