Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

Feldman did not wait for the salesman to write up the order, but rushed away, almost as if he needed to be unaware of something good happening to him so that when it came to his attention later, it would carry a special increment for having been delayed. He rarely thought of his character, but took a certain comfort from such measures, seeing them as respectable evidences of his soundness, a willed humbling that qualified him for fortune.

In his effort to hurry away, Feldman took a wrong turn and found himself on a descending escalator. Feeling exactly like one drifting earthward in a parachute, he saw the looming women’s-wear department and was seized by an old idea.

There had been, in his adolescence, a spate of films about department stores — comedies about stern old merchants who found it difficult to understand their carefree rakish sons. Sometimes it was the fathers with the eccentric good will and the sons who were serious. These films had been Feldman’s literature. They embraced, he thought, everything that was possible in human character, and watching them, he had glimpsed the irreducible polar concepts of human existence — stodge and lark, duty and holiday, will and sense. Inclined to the one or the other, he was sympathetic to both, the good arguments of reality and the good jokes of hedonism. He saw that life could betray decent men and that beauty took beatings. The comedies were turned into torments for him. In the darkened theaters, biting his nails, seeing the tragic implications of either alternative, he felt himself the most vulnerable human in America. His own father was obliterated; his own self was. (It sometimes occurred to him that in modeling himself in those old days on those characters’ character, he may have slipped his own. Perhaps, he thought, Feldman was all artifact now, supposititious, and the real Feldman, meant for one fate, had found another.)

With puberty, however — Feldman’s puberty had been late, his drives unserious; perhaps in serving two personalities, he had actually stalled biological time — he discovered something else: that the conflict between the father and the son had been only a natural irritation, the personality of the one demanding the personality of the other, imposing a petty distance that wrote no one out of anyone’s will and generated no avenging codicils; discovered, well, the girl. And because the people he had become loved her, he loved her too. Loved her helplessly.

He had never seen anyone like her and never would perhaps, but it was enough, as it would have been enough for some knight of old time, for him simply to have an idea of her. Now he named all those girls Jean Arthur, and he loved her still, looked for her still, listened for her funny squeaky voice, seeking her feisty intensity. (He recalled her as a girl Communist, someone trying to organize the help in the store; other times he saw her in a Salvation Army bonnet, adorable with her cheeks in mumpy, musical pout, filled to bursting with trumpet geschrei . He loved her tics, remembered how cute she was in men’s pajamas, or when she was drunk and mispronounced words. He loved all her irrelevant passions, her tough — cutest of all when making a tiny fist, throwing things, huffing and puffing, her hair in her mouth — working girl’s integrity.) She defined innocence for him at a stage in his life when everyone else his age was falling from grace into a despair, so that for Feldman, who had come from a despair — his years as his father’s captive, his inability when embracing the style of the one son to annihilate ultimately the style of the other — it was like awakening to a grace, like an infant angel smothered in his crib. In this way his timing had been thrown off, and he left moony and smitten — not catching the joke, actually believing such women existed — and all love was love fallen short of itself, doomed through his credulity, and himself given over to an unwilled but permanent adultry, made to serve like the forced slave of Amazons.

Perhaps the department store itself — the real one, the one he owned, that terrified him — was only a sort of the creating of the conditions in which his dream might be realized, a fatuous placation like that of the New Guinea cargo cults which constructed bamboo airplanes on the tops of hills in the hope that they would attract real planes with their heaven-launched gifts. Idiot! Lovestruck! he thought. So this is what lies at the source of my will. So this is what my profit motive rests on. He felt like a sucker, comic as a cuckold. In fact he was a cuckold: where is she anyway? who has her? “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” he thought, “I wonder who’s showing her how.” But despite what he knew to be the reality, he held on to a helpless hope that he might yet find her.

“Somewhere I’ll find you,” he sang in his head. “Someday my prince will come,” his heart answered. (That was another thing: even his ballads were old-fashioned. Most of them came from operettas. He didn’t even adjust the lyrics to his condition, but hermaphroditically sang for both sexes. It was a vestige of the old schism in him between the stuffed shirt and the prodigal.) “I am calling you — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh — ooh,” he sang mutely, soul seeking soul, love’s sonar. “Someday he’ll come along,” he rendered, “the man I love.”

Now, looking for Jean Arthur in earnest, he roamed the store, loped it — Feldman striding, darting, squinting, peering. There was a labored, frantic quality now (“Through the dark of night,” his head sang, “I’ve got to go where you are”), exactly like one partner to a comic appointment just missing the other in a revolving door, or losing her behind a pillar or a potted fern. “Some enchanted evening,” he warbled silently, “you will meet a stranger.”

He sat down to catch his breath in front of a tiny vanity table in Ladies’ Hats. He had not made his search in several months and he was rusty, unused to the strain.

He looked at himself in the table’s oval mirror. The tricky glass — hat sales up fourteen percent since it was installed — gave back a thinned, lengthened Feldman. Aware of the ruse (he had commissioned optical specialists in Baltimore to do his mirrors), he compensated by filling his cheeks with air. Too much, he thought, and let out a little. There, that’s what I look like. But he couldn’t be sure (only the mirrors in the employees’ toilets were accurate), and he stood up and gave himself half an hour to find his true love.

Picking girls who wouldn’t know him, he approached their counters in disguise. Now he was one sort of son, now the other. In Ladies’ Nightgowns he grinned shyly at the young woman behind the counter. By holding his breath for a minute and a quarter, he was able to bring a blush to his face.

“It’s a shower gift for my secretary,” he gulped. “She’s just about your size, ma’am. I guess I could get a better idea if you could sort of hold it up to your — to your — if you could sort of hold it up to yourself. Gee,” he said, “wow. I mean that’s very beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Its washable,” she said wearily, “it’s wrinkle-resistant. It won’t stain.” She took up her order pad. Feldman hesitated. “You throw it in the washer same as you would a bedsheet. It’s one of our sexiest items,” she said, looking at a point somewhere above his left shoulder. “Is that a charge, dearie?”

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“I do not,” she said.

“I’m Leo Feldman, and you’re fired.”

“I need this job,” she recited. “I’ve got to have an operation on my internal female organs. I’m saving up.”

“Out, dearie,” he told her. “You’re washed up, same as you would a bedsheet.”