Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

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.

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.