Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“Yes?”

“The insurance company is talking about canceling his policy. There’ve been some claims against him.”

“ Boy, the nerve of those guys. You pay your premiums — and those are some premiums. Believe me, I know. You pay your premiums, dent a few fenders, and they want to close you down. Sore losers. I can’t get life insurance because of the M.S.”

“Well—”

“The underwriters. Letters from a half dozen of the best neurologists in the country. I’ve seen the letters. Beautiful. Like good references. Like advise and consent on a shoo-in Secretary of State. The companies turn me down.”

“Really?”

“They turn me down. Or want ridiculous premiums. I wanted to take out a million dollars. You know the premium those putz-knuckles are asking?”

“A million bucks? Why would you want to take out a million-dollar insurance policy?”

“My God, Gus, you have to ask something like that? For the kids, for you guys, but it’s out of the question. They want a hundred twenty-five grand a year to cover me. Fucking whore-hearts. My neuros tell them it’s sensory…Hell, their own neuros tell them it’s sensory and they’re still betting I won’t live eight years.”

“A hundred twenty-five thousand. That’s wacky.”

“Goofy.”

“ Incredible.”

“Well, what the hell, I’ll be on steroids in a year, my face out of shape as a whore’s pillow. Lopsided as hobgoblin. Still, I could last years strapped to the wheelchair. But I guess I see their point. The payments. How would I keep up the payments?”

“Gee, Ben, when you talk like that—” Kitty said.

“Don’t you worry, baby, just don’t you worry. You guys are provided for. Have I ever cost you a nickel?”

“I hate to hear—”

“Have I cost you a nickel? Was there ever a time I didn’t pay back? Did I ever once have to come to you and say, ‘Boys, girls, I can’t handle the payments, go to bat for me.’?”

“Come on, Ben.”

“Not once. Not one time. Dad put you under an obligation and I’m obligated.”

“Please.”

“No. I’m obliged. All right,” he told Mary, “it ain’t the Ottoman Empire, but Monaco maybe, San Marino perhaps, whatever they call those postage-stamp republics they have over there. Something like that my tidy enterprises. For you, for Lorenz, for Helen, the others.”

“Speaking of Helen,” she said as if she wanted to change the subject.

“No no. Don’t be embarrassed by my love. Please, Mary. Take it or leave it, but don’t be embarrassed. And how do you like this? My old guy rhetoric, my stage-door style? Call me Pop and give me high marks for loyalty.”

“Loyalty? Loyalty to what, Ben?”

“To what? To you. To you , Irving. To you like a toast. To you . Listen, I’ve taken plenty of loyalty lessons over the years. I’m a Finsberg patriot, hip hip hooray. Maybe loyaler,” he said to Cole, “than you guys have been. Oh, not to me. I don’t complain. All I got to complain are my toes tingling in my shoes like I’m walking barefoot in sandstorms. All I got to complain are my fingernails tickle. That my electricians don’t settle — but I heard the Fed mediators are in on it now. There may be a break soon. I think August at the outside for the opening of my Inn. You can come, right? My guests. There’s never been a Flesh/Finsberg Franchise Gala. What, you think I’d ask you to a Baskin-Robbins opening? You should fly in and look at the flavors before they melt? Though, you know,” he told Gertrude, “it might have been worth it. The colors of those ice creams! Chocolate like new shoes, Cherry like bright fingernail polish. We do a Maple Ripple it looks like fine-grained wood, a Peach like light coming through a lampshade. You should see that stuff — the ice-cream paints bright as posters, fifty Day-Glo colors. You scoop the stuff up you feel like Jackson Pollock. There have been times — listen to me — there have been times it’s busy, I’m tired from a trip, my symptoms are crawling in my ears like ants, and I go back of the counter to help out. I roll up my sleeves and I get cheerful. Cheerful . I whistle while I work. No kidding,” he told Patty, “I take one look at the ice-cream acrylics and I’m happy as Looney Tunes. I almost forget my teeth have goose bumps.”

“Goose bumps?”

“This M.S. is no respecter of feelings. It blitzkriegs the nerves, gives your hair a headache. You think there are splinters in your eyes and the roof of your mouth has sunburn. But what the hell, the electricians are close to settling, the union representatives are seriously considering the latest proposals, they may bring them to the rank and file for a vote. Then — who knows? — five, six weeks’ work and you can call it a Travel Inn. You’ll be there, of course. I’m expecting all the kids. It’ll be like old times.”

“With Jerome the way he is—”

Jerome? Jerome’s fine. Shipshape. I already invited Jerome. I spoke to Jerome last week.”

“He hadn’t gone in for the tests last week.”

“What tests? He didn’t say anything about tests. He never mentioned tests. What’s going on with Jerome?”

“That’s what they’re trying to determine, Ben. I don’t understand it. Supposedly we’ll know in a few days.”

He called Jerome but there was no answer.

He called Helen.

“Christ,” she said thickly, “who the hell is this?”

“It’s Ben. Did I wake you? Gosh, I’m sorry. It’s only just past midnight here. I didn’t think you’d be asleep yet. You’re what, nine o’clock in Los Angeles?”

“I sound like the time and temperature lady to you, jackoff?”

“Hey, Helen, it’s Ben. It’s Ben, darling.”

“ ‘Hey, Helen, it’s Ben,’ ” she mocked. “Jeepers, douchebag, you’re some fucking bore. I spoke to you a month ago. You told me your knuckles had temperature. What’s up now, you getting electric shock in your snot?”

“It’s about Jerome, sweetheart.”

“Screw Jerome.”

“Helen, have you been drinking? You know how you get when you’re drinking.”

“Mind your business. What do you think this is? You some kind of wise guy? Nuts to you. Wanna fight? Get off the planet.”

He’d been calling them, feeding them his symptoms, the heavy weather, all the isobars and thunderheads of his multiplying sclerosis. (It was crazy, but it was as if the days when his paresthetic hands had troubled him, when his skin crawled in anything but natural fibers, when the nerves in his feet sent out shoots of electric quiver, had been a golden age, the halcyon good old days of manageable discomfort.) Now his body shipped a queer illicit cargo of intolerable contraband sensation. Things no torturer could make up. His body a host to amok feeling — and all still below the level of pain, things not pain, as if pain, as he remembered it, was only a matter of the degree of things honed and sharp, tender through sore to pinched, some verb wheel of friction and thorned flesh, only the surgical cutlery of bruise, nip, sting, stitch, ache, and cramp. Pain, he thought, he could take. Or could have afforded the addiction that would have purchased relief. These other things, these new proliferating sour dispensations were something else and lived, thrived — he knew, he’d tried them — beneath all the powerful analgesics — Demerol, codeine, laudanum, morphine. And had held back from his godcousins the really big stuff, the monstrous that he dared not put in words, dared not try them with. Held back all that was unimaginable: sounds that tickled his eardrums; his tongue rubbed raw in his saltwater saliva; the steady, constant Antarctic cold of his hands and feet and eyelids — he could not endure air conditioning and wore thick furred gloves in even the hottest weather — the impression he had that his body was actually striped like a zebra’s, the dark strips of skin and flesh, or what he imagined were the dark strips — he could see that he was not really striped — heavier somehow than the light, harder to negotiate in gravity; the sensation he had that he was wet deep inside his body, wet where he could not get to it — like someone with an unreachable itch — where he could not dry it with towels or rub it with toilet paper, though he tried. Though he wiped and wiped himself, he felt always as if he sat in some medium of diarrhea, minced, oozy, slippery shit. Also, his olfactory system was faultily wired so that he hallucinated tastes and smells, confused them crazily with their sources till finally, experimentally breaking the code, he ordered desserts and cakes at dinner if he felt like seafood, seafood if his body craved meat, meat if he had a taste for something sweet. Had not told them any of this who kept on now — he couldn’t say why, couldn’t account for why he did not kill himself, or had not died — by dint of a will and a set of motives he knew to be as illusory and unfounded as his impression that his body was striped.