Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“When they were both in bed — and they slept in different beds, incidentally, for I heard Ness pull back his bedspread — and had turned off the lights — I could see the little strip of light go out where the door just barely misses meeting the carpet — and I was just about to go down the corridor to see what was with Marie Kripisco in 2240, I suddenly heard Mrs. Pewterball’s voice.

“ ‘Ness?’ she said. ‘Ness? Are you awake, darling, are you still up, dear?’

“ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘what is it, Elly?’

“ ‘I’m frightened,’ she said.

“ ‘Oh, El,’ he said, ‘I promise it will be all right.’

“ ‘But Florida , Ness.’

“ ‘It’s three years yet before I retire, El.’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘The St. Paul winters.’

“ ‘I know.’

“ ‘All that snow.’

“ ‘I know .’

“ ‘We’ll make friends, El. There’ll be people there. Why, goodness, 95 percent of the people in those condominiums are from up north. People like us. And we’re just looking. Though I’ll tell you, El, prices are going up all the time. If we find something we really like, I think we ought to snap it up, make a down payment. That way, too, darling, we could take our vacations in the winter and rent it out when we’re not using it. And don’t forget, there’s a Crossroads branch now in North Miami Beach. With my discount we could furnish the whole place for under two thousand dollars. Golly, El, if we did rent it out, our tenants would be making the down payment for us.’

“ ‘It isn’t that, Ness. I get just as cold in the winter, I know we’ll make new friends, I even agree about the economics of the thing. It isn’t that.’

“ ‘Then what?’

“ ‘The water, Ness. The water’s so hard down there. Do you know how much effort it takes to work up a good lather? People our age? Sweetheart, have you any idea what the heck that’s going to do to our love life?’ ”

He contacts Huntsville, Alabama, contacts Lumberton, North Carolina, contacts Fort Myers, Florida. He tells on the Glosses, tells on Mrs. Renjoubert, on Kith and the Buggle girls and the Pewterballs, and relates the normative one-on-one passions of the Marshes and Mangochitnas. He has Kingseed patrol the corridors of the motel and sends the news to Wilmington, Delaware, that Ron and Minnie Cates, talking in their sleep, each call out the name of different lovers. “Oh, Hubert,” Minnie pleads. “Sylvia, Sylvia,” Ron Cates cries out.

“Wilmington, Wilmington,” he has Kingseed ask their Inn-Dex, “what’s this? I recall,” he has him spell out on Travel Inn’s world-wide reservation system, “coming across scumbags in forests, panties in wilderness, love’s detritus on posted land, everywhere the flotsam and jetsam of concupiscence scattered as beer can, common as litter. What’s this, what’s this? Everyone everywhere is evidence, datum. The proof is all about us. We’re the proof. Everyone at the Super Bowl a fact of fuck. Every schoolboy, each senator, and every officer in every army, all the partners in law firms, and anyone on a mailing list or listed in a phone book or cramming for the written part of his driver’s exam. Each civil servant and every Pope and all the leads in plays and films and all the walk-ons and everybody in the audience. Everyone with anything to sell and anyone with money to buy it and all the faces on the cash exchanged for it, and every old man and all the dead. And also every representation, every sketched face in the funny papers, and every piece of clothing on every rack in every store in the world. And even furniture. Every chair or table or lamp to read by and all the beds. Every sideboard where the dishes are put away and every dish as well as every machine ever made, the toaster and the nuclear submarine, and every musical instrument and every rubber comb and each piece of chewing gum and all the pot roast. As though the world were merely a place to hold it all, as if gravity and Rumania and history were only parts of some great sexual closet. The world as Lovers’ Lane, drive-in, back seat, front porch, park bench, and blanket on the beach. Am I right about this Wilmington, Delaware? How’s your love life? Over.”

And an answer came, Ben reading it like stock-market quotation as it ticked out on the Inn-Dex:

YES. YOU ARE. A CONVENTION’S IN TOWN. WE’VE SEEN EIGHT HOOKERS GET INTO THE ELEVATORS SO FAR. EARLIER THIS EVENING WE HAD A CALL FROM TOM KLEINMAN IN 317 OBJECTING TO THE NOISE THAT THE HONEYMOONERS, EARL AND DELORES SIMMONS, WERE MAKING IN THE NEXT ROOM. MR. KLEINMAN SAID HIS BOY, TOM, JR., ELEVEN, COULD HEAR EVERYTHING THAT WAS GOING ON BETWEEN THOSE TWO. HE ASKED THAT EITHER WE CALL THE SIMMONSES AND TELL THEM TO HOLD IT DOWN, OR PUT HIM AND TOM, JR., IN A DIFFERENT ROOM. WE COULDN’T DO THE LATTER BECAUSE WE’RE FULL UP — THE CONVENTION. AND WE WERE RELUCTANT TO DO THE FORMER BECAUSE, WELL, YOU KNOW HOW IT IS, YOU CAN’T CALL GUESTS UP AND TELL THEM NOT TO FORNICATE. IT IS THEIR HONEYMOON, AFTER ALL. WHAT MR. PITTMAN, OUR INNKEEPER, FINALLY DID WAS TO CALL EARL SIMMONS UP AND TELL HIM HE’D HAD A COMPLAINT HE WAS PLAYING HIS TELEVISION TOO LOUD. YOU HAVE TO BE DIPLOMATIC. BUT YOU PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT, RINGGOLD, THE WORLD IS A VERY SEXY PLACE.

They Inn-Dex’d Chicago, contacted Denver, rang up L.A. Everywhere it was the same story. Not even the time differential made any difference finally, Ringgold’s nighttime, California’s evening, love’s mood obliterating time and space and all zones erogenous.

They put out all-points bulletins, calling Fort Wayne, Indiana, Springfield, Missouri, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Burlington, Vermont, Wichita, and Great Falls, Montana and Albuquerque, Phoenix, and towns up and down the Pacific coast. It was the same. Sperm was in the air like — like humidity. Heavy breathing was and squeals like imprint sounds in nature. Love’s high-pressure systems and lows, its fronts and squall lines and small-craft warnings only a sort of generic weather at last. Everything reduced finally to the skin’s friction, the fusion of agents and objects and all the moleculars of love.

Flesh couldn’t stand it. He had hoped to be torn off the air, to have been comeuppanced, jammed like the Voice of America, warned by Richmond itself perhaps. What he had not wanted was endorsement, all hunches confirmed. He should like to have been told by Houston that, no, folks round there seemed tuckered out, content, after a long day’s drive from Lubbock or a rough flight from Cleveland, to shower, in clean p.j.’s take their dinners on trays from room service, watch the telly, read the local papers, doze off.

“What’s this, what’s this?” he asked Kingseed. “Look, look,” he said, taking up the long printout. “Oh my. Oh. Oh my oh my.”

“Why are you upset?”

“Why? Because love happens,” he said. “It really happens. It actually takes place. It occurs. Why am I upset? Because love is sweeping the country and lyrics are the ground of being, singing the literature of the ordinary, and romance is real as heartburn. Because guys score and stare at the women next to them and trace their fingers gently over their sweetheart’s eyebrow breaking like a wave. Twelve million are epileptics.”

“Sir?”

“Twelve million are epileptics. A million and twenty-one thousand three hundred and eighty died of cardiovascular diseases. Three hundred and nineteen thousand of cancer. A hundred eleven thousand were killed in accidents. Pneumonia and influenza knocked off seventy thousand. Diabetes thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and seventy. Bronchitis and emphysema and asthma thirty-three thousand. Twenty-nine thousand died of cirrhosis of the liver and seventeen thousand of birth defects. Kidney diseases got twenty thousand and hernias close to eight, for Christ’s sake. TB killed sixty-six hundred and there were twenty thousand homicides. And one died of heaviness and one of bed wetting and one of prejudice and another of cradle cap and one of constipation and one of a blindness to metal and another of orneriness and one of household pests and one of left tittedness and one of female hard-boiled eggs and another froze to death when his temperature hit 98.6.”