Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“You know a lot of songs,” he said.

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “I know everything .”

They made love. Her cries during orgasm were insights.

“I wonder,” she moaned, “why the group photograph has always been a convention? It must be because the group is aware that the next minute one of them could be dead. We are good. We are .”

“Oh. Oh,” Ben cried.

“Have you ever noticed,” she squealed, “how bottles of salad dressing are all the same shape, tall necks and wide, bell-shaped t-t-torsos?”

“Oh, God,” Ben shivered. “Oh, God.”

“And how,” she panted, “the la-labels are the-these little co-collars at the neck, and the-these sh-shield shapes on the front and back, and how there’s al-always a r-recip e? ”

“Oh oh,” Ben raptured.

“That’s,” she groaned, “so they can all be sh-shelved to-together, so they may com-com -compete oh oh openly on the oh oh open market.”

“Uhnn. Oooh. Ahnn,” Ben whined.

“State capitols are legislative surrogates for the church architecture of Europe,” she keened.

Afterward they smoked some marijuana Patty had brought with her from New York. They passed it back and forth wordlessly. Ben was grateful for the silence.

“You know,” she said after a while, “you have this amazing insight into our bodies.” She meant hers and her sisters’.

“Yes,” he said, “by now I know exactly what you’ll do if I do this or that.”

“Why are you so stuck on us, Ben? Why are we so stuck on you?”

“You’re the Insight Lady.”

“The greatest neologism in the history of the English language is Tarzan’s cry when he’s swinging on vines—‘Awawawawawaw!’ What else could Burroughs have put in his mouth? ‘Gee!’? Believe me, it was a stroke of genius, Ben. You can demonstrate the reactionariness of reactionaries by showing how liberal they are about the distant. Policies that have them up in arms in their own country are a matter of indifference to them in underdeveloped nations. This is also true, incidentally, of people’s attitudes toward death. The best sentence is made out of the best combination of tenses, not out of the best words. Likewise the great work is the great action. Plots are more important than language. Plot is the language of time. How pompous pomp in a new country! The aristocracy, the army, and the pecking order in General Motors are all alike. All organizations equal all other organizations. Parliament and Barnum and Bailey. A Harvard professor I once saw on the Today show showed me that genius seems to have thought about what it has only just now been asked and, speaking beautifully about a subject, is actually inventing what it seems merely to be remembering. Other people’s lives are art. That’s why there’s a Broadway and a West End, why there’s literature. Spartacus was an antipacifist preaching exactly what Martin Luther King preached, but in reverse. Thus, ends are justified by means, since all means, if they work, are ultimately equal, that is, efficient . It is only ends which are unequal. We would both agree that some ends are nobler than others. Since means are interchangeable then, it is only ends which ever need to be justified. Oh, Ben,” she cried passionately, “I’m only this archaeologist of the daily. I read the quotidian is all. To me today’s newspaper is already nostalgia. Don’t look to me for the secret of your life!”

And no small talk even at dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurants. The menu her muse:

“Oh, look,” she said, “look at the menu! ” They were in the Penrose Room at the top of the old building with its view of the Rockies beyond a solid wall of glass. “ Feel it. The paper like a certificate of stock. Blue chip. If you look close you can see the tiny colored threads that run through it like a precious aspic of lint on money.”

“I can look close but I can’t feel it,” Ben said.

“Look at the cursive font distinctive as signature, the prices like distinguished addresses.”

“My hand.”

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “it’s as if printing costs determine the range of one’s appetite and fix it forever. Movable type and the destiny of hunger. When this menu was designed, it was designed once and for all. The chef and the man from graphics in consultation. Preordained, don’t you see, by what would look good on the document, for that’s what such a menu becomes — a document — legal and binding. Yes. A contract, if you please. ‘What do you do best?’ the graphics man must have asked. ‘Decide now, because you can’t change your mind later. The cost of this thing is like putting out a magazine.’ And he would have to have told him. Don’t you see what it means? Image and printing costs are responsible for the tradition of mediocrity in American restaurants.”

“But if the chef is doing what he does best—” Ben said.

“And how long must he do it? Chained to a years’ old assembly-line expertise, he must finally get bored, the quality has to suffer. How can he experiment? Where can he try out new recipes?”

“The food’s supposed to be very good here,” Ben said.

“Oh, Ben, don’t be naïve. Idiom only is informed. ‘Stop,’ it tells us, ‘where the truck drivers do.’ Do you suppose a truck driver’s palate is more knowledgeable than a rich man’s?”

“But you said—”

“It’s because they don’t usually have printed menus in such places. A mimeographed sheet shoved behind a hard clear plastic, and tucked like a snapshot into corner mounts in a photo album. Yes. And the blue-plate special in blue. You’ve seen him, surely you of all people, Ben, with your seventy thousand miles a year, you’ve seen him, the owner of the diner or the cook at the truck stop up on the last stool at the counter an hour before closing with his stencil in the typewriter and his hunt and his peck, doing tomorrow’s menu.”

“Usually such places the food is lousy.”

“The food, perhaps, the principle no. I don’t know this for a fact but it’s my guess that the Michelin people rarely list restaurants where the menus look like the Magna Carta.”

“Try the Rocky Mountain Rainbow Trout,” Ben said.

She was looking off in the distance. Ben followed her glance. Apparently she was studying a table of seven people near the western wall of glass.

“Never so much the family,” she said, “as when sitting together in a restaurant, the group leavened by an outsider, the daughter’s boyfriend or the son’s pal from university, say. A grandfather there, a father to pick up the check, a younger son ten. It’s the simultaneity of ease and showing off which makes the effect work.”

“You’re an expert on atmosphere,” Ben said. “But if you want to know, it’s the simultaneity of generations which does that.”

“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“I wanted to tell someone,” he said. “I wanted to tell someone what’s in store for me, and all you do is give me Significance drill.”

“You told me your symptoms. You gave me Gibberd’s prognosis. It’s very hopeful.”

“I want my remission back,” he said and burst into tears.

If she understood she chose to ignore it, unless the fact that she walked on his left — his right hand was the paresthetic one, his right arm the numbed one — both her arms wrapping his in the doggy stance of a woman without insights, like a gum chewer or a teenager window-shopping with her date. If he had looked into her face at such moments he would have seen it scrunched, beautifully cutened, her cheek high up on the sleeve of his sport coat and her eyes closed. If such cheerleader conditions were meant to make him feel the letters bloom on his jacket, her efforts were wasted. He felt mocked, a jackass old man fifteen years her senior. (Her Senior, yes.)