Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“Friends,” he said in conclusion, “I don’t want to keep the Admiral too long from his pensées , so I’ll turn him over to you right now, but I must just mention one more of his ideas that was particularly exciting to me. I’m talking about his research regarding the dangerous integration of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Panama Canal, what the Admiral calls ‘The Mongrelization of the High Seas.’ Maybe he’ll tell us a little more about that one himself. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome aboard Vice-Admiral Retired Harlow ‘Sea Power’ Bellingstone, USN.”

The madman blinked, talked crazily for twenty minutes about his theory on mermaids — they were not good swimmers — and Feldman sold three hundred books.

Or the bananas. From time to time Feldman had noticed news stories about merchants who, through misplaced decimals and literally interpreted metaphors in incautious ads, had been forced to part with valuable merchandise. A woman in Hartford bought a used car for four hundred potatoes. In Idaho a furniture store had to let a dining-room set go for “only a very little lettuce.” It was always big, good-humored news, and worth a picture even on the front page: a housewife, bent, smiling under a one-hundred-pound sack of potatoes; a gag photo of the Boise furniture man staring glumly—“That’s one on me”—at a shriveled garden lettuce, one browning, crumpled leaf of which protruded from his lips; a woman with her mouth open, and a beefy fellow with his hands over his ears who had just sold an air-conditioning unit for a song. It was as if a real bargain, things being what they are, were a blow for the underdog, from which all might take heart. The lucky seemed to give the unlucky hope, cheer, a belly laugh.

A year before, Feldman had given his TV salesman a day off and run an ad for a floor-sample color television set with a twenty-five-inch screen. The price was three hundred and fifty bananas, and he had arranged for someone from his photography department to stand by with a camera. When the store opened, Feldman was behind the counter, waiting. In ten minutes there was a man before him, holding his ad. “You advertise the sale on the twenty-five-inch color TV?” the man asked.

Feldman looked at the ad closely. “Yes sir,” he said, “but that’s just a floor sample.”

“I know that,” the man said.

“Yes sir,” Feldman said.

“You still got that set?”

“Yes sir.”

“I want to buy it.”

“Don’t you want to see it demonstrated first?” Feldman asked. “The first color show doesn’t come on until ten this morning.”

“No, that’s all right. It’s guaranteed, ain’t it?”

“Yes sir,” Feldman said.

“That’s good enough for me,” the man said. “Three hundred fifty, right?” he asked cagily.

Feldman smiled. “That’s right.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Feldman said. “Let’s have them.”

“It’s a charge,” the man said.

“A charge?”

“Here’s my charge plate.”

“What is this, buddy?” Feldman demanded. “Are you trying to get away with something? That ad says bananas!”

In the end he had to let the set go for three hundred and fifty dollars, but the photograph of him making out the sales slip was uninspiring.

A month later he tried again. In a prominent ad in the Sunday papers he promised to sell an electric typewriter for “peanuts.” He was shooting for the wire services, and in fact it was a reporter and his photographer who showed up first. The reporter claimed the machine and handed Feldman the peanuts.

“What,” Feldman said, extending the peanuts in his outstretched palm and turning toward the photographer, “peanuts? Where are the lawyers? Will this stand up in court? Well, well, that’s one on me.”

His heart wasn’t in it. But he did it.

As he did everything. “That Feldman,” anyone might have said, “there’s a man who’s alive .” As if eccentricity and a will set to scheme like a bomb to go off had anything to do with life. As if aggression and the maneuvered circumstances did.

Look at him, his ringed, framed concentration like a kid seeking a lost ball in high grass. An aesthetic of disappointment, a life of wanting things found wanting, calling out for the uncalled for. But the shout down from the mountain was always the same — that the view wasn’t worth the climb. It was what one heard: “War is hell,” says the General. The movie star quoted: “All those retakes. Always on a diet. The lies about you in the columns. The crank mail.” Or the truth about spies: “People don’t realize. Mostly it’s just boring legwork. It’s dull, routine. I don’t even carry a gun.” And the loneliness of the Presidency, and the endless ceremonial obligations of the King, and the brief, doomed flare of the athlete’s prime, and all the small-print, thick-claused rest. People didn’t realize. That it wasn’t who one was, or even what one was, or if one made an effort or only took what came. What counted, finally, was whether you were lucky or not, whether the gods, the stars in their ornate sequences, had given you timing. There were lucky men. How often — this seemed strange now — had he had occasion to say, “I am one. I am.”

So he kept up his ersatz enthusiasms and redoubled all efforts, like some gambler letting it ride, and just yesterday he had called all his stock boys and shipping clerks and maintenance men together for a meeting in the back of the store.

He smelled glue and string and rope and wrappings and postage and saucered sponges the color of erasers on pencils. In the shipping room he felt a physical disgust. He heard scales click, whir, a solid, metallic tattoo of postage meter. He saw the open rate books, the thumbed, greasy timetables. A telephone was out of its cradle. He lifted the receiver to his ear. “That you, Simon?” a woman’s voice said. “ I see you tonight, honey. I tell my husband Mrs. Shicker want me for a dinner party she giving.” He hung up. Oppressed, he saw the pink third copies of bills of lading and wandered through a maze of senseless shipments with crayoned messages: “#7 of 10,” “3 of 9,” “1 of #4.” He felt a thick sense of half-point signatures, a smudged, bewildering spiral of unfamiliar initials and names: R. L. and J. H. and Herman Shaw. (They were his proxies. They signed for him. Who were they?)

He opened a heavy door. A man lay sleeping on a wide loading platform. Feldman saw his shoes — thick, high-topped, like blunt weapons. He closed the door and continued through a warehouse whorl of bagged lunch and paper cups of gray coffee. Everywhere were the smooth, dark cardboard rails of open packages of candy. (He made a profit on the machines: here a profit, there a profit, everywhere a profit profit.) He saw the safety signs, the conserve-electricity signs, the turn-off-faucet signs, the absenteeism signs: all the crazy placard pep talk of management to labor. It was the landscape of time clock, and he plunged still deeper into it. He breathed the whelming dinge, the hostile, grimy fallout.

They were all waiting for him in the locker room. There were high school boys in tan linen jackets and women in the blue uniform of maids in hotel corridors. A few of the men wore the thick wool of lumberjacks, or wide bright ties down the front of their denim shirts. Feldman paused beside a young boy and held his elbow. “There’s a man sleeping on one of the loading platforms. Get him.”

He climbed up on a long bench. “I like it back here,” he told them. “You’re the backbone. The fortunes of this store rise and fall because of what you do here. Listen, just because you don’t get the medals and the hurrahs of the crowd, that doesn’t mean you’re not appreciated. You’re behind the scenes, you folks on the bench, you understudies. You’re unsung. Permit me to sing you.” They looked up at him, and he saw their pastiness, the abiding solemnity or causeless joy beneath their waxy pallor. Suddenly he had a sense of his own presence and was touched, seeing himself not as someone beyond them, out of their lives, but as someone close. He whiffed their hatred and sensed himself their caricature, demonized by them, stuffed into monogramed white-on-white shirts, dappered for them, given a thin mustache, his fingers fattened, pinkened, softened, remembered as one who wore rings. (Looking around, he recognized a boy who had delivered a package to his office once, while he was having his hair cut. What a story that must have made: “Fat-assed Feldman in a Big Silk Sheet.” And the hair on the sheet — stiff, curled shavings, the association made forever in the kid’s mind with ruthlessness, strength. Passionate hair. Showy, shiny sprigs of it, waved, tufted, patent-leather clumps of it by the large pink ears — a dancer’s tufts, a pitchman’s, Mr. Big’s.) He imagined their projections of his green felty drawers of clothes, their lustful thoughts of the cedary scents, the smooth piping on his handkerchiefs, of where he kept his cuff links, his Broadway agent’s jewels. He was part of them now, food for all their false anecdote. Adding up his curt hellos, his Jew’s indifference. How dare they? he thought. How dare they?