“I say die.”
“It’s a beautiful site, Leo. When the projects go up, there’ll be ten thousand middle-income families within a twelve-block radius.”
“Die,” Feldman said.
“Parking for fifteen thousand cars. At least talk to the developer.”
“Die.”
“You can’t avoid it any longer. The handwriting’s on the wall. Leo, I warned you a year ago. It’s no joke, being dropped from the group charge plate. It’s a slap in the face. What do you keep me for if you don’t listen to me? I don’t sell for you, I don’t wrap packages or wait on trade. I’m an idea man, Leo, a merchandising-concepts man. I see ways to bring this all off. We can get financing. My home-shopper plan, Leo—”
“Die,” Feldman said. “I say die.”
“It could be terrific. We put the customer’s size on IBM tape, we code his tastes, his needs, then we keep him advised what we have for him and send it to his house. They’ll go for this big, Leo.”
“Die.”
“Leo, you don’t listen. My franchise plan. What was wrong with my franchise plan? It’s only logic. If the little name can’t absorb the big name, let the big name absorb the little name. Merge, Leo.”
“Die? You say die?”
“All right, forget that, but at least look at the site I have in mind. This charge-plate business is only a first step. If the big stores put on the pressure, the papers won’t accept our advertising. It could happen. It happened in Mobile to Blum’s. Our volume is down eight percent. We let go sixteen people this year. Gerard Brothers took on fifty, Llewelyn’s thirty-seven. At least look at the site.”
“All right,” Feldman said, “I’ll see the sites. Die. Die.”
“Listen to what the developer tells you. It’s important.”
“Die,” Feldman said.
Feldman with his buyers—there were more men than women now (the war over and no more shortages, it being everywhere a nineteenth or even twentieth fat year, Feldman’s girls had been replaced, no longer traded away in his name their ultimate quiff pro quo, happily married for years, raising kids; really, he thought, it was astonishing how many of them had married the very men who had once been their clients, the boys stirred to sacrament by the premise of unvirtue). They were in a private dining room of the best hotel for the Quarterly Lunch. Back from the Coasts, returned from the factories and showrooms and warehouses for the ceremony, they felt, he supposed, in what was after all their home base, somehow even further than the miles they had traveled, because they were all there together, like correspondents returned from the fronts, knowing some special sense of colleague that lent distance. Specialists, authorities, one big happy family with private knowledge of the skies over Texas, Twin Cities’ economy, what’s moving in Portland. Today their mysterious brotherhood even deepened by a still unconfirmed report of a brother downed, Chester Credit of Furniture, alleged to be aboard a plane that had crashed outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. One of our aircraft is missing.
Feldman taps the cut-glass water goblet with the edge of his butter knife, rises to speak, their gloomed attention making him cozy, snuggish, solemn-comfy in the orderly business reality, actually at home, and them too—you couldn’t tell him otherwise—in the reserved room, reassured by the deep brown walls and the dark carpets and the white tablecloths and black waiters and, oh yes, this too, even Credit’s empty chair. He waves off the white sleeve of a waiter offering a dish of ice cream. He speaks to him in a soft voice, making an arrangement. “Don’t bother with that now, Waiter, please. I have to speak to these people.” The waiter looks at him. “If it melts, it melts, pal, okay? My responsibility. Thank you very much.” He clears his throat, a joy rising in it with the phlegm. He loves saying something important. “Ladies and gentlemen, my dear associates,” he begins formally, pleased as always by the rhetoric he brings to these occasions (his Secretary of State diction, as he thinks of it). “In private conversations just prior to this luncheon, I have already given some cursory briefing to a few of you regarding the absence of Chester Credit. I did not intend that my unfortunate news be imparted to some rather than all, and if I may be permitted a rather bitter paradox, it pleases me to see all of you so solemn. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, least of all myself, and I take it that the seriousness of your composure is an indication that you have all been apprised of my fears for Chester.
“Regarding the crash itself, I have very little additional to report at this time. During salad I was in telephone contact with our Miss Lane, and she tells me the situation in Charlotte is still indefinite. Let me emphasize that there has still been no official confirmation of the crash—repeat—there has still been no official confirmation of the crash. All we know for certain is that a check with the tower in Pittsburgh indicates that Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven is seven hours overdue. My informants tell me that an airliner’s instrumentation, and that would include its radio apparatus, frequently kicks out during the traumatic jar of a forced landing. But this ought not to comfort us very much, as none of the control towers between Charlotte and Pittsburgh report having had any communication with Flight Number Eighty-seven. The reflex s.o.p. for a pilot forced to bring his ship down is first to declare his intent over a special emergency frequency. Additionally, the weather throughout the East has been almost preternaturally clear for the past eighteen hours with an unlimited ceiling. Thus, unfavorable climatological murk can have nothing to do with the plane’s disappearance. For all these reasons, we can only conclude that the ‘fireball’ reportedly discerned by the two farmers fifty miles from Charlotte probably was Coast Airlines Flight Number Eighty-seven. I can extend no reasonable hope that these men may have been mistaken.
“Half an hour ago, during meat, Charlotte Airport was still unwilling to release its passenger manifest for Flight Eighty-seven. Coast Airlines was quite as adamant. I’m not blaming them for their reticence. Indeed, as I understand it, they are bound by law to maintain silence until it is positively ascertained that there has been a crash. Frankly, they have been most cooperative, and I for one am proud as hell of both of them. I’ve obtained their promise to release the manifest to us as soon as it’s made available, even before the agonizing rituals of positive identification and notification of next of kin, which, strictly speaking, they are obliged by law, though not, I gather, so stringent a one as the other, to observe. Their cooperation here could save us literally days of anxiety, and so, even under the oppression of our feelings, I don’t think we ought to let this occasion of still another instance of the mutual courtesy and respect between one American industry and another go by without acknowledging it. Whatever happens, I am tomorrow sending my personal letter of appreciation both to the executives of the Charlotte Airport and the executives of Coast Airlines.
“I want at this time to commend, too, Mrs. Beatrice P. Lisbon, secretary to Herbert Kronenberger of Dixie Chair, for her untiring efforts during this crisis. Not everyone knows this, but it has been chiefly Mrs. Lisbon with whom we have been in communication in Charlotte, and Miss Lane apprises me that the woman has been unstinting in her efforts to keep on top of the situation. I understand that she has put in numerous calls to the Coast Airlines people and the C.A.B. people and the Charlotte tower people, some of them during her lunch hour at perhaps her own expense. From what Miss Lane tells me, I am thoroughly satisfied that we could not have had a more selfless anchor man in Charlotte, and I mean at some not too distant date to formalize our appreciation with a small token from one of our departments.
“Now I don’t mean to extend to you here something which might ultimately turn out to be a deluded hope. We’re adults, and we must accommodate ourselves to adult reality. However, I would be finessing my responsibilities and would perhaps irretrievably undercut any future claim to candor, or claims on your candor, did I not acknowledge now one tiny morsel of possibility that Chester may not in fact have been aboard Coast Airlines’—let’s face it—FATAL F
light Number Eighty-seven at all.” Feldman paused. “Would you close the doors please, Waiter? Very good. Thank you very much.” He leaned forward. “What I am about to tell you must go no further, ladies and gentlemen. Should it turn out to all our infinite relief that Flight Number Eighty-seven did not crash, or that it did crash but that Chester was not aboard it, the information I shall impart must remain privileged. I wouldn’t bring it up at all, save that in matters of life and death, those concerned, even only peripherally concerned, are entitled to all the facts, that they might more intelligently apprehend the dangers. Not even Chester himself—if he’s alive—must ever know you know this…Very well, then. Here’s the situation.
“On first hearing reports of the alleged crash, I had Miss Codlish in Payroll research Mr. Credit’s expense sheets. This was a routine measure, intended merely to provide us with the name of Chester’s Charlotte hotel. Many things can happen, people oversleep, people miss planes. I wanted it confimed that Chester had or had not checked out. Well—and this struck me as peculiar—there just is no record of a Charlotte hotel, not a single voucher for the last five years. I had Miss Codlish double-check—with the same result. His dinners are accounted for, mind you, his lunches are, and there were even some significantly costly breakfasts, but not a single hotel or motel bill. It was upon discovering this that I first contacted Mrs. Lisbon, or rather had Miss Lane contact her, to find out if Chester had divulged his plans for the evening. You all travel. You know the small talk that goes on between a buyer and a secretary. Evidently she at first denied any access to Chester’s confidences, but from a certain tone she took, Miss Lane suspected she was concealing something. She pressed her on this, and several things came out. It seems that on one of Chester’s Charlotte trips five years ago Mr. Kronenberger gave a party. I know Herbert Kronenberger and have always found him to be a gracious, hospitable man, not one to stand idly by while a lonely buyer fends for himself in a strange city. He would invite Chester to his party. It would be a typical Kronenberger gesture. Mrs. Lisbon was at the party too—perhaps as innocent company for Chester; that part isn’t clear. What is clear is that evidently Chester had quite a lot to drink. Let’s not mince words: Chester was drunk. Rather than let him go back to his hotel by himself, one of the guests—not Mrs. Lisbon, and it’s chiefly this which leads me to suspect that Mrs. Lisbon had been invited to the party earlier and not merely as the extra woman to Chester’s extra man—volunteered to take him back. He left with a Mrs. Charlote DeMille, a prominent Charlotte divorcée, and there is some reason to believe he spent the night with her. What happened, evidently, is that in the car on the way home, Chester vomited all over himself. (Many of you will remember his behavior during the store’s tenth-anniversary celebration some years ago.) You can appreciate Charlotte DeMille’s position. She could not enter the hotel with him, and he was in no condition to negotiate the lobby by himself. Even to discharge him into the custody of a doorman would be to compromise herself irrevocably. (Charlotte is not the biggest city in the world, and this woman is, as I say, a prominent person there.) All evidence points to the probability that she drove him directly to her own home. There, from what I can gather from Miss Lane, who pieced it together from the discreet Mrs. Lisbon, Mrs. DeMille helped the helpless Chester to the bathroom next to her master bedroom, there being only a half-bath on the main floor, and a tub, in which she must have feared he might drown, in the guest bathroom on the second floor—helped Chester to the bathroom next her master bedroom, and undressed him and put him under the shower. Then, perhaps seeing that he was still helpless and that the vomit was not coming off, she found it necessary to lather him herself, and one thing led to another and she began to lather his penis and testicles. (Mrs. DeMille is a healthy woman, ladies and gentlemen, a healthy divorcée with the appetites and needs—I say needs—of any healthy woman.) All indications are that the warm water, the creamy lather, the concupiscent silences and darknesses of the divorce-lonely house created in Chester an erection a foot and a half long, and to make a long story short—no pun intended—Chester and Mrs. DeMille have been lovers for the past five years.
“Now, I had Miss Lane urge Mrs. Lisbon to call Mrs. DeMille to check about Chester’s sleeping arrangements last night, and although she manifested some reluctance, as they are no longer friends and such a question breaches the proprieties of estrangement, she did at last agree to have Mr. Kronenberger himself make the call. I have every confidence in Mr. Kronenberger’s delicacy in such an affair, but the fact is that Mrs. DeMille hung up on him, and we know no more now—unless one interprets outrage as guilt—than we did before. Even if Chester lives, I feel that a permanent strain may have been put on the Kronenberger / DeMille relationship. But I say this. I hope he lives. Although I better understand the real justification for those exorbitant breakfasts I have been paying for for the last five years, and although he was committed to return to our Quarterly Lunch, and although in the light of these developments we must soon undergo a searching reexamination of our furniture requirements—I must say that up to now I have never fully understood Chester’s insistence on using the products of North Carolina when other, cheaper merchandise is available elsewhere—I hope he lives. I hope, in sum, that it was a lovers’ quarrel, or some happy passion, some newly discovered refinement of shower love, that has kept him from us. And while I am not of course in a position to guarantee his job, I hold his life of value.”
At this point the maître d’ approached Feldman and whispered in his ear. Feldman straightened. “Thank you very much Maître d’,” he said. “See what else you can find out, please.” He turned back to the table. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned, “I have just been informed by the maître d’ that Charlotte has confirmed the crash. Fragments of the plane and the main fuselage have been discovered in a woods thirty-five miles from the airport.” Again the maître d’ approached the table, and Feldman heard what he had to say. “Yes,” he said, “I see. Thank you.” He sighed. “A headless body that fits Chester Credit’s description, and in the suit pockets of which have been discovered some singed identification papers belonging to him, was one of the first recovered. Under the circumstances, I have suggested to the maître d’ that we probably don’t want dessert, but if I have been unduly presumptive in speaking for all of you, I would want at once to be told about it, and in that case we could call the fellow back.”
The developer turned out to be little Oliver B.’s father.
Feldman went with him to the site, an ovoid valley three miles from the western edge of the city, where the developer tried to explain what the scarred, bulldozer-bruised area would look like in a few months, with its facilities in—the spanking planes of cement and intricate ramps and the cunning approach of the access road from the new interstate. But Feldman, who had no imagination in these affairs—he could not read blueprints or conceive how furniture would look rearranged—and for whom there was a terrible inertia in things, had difficulty following the developer’s explanations.
Instead, he found himself fascinated by the man, saw something terribly virtuous in him. For all the developer’s slim, distinguished appearance, his large eyes scholarly behind glasses, and odd, ruminative quality as he talked, the muscular mounds of cheek rising and falling comfortably with his words, Feldman sensed in him a fearful, optimistic energy, and found himself resenting what he knew would be the man’s good luck with machines—he was positive the developer got better mileage than he did—and skill with nature. He looked into the developer’s white, fierce teeth and knew at once that they were teeth that had sucked blubber and jerky—is that jerky on his breath now? he wondered—as easily as his own had scraped the pulp from an artichoke. He had a mouth that had saved lives. Feldman imagined its ardent kiss on a snakebite, or slipping over the blue lips of a man dragged from the sea. Listening to him, Feldman grew oddly comfortable, easy, and found that he had to move about to shake out the warm sensation in his extremities, the sense he was beginning
to feel of melting into the universe.
Frequently, as Feldman spoke, the developer smiled, inclining his head in an attitude of listening and judgment, his mood not of attention but of nostalgic concentration and courtesy and patience. At these times Feldman looked over the teeth and into the mouth and throat at the healthiest tongue he had ever seen, choice and red as a prime cut. You could drink his bright juices, his saliva clear as a trout stream. He could feel the man’s immense, beaming tolerance, concentrated as heat from a sun lamp, and had actually to shuffle his feet to dodge bolts of the chipper good will.
Then the developer, making a point, smiled a wide one, the biggest Feldman had yet seen, and Feldman stared deep down the man’s eyes, past good wishes, deeper than good hope, past faith itself to the sourcy bedrock of the developer’s vision, where he thought he saw the basic mix—the roily vats of molassesy premise that worked the circuits of his phoenixy will and gave him his feel for reclaimed land, for swamp and ashpit and trashy field where rats lurked and mice skittered. Feldman had seen enough. He interrupted him. “Excuse me, but that’s some smile you’ve got there.”
“I beg your pardon?” the developer said.
“You make jumping rabbits for Oliver out of an ordinary pocket handkerchief. Am I right?”
“Well, yes—but…”
“Sure,” Feldman said. “You do an admiral’s hat and a paper airplane from the war news. You make a tree from rolled-up newspapers, and forest animals from the shadows of your fists. Right?”
“The developer nodded slowly.
“I know. And a flute from a reed, and a kite from the wrappings around your shirts from the laundry.”
“What about the property?” the developer asked coolly.
“The property? I don’t want it.”
“Mr. Victman said—”
“I don’t want it,” Feldman said. He was very excited. “I won’t have it. Fuck your virgin land.” He looked at him narrowly. “We’re in the homestretch of a race: your energy against my entropy. The universe is running down, Mr. Developer. It’s bucking and filling. It’s yawing and pitching and rolling and falling. The smart money’s in vaults. Caution. Look both ways. Look up and down.” He picked up a beer can one of the workers had discarded. “Here,” he said, pushing the can toward him, “get yourself a string and another can. But don’t call me, I’ll call you!”
A Bad Man Page 26
