Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

Feldman called his distributor. “Why haven’t you been sending me the Mildred Eve records? Do you know how many sales I’ve lost because I don’t have them?”

“Mildred Eve?” the distributor said. “She sings filth. Her stuff is sold under the counter.”

Feldman ordered all her releases and put them on top of the counter. He had the records played on the stereo equipment so that they could be heard all over the basement.

A strange thing happened. Whether because of the music or for some other reason, the tone of the store gradually changed. This was his sense of it, at any rate. There began to appear in the basement certain listless men who seemed to be on lunch breaks, well dressed enough, and carrying briefcases, many of them, but giving off an impression of loitering. There were boys too, wiry and underweight, who seemed to have stepped from morning movies at the downtown theaters. They strolled the aisles of his basement, the rolled sleeves of their tee shirts making pockets for their cigarettes, and dropped their butts without stepping on them. The women seemed to have changed too, to have become faintly aimless, like people killing time in bus stations.

His first thought was sales. He kept a careful check on the figures, lest the new music — he attributed the changes to this — should wind up costing him money. His research, however, did not indicate that the basement was doing less business, although, and this might be something to look into, the kinds of things that people bought seemed to have changed considerably. Formerly, his basement had done a substantial business in family dry goods. The back-to-school sales and the volume in sportswear (a little out-moded, perhaps, the basement of Feldman’s store being a place where a sort of mercantile sediment tended to collect; it was, for example, one of the few places left in America where a man might still purchase hobby jeans, or fur-collared car coats) had been among the most impressive operations in the city, and almost by themselves brought in enough profit to justify the existence of the basement. Now, however, domestic clothing gradually ceased to move at all, and housewares fell off. But these losses were made up for by a sharp increase in the sale of fetishistic automobile accessories, stereo phonographs, color television, transistor radios and, in the basement’s small Toy department, those miniature roulette wheels and baccarat decks and dice cages that had once done little but collect dust. His personnel were hard put to maintain supplies, and Feldman had, over the long-distance telephone, to wheedle and lean heavily on old relationships, reminding more than one jobber of forgotten favors. The record department itself was apparently unaffected. Mildred Eve’s records did well, of course, once people learned that Feldman was offering them at list price — a fiction, since there was no list on her recordings — but fell off a little when the other stores began to feature them.

Feldman could not get over the feeling that the basement had metamorphosed. This was all the more dramatic when he realized that in the main store nothing had changed at all. That is, business there continued to fall off, but at a rate so imperceptible that apparently nothing could be done. Feldman wrote it off as his personal lean years and had no energy — audacity? it took audacity to go against the whim of God — to try to change it. Instead, he concentrated on the basement: what could be made of the strange changes he sensed? how could he capitalize? he wondered, staring at the people down there, observing each with a commanding curiosity as if they were foreigners wrapped in saris or the queer robes of chieftains.

One of the strangest things he noticed was the peculiar decorum of his personnel. Perhaps it was owing to his frequent presence (something was up, they may have thought, and been put on their guard), but their dignity — they could have been salesmen in Tiffany’s — was jarring when contrasted to the rather blowsy bearing of the customers. He played with the idea of finding more lively types elsewhere in the store to change places with them, and experimentally he brought down some glad-hander from his hardware department. But observing the fellow in action, he was astonished that his presence was somehow even more jarring than that of the solemn salesman he had replaced. Hurriedly he had the hearty, peppy Hardware man reexchange places with the solemn salesman. Somehow, discrepancy or no, the serious man seemed more at home, better for the counter and more appropriate, than the flashy fellow from upstairs.

He was convinced there was a clue here, but try as he might, he could get nowhere with it. Increasingly he sent for sales figures— sent for them, not daring to leave his vantage point near the solemn salesman, pulling salespeople from behind their counters to get almost hourly totals from the various departments in the basement. These he checked against yesterday’s figures, looking for clues and, because he found none, to see at least if the trends had held. Only two weeks had passed since the young man had asked for the recording, yet he was convinced the trends were genuine, and he had the feeling that here in the basement was the true pulse of the store, the true pulse, perhaps, of the economy itself.

Preoccupied, he had no time for any monkey business at home, and for the first time since his marriage to Lilly, their relationship took on at least the appearance of a normal one. He picked no quarrels, played no games, and at night, exhausted from the day’s labors, simply forgot to invent his lusts. He even lay more easily in the bed, shifting his limbs when they cramped, unrestrictedly turning his pillow, and occasionally rolling over to make an accidental contact with his wife, unthinkable before — and even, occasionally, maintaining it.

Lilly, meanwhile, mistaking distraction for détente, became more natural too: that is, more un natural, for her attitude, except for those few times when she openly resisted his domestic games, had always been solicitous and conciliatory. But under the influence of his own apparent relaxation, she too changed. Though she did not fight with him, she became more peckish, expressing her discontents, as if now it might be safe to do so. On the occasion of one of Feldman’s neutral rolls to her side of the bed, she misread his intentions, and thinking he wanted to make love, declined gently. “No, Leo,” she said, “not tonight.” It was the first time she had ever turned down a fuck. Later she herself, dreaming whatever dreams she dreamt, maneuvered herself into his arms, and it was the first time she had ever initiated one. Still preoccupied, he accepted.

The solemn salesman began to appear regularly in his dreams, conducting his transactions (Feldman could not tell what merchandise he sold, though in real life he sold loose cutlery, odd-lot glassware, tumblers and small sets of Melmac such as bachelors buy) with that nonsense dignity Feldman had noticed in the store, at subdued odds with the uneasy, shifty customers.

Still he was unable to account for his effectiveness, until one day — was this only the Thursday after the Monday that he had first noticed the man? was that possible? — happening to be in the old bus depot near his store, where he sometimes ate a solitary lunch at the fountain, he passed through the arcade. A woman was playing a pinball game; another was buying a horoscope from a vending machine. A teen-ager had his driver’s license laminated in plastic, and a Negro with a stocking over his forehead recorded his voice. A soldier took four snapshots of himself for a quarter; and another man peered through a thick, greasy collarlike device at a one-minute dime movie of some ancient stripper. The man at the booth, leaning down from a high stool to dispense change, reminded Feldman of his own salesman. Of course , he thought, recognizing the expression at once. And requesting change for his dollar just so he could obtain a closer look, he perceived in himself the same shy shamble, the same odd, crablike sidling of the customers. He felt the two-mindedness of a delicate shame, the ambivalence of a regretted decision freshly made, and thought he sensed what the customers sensed — an uneasy submission of embarrassment to desire. (But what were their reasons? What were his? Just being there? Having to submit to a kind of moral muster before this distant, disapproving godlike man? Of course! And since the music, they had not come in any honorable, aggressive pursuit of bargains. Money was no object. It was as if their needs had been subverted, and they had now the aspect of people who knew they had been worked but could not help themselves.)