Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“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 neurologist 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.”