Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

And Patty was the last. (She was not the Insight Lady for nothing.)

They drove up to the Broadmoor, a pink Monaco castle at the foot of the Rockies, and he showed her the hotel in a proprietary way, taking her through the nifty Regency public rooms with their beautiful sofas, the striped, silken upholstery like tasteful flags. He showed her huge tiaras of chandelier, soft plush carpets.

“Yes,” she said, “carpets were our first floors, our first highways.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“We call the rug in the hall a ‘runner.’ It’s where the runners or messengers waited in the days of kings and emperors.”

“I never made the connection.”

“It’s an insight. Chandeliers must have come in with the development of lens astronomy at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I should think it was an attempt to mimic rather than parody the order of the heavens, to bring the solar system indoors.”

“Really?”

“Well, where, to simple people, would the universe seem to go during the daylight hours, Ben?”

“But chandeliers give light.”

“Not during the daytime. The chandelier is a complex invention — a sculpture of the invisible stars by day, a pragmatic mechanism by night. But a much less daring device finally than carpeting.”

“Why, Patty?”

“Because carpeting — think of Oriental rugs — was always primarily ornamental and decorative. It was a deliberate expression of what ground — our first flooring, remember, and incidentally we have to regard tile, too, as a type of carpeting— ought to be in a perfect world. Order, symmetry, design. And since rugs came in before lens telescopy, how could they know? Oh, carpeting’s much more daring. A leap of will.”

“Of will?”

“Men will the laws of nature.”

“I’m glad you came, Patty.”

“Oh, look,” she said, “just look.” They had stepped through the great French doors onto the broad cement patio behind the hotel where small wrought-iron tables and chairs had been set up. People chatted, sipped drinks, and watched the promenade of guests as they moved across the patio and onto the smooth, flower-bordered paths that circled the man-made lake. Cheyenne Mountain and Pikes Peak rose unobstructed behind the lake.

“It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?” Ben asked.

“It’s so sad,” Patty said.

“Sad?”

“Look,” she said, “look at the arrangement of the chairs. Look at the round tables.”

“So?”

“Ringside seats, Ben. It’s a play . They’ve pettied the mountains, turned them into a kind of nightclub act. They’ve made them a spectacle. Our rooms,” she said, “they’re rooms with a view, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Ben said, “we have a suite in the new building.”

“How European!”

Ben agreed, though he had never been to Europe. There was a Marienbad quality to the place, a sense of spa. It wasn’t what she meant. She meant that the idea of rooms with views was European, that the practice of pegging rates to one’s proximity to a mountain, or, as in the case of hotels and apartments lining Central Park, was, not so much a matter of commerce — surely hotels could fix the price of their rooms and suites so that they could make just as much money without charging extra for a view — as a throwback to an aristocratic principle that had, she supposed, its source in some notion of succession, a crown prince higher than a duke, a duke higher than a count.

“Certainly,” she declared. “ Now I see! It comes from the Court and the seating arrangements at table. The greater the revenues one could provide the royal treasuries, the closer one got to the king.”

“Gee,” Ben said.

“But it’s all so unnecessary . With the advances of architecture all rooms could have views. Rectangles are the enemy of democracy, concavity is its best friend.”

“I’m sick,” Ben said.

“What a lovely tie, Ben.”

“They told me I have multiple sclerosis. I got into my car and just started driving.”

“Men’s ties are a sort of male brassiere, of course. In the phallic sense of straightening the chest. I don’t go much for the plumage theory. What’s more interesting is that ties complete the circle of the throat, much as a priest’s collar does. Shirts, open at the throat, are arrows to the genitals. Do you suppose there can be a correspondence between the tie and the hangman’s noose? Idiom says ‘necktie party,’ but the operative word is ‘party,’ I should think, with its comic insistence on the collaboration between the celebrational formality and seriousness of death. Then there’s the notion of the knot, a clear adumbration of the Adam’s apple. But overriding all is the tie’s tattoo symbolism.”

“Overriding all, yes,” Ben said.

“To suggest the throat’s tattoo. Marvelous. And to do it in silk, wools, the softer cottons. Pleasure/pain. Velvet bondage. God! ”

“Maybe we’d better go up.”

“When they told you,” she said, turning to him, “did you ask, ‘Why me?’ ”

“No.”

“Listen,” she said, “this is important. Later, during your mad dash about the country, did you say it? Did you ever think it?”

“No,” he said, “not once.”

“Good for you, Ben,” she said. “Let’s go up. I want to make love.”

“Why me?”

As she unpacked, hanging her pantsuits so they would not wrinkle, carefully arranging her blouses and dresses on the hangers as one might tug and fluff clothing on a dressmaker’s form, making a chorus line of her shoes in the closet, setting out her lotions and creams on the counter, her combs and her brushes, like one setting out plants in a garden, putting her jewelry in the drawer like a shopkeeper seeding his cash register in the morning, Ben lay in the center of the king-size bed and watched her, another’s chores tranquillizing to him, soothing, seductive. The FM played softly and the insights poured from her as she moved about the room.

“ ‘La la la’ in songs is code for ‘love.’ Music is missionary. The church has its hymns, nations their anthems, every song is a serenade. Don’t kid yourself. Every song. And I’m not talking sombreros now, or greasers beneath the baked brick or near the stucco. What, you never heard the expression ‘They’re playing our song’? Music is primal salesmanship, Ben. Its most basic terms—‘note’ and ‘scales’—can be traced back to banking and commerce. What’s the commonest word in a lyric? ‘Gold.’ Consider musical comedy, Ben. The kind of song that made the Finsberg fortune. ‘I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store’; ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’ ‘There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow, there’s a bright golden haze on the meadow.’ (And a gold record, incidentally.) Or”—here she broke into song—“ ‘Longing to tell you but afraid and shy, I’d let my golden chances pass me by.’ And ‘by,’ incidentally, is a play on words. ‘I’ll get by as long as I have you.’ By — buy.”

Bye-bye, Ben thought.

“And ‘ have ,’ Ben, ‘ have .’ Good Lord, Ben, wake up. Think things through. ‘Pennies from Heaven.’ ”

“ ‘He’s just my Bill,’ ” Ben said.

“That’s it, that’s it. You’re making fun, of course, but subliminally that’s precisely what’s going on in that song. Remember, Showboat wasn’t written until America went off the gold standard and paper money came in. ‘I bought you violets for your furs .’ ‘A kiss on the lips can be quite sentimental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.’ ”