“That sounds uncomfortable.”
“Oh yeah. It is. I take a few steps and I feel the locks tumbling in my parts. I come and I feel magnets colliding. I piss and the ball bearings get out of line.”
“Terrible. I heard that Moss—”
“But it’s still chiefly sensory, I think. Oh my balance isn’t that terrific. I trip but I don’t always go down. I can touch my finger to my thumb. But what’s the good of kidding? I’ll be on steroids in a year—two at the outside. All I’m really holding out for is the opening of my Travel Inn. I’d like to get that under my belt. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Now the damned electricians are out on strike. But there’s talk of settlement. It could be open by this summer if they get down to business. Almost everything’s ready, the furniture will be coming in, the TV’s. It’s just the electricians holding us up. It’s going to be terrific, Gus-Ira. My biggest thing yet. I want you and the family as my guests for the opening. Hold July open.”
“That sounds swell, Ben. We’ll certainly try to make it.”
“That’s a promise now.”
“Sure. We’ll try.”
“What’s this about Moss?”
“Moss?”
“You said you heard that Moss something something.”
“Oh. Maxene was telling me that he may have his driver’s license revoked.”
“Yes?”
“The insurance company is talking about canceling his policy. There’ve been some claims against him.”
“ Boy, the nerve of those guys. You pay your premiums—and those are some premiums. Believe me, I know. You pay your premiums, dent a few fenders, and they want to close you down. Sore losers. I can’t get life insurance because of the M.S.”
“Well—”
“The underwriters. Letters from a half dozen of the best neurologists in the country. I’ve seen the letters. Beautiful. Like good references. Like advise and consent on a shoo-in Secretary of State. The companies turn me down.”
“Really?”
“They turn me down. Or want ridiculous premiums. I wanted to take out a million dollars. You know the premium those putz-knuckles are asking?”
“A million bucks? Why would you want to take out a million-dollar insurance policy?”
“My God, Gus, you have to ask something like that? For the kids, for you guys, but it’s out of the question. They want a hundred twenty-five grand a year to cover me. Fucking whore-hearts. My neuros tell them it’s sensory…Hell, their own neuros tell them it’s sensory and they’re still betting I won’t live eight years.”
“A hundred twenty-five thousand. That’s wacky.”
“Goofy.”
“ Incredible.”
“Well, what the hell, I’ll be on steroids in a year, my face out of shape as a whore’s pillow. Lopsided as hobgoblin. Still, I could last years strapped to the wheelchair. But I guess I see their point. The payments. How would I keep up the payments?”
“Gee, Ben, when you talk like that—” Kitty said.
“Don’t you worry, baby, just don’t you worry. You guys are provided for. Have I ever cost you a nickel?”
“I hate to hear—”
“Have I cost you a nickel? Was there ever a time I didn’t pay back? Did I ever once have to come to you and say, ‘Boys, girls, I can’t handle the payments, go to bat for me.’?”
“Come on, Ben.”
“Not once. Not one time. Dad put you under an obligation and I’m obligated.”
“Please.”
“No. I’m obliged. All right,” he told Mary, “it ain’t the Ottoman Empire, but Monaco maybe, San Marino perhaps, whatever they call those postage-stamp republics they have over there. Something like that my tidy enterprises. For you, for Lorenz, for Helen, the others.”
“Speaking of Helen,” she said as if she wanted to change the subject.
“No no. Don’t be embarrassed by my love. Please, Mary. Take it or leave it, but don’t be embarrassed. And how do you like this? My old guy rhetoric, my stage-door style? Call me Pop and give me high marks for loyalty.”
“Loyalty? Loyalty to what, Ben?”
“To what? To you. To you, Irving. To you like a toast. To you. Listen, I’ve taken plenty of loyalty lessons over the years. I’m a Finsberg patriot, hip hip hooray. Maybe loyaler,” he said to Cole, “than you guys have been. Oh, not to me. I don’t complain. All I got to complain are my toes tingling in my shoes like I’m walking barefoot in sandstorms. All I got to complain are my fingernails tickle. That my electricians don’t settle—but I heard the Fed mediators are in on it now. There may be a break soon. I think August at the outside for the opening of my Inn. You can come, right? My guests. There’s never been a Flesh/Finsberg Franchise Gala. What, you think I’d ask you to a Baskin-Robbins opening? You should fly in and look at the flavors before they melt? Though, you know,” he told Gertrude, “it might have been worth it. The colors of those ice creams! Chocolate like new shoes, Cherry like bright fingernail polish. We do a Maple Ripple it looks like fine-grained wood, a Peach like light coming through a lampshade. You should see that stuff—the ice-cream paints bright as posters, fifty Day-Glo colors. You scoop the stuff up you feel like Jackson Pollock. There have been times—listen to me—there have been times it’s busy, I’m tired from a trip, my symptoms are crawling in my ears like ants, and I go back of the counter to help out. I roll up my sleeves and I get cheerful. Cheerful. I whistle while I work. No kidding,” he told Patty, “I take one look at the ice-cream acrylics and I’m happy as Looney Tunes. I almost forget my teeth have goose bumps.”
“Goose bumps?”
“This M.S. is no respecter of feelings. It blitzkriegs the nerves, gives your hair a headache. You think there are splinters in your eyes and the roof of your mouth has sunburn. But what the hell, the electricians are close to settling, the union representatives are seriously considering the latest proposals, they may bring them to the rank and file for a vote. Then—who knows?—five, six weeks’ work and you can call it a Travel Inn. You’ll be there, of course. I’m expecting all the kids. It’ll be like old times.”
“With Jerome the way he is—”
Jerome? Jerome’s fine. Shipshape. I already invited Jerome. I spoke to Jerome last week.”
“He hadn’t gone in for the tests last week.”
“What tests? He didn’t say anything about tests. He never mentioned tests. What’s going on with Jerome?”
“That’s what they’re trying to determine, Ben. I don’t understand it. Supposedly we’ll know in a few days.”
He called Jerome but there was no answer.
He called Helen.
“Christ,” she said thickly, “who the hell is this?”
“It’s Ben. Did I wake you? Gosh, I’m sorry. It’s only just past midnight here. I didn’t think you’d be asleep yet. You’re what, nine o’clock in Los Angeles?”
“I sound like the time and temperature lady to you, jackoff?”
“Hey, Helen, it’s Ben. It’s Ben, darling.”
“ ‘Hey, Helen, it’s Ben,’ ” she mocked. “Jeepers, douchebag, you’re some fucking bore. I spoke to you a month ago. You told me your knuckles had temperature. What’s up now, you getting electric shock in your snot?”
“It’s about Jerome, sweetheart.”
“Screw Jerome.”
“Helen, have you been drinking? You know how you get when you’re drinking.”
“Mind your business. What do you think this is? You some kind of wise guy? Nuts to you. Wanna fight? Get off the planet.”
He’d been calling them, feeding them his symptoms, the heavy weather, all the isobars and thunderheads of his multiplying sclerosis. (It was crazy, but it was as if the days when his paresthetic hands had troubled him, when his skin crawled in anything but natural fibers, when the nerves in his feet sent out shoots of electric quiver, had been a golden age, the halcyon good old days of manageable discomfort.) Now his body shipped a queer illicit cargo of intolerable
contraband sensation. Things no torturer could make up. His body a host to amok feeling—and all still below the level of pain, things not pain, as if pain, as he remembered it, was only a matter of the degree of things honed and sharp, tender through sore to pinched, some verb wheel of friction and thorned flesh, only the surgical cutlery of bruise, nip, sting, stitch, ache, and cramp. Pain, he thought, he could take. Or could have afforded the addiction that would have purchased relief. These other things, these new proliferating sour dispensations were something else and lived, thrived—he knew, he’d tried them—beneath all the powerful analgesics—Demerol, codeine, laudanum, morphine. And had held back from his godcousins the really big stuff, the monstrous that he dared not put in words, dared not try them with. Held back all that was unimaginable: sounds that tickled his eardrums; his tongue rubbed raw in his saltwater saliva; the steady, constant Antarctic cold of his hands and feet and eyelids—he could not endure air conditioning and wore thick furred gloves in even the hottest weather—the impression he had that his body was actually striped like a zebra’s, the dark strips of skin and flesh, or what he imagined were the dark strips—he could see that he was not really striped—heavier somehow than the light, harder to negotiate in gravity; the sensation he had that he was wet deep inside his body, wet where he could not get to it—like someone with an unreachable itch—where he could not dry it with towels or rub it with toilet paper, though he tried. Though he wiped and wiped himself, he felt always as if he sat in some medium of diarrhea, minced, oozy, slippery shit. Also, his olfactory system was faultily wired so that he hallucinated tastes and smells, confused them crazily with their sources till finally, experimentally breaking the code, he ordered desserts and cakes at dinner if he felt like seafood, seafood if his body craved meat, meat if he had a taste for something sweet. Had not told them any of this who kept on now—he couldn’t say why, couldn’t account for why he did not kill himself, or had not died—by dint of a will and a set of motives he knew to be as illusory and unfounded as his impression that his body was striped.
“I have arrived,” he told Oscar, “at a stage of my life where I must manufacture reasons to keep going,” but not explaining this further, certainly not giving any indications that his love for them might be one of those reasons. But perhaps he did not believe this himself.
Was worried. Concerned. Not hurt (everything beneath pain). Even though he knew they knew where to find him, where he hung out to keep his eye on the landscapers and supervise the movers who daily brought the suites of motel furniture, where he oversaw the construction of the swimming pool and sauna and signed for the television sets he had bought over a year before from Nate Lace at the Nittney-Lyon, and kept a weather eye out for any nuance of movement in the impasse with the electricians, and conducted the business of all his remaining baker’s-dozen franchises throughout the country, become a sort of Nate Lace himself now, holed up, at once waiting and doing business. And still they didn’t call. Even though they knew of his illness (though not its degree, he having spared them that, spared them, even as he spoke to them, when he, that is, called them, the terrible symptoms of speech itself: that talking, making sounds, seemed to chafe the soft insides of his cheeks, raising blisters). Not even forgiving them. What was there to forgive? They’d told him. They’d grown apart.
“Loyaler,” as he told Irving, “than you guys have been, not even to me, I’m not in it, but to each other. Growing apart. What was it, you didn’t watch your diets? You let yourselves go? Genes, genes like that, like you had, are holy. A responsibility. Once-in-a-lifetime genes. To be protected. What’s the matter? You’re Finsbergs. Don’t you know anything about endangered species?”
“But why complain to me?” Irving said. “Jesus, Ben, I’m the one who held on. Don’t blame me,” racially prejudiced Irving said, “for the mongrelization of this family. Sure, I married a darkie, but damn it, Ben, I’m the only Finsberg who hasn’t changed. I look the same. A year older but still charting the Finsberg course, still with the old twin and triplet telemetry and trajectory. It was them. I’m right on target for what would have been the manifest destiny of Finsberg evolution. Gee, Ben, I didn’t grow apart.”
“I know,” Flesh said, “I know, Irving. You’re a good boy, a nice man, but how could I say such things to the others? To the ones who did let themselves go? Who did grow apart? Forgive me, pal, I’m just letting off steam.”
And the more worried, the more concerned—Jerome’s tests—the less there was to forgive anyone. Perhaps they didn’t want to upset him, felt they needed to protect him, as he protected them from his darkest symptoms. So he didn’t call. He stopped calling. Waiting for good news, waiting for the strike to be settled, waiting for something nice to tell them for a change.
It was settled in April. Ben nodded to the man who told him and went immediately to the telephone.
He called Gus-Ira. When the ringing stopped and he heard the connection completed, he began talking at once. “We’re cooking, the rank and file ratified and the boys will be…” There was a voice against his own voice. “Gee, I was so excited,” he said, “I didn’t even say hello. It’s me, Gus-Ira, it’s Ben. Say, I just…”
“…and that’s just for starters,” Kitty’s voice said, “you haven’t heard the…”
“Kitty, is that you? Hi, it’s Ben. There must be some freak connection. How are you, Kitty dear, how are you, Gus-Ira? ”
“…thing is he doesn’t stop. I think someone should call him off, tell him that (a) number one…”
“Kitty? Gus-Ira?” Ben broke in.
“…our own troubles, and (b) number two…”
“Hello? Hello?”
“ water is thicker than godblood.”
“Can’t you hear me? This is a freak connection. Hello?”
“…and Patty’s grandstanding that time: ‘He can lie beside me.’ All right, I know she said it to get him off our backs, but statements like that only encourage him. These damned phone calls. I tell you, he’s a sick man. I tell you? He tells you. How much longer do you think he can continue to function? I mean it. He expects to stay in Riverdale and have the family care for him. Do you realize what that would mean? The man’s a bore with his love and loyalty. And not just Riverdale. You won’t escape. It’ll be Ben Flesh, the traveling invalid, Ben Flesh…”
“Hello?”
“…shlepping his roadshow symptoms around the Finsberg bases like King Lear. A month or so in Riverdale. Then we parcel-post him to Noël in San Antonio. Dying on the circuit, only instead of doing his Grand Rounds on his own time and at his silly franchises it’ll be at our places, we’ll be his franchises, and don’t kid yourself, it’ll end up being at our expense, too. The man has no head for figures.”
“No,” Ben said involuntarily, “I have a head for figures. Hello?”
“Well, I won’t have him,” Kitty’s voice said. “And I’ve spoken to Lorenz and Gertrude and Cole. I’ve spoken to Moss, Maxene, Oscar, Irving, and poor Jerome.”
“Poor Jerome? Why ‘poor’ Jerome? What’s wrong? Kitty? Gus-Ira? Hello?”
“…feel the same. So I’m calling to tell you, Gus-Ira, I won’t have him, no one will. And my thinking is, there ought to be a solid front on this thing. We’ve got to get it together, we’ve got to be prepared. Ben will take any advantage. Okay, when we were kids it was different, he even filled a need, I suppose, but now we’ve got our own families. I won’t have him, Noël won’t, none of the girls, none of the boys I’ve spoken to. So the next time he calls, try to give him some inkling. No one wants to be actually rude to the old man, no one wa—”
Her voice broke off in the middle of the word. It was as if there had been a sudden power failure, or, rather, as if the lights in one part of the house, the living room, say, had suddenly gone out while the lights in the dining room continued to burn, for Flesh could still hear the crepitation of connection. Perhaps she was catching her breath, he thought, perhaps she was biting her tongue. Water is thi
cker than godblood? Than godblood?
“No,” Ben Flesh said into the phone, “you’ve got me wrong, Kitty. A man organizes his life around necessities, principles. Only some people, me, for example, are born without goals. There are a handful of us without obsession. In all the world. Only a handful. I live without obsession, without drive, a personal insanity even, why, that’s terrible. The loneliest thing imaginable. Yet I’ve had to live that way, live this, this—sane life, deprived of all the warrants of personality. To team up with the available. Living this franchised life under the logo of others. And do it, these past years, under impossible burdens of discomfort. Have some feelings, Kitty, have a little pity, Gus-Ira. What, you think I like these random patterns? I’m irregular as the badly toilet-trained. The strange, the personal have been spared me. Nothing happens but disease. Nothing…”
“Hello,” Gus-Ira said jovially, “this is Gus-Ira Finsberg. I’m sorry that I’m not in to take your call. This is a recording. If you’ll wait for the little electronic beep and leave your name, number, and message, my Phone-Mate 270 will record you for two minutes and I’ll get back to you just as soon as I return.” There was a pause. Ben heard the beep.
“It’s me, Gus,” he said, “it’s Ben. Your Phone-Mate 270 is fucked up. Probably you put the reels in backward. You were never mechanically inclined, Gus-Ira. Even as a little boy. Goodbye.”
Gus-Ira called.
“Ben,” he said gloomily, “oh, Ben.”
“It’s all right,” Ben said, “don’t feel bad. Kitty’s a bed wetter. I consider the source. Don’t fret, Gus,” he said. “Only tell me, level, do you feel that way? Kitty’s—”
“Kitty’s dead, Ben,” Gus-Ira said.
“What?”
“She died. She’s dead.”
“When? How? What are you…”
“She bought it, Ben. She chafed to death.”
“She…?”
“All those years of wetting herself. C5H4N4O3.”
The Franchiser Page 31
