The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

  “Ben.”

  “—He wanted his sister’s life to be interesting, too. He felt bad that she envied him.”

  “Oh, Ben.”

  “—That’s another ironic part. She still envies him. She doesn’t know shit about interesting lives.”

  “Oh, Ben.”

  “—He never told her about this woman he knew who made up contests for magazines.”

  “Ben,” Patty said.

  “There was this woman—the Contest Lady.”

  “Please, Ben.”

  “Maybe you know her.”

  “Please, Ben.”

  “After college she knocked around some, traveling, working a bit, taking lovers—like that.”

  “Why are you—”

  “But Lotte wasn’t satisfied. Things bored her. I never knew anyone so easily bored. Your sister must have been very religious, I think, to be so bored.”

  “Religious?”

  “Well, she wanted everything to have a point. She had the highest expectations of anyone I’ve ever known. Wondrous high. Expectations higher than these mountains, higher than my sister’s. Expectations to give you the nosebleed. ‘Come,’ I’d say, ‘I’m your godlover, I like you, come home, I’ll take you to the ball park and buy you a hot dog.’ But the hot dog has not been packaged that would satisfy your sister. When she bought her cooperative in the East Seventies—Tower East—she bought on the top floor, the thirty-eighth.”

  “The thirty-sixth,” Patty said.

  “See? She thought it was to be the thirty-eighth. See how high her expectations? See? But there she was, forced to live two stories beneath her expectations. What was that guy’s name she liked so much?”

  “Bob Brown.”

  “Yes. Bob Brown. You know why she wouldn’t marry him?”

  “Because he lived in Oklahoma City. ‘How can I marry a man who chooses to live in Oklahoma City?’ That was her reason. That was what she told me stood between them.”

  “Do you know the only time she ever saw the apartment in daylight was when the agent showed it to her?”

  “She slept till dark.”

  “She slept till dark. She could see how boring things were in the daytime. They stood out more plainly in daylight. Sharper definition. Greater resolution. She never once—think of this—she never once saw the view—the bridges, midtown Manhattan. Only by night. And then only until the drapes came. I don’t think she opened them once they were up. She ate her meals at Elaine’s. All she kept in her refrigerator was club soda, tonic water, and shriveled lemons. Elaine billed her. It cost her $8,000 a year for her dinners.”

  “She saw her friends there.”

  “Yes. Her friends. They’d sit around and play her contests. Those crazy contests she made up.”

  “They were funny. Did you ever do one?”

  “I’m no good at that stuff. What were some of the good ones?”

  “The inventions.”

  “Oh yeah. Right. The inventions.”

  “The Planet of the Apes.”

  “Right. The apes were very advanced but couldn’t see the obvious. Wasn’t that it? Something was always left out and an earthman had to set them straight.”

  “Blowing,” Patty said.

  Ben laughed. “Blowing. Blowing was terrific. These ape kids would go to the zoo or the park with their mothers and fathers and there’d be this ape selling colored balloons and the kids would make their parents buy them one and then they’d shlep the goddamn balloons along the ground on a string. Until the earthman said, ‘They’re beautiful balloons, why don’t you blow them up?’ And that was how blowing was invented.”

  Patty laughed. In the thin air she had difficulty catching her breath.

  Ben held his stomach, his sides. “Oh, God,” he said, “it is, it is dangerous. We could die laughing up here.”

  Patty couldn’t stop. Slime spilled from her nose like blood from a wound. “And when he…he…hee hee hah hah…oh, Ben, sl-slap me or hah hah hah some-something.”

  “Their fountain pens,” Ben said, roaring. “They had these fantastic fountain nch nch pens. Much more advanced than ours. Parker 22’s! But whenever—whenever they wrote anynchnchthing they al-always rip r-r-ripped the pa-paper.”

  “Till the earthman told them about ink. Oh, God, Ben,” she said, exhausted.

  Ben was completely lightheaded now. He was no longer convulsed because he had run out of air, out of breath. “They had radios,” he said quietly. “Transistorized AM-FM stereos that never made a sound. Only some static if there was a bad storm. TV’s with blank screens.”

  “I don’t remember that one,” Patty said.

  “The earthman asked why they hadn’t invented programs.”

  “Oh yes,” Patty said. “I forgot that one.”

  “The Wild Idea contest.”

  “The Physics jokes.”

  “They were too complicated,” Ben said. “But she was a hell of a Contest Lady, Insight Lady.”

  “Yes,” Patty said.

  “She was this fucking princess setting tasks, her ass to the guy who won her goddamn contests.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “How do you think she met Brown? He was out there in Oklahoma City, for Christ’s sake, entering those stupid contests and picking off first prize or honorable mention every week. She finally called him, summoned him. And it wasn’t because he lived in Oklahoma that she didn’t marry him.”

  “It was.”

  “But because she got bored with making up contests. Because your sister got bored with laughter.”

  “What?”

  “Because finally, if you want to know, just plain being happy didn’t come up to her expectations.”

  Patty was crying. “Why did she have to kill herself? Oh, God, I miss her,” she sobbed.

  “Those grotesque childhood diseases. The bad fairy’s chicken’s pox. The delayed measle and the mopey mump like a pea under her hundred mattresses. (Because she was, too, a princess and did, too, live in a fairy tale.) The colic of a kid’s sky-high fevers and all deferred disease. Her tardy terrible times. Lotte’s laggard, dallying, dilatory death. Let’s get off the mountain.”

  “Oh, Ben.”

  His bad hand felt as if it were housed in a sandpaper glove. “Because boredom is the ultimate childhood disease, and your sister had too damn many more rainy days than she could handle. Tell me, tell me, how high are your expectations? Are they bigger than a bread basket?”

  “No.”

  “Mine neither. How about boredom? Are you bored?”

  “I’m excited.”

  “Yes? Good. Long life to you.”

  “Ben—”

  He pushed himself up to his knees. He was breathless and his balance was bad and Patty had to help him and it was a good thing the horses had not left but were standing just the other side of the trail when, Patty helping him up the slight incline, they got back to it, and lucky that Patty was there to help him work his fingers into the proper sheaths of the glove, for he could feel nothing in his right hand and was unaware, who was aware of the significance of his encounters with princesses from fairy tales, that he had jammed his index and forefinger together with all his strength into a single sheath of the wrangler’s borrowed glove, unaware of this till Patty, Insight Lady that she was, saw the wide salami casing of his jammed hand and helped him with it, splaying his paresthetic fingers that burned if they touched something that was merely warm and turned icy if they touched that which was only cool and could not distinguish textures or else confused them, mistaking the blunt for the sharp, the rough for the smooth, but could feel well enough, when it came right down to it, pain but never pleasure, unaware that he had made this mistake who understood not merely the significance of his old lover’s, Lotte’s, death but the continued presence of the horses as well, that, riderless, freed, one might have expected to return to the stables of the Broadmoor—why certainly! clearly! because we are dudes and they know it and are dude-trained, b
roken to dude habits, knowing by heart of course the dude-resting and dude-dismounting places on this dude mountain, horses like good dancing partners who by this time could follow anyone, even franchise dudes like me and Insight Lady dudes like her, but not doing us any favors either and not even just doing their job but lessoned in this, made to go right fucking back up the mountain unhayed and unwatered with the wrangler if they return empty-saddled to a class dude place like the Broadmoor!—and lucky, too, that she was there to help him back on his horse, well, a horse, for God knew—not an Interstate, civilized trademark dude like him—whether it was Thunder or Cherry whose back he rode or she rode, and they pulled the reins just as the wrangler had told them to if they wanted to turn the horses and the horses, who were also in nature, too, recall, turned easy as pie and they went back down the trail together, half dude and half horse, just like something else from the fairy tales.

  They spent part of their last day together at the Broadmoor with Patty analyzing the handwriting in the logos of some of Ben’s franchises. They found their samples in the advertisements of the Colorado Springs Yellow Pages. She told him that the Fin the “Fred Astaire Dance Studios” was very interesting.

  “See,” she said, “how at the lowest point of the downstroke there begin to be right and left tending upward spirals. The F is practically a caduceus. God, Ben, it is a caduceus. In classical mythology this was the staff carried by Mercury. Mercury the messenger, fleet and nimble-footed in the sky. What is dance if not the defiance of gravity? Oh, I say, Ben, see the A, the hiatus at the top of the oval, the long l loop that doesn’t touch the base line. These are ‘irresistible eyes.’ This writer exerts a compelling influence on people. He wins their affection and confidence.”

  “That’s Fred.”

  Dairy Queen wasn’t in cursive, or Radio Shack, or Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken or Econo-Car, or most of the other of his franchises that had branches in Colorado Springs. But he’d had a Ford dealership once and Patty had a lot to say about the r in Ford, though it was poorly printed and didn’t show up clearly on the page.

  He asked her to analyze Holiday Inn, said it might be useful to know about the competition when he opened his Travel Inn.

  “When one leg of the H has a firm downstroke and the other is generally the same length but has a generously deflated concave loop, these are ‘horns,’ and the writer can become very obstinate and will almost always insist on his own way of doing things regardless of opposition or consequences. See how the H is crossed? Graphologists call this ‘airplane wings’ and think it indicates a tendency to press people for information which will be of advantage to the writer. When the wings cross both downstrokes, these are ‘riding crops one upon the other’ and the writer—”

  “Do you believe this crap?”

  “I get many prospectuses from corporations offering their stocks,” she said. “The numbers mean nothing to me. I’ve a head for figures but figures change. I look only at the signatures of the corporation’s officers. I am a rich woman.”

  Ben nodded and they went to bed together one last time. It was, from Ben’s point of view and almost certainly from hers, the most satisfactory screwing they had yet done. As usual, at climax, the insights came pouring out of her, a mile a minute and on every subject under the sun. Ben tried to follow, for she was very interesting and made a lot of sense, but his own groans and whimpers interfered, blocking out much of what she had to say, until all that he could hear at last were his own cries of pleasure, the baritones of his fulfillment and tenors of his dude ecstasy and, listening to these, to his own forceful shouts of completion and triumph, it was as if he tried to distinguish between speakers on two contending frequencies on the radio—they were now truly in nature—and as he concentrated, squeezing all meaning from Patty’s lucid, fastidious orgasm, the better to hear his own barks and cackles and yaps of relish, he heard his noises coalesce, thicken into speech, the vowels and consonants of violence contained, intelligently rearranging themselves into an order and form that may have been there from the beginning.

  “I,” he roared—from “ahh”—“want,” he demanded—from “oh,” “nh”—“my remission”—from “mnmnh,” from “shhh”—“back!” From shudders caught in his throat like chicken bones. “I want my remission back,” he said quietly.

  He rolled off her and onto his back, his penis wetting her thigh, marking it with its contact and scent as animals mark other animals.

  They turned on their sides away from each other, joined curiously at the ass, making an X. These were “railroad crossings” and the writer wants his remission back.

  “Yes?” the Insight Lady said. “You want your remission back? Yes? Ben, you know ever since you first told me that, I’ve wanted to say certain things to you. I think I have an insight that might help you. It seems to me, Ben, with all this talk of remission, that you want to live like a man with his bladder empty, to travel light and even weaponless, but be protected anyway. It’s interesting, for example, that you have always had all that power equipment in your automobiles. Power steering, and power brakes, Ben, power windows. A power aerial that rises from a hole in the front fender. Oh yes,” she said, “you want to live even emptier-handed than the rest of us.”

  “My hand?” he shouted angrily. “My hand? Graphologist! What about my hand? Did you ever once analyze that?” he yelled. “What the fuck do you think it would show?” he screamed. “The sand, the fucking sand! It’s a Sahara. Riffs ride their horses in it and shoot at the Foreign Legion. It’s a sandbox. Kids piss in it and make mud pies. My hand? This? The writer is in agony and only wishes, only prays he were fucking contagious!” he cried. “Silly bitchbody with your jerk-off insights and your pukey mind!” he thundered at her.

  Patty turned to him. She touched his shoulder, pulling on it, turning him toward her. She leaned forward and kissed him sweetly on the lips and smiled.

  “Oh, Ben,” she said, “it’s been a wonderful week. You’re a good listener,” she told him. “I wish my husband were. Well. I guess I’d better get dressed now. It’s only two hours till my plane. I love you, sweetheart. I love you, Ben.”

  For of course she hadn’t heard him, hadn’t heard even the least of his loud noises.

  “…a disgrace,” the guy from Fort Worth said. “Fun is fun and boys will be boys and it’s all very well to live it up at a convention, but to come in drunk and disrupt a meeting like that, the full plenary session with a new line on the line, that is quite another story altogether and really it would be best for everyone concerned, best for Mr. Flesh, best for the people in the Bowling Green area, best, frankly, for Radio Shack, if Flesh would just quietly relinquish his franchise, sell it back to the mother corporation, which would of course buy back his stock as well, all at a reasonable price. We assure you, sir, that you will not lose by the transaction. If anything, it’s Radio Shack which will suffer the most immediate financial setback. So, while we cannot force you, while we cannot—”

  “How much?”

  “What?”

  “How much? What’s your best offer?”

  “Well, we’d have to send someone down there to take an inventory. We’d have to have an audit. We’d want to—”

  “Sold.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought you’d be so—”

  “On one condition.”

  “Condition? Now look here, mister, you don’t have to sell to us, but we don’t have to sell to you either. We can cut off your purchasing privileges, you’d have to find some other supplier. So don’t you start waving any ‘on one condition’s’ around.”

  “That if he wants it you’ve got to resell the franchise to Ned Tubman of Erlanger, Kentucky.”

  “There’s a franchise in Erlanger. Isn’t Tubman…”

  “Tubman, yes. He owns the Radio Shack in Erlanger.”

  “Why would you care…Listen, if you’re thinking of making some sort of dummy corporation, selling to us and using Tub
man as a front…”

  “Tubman, yes. Tubman must have first refusal. I’m not in it. Tubman has always wanted to see Bowling Green, Kentucky.”

  “He wants to see Bowling Green, Kentucky?”

  “Like other people want to see Paris or the Great Wall of China.”

  “He’s never seen it?”