by Luke Geddes
“You’re not coming?”
“Tempting, but I’m not really in an acquisitions phase. At my age it’s hard to find anything I don’t already own. I keep thinking I’ve snagged a holy grail but then I come home, find its place on the shelf, and there’s the copy I bought once upon a time and haven’t listened to in forever.” Seymour wasn’t sure if he was sizing up his competition or sycophantically trying to prove his bona fides to a fellow collector.
“I hear that, man. I guess you tore that tab off as a keepsake, huh? Listen, I’m not into the hard sell. I don’t even consider myself a seller. I’m a market in and of itself.”
“Very ambitious.”
“Yeah, so take this as a favor when I tell you this sale is one not to be missed. You’re the record guy. Me, I don’t know shit. I ain’t hip, I’ll tell ya that. You know what I listened to in the car on my way over here? Fucking ABBA.”
“They’re a great pop band.”
“Damn right, but you get that I’m not part of your tribe. The guy I got this collection from—he was my uncle, actually, at least I called him that—he was one of you. Every collector’s got a few of those things, those holiest of grails, they’ve never been able to find. So just for example tell me one of yours.”
“Like I said, I’ve got pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted.” Why was that so depressing to admit? Seymour wondered. His broke eighteen-year-old self could never in his wildest dreams have imagined one day owning the collection he currently had.
“Oh come on. I know guys like you. The collection’s never complete.”
“Well, off the top of my head, I’m always looking to upgrade some of my favorites. White labels, superior pressings. Wouldn’t say no to the Velvets in mono, an OG Big Star—”
“I don’t want to lead you on, buddy, but that sounds awful familiar. I could swear the guy I got this collection from said something about mono promos. And you said Big Star? Not familiar with that group myself, but I can see it in my mind, when I was sorting through this lot, that phrase was in there somewhere.”
Seymour looked at the tear-off from the flyer. The address was not far from his own. This guy was obviously a liar, but he was also obviously someone who wouldn’t know Big Star from Mr. Big, so it wasn’t implausible that there might be treasures to uncover. “Thanks for the tip,” Seymour said. “I got a lot more stuff to unload.”
“Sure, man. I won’t keep you.” Jimmy removed from his sleeve like a magician a business card. JIMMY DANIELS, it read, PURVEYOR OF ALL THINGS, a simple caricature of a winking Mr. Moneybags alongside contact information including an AOL email address. Seymour stuck it in his shirt pocket along with the tear-off. “Mostly I buy whole estates, but you never know. Give me a call if you’re looking to unload anything interesting.”
“Will do.”
“I’m not kidding about the hair, by the way. I know a guy, if you’re interested.”
Outside, the smell of exhaust and the unpleasant October humidity came as a relief from the stale air inside, the fluorescent lights and incessant piped-in oldies music not quite headache-inducing but suggestive of headaches. A man Seymour had earlier seen arguing with a customer over an alleged crease in a Beanie Baby tag sat at the picnic table smoking a cigarette with an unblinking, Buster Keaton–esque expression of abject despair. In lieu of hello he grunted, or maybe it was more of a whimper.
Is that what life in Wichita did to you? Seymour seemed to be noticing them more and more, sad-dad types standing befuddled on the street or in drugstore aisles patting the back pockets of their khakis to confirm that the inches-thick wallet was still there. Or maybe it wasn’t Wichita that did this to them but just ordinary middle age. He shivered, and not from the chill of the air conditioner as he reentered the mall, another box wobbling in his weary arms. He had no kids, of course, but that didn’t preclude him from becoming one of them.
Just because he and Lee shared debt didn’t mean they had to share a life. All it’d take would be for him to open his mouth and say a few unpleasant words. No waiting for the right moment. No couching his terms in gentle euphemisms. Quick and straightforward was the only way to go. He dropped the box on the floor of their booth and looked Lee right in the face. A frayed red yarn, the vestige of a stuffed toy, stuck in his hair.
And like that, Seymour lost the nerve. What did he have to gain, anyway? He’d break up with Lee and then, what, move back East a newly single man and clutch to his faded youth with a weakening vise grip like his New England crowd, the guys who dressed in decades-old jeans and threadbare band T-shirts, who attended house shows religiously but spent the whole night complaining that the vox were buried? No, thanks.
Seymour plucked the yarn free, held it to his lips like an eyelash, and blew.
Lee drew the tear-off from Jimmy’s flyer out of Seymour’s shirt pocket. “What do we have here?” he said. “A sale? If I’m not mistaken, our objective is to downsize.”
“Right you are, master, but it’s something to do. Window-shopping.”
“Maybe we need some kind of system. One thing bought for every five things sold.”
“Oh god, if you’re going to be mathematical about it, forget it.” Lee had a system or formula or plan in place for everything. He’d calculated that with Wichita’s low cost of living and the rent-free budget of living in the house his mother had left him, it would take about five years to pay off enough of their debt to “get back on track” and renovate the house—a dump with rotten floors, a broken water heater, and a code-violating electrical system that predated the invention of the three-prong plug—into salable condition. Only once they got their “finances in order” would they decide their next move. Seymour worried that their next move would be to not move. Lee wasn’t treating their current situation as especially temporary, and Seymour knew from experience that it was easier to choose to stick with the misery you knew than to change course and risk ending up even more miserable. After all, their last major life decision—opening the store—hadn’t exactly resulted in a bonanza.
Lee touched Seymour’s elbow and feigned disgust. “Bony,” he said. “Meatless.” It was a thing they did, acting grossed out by the mere sight of each other, homing in on the perceived flaws that had haunted them since adolescence. Somehow, it was tender, this arcane language sprung from veteran coupledom.
“I’ve never seen such a thin man with such a fat face. So many chins,” Seymour replied.
“Now, if your brittle bones can handle it without snapping, would you mind running home to get the stuff left in the garage and bringing it here before the meeting?”
“I live to serve,” Seymour said.
Lee was insisting on attending the Dealer Association meeting. At a place like Heart, he’d said, dealers make more sales to each other than to anyone else. It wasn’t for an hour or so yet, thank god. Enough time to do as told and then find a Heart-adjacent watering hole in which to condition his mind for the tedium to come.
Lee squeezed his wrist. “It’s good to be back in business with you.”
Seymour wished it were the truth.
5 ELLIE
“Are you even listening to me?” Margaret Byrd said to Ellie, who wasn’t listening. On the antique mahogany bank’s counter that served as the Heart of America’s checkout station Margaret pounded like a gavel a doll resembling the nineties pop-rap icon MC Hammer. “Just wait till your parents hear about your attitude.” She brandished the doll. “This, too. Unacceptable.”
“Help yourself to a peppermint.” Ellie slid a small sterling dish across the counter. “It’s supposed to be calming.”
Margaret huffed off to wait near the entrance. She looked like a petulant child who’d refused to share and been sentenced to a time-out in the corner. Ronald Marsh, that lonely old widower, ambled by and tipped an invisible hat to her. She ignored him, or tried to. A customer came through the lobby and nodded in his general direction, and at once he straightened the sulk out of his spine and began
yammering. The customer smiled politely and tried to walk away but Ronald followed him down Fancy Street. He wouldn’t be shaken that easily.
Ellie turned pages in her book, reading not a word. She was trying to blank out her mind so she wouldn’t have to think about her miserable life, her mother’s betrayal, her father’s refusal to cosign on the private student loans she needed to attend a real school far, far from Wichita. “Your future self will thank me,” Keith had said. Who cared about the future? In the future, she could be dead. It’d be easier if she were dead. If only she’d been lucky enough to have been abducted as a child like that Bobo brat, she could be rotting in a ditch right now instead of having to live at home, sentenced to work the register at Heart whenever she wasn’t in classes with all the losers and hicks at the local community college while her few friends enjoyed life at coastal art schools where graduate instructors dealt weed on the side and you could major in astrology. All because Stacey blew her entire college fund on a pottery auction bender, resulting in a collection of such tremendous and esoteric value that it was impossible to find anyone else in the known world with both enough money and the incredible self-delusion to buy it.
She’d distracted herself from her misery for a short while by sleeping with her art history teacher. They were inexorably drawn to each other, he passably attractive though blowhardy, she the only student in his class whose brow wasn’t furrowed, caveman-like, in a congenital stupor. He was an attentive but graceless lover offering her an orgasm ratio of one-to-three in his favor. She ended things after he gave her a B-plus on a short-answer exam, claiming she’d imprecisely used the term art brut. Complicating matters: for some reason Professor Douchebag had decided he was in love with her, and he’d been declaring his intentions by leaving his “outsider art” Troll figurines almost every day since their breakup in her “student cubby.” (Why did they call it that when college was supposed to be for grown-ups?) The latest had been modified to resemble Kim Jong-il. His little dress-up dolls weren’t real outsider art. Even she with her B-plus could see that. The Professor was an outsider only in the sense of being too stupid to be allowed to teach at a real school. He wasn’t even really a professor, although he made his students call him that. “You’re my muse,” he’d said the other morning after cornering her in the parking lot. “Fuck off,” she’d said.
This place was a graveyard. Ellie’s parents had owned it since as long as she could remember and she’d worked here off and on since she was thirteen, but recent years had seen the Heart of America in decline. In some booths, the same merchandise had been sitting out for so long that it literally moldered. Except in Hall One, where the most steadfast and well-to-do dealers had always clustered, walking the aisles brought you past the empty spaces and dust impressions of once-reliable renters gone AWOL. Her parents had recently let go of all the full-time employees, forcing Ellie to fill in for an entire workforce, and cut the store’s hours by a third. Ellie did not pay much attention to current events—Wichita was so culturally isolated from the rest of the world, it didn’t seem like anything interesting on a national scale would ever penetrate it—but it probably had something to do with what was called the “financial crisis” by the pixie-haired cable news anchor Keith watched nightly and on whom he seemed to have a schoolboy crush. Either that or the customers had awoken one day to the epiphany that they’d been spending their hard-earned money on what was essentially garbage.
She’d never admit it to them, but when her parents used to bring her here as a kid, there’d been a magical quality to it, like the underground caverns in the My Secret Princess cartoons, full of hidden treasure and harboring its own population of misfits and eccentrics. But now during the slow hours it felt outright postapocalyptic, abandoned by all but the small cohort of plaintive losers who considered themselves Heart of America regulars. Even during her busy weekend shifts, Ellie’s job consisted of watching a steady stream of browsers enter and exit without buying a thing. Mostly they came to loiter, to reminisce about the toys they’d had as kids and the tchotchkes that once rested on their grandparents’ credenzas, to compare Heart’s prices with the much lower ones glowing on their cell phone screens.
And yet, to hear Keith talk about it, the Heart of America was due not just for a reversal in fortunes but an explosion of wealth. The glut of TV shows about resalable family heirlooms and unexpectedly priceless junkyard oddities had burgeoned the public’s interest in the antiques industry (not that that interest had ever manifested in sales), and through a mix of toxically masculine desperation and stupid (very stupid) luck, he had convinced the producers of Pickin’ Fortunes, a Home Channel reality show about two sexless grifters who traveled the country defrauding old ladies of their priceless heirlooms, to send Mark and Grant to the Heart of America to film a segment for their new special about America’s finest antique malls. Once it aired—according to Keith—the Stoller family would be “rolling in the dough” and Ellie wouldn’t need any loans to go to whatever East Coast college she desired. For her part, Ellie did not quite follow how embarrassing themselves in front of the national audience of the perennial virgins and elderly shut-ins that comprised the Home Channel demographic would lead to anything other than, well, embarrassment.
Margaret Byrd, one of the plaintive losers, shrieked and came running back to the counter. Out of breath even though she’d crossed a distance of only some thirty feet, she gasped, “Him. He’s the one,” and pointed at the thin blond man standing in the threshold to Hall One.
Ellie recognized him as one of the mall’s newer dealers. “I don’t care,” she said.
The man met them at the counter, dug his fingers into the candy dish. “Hello,” he said to Ellie, then, “Margaret, so nice to see you. How’s things at the Memory Lane/Treasure Way intersection? Business booming?” He picked the faded wrapper off a Tootsie Roll with his thumbnail and chewed it like bubble gum, brown dribble coating his teeth.
Margaret held the MC Hammer doll out like a gun. “You… you…” she stammered. “S-Seymour.”
“That’s my name.” He put his elbows on the counter, one of them pinching Ellie’s book closed, and waited with mock patience for Margaret to continue. Ellie tried to tug the book free. He flashed a cartoonish grin. As if she were amused.
He looked like the guy from the B-52s. A walking stereotype, the aging hipster whose every utterance and action was some sort of ironic statement that no one but he understood. Every bit of style, every personality trait and interest, every strand of hair on his precisely manicured head, had been borrowed or copied or stolen and then assembled, Frankenstein-like, into an approximation of a human being. The tongue-in-cheek gay guy—should she be impressed? He was acting, had been doing it so long he couldn’t remember that there was a real person buried underneath all those layers of self-aware cliché.
“I found this in my sugar bowl. My Riverside Croesus,” Margaret said, pointing the plastic feet at Seymour’s temple.
“Oh, is that where that ended up? Must’ve been some party.”
“This—this could have damaged a very valuable item. This”—she threw her hands up and slammed the doll on the counter—“is a very serious matter. Do you know who I am? I happen to be treasurer of the Heart of America Dealer Association, and more than that I am the mall’s senior-most dealer.” She gave Ellie a nod of affirmation, then picked the doll up and twisted her knotty fingers around MC Hammer’s neck. “You’ll be sorry.”
Just then Pete Deen appeared out of Hall Two and made a beeline for Margaret. “Excuse me. Excuse me.” He tapped her shoulder but she ignored him. “Excuse me,” he said again, his potbelly quivering, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man on his undersized T-shirt stretched and flattened into s’mores-ready form. He stroked MC Hammer’s cheek. “Margaret, I never knew. How much? I must have it.” He was already reaching for his wallet.
Margaret scowled and shook her head. “This is not the end of this. Your parents will hear about it.” She threw the doll
at Seymour, its arm catching on his collar, and walked off toward the lounge.
“I’ve got to have it,” Deen said. “How much?”
Seymour licked the edge of his mustache. “I’ve got the box, too. Excellent condition, including all the accessories.”
“The exclusive cassette?” He began to remove bills from his wallet, one by one.
When his hand practically shook under the weight of the cash, Seymour nodded and relinquished the doll. “The box is over in our booth, Hall One, one-forty-six.”
Deen walked off mumbling happily to himself.
Seymour spread the cash on the counter like a deck of cards. “You hate your job,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” Ellie said.
“I remember being young and having a shitty job.” He slid her a five-dollar bill. “A tip.”
She balled the bill in her hand. She should be insulted—he was condescending to her—but for some reason she wasn’t. And she wouldn’t turn down the money even if she was insulted. Her parents paid minimum wage for this shit.
Seymour stared at the money crumpled in her open palm. He was thinking maybe he could have charmed her with just a couple ones. His gaze returned to her face. “I love your makeup,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said flatly. Strangers were always approaching her in random places—at bus stops, in restaurants, on the street, at work—and attempting to start little conversations with her, make pleasant small talk. If she were one of five people on a park bench, an inebriated homeless guy would choose her and only her to serenade with a ballad of expletives. She didn’t think of herself as a friendly person, so she couldn’t understand why everyone acted so friendly toward her. Stacey once said it was on account of her open face. “What am I,” Ellie had said, “a sandwich?” Since then she’d taken to dressing in as off-putting a style as possible—combining, for example, a lime-green polyester sport coat from the Salvation Army with a neon-yellow pleated tennis skirt, zebra tights, and penny loafers—and covering herself with purposefully ugly layers of makeup: uneven streaks of blush across her pale cheeks, goopy dollar-store eye shadow, and dark brown lipstick. Seymour probably thought she was paying homage to some short-lived eighties fashion trend or aping the style of an obscure avant-garde German pop singer who had one hit before dying tragically young, when really she only meant to repel people like him. Cashier was one of the most open-faced jobs there was.