The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “What’s the point? You’ve been talking for hours.”

  “Wait. Don’t mix me up. What was that last one? Loaves of white bread. Decks of cards. Huh? Decks of cards. Wristwatches in their boxes. Three or four bananas with a strip of green tape around their middle and, uh, men’s shirts with those little pins always in the same places and lollipops and the ridges on licorice and, my God, automobiles, airplanes, cuts of meat—Kansas City strip, New York, porterhouse, chuck roasts, chops, cutlets—I mean Jesus, Patty (patties, Patty!), the animals aren’t built that way. Those are just arbitrary shapes. Why isn’t gum like a wafer? Why is it always a stick of gum? Why a bag of potato chips? Why wristwatches? I mean, this is it, there’s going to be a breakthrough here tonight.”

  “You’re not doing my ass.”

  “I can’t do your ass and concentrate on the breakthrough. All right. Did I say lipsticks? Lipsticks. Spaghetti boxes, boxes of soda straws, you know how there’s always a little window in the box? You remember seeing that? I don’t know if they still do that but they used to. Postage stamps! With their serrated edges. Well sure, I know, that’s functional so you can tear them off the sheet without ripping them. But that’s not the real reason, because you have the example of money, too. Why are there milled edges on dimes, quarters and half dollars but not on really small change like pennies and nickels? Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Traffic lights. Red. Amber. Green. The world over. Ethiopia and Iran. Ohio and Tasmania. Canned goods. The label goes all the way around. Top to bottom. Wall to wall. Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Uniforms—cops’, soldiers’, firemen’s. The metal badge on the front of a bicycle. Bicycle pedals. Who said that bicycle pedals have to look the way they do? Shoes! Sixteen holes for the laces. The laces. A pair of shoelaces. Think how they’re wrapped. The little armband of paper. Spools of thread and balls of yarn.”

  “Toilet paper.”

  “Toilet paper, right. Kleenex, Puffs. Paper napkins. Baby powder with those round holes punched in the top like a solar system. Tubes of toothpaste. Why not a jar of the stuff? Tubes of toothpaste but jars of cold cream. It could have been the other way around, you know. Yes, and money could be serrated just like postage stamps. As a matter of fact, it would be easier for banks to handle if it came that way. They could give you a sheet of money and you’d tear the bills off yourself. Jesus, Patty, do you see? Are you with me on this, Insight Lady?”

  “What?”

  “We read shapes. The culture is preliterate!”

  “You think?”

  “Sure. I think so. It’s tactile, a blind man’s culture. White canes and dark glasses. Or umbrellas wouldn’t furl left to right in both hemispheres. There’d be more variety in dog leashes. In our belts and boots. It’s never been taken for granted that anyone can read!”

  “You think?”

  “Why books have dust jackets.”

  “Gee,” the Insight Lady said.

  “Why bulbs look like pears and how the world got its curly tail. Nobody. Nobody ever. Nobody with money invested ever took it for granted that a single mother’s son of us could read. They think we’re so dumb. We are so dumb. And they are, too. So we get these symbols. The mustard jar a symbol and the candy bar a symbol, too. We live with molds, castings, with paradigms and modalities. With recognizable shapes. With—oh, God—trademarks like the polestar. I could go it alone in an Estonian supermarket. We live in Plato’s sky!”

  “That’s a hell of an insight,” Patty said.

  “It’s a farsight.”

  “It’s a faroutsight.”

  “Tactile.”

  “Good, Ben.”

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Tactile, tactile,” he said. “Men. Paradigms. Modalities.”

  “Yes.”

  “Women. The Finsbergs. The world like a chunk of Braille. Tactile.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want my remission back!”

  And rented horses the following day and rode without a guide into the mountains. The animals, both a rich brown the color of their saddles, knew the trails. Ben had not been this excited since that day in the Bucket. He whistled John Denver songs until he caught himself doing it. In San Francisco once he had suddenly become aware that he’d been humming “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and one time at the shore he heard himself sing snatches of “Ebbtide.”

  Patty was in the lead—neither was expert; Patty led because her horse had taken the initiative—and Ben, still stimulated from the night before, called after her. “Horses! Their names. Horses’ names. Cherry, Thunder.” These were the horses they rode. “Lightning. Flicka. They’re sexual traits. Male and female.”

  “I’m sorry?” Patty said. “What was that? I don’t follow. ‘Lightning flicka,’ you said. ‘Their sexual traits. Male and female.’ Whatever are you talking about? What does ‘lightning flicka’ mean?”

  “Huh? Oh.” She hadn’t heard him when he’d shouted. She’d gotten only the last part. He explained his new insight in a low voice so she could hear, but it was difficult to keep his voice down when he was so excited.

  “But pets, dogs and cats, often have joke names, usually the name of their owners’ interests and obsessions. An English professor might call his dog Hemingway, and once I knew a stockbroker with a dog named Florida Power and Light. It’s a sort of inexpensive self-mockery. But boats, sailboats, small craft that sleep four to eight, rarely have funny names. That’s because boats are a big investment. There’s money involved. The men name the boats and give them the code names of sweethearts, their dead sons, and ancient dreams.”

  “LaVerne and Maxene,” Patty said. “Ethel, Mary, Lotte, and Kitty. Helen. Gertrude.”

  “Yes,” Ben said. “Gee.” There was a sort of clearing off to the side of the trail. They were perhaps nine thousand feet up now. “Would it be all right if we got off for a while? My balls are killing me.”

  “You don’t have a jockstrap?”

  “I never use them.” It was true. He never wore jockstraps and didn’t really understand their purpose. Into this he had no insight. They dismounted. Ben stumbled. It was as if he had been straddling an elephant. “You suppose they’ll wander off? I guess we could sit on that log and hold on to their reins.”

  “How’s the hand?”

  “Not bad. I’m glad I thought about the glove though.” He had asked to borrow the wrangler’s glove to wear on his right hand. It was odd. His hand was protected but not his balls.

  The view was spectacular, immense. The trail had led through a pass in Cheyenne Mountain, and though the view was open and they could see for miles on almost every side, only the mountain itself walling their vision, they felt themselves separated from the culture they had talked about, on which each thrived and endlessly explained. It was nowhere visible. Colorado Springs had disappeared. Not even firebreaks were to be seen, nor the cog railroad that climbed Pikes Peak, nor the mysterious strand of electric lights visible from the Broadmoor—never identified—that followed the contours of the mountain into the sky. Not even the trail itself, now they had left it and led their horses down the gentle six- or seven-foot slope to the clearing.

  “Hansel,” Patty said.

  “Gretel.”

  They were in nature. Ben let go of Thunder’s reins and stretched out on the ground, the soft scrub just downhill of the log he used for a pillow.

  “Ought you do that? He might take it into his head to go back to the stables. Then Cherry would follow and we’d have to go back down the trail on foot.”

  “They won’t,” Ben said. “They’ll go off to eat the mountain, but I don’t think they’ll leave us. You can let go.”

  “I don’t know, Ben,” Patty said.

  “Trust me,” Ben said. “Don’t foreshadow. I’m going to die of multiple sclerosis and you of loud noises. We’re safe. Lie down. Use the log.” She lay down beside him. “Can you feel it?” he said.

  “What?”

  “
Gravity. Nine thousand feet of gravity sucking at our bodies, drawing our blood. The lines of force like tide.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Mother Nature’s blow job, Her Magic Fingers.”

  “Yes,” Patty said.

  “I feel wonderful,” Ben said.

  “I do, too.”

  “I feel wonderful. I feel magnificently stupid.”

  “Stupid? No, Ben, not you.”

  “Sure me. Oh boy. Stupid. It’s good. It’s fine. The incredible stupidity of a man in the sea, or on a mountain—well, I am on a mountain—or some place cold, freezing. Dumb as guys in mines or tumbling in the avalanche or breathing recycled air in submarines. Dumb as astronauts, as men in space, or clumsying the moon. You know what it is?”

  “What?”

  “It’s throwing yourself on the planet’s mercy, I think. Up here. Up here—a storm could come up. The lightning could whack us, we dassn’t screw or our hearts would explode. Even like this, at rest, they pump away at the thin air as if it were a punching bag. The forests could catch fire. We could die, Patty. The horses could take off. We could stumble. Misjudge the time, let it get dark, let it get too cold. It’s so dangerous,” he said. “All of it. It’s so dangerous. It’s terrific. Shhh. Shhh. I’m out…I’m out of breath.”

  He was in nature. As far as he could see. Wherever he looked. In the path of the Ice Age, the scars and pockets gouged by the glaciers. He was in nature, his head as high as the timberline. He was in nature. At the scene of the planet’s crimes and explosions, its rocks thrown up from the center of the earth like an anarchist’s tossed bombs. In nature. His scent in the thin air like a signal to the bears, to the cougars. Out of his element, the franchiser disenfranchised. Miles from the culture, from the trademark and trade routes of his own long Marco Polo life.

  And talked, when his breath was recovered, of wonders. Because that was all there was to do in nature, the only way he could protect himself, no place to hide in nature save in the wonderful. He meant the bizarre, he meant the awful, strangenesses so odd, so alien, they were religious. Vouchsafed to die of his disease, it was as if here, in nature, where everything was a disease, all growth a sickness, the mountains a sickness and the trees a sickness, too, with their symptomatic leaves and their pathological barks, the progress of his disease could leap exponentially, travel his bloodstream like the venom of poisonous snakes or the deathbites of killer spiders.

  “I heard,” he said quietly—was this praying? was this some crazy kind of prayer?—“I heard of a man who had a bedspread made out of wolves’ muzzles. He kept them in a freezer in St. Louis until he had enough for his tailor to stitch together. I once,” he said, “knew someone who would tell his troubles to strangers on elevators, just the way travelers on buses and trains unload when they know they’ll never see the other party again. He talked very fast, of course, and as he got older and accumulated more troubles, he would have to seek out taller and taller buildings in which to ride. On the way down he never said a word.”

  Patty was laughing.

  “I guess,” he said, “the most selfish person I ever met was the wife of one of my managers. I happened to be in their town one time when she gave a birthday for her six-year-old kid. My manager told me about it.”

  “What’s so selfish about that?”

  “Well, she was giving the party, I don’t remember the exact date but this was when I had my Dr. Pepper bottling plant in Jackson, Mississippi, and I usually tried to make it down about the first week in August. I recall I had some car trouble and didn’t get there until late on Friday. The point is, there wasn’t enough time to do any work that Friday and I asked my manager if he’d come in on Saturday. That’s it—I remember—he said his wife was giving this birthday party for their kid on Saturday and he was supposed to help out.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “Well, hell, I’m no Simon Legree, but I didn’t have much desire to hang around Jackson, Mississippi, all weekend until business hours on Monday, so I asked my manager—his name was Paul—I asked Paul if he couldn’t meet me at the plant after the party on Saturday. That way we could do our business and I could be out of there and back on the road, drive all day Sunday and make my next call Monday morning in Atlanta.”

  “But he expected you Friday. I mean, Saturday was his day off. He didn’t know you were going to have trouble with your car. He’d told his wife—”

  “Wait. I didn’t care about that. Neither did he. He was willing to meet me after the party.”

  “Then—”

  “The kid’s birthday wasn’t for two weeks yet. Thursday or Friday or something of the week following the next one.”

  “Mothers often…They don’t always make the party on the exact day that—”

  “They were starting their vacation on Sunday.”

  “Sunday?”

  “The Sunday following the party.”

  “Well, I don’t—”

  “They were driving to relatives who had a cabin on a lake in Door County, Wisconsin. Paul told me that. I remember his saying that.”

  “I still—”

  “His wife could have given the birthday party after they came back. It would have been closer to the actual birthday. Paul told me that, too.”

  “Really, Ben—”

  “She wanted the kid to have the presents.”

  “So?”

  “So he’d have things to play with in the car!”

  Patty was silent. “That’s selfish,” she said finally.

  “It’s wondrous selfish.”

  He closed his eyes. “Ben,” Patty said, “you mustn’t fall asleep. We really would be in trouble if we fell asleep. We really could get killed up here.”

  “I know a man who,” Ben said, “I knew a woman that…There was this fellow that…”

  “Ben—”

  “…had franchises.—Yeah?—Yes. He bought and sold franchises. He had maybe twenty, twenty-five franchises in his career. He was this small businessman with lots of small businesses. He had a hand in making America look like America.—I don’t get it, what about him?—Him? Not much. He knew these Finsbergs.—The freaks?—Yes.—But what about him?—He once heard about a farm woman who got up every morning at six-thirty to watch Sunrise Semester. She watched programs about American history, Italian literature, about Freud, art history, archaeology, the history of journalism. She watched it all. The French Symbolist poets. Whatever. She thought the professors were preachers.—Preachers?—Because they always held a book! She was wondrous ignorant. He didn’t know her, he’d only heard about her, but he had it on good authority, so you can be sure there really was such a woman so marvelous ignorant, so spectacular naïve.—Does it count if he never met her?—It has to.—Why?—Because he has to use everything he’s got. Because otherwise…—What otherwise?—Never mind, don’t get personal.—I was only asking.—I know, and I’d help you out if I could. It’s what they all say, of course, but I really would. I’d tell you about his lousy life expectancy. I’d tell you about his sister.—What about his sister?—Well, this guy, this franchiser, had a sister, has a sister.—Yes?—She lives in Maine. Outside Waterville. Her husband works for Colby College as a professional fund raiser.—That’s nice. That must be interesting work.—He has no franchises in Maine. They don’t see each other much. The sister’s barren and, he gathers, the guy, the franchiser, that it’s sort of, well, made her, well, very unhappy. I know what you’re going to say, that they could adopt, but for a long time they didn’t really want kids and now that they do, when they did, it was too late. She’s in her fifties. His sister is in her fifties. The agencies don’t like to give women that age…The husband wasn’t doing too good. It was during the Vietnam war. The kids were acting up, trashing buildings, rioting. People didn’t want to give money to a school where kids behaved like that.—But they all behaved like that back then.—People don’t like to give their money away. The husband wasn’t doing too good, too well. Colby�
��s kind of a small place. No government contracts. No state support. It depends upon alumni gifts.—Yes?—The husband wasn’t doing too well. I don’t remember now how he got into fund raising. Yes I do. He used to be a social worker. That’s the ironic part. He used to be a social worker in Chicago, where the franchiser’s sister lived.—This is an awfully long story.—Not so long. Hang in there. He’d been a social worker. With the agencies. ADC. HEW. HUD. All those letters. He had an in with the adoption agencies. He could have had all the kids he wanted. He could have picked them up in the Delivery Room. But they didn’t want kids back then. At least the sister didn’t. She was jealous, well, envious, of her brother. She thought he lived kind of an exciting life. He had all these franchises and he was always on the go. He didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t an exciting life, but that’s what she thought. She wanted to live an exciting life, too. On a social worker’s salary. They don’t make much, you know.—I’ve heard that.—So she worked, too. She saved. They went to Europe on their vacations. To Hawaii. After they’d been to Europe about a half dozen times, after they’d been to Hawaii, she got it in her mind that she really ought to go to school. That if she were educated, maybe then her life would be more exciting. She put herself through college. She was already in her thirties. She majored in—get this—Oriental Studies. Learned Japanese. Took an M.A. in Japanese. So she had this M.A. and would have gone on for the Ph.D. but their savings were all used up and anyway her adviser didn’t think she was good enough for the doctorate. They gave her what they called a ‘terminal M.A.’ Funny name.—I still think it’s a long story.—She was very disappointed and figured she was all washed up in the life-can-be-interesting department. This is when her husband heard about this fund-raising position in Maine. He’d been giving away money and food stamps and stuff all his professional life and he figured that if he was good enough to give it away, then he was good enough to collect it, too. So he asked his wife about it and she was anxious to get out of Chicago anyway because by now all the people she knew that she’d gone to graduate school with had either earned their Ph.D.’s or were writing their dissertations and she felt sort of funny about being around them. You know?—Sure.—But by this time it really was too late for them to adopt, even if she had had the energy. Which she didn’t, hadn’t. For she was worn down to the nub with all that trying to make her life interesting.—I see.—Yes. So he was very serious about the job and when the people at Colby thought there just might be a position for the franchiser’s sister in the Comp. Lit. department, that really reinforced their decision to go.—Did she get the job?—The sister? Yes. She taught Japanese literature in translation.—Well then.—She was a lousy Japanese-literature-in-translation teacher. After three years they decided to drop her. She was pretty good in Japanese itself, but they didn’t offer a course in that. Well, they had some friends in the college but mostly they were what her husband brought in, his colleagues, people in the Bursar’s Office, in Admissions, not the faculty itself. That crowd.—Oh.—And just about when the guy was running out of ways to write up proposals and get grants from the government, Vietnam came along and the kids acted up and the alums had a good excuse to stop giving. To make a long story short…—You said it wasn’t long.—I had to say that. It was a white lie. To make a long story short, it looked like the guy was going to lose his job.—Really?—Yeah.—Well, what about the franchiser?—Oh, him. Well, he waited until the last minute.—And?—He gave his brother-in-law $100,000 for Colby College so they would keep him on.”