Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

Yes, Ben thought.

“Well, she found out where the auditions were to be held and she went down. She used her maiden name. She wasn’t looking for favors and figured that after all these years the Finsberg name packed more clout than the name she used to dance under, so she deliberately used her old stage name. These producers are young. They aren’t the old-timers.”

“Yes?” Ben said.

“So what can I tell you, Ben? They asked her to tap dance to ‘They Go Wild, Simply Wild over Me.’ She dropped dead. What can I tell you?”

“She dropped dead?”

“She was out of condition, Ben. She’d prepared ‘Alice Blue Gown.’ She never expected the other.”

“I’m sorry, Cole. I don’t know what to say.”

“So that’s the story. What can I tell you?”

“Gosh,” Ben said, “a heart attack.”

“Yeah,” Cole said dreamily, “that and stage fright. Comeback fever. It’s getting them all, the old-timers. It’s a terrible thing, Ben. These revivals are killing them all off. The ex-hoofers are dropping like flies. So how have you been?”

“Is the family together?”

“Until a few days ago. Most everyone’s gone off by now. Gertrude and Gus-Ira went back today. There’s just a few of us in Riverdale.”

“Who’s there now, Cole?”

“Oscar,” Cole said, “Noël, and myself.”

“What about the girls?”

“Patty, La Verne, and Maxene,” Cole said coolly.

“I’d like to speak to Patty, please, Cole.”

“Sure,” Cole said. “Sure you would.” He could hear Cole call out. They must all have been in the drawing room. “It’s himself. He wants to speak to you , Patty.” There was a pause. “She’ll take it upstairs— Godfather .”

He understood Cole’s feelings. He had slept with almost all the boys’ sisters by this time. “How are you, Cole?” he asked gently.

“Oh,” Cole said, “you know. The Japanese beetles have been pesky this summer, but aside from that I’m managing.”

“That’s good, Cole, I’m glad.”

“Hi, Ben, it’s Patty.”

“Hello, Maxene. I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”

“Darn it, Ben, we never could fool you.”

“No.”

“Hello, Ben.”

“Hello, Patty.”

“I’ll get off now, Ben.”

“Goodbye, Cole.”

“Goodbye, Ben.”

“Goodbye, Maxene.”

“Have you got to see me, Ben? Are you at a hotel now?”

“Patty, I’ve got to see you. I’m at a hotel in Colorado Springs. The Broadmoor. Get a plane to Denver, then fly down from there.”

“I’ll come out tomorrow,” Patty said. “I’ve been waiting for your call. I knew it would be you. I knew you would need me. That’s why I stayed on.”

“I know.” He did. Patty, who could not hear loud noises, was the one he needed.

She wired her arrival time and he met her plane. “I’m sorry about Estelle. I sent a contribution in Mom’s memory to the Riverdale Temple Sisterhood.” Patty nodded and opened her arms. They kissed. She flicked her tongue around inside his mouth, darting it like a mouse across the vault of his palate. “Woof,” he said, releasing her. “Woof.”

“The Black Studies Programs in the nation’s high schools and universities,” she said, “are racist in intent. They’re designed to induce in young colored people a pride of such fantasy dimensions that an entire generation of blacks will voluntarily return to Africa.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“I’m not the Insight Lady for nothing,” she said.

He had loved all the girl twins, all the girl triplets. From the time he was twenty-four until now they had been his collective type. All that could happen to married men had happened to him. He had courted them, loved them well, had affairs, been unfaithful, kissed, made up, moved in, moved out. He had loved and won, loved and lost, pined, mooned, yearned. He had had understandings, stood up at their weddings, given the brides away, proposed the toasts. He had flown in for their operations, collared the surgeons in the corridor, spitting his tears in their faces, thrown down his distraught warnings, pleading always his passionate sui generis priorities. Over the years his love letters to them would have made thick volumes. And though they were identical physically, he had loved each in her turn — achronologically — and despite the monolith of their triplet and twin characters, for different but not quite definable reasons.

“I don’t know,” Ethel had once said to him when he was falling in love with Mary, “what you see in her.”

“What,” Mary had asked when he was beginning to see Helen, “has she got that I haven’t got?”

And he could not have told her. Could not have told any of them. It was as if love were the most solipsistic of energies, spitting and writhing, convulsing on the ground like a live wire, uncoiling, striking at random.

“It’s — what? — a feeling, an emotion,” he told Kitty when he was starting to itch for balding Maxene, “like anger, something furious in feeling that will not listen to reason.”

“All us cats are gray at night, surely,” Lotte said when she learned he was seeing LaVerne. “Don’t you know that?”

And it was so. If he knew anything it was their replicate bodies, their assembly-line lives, their gynecological heads and hearts, informed about their insides as a mechanic. Which, for one, made him a great lover, the official cartographer of Finsberg feeling, expert as a pro at the free-throw line, precise as a placekicker. And lent something cumulative to love, some strontium ninetiness in his ardor, the deposits compounding, compounding, till the word got round, the sisters deferring after the third or fourth, hoping probably to be last, as heart patients, say, might want their surgeons to have performed an operation a thousand times before it was to be performed on them.

“Oh, God ,” Gertrude screamed in orgasm, “the last shall be first!”

And for him cumulative, too. But if the sex was better each time for his practice, that did not mean it had ever been fumbling. No. Never. The kiss he had given Lotte beside the bus all those years before had had in it all the implications of his most recent fuck. And some increment of the social in his relations with the girls, of the historical. Because he had seen them through not only their own puberty but the century’s, had heavy-petted them in the fifties, taken them, stoned on liquor, in lovers’ lanes in the back of immense finned Cadillacs, like screwing in a giant fish, worrying with them through their periods, sometimes using rubbers, sometimes caught without — who knew when one would fall in love? — driving them in the late fifties to gynecologists in different boroughs and waiting for them in the car while they were fitted for diaphragms. And in the sixties going with them to the gynecologists’ offices while their coils were inserted. Discoursing about the naughty liberation of the Pill and, when, in the late sixties, the warnings and scares began to appear, going with them right up to the shelves in pharmacies where they picked out their foams. Something of the mores of the times associated with each act. Could he, then, have fallen in love with history, with modern times, the age’s solutions to its anxieties? Have had with each girl what other men had never had — the possibility of a second chance, a third, of doing it all over again, only differently, only better? Sexually evolving with them during the sexual revolution.

But sentiment, too. That refractive as well as cumulative. Associating with each sister the song, the device, the clothing and underclothing peculiar to her incumbency. A living nostalgia, differentiated as height marks inked on a kitchen wall. An archaeology of sex, love, and memory.