Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

Feldman gave the girl the name of the abortionist but would accept no money. “It’s a service of the store,” he explained. “We’re building good will.” He allowed her to fill out an application for a charge account.

Although he had many opportunities to use the abortionist’s name during those first weeks — later he would ask Freedman for the names of others, it being a matter of curiosity, as he would frankly tell him — something about his new business was disturbing to him. The world had begun to smell pregnant to him, spermy. He came to distrust all virginal appearance and thought of himself as love’s piker. Love was everywhere. It was June in January, April in May. Before long, he thought nervously, he would begin to make passes at the prim little fuckers himself. (Prim, they were prim, white-gloved, white-shod, their gynecological beings underscored by the graduation-dress packages in which they wrapped themselves, like gift-wrapped horrors in boxed practical jokes.) Indeed, he felt they expected his advances, that in their eyes his profitless continence made him more perverse, and he was careful not to touch any of their tokens, refusing even their fountain pens when he had to write down a name or a direction, calling them back to retrieve the forgotten purse, never touching it himself or daring to smell the cloudy, steamy face-powder-cum-chewing-gum odors of their open bags. To protect himself, he was short with them, scornful, encouraged them to think of him as of an agent, an advance man, someone who would later be cut in by the abortionist himself.

He went further, and by stripping his office even of memo pads and desk calendars and blotters and paper clips, he managed to create an atmosphere of the guarded discussion, a place where deals were made while no tangible product, even money, was ever allowed to show; there was an overall impression of records self-consciously not kept and of a deliberate, guilty respectability. Still, he regretted his celibacy and found himself with a developing predilection that fed on his copious sense of the availability of these one-time losers. He was in love with their country-girl, milkmaid — in a way, they were already mothers — underdog sexuality, and with their flat-chested, smooth-thighed, stick-limbed, straight-assed boyish bearing. He was in love with adolescence, in love not with the blatant statements of brassiered and pantied organs, but with all the invisible code machinery of their insides, the clear, young, clean-as-a-whistle tunnels of their bodies. As smitten by their invisible treasures as any dirty old man his gray heel bending the counter of a lady’s shoe and a garter band trebled around his wrist, with the cheats of fetish.

It was no joke: for the first time in years Feldman had a mixed feeling — anxious for excitement, thrilled and annoyed when it came, irritated and relieved when it didn’t. Finding no one there when he came for his office hour, he would shrug fitfully. Nothing ventured, he would think, and nothing gained, and only quits at that.

Beyond this, something else bothered him. It hadn’t ever been profit that had driven him, but the idea of the sale itself, his way of bearing down on the world. Now, however, he had become a mere order-filler, no better than the kind of salesman he had always despised. He strove to counter this. “You seem oversexed,” he told one pregnant teenager, “hot-blooded. Come here. I’ll show you something.” He blew the fair, fine hairs along her arm. He put his mouth next to her ear, and without touching it or moving his lips, kept it there until she squirmed. He kissed the back of her neck softly. She sighed. Her flesh rose in goose bumps. “You see? You’ll always have trouble with that,” he told her. “Five minutes of this treatment and I’d be inside your blouse, ten more and my fingers would be strumming your crotch. In a quarter of an hour we’d be screwing. And mind you, I’m a stranger — fat, homely, older than your pa. You’ve pronounced erogenous zones, sweetheart. One out of a hundred suffers. Sure suffers, certainly suffers. Are you Catholic? No, not even Catholic. Then why pay for some biological quirk not your responsibility? Fertility goes with your disease like night with day. You can’t help it. There’s sex cells on your pores thick as peanut butter. I tasted them when I kissed your neck. Listen. I say go ahead with your plans, have your abortion. But afterwards — listen to me — afterwards have this operation. Be spayed. Come on, who winces at a scientific term? Be made infertile then, become sterile. Whatever you want to call it. A small love knot in the Fallopian tubes.” It was the sort of terminology which made him lustful, though now he used it dispassionately, throwing it in to make his case. “We can’t operate on desire yet, dearie. The lust glands are contiguous with the synaptic neurons. Excuse my talking dirty to you, miss, but we’re both adult, n’est pas? It we destroyed your neurons it would be too dangerous. You wouldn’t feel pleasure, but you wouldn’t feel pain either. A neuronectomy is out. I couldn’t permit it. You’ll have to be sterilized. I’ll bring in the biggest man. As if you were my own daughter. Could I say fairer? Wait, where are you going? Sit down, where are you going? All right, smartie,” he shouted after her, “it’s your funeral.”

He was wringing wet when he sat down again. Have I gone crazy? he thought. He closed the office, canceled the appointments of two people and did not come in at all for a few days.

It was only that he had been overanxious to make the sale, he was able at last to reassure himself. He had to accept it: abortions were closed circuits, dead ends. Though it was stimulating to do business with anyone with a private shame, he was coming to resent the distinctly medical emphasis of sin. The doctors had a cartel, he saw; businessmen were just their errand boys. But, he thought, what can I do? Love makes the world go round, damnit.

He had five full weeks of this. Only then did he realize that he never saw a man in his office unless he was there with the girl, or by himself on the girl’s business.

He began to wonder about the fellow to whom he had sold the rifle. Had he killed anyone yet?

Then he had a break. A young man came in alone one day. Feldman expected that it was more of the same and greeted him without interest. The man’s uneasiness — usually these fellows were as matter-of-fact as himself — might have provided a clue to his difference, and perhaps it was an indication of his flagging faith that it didn’t. He accepted the boy’s halting quality as sincerity, and told himself that it was refreshing to come upon a fellow so unused to the feel of his compromise. To make it easier for him to begin, he said, “You’re not married?”

“No sir.”

“Not in a position to marry, I suppose?”

“No sir.”

“Though it sticks in your craw to do something like this, you see no alternative.”

“I’m sorry?” the young man said.

The customer’s bashfulness was a waste of time, but Feldman understood it. To the man he must have seemed someone unlicensed or lightly so, like a tip-off man to the cops perhaps, paid with taxpayers’ money, or a prostitute, or the man who sells fireworks out on the highway.

“I say you see no alternative to the abortion.”

“I’m sorry?” the young man repeated.

Then he realized that they were speaking at cross-purposes. (Ah, it was no piece of cake. The customer was always right in this business.) He held his tongue and let the young man tell it, ignoring his own last statements as if they had been part of the room’s packed silences.

“I saw your ad in the P-Personals column—” he began falteringly. (My, the dignity, Feldman observed, as though truth required an imperfect delivery, the boy’s faint stutter like the riddling of an oracle.) “I didn’t know. I mean — about this p-place. I’ve come by. I’ve s-seen the g-girls outside. They seemed f-frightened to me. Then I rec-recognized one from my b-block who got into trouble with a guy. I s-saw her here.” Feldman enjoyed the cave style; he actually folded his hands at one point. There could have been diplomas behind him on the walls; he could smell the diced breath that comes through the grills of confessionals. His face fixed in a mask of stern encouragement. But when would he get to it? Were there no gestures? The boy was too coltish, yet he dared not risk a single sepulchral “Yes?” “I thought you could h-help me.” A good sign. You could see light with a good sign like that. (These people actually have to want to be helped.) Soon they would both be all over the kid’s needs, taking their greedy draughts, travelers at a well.