Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

Then he touched with the fingers of both hands every square inch of his body. And the insides of his ears. And explored his nostrils. And poked about in his mouth to feel his teeth on his fingers, his cavities, to touch his tongue and dip it into the well behind his jaw. And reached into his asshole, going deep as a doctor.

His body was still there.

He called the front desk and asked that a bellman be sent to his room.

“Listen,” he told the man, “I’m going to give you ten dollars. I want you to send a woman. Cheap, expensive, I don’t care. I don’t care what color she is or what she looks like or anything about her age. I just want—”

“You want to be chucked out of here, that’s what you want.”

“No, no, you don’t understand—”

“Mister, it’s eleven-thirty in the morning. Oklahoma City isn’t New York.”

“Oh, I see,” Ben said, “the call girls haven’t started yet. I misunderstood. Oh, I see. Oh, that’s different.” He was addressing the bellman like a pimp but in his heart he felt as rehabilitated as Scrooge on Christmas morning. In another minute he would give him money to fetch a goose.

“Put your clothes on,” the bellman said.

“What? Oh.” He was still naked. Christ, had he traded his sanity for his remission? He couldn’t hope to explain. “Will you take the money anyway? I’m not — I didn’t know — look, I know what you’re thinking, what you’d have to be thinking, but it isn’t — It’s — Where’s my Bible?” he asked desperately.

The bellman sneered and Ben, when the man had gone, laughed his ass off, the same one he could touch again with his fingers and feel when he wiped himself.

Which didn’t butter any parsnips. He should have been at his Cinema I and Cinema II in the Draper Lake Shopping Mall, but he wasn’t leaving the motel till he got laid. He called his manager and said he was still in Wichita but was about to leave and would make it down by that evening.

He dressed and went into the dining room and had his lunch. The waitress was a young and pretty girl, and under the napkin on his lap he had an immense hard-on. He chewed his food nervously and stammered when he asked the girl for water. He made her stand by while he added up his check and his brain raced with schemes to engage her personally. He ordered desserts he did not want, commented on the weather, what people did before there was air conditioning, how interesting it must be to work in a motel, meet all those people, American people, who lived — he recalled his rider’s phrase — in the middle of the middle class. “You learn,” he said wildly, “about their different tastes. I mean, coming from all over as they do, they bring, they, uh, bring their customs with them, their peculiar, well, er, folk dishes. That would be, uh, be a, a fair statement, wouldn’t it?”

“Very fair,” she said. “In the morning the kids want Sugar Frosted Flakes and the grownups eat bacon and eggs.”

“Yes. Well…”

“Was there anything else? One of the girls is out today and I have her station, too.”

“Anything else? No no. It was, er, delicious. My compliments to the chef.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Yes. Well…Good luck, good luck to you. Only you can prevent forest fires,” he added lamely. He felt like an idiot and tipped her two dollars for a three-dollar lunch. His salvation now, his only hope not to seem like a fool in her eyes, was to seem insane. Madness had a certain integrity which stupidity lacked.

He started back to his room. It was absolutely necessary that he have a woman, yet, in a strange way, his desire had little to do with lust. Even his hard-on had been more a fact of his remission than of lasciviousness. He had told his brain what to do and it, in its new health, flexing all its recovered muscles, had done it. “See,” his brain said, “watch this. It’s like riding a bicycle.”

A maid was making up the room across from his. He let himself in with his key and cleared the motel soap off the bathroom shelves and hid it in his suitcase. He scooped up the towels he had used and shoved them into the shower stall.

“Miss,” he said, standing in the doorway of his room, “oh, miss?”

“Yes yeah?” She looked to be a woman in her late forties or early fifties, but it was difficult to tell. She may have been an Indian. She was extremely short, very fat.

“I don’t seem to have been left any soap.”

“No yeah? Take from cart what you need.”

“Oh.” He had had the idea she would bring it to him. He made a great to-do about selecting the soaps, strolling about the big canvas wagon as if it were a sweet table or a notions counter, looking into the cartons of matchbooks and the sheaves of treated shoe-shine cloths like bundles of fresh dollars in a teller’s drawer. He examined the cutlery of ballpoint pens and poked about among the waxy motel postcards and stationery. “Well,” he said, when the Indian woman came out with a roll of dirty bed linen, “there’s certainly a lot of things you have to remember to give out. All these pens and cloths and”—he looked directly into the woman’s face—“ sanitary napkin disposal bags .”

“Mnh.”

“Oh hey,” he said, “look at that, will you? The sheets.” From where he was standing he could not see the sheets. “All crumpled and soiled …A lot goes on in a motel room, I bet.”

“What yeah?”

“I say, a lot goes on in a motel room that you and I wouldn’t know about. Or that I wouldn’t. You must see it all though. I mean, if you could only talk I bet you could tell some stories.” She had walked back into the room and started to make up the bed. Ben followed. “Could you use some help? I don’t claim to be much of a hand at making beds, but — uh, a little lady like you, I mean, well, if both of us…” She moved very quickly, so short she barely had to stoop to tuck in the sheets. Ben watched as, inverting the pillowcase and aligning one end of the pillow with it while holding the four edges, two of pillow and two of pillowcase, she flipped the pillow into its case. “That’s good,” Ben said. “I’m going to watch you closely on the next one. That’s a real time-saver.” She seemed unaware that he was in the room. “That’s really something,” he said when she had done it again with a second pillow. “That’s one of the tricks of the trade, I guess, what you pick up over the years. Yep yeah?” She had covered the bed with its spread. Ben took a deep breath. “I can’t get over how fast…I’ll bet you could muss up a bed and make it again with the same sheets without the housekeeper ever…Let me ask you something up front. Do you know what the hell I’m talking about?”

“No yeah.”

“All right. We’ll put it this way: You must get all kinds in a place like this. You must even get kinds like me.”

“Yes yeah? You yeah?”

“Lonely.”

That was not it, of course. He was not lonely. He was coated with the need to use himself. Ben Flesh, the restored Bourbon, the found Louis, the exile returned and looking for ways, literally, to feel and make himself felt. He did not so much want to screw — he had screwed in the last three years; he had not run out of god-cousins; there was the “Looks-Like Lady,” the “Way to Make a Million Dollars Lady,” there were others, some even who were not his godcousins — as to touch another human being, to hold someone, to feel their two lives, his, the other’s, like sparks arcing between two rods, to catch a pulse — this morning, lying on the bed after his shower, he had taken his own pulse, able to feel for the first time in years in the tips of his fingers the rhythm of his blood — his hands like heat-seeking devices, holding the life signs and interior parameters of another human, to feel her tremble, to hold her and feel her sweat, to know her body temperature and search out beneath her skin the muscles and bones, to feel hair and know it from flesh and flesh from cosmetics and with his eyes closed trace the calluses on her fingers and distinguish the fine down on her arms. His disease had deadened others as well as himself, had turned whole populations to wood and stone and given them the dead, neutral texture of plastic. It needn’t even be a woman. A child would do. He would have pinched cheeks and held their small heads, or dandled babies on his lap, and the squirmier the better. Oh yes. And been arrested. The curious fact of his civilization was that all intimacies save the ultimate were out of the question. You could fuck but not touch. He wanted nothing more now than to stand beside this small woman and close with her, feel her breath on his hand, or even, just to shake hands with her. But it was impossible, finally, to ask. She would have to know his life. From the beginning to this moment. Then, the most curious thing of all, she would yield, lending him her humanity as eagerly as if he had been her child. They would lie beside each other and he could touch her wherever he wished. She would run her finger across his palm. He would let down her hair. Everything would be permitted, nothing withheld. But it was impossible. There were no words save those of proposition and he could humiliate neither himself nor her any longer. “Thank you,” he said, “for the soap. You’re very kind.”