“She asks me that, too. She asks everybody. Everybody asks everybody. It’s another way of saying hello.”
“Not for me.”
Lou was having a bad day. There had been many of those since the stroke.
I liked Lou, but just now I wasn’t in the mood for him and frankly, as of late, I wasn’t in the mood for anybody.
The phone rang and of course it was Fat Jack, Fat Jack doing Stephanie Eaton.
“Oh, Eli, I love you so much.”
“Not funny,” I said.
“Oh, Eli, I’ve thought about you every day, even out in California. The guys out there can’t compare to you.”
“Fat Jack, I’m hanging up.”
Back to his regular voice, Fat Jack said, “Don’t you wish?”
“Okay, I wish.”
“She’ll be here any minute, for real. Will you get it right this time or are you still a loser?”
I hung up and got back to Lou.
“I’ll let you know as soon as we come up with a lead for you,” I said, hoping he’d take the hint.
Lou was a sensitive guy for a salesman.
“I’d appreciate that,” he said. And then he whispered, “You know, Eli, I haven’t had a sale in six weeks.”
“It’s been that long?”
“Yes.”
“But I’ve been giving you leads.”
“The good ones? Aren’t you giving them to the Big Three?”
“That’s not true.”
Maybe it was true, to a degree. Some leads were so good, like say out in Hyde Park, that it would be a waste to give them to Old Lou, who simply didn’t have it anymore, so you gave him the marginal ones just to keep him busy. Just to keep him thinking he was still alive and ticking. Fat Jack considered him already dead. Fat Jack was a very subtle guy and when he saw Lou coming, shuffling along as he did, he’d say, “Here comes our cripple.” Or, “Dead salesman walking.” As I said, Fat Jack was a very subtle person and he’d be on my back if he caught me wasting good leads on Old Lou, though once in a while I sneaked one through, and sure enough, nine times out of ten, Lou would return with excuses.
(Lou? I always figured that he’d been delivered to me by Arthur Miller.)
I had suggested to Fat Jack that we send a CLOSER to accompany Lou on his appointed rounds, somebody to finish off a sale – there were people like the Big Three who specialized in that, it was an extraordinary skill – and Fat Jack said, “YOU propose it to him,” meaning that Lou would have a fit at the insinuation that he wasn’t salesman enough to close deals on his own anymore.
“Far be it from me to make accusations,” Lou said. “It just seems when they go out on a call for you, ends up in a sale.”
“It’s all luck, Lou.”
“Me – sometimes the people aren’t even home. Like that time in Amberly Village, and you call that verifying?”
“She was a new girl, who got us that lead. I fired her.”
Do I tell him the truth? Do you tell a man the truth, that he’s kaput? Not me. I won’t give that line and I won’t take that part or play that scene. As for that new girl, the real reason I had fired her was because after we had made love that one time she thought it was time to get married and even went around telling the others that we were engaged. Her name was Sue. Or maybe it was Mary.
“Just get me some good leads, will you pal?” He slapped me on the back. “We’re pals, right?”
“We’re pals, Lou.”
Slapping me on the back had taken up much of Lou’s energy and he started coughing again, which drove me nuts; I was afraid he’d never stop or start choking and that would be the end of him. He really was sad to behold. You kept blessing God that you weren’t in his condition. But it worried you what happened to people. Lou was a warning of things to come. It’s great that we get to live longer – but for what reason?
Lou walked over to Mona and kissed her on the cheek. She got red in the face and kissed him back. “Friends?” he said.
“We’ll always be friends, Lou,” Mona said. “You and I go back too far for it to be otherwise.”
“You’re my girl. Eli, you’re my pal, right?”
“We’re pals, Lou.”
Chapter 5
Downstairs I said to Fat Jack, “Are you out of your mind?”
“Just ask her,” he said, breathing into my face, an old habit of his when he wanted to trouble me, and he always did. We were in the Oriental Department, Oriental rugs, that is, which was deserted, since nobody bought Oriental rugs when the economy was bad, and even when the economy was good, which it never was. Oriental drew a very specific clientele, classy types, like Stephanie, oh well.
“A favor,” Fat Jack said. “All I ask is a favor. I do plenty for you. The fact that I keep you employed is a favor. All you use those girls for is to fuck ‘em.” He had me in a schoolyard bear hug, letting go only after I tapped him silly in the balls. He said, “That’s money out of my pocket, those girls I hire for you. I pay for your pussy.”
Fat Jack thought I ran a regular harem up there. Everybody thought so, in fact.
“I’m not playing pimp for you, Fat Jack. You want her. You ask her.”
He wanted Marie, that sleek little blonde from Newport, Kentucky I had brought on about two months ago. (The turnaround in telephone soliciting, excuse me, telemarketing, was something terrific.) Fat Jack was an outrageous guy, and proud of it, witness those TV commercials in which he bragged that he must be CRAZY, CRAZY, CRAZY for slashing prices like that, even pulling his hair and grimacing all over the place just to show how crazy he was, but I wasn’t prepared for this. He wanted to rent one of my girls. He was a married man. A pillar, a very wide pillar, of the community.
“So I’ll do just that,” he said. “I’ll ask her myself.”
“She won’t go for it,” I said. “She knows you’re married.”
“She’s from Kentucky, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“She’ll do it,” he said, punching me in the ribs.
“Because she’s from Kentucky?”
“Because I’m offering her a hundred bucks.”
“She’s no whore.”
“They’re all whores.”
“Girls from Kentucky?”
“Girls from everywhere!”
“Ten bucks says she turns you down.”
“Make it a hundred,” he said. “Make it a THOUSAND.”
“The kind of money you pay me?”
“All right. Ten. Eli, you may be the biggest Romeo in Cincinnati, but you’re naïve as hell. You’re a baby.”
Frankly, I considered that a compliment.
* * *
The rumor was that Marie was in love with me, which was a no-no. Take them to bed if you must, but no tie-ups, or like the guy before me said – and he didn’t even believe in taking them to bed – “Don’t piss in the pot you drink from.” Well, I did much pissing into that pot, not that I was proud of it, but what were you going to do? Marie and I had made love only once, most of the seducing coming from her, as when she said, “Can I go home with you?” She was a sweet kid, quiet, well built, actually very well built, terrific breasts, and I happened to be strictly a breast man.
I had been putting her off for weeks because I didn’t want to hurt her, Marie. I’d be using her.
“No,” I said bravely. But she followed me to the car. How long can you go on being a hero?
She did all the work in bed and was trying very hard to please and in a strange, detached way it was quite wonderful, pure sex that it was, and to think how completely she had given herself and was offering herself, like a sacrifice; there was nothing she’d refuse me. Which made it all quite sad. I wasn’t using sex for passion anymore, or even for pleasure, certainly not for love. Just to kill time.
Until Stephanie came back. She always did, did come back, although there is always a first time, or do I mean a last time?
It was all about Stephanie. Nothing else counted, nothing a
nd nobody. Only Maishe would understand. Maybe not. Maishe was still Joe College, living the frat life, even though he had already matriculated and was still matriculating from one girl to the next so maybe he’d fail to understand this obsession of mine over a single woman – but what a woman! Maishe still tallied his conquests. Maishe still kept score.
I kept telling him it’s getting late. Soon there’ll be no one left to laugh at our pranks and buy our charms. This too shall pass.
* * *
The girls were making plans for lunch. That’s a routine that has them going back and forth. Mona seldom went with them so there was no one to make a decision. They decided, finally, on Frank’s Diner on Vine Street and asked Sonja the Psychic to join them. She declined, the third straight day she had done so, and instead, after the room emptied out, sat there at her desk occasionally reading a book and occasionally staring at me.
She was reading the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. How come?
“Because I knew you liked him.”
“How did you know?”
“I told you. I’m psychic.”
I shouldn’t have asked. But oh my gawd! She is. She is psychic, or something.
“Why don’t you go out for lunch?”
“What about you?”
“I don’t eat lunch.”
“That’s good enough for me,” she said.
I asked her if she was getting along with the other girls.
“I’d rather read,” she said. “I find that more stimulating.”
“Except that real people are what books are all about.”
“I’m waiting to meet Stephanie,” she said smiling.
“Why?”
“Just because.”
“Just because why?”
“Are you afraid I’m going to hurt her?”
No I wasn’t. Not until she brought it up.
“Hurt her?”
“Well I know you think I’m some kind of weirdo. Everybody else does.”
“Why would you say anything about hurting Stephanie?”
“Forget it,” she said.
Do I fire her now? Practically very day I was on the verge of making that move. Except that so far she had given me no solid reason. She wasn’t that bad on the phones. She was okay. She got us a couple of leads a day and that’s about all that can be expected, and some of the girls were lucky to get that many in a week. She gave good phone, as Fat Jack would say.
“I want to know why people think you’re weird.”
“Because people think I’m…oh never mind!”
“Please. Go on.”
“All right. Some people think I’m dangerous.”
“Well are you?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes trouble seems to follow me.”
“Like when?”
“I told you I predicted my father’s death. My mother thinks I made him die.” She laughed at that, though I wasn’t sure at what in particular, her father’s death or her mother’s suspicions. “Same thing with a boyfriend I once had. They always blame me. All I do is tell people what I see. But they always blame me. You’ll see. You’ll blame me for Stephanie, too.”
Oh Please!
Fat Jack called from downstairs, from down in the store, the showroom as it was called, first to ask if I was giving good leads to Lou. “Don’t waste them on that cripple,” he said. I defended Lou but it was no use. Lou was a cripple and Fat Jack was a crude son of a bitch and there was nothing you could do about either. The second reason was this: He wanted me to send down Marie so that he could proposition her.
“Get her down yourself, Fat Jack.”
“Put her on the phone.”
“To hell with you,” I said, and hung up.
A minute later he was upstairs.
Mona said, “Well lookie who’s here.”
“Quit yapping and get us leads,” Fat Jack howled. “Stay on those phones. LEADS, LEADS, LEADS. We’re STARVING.”
“Oh you,” said Mona. “You don’t scare me.”
Mona was used to Fat Jack’s entrances and Fat Jack’s shenanigans. He’s all talk, she liked to say.
“Well I better scare you because I OWN you.”
“Oh shush.”
“You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,” Fat Jack said, pointing to each girl individually. “I own all of you.”
The girls were giggling, those familiar with Fat Jack’s outbursts and hip to his whimsy. Except for Sonja Frick.
“What’s with her?” Fat Jack asked me, privately, as soon as order was restored.
“Who?”
“That new broad.”
“She’s psychic.”
“She gives me the creeps.”
“Me, too.”
“So why did you hire her?”
“People haven’t been breaking the doors down to work here, Fat Jack.”
“I didn’t know we were that desperate. I’d keep away from her, Eli.”
“I intend to.”
“That’s fatherly advice. That girl’s trouble. I can smell it a mile off. Dump her.”
“Not just yet. She’s got us a few leads.”
“Give her a couple of days and send her home. Spooky. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“That’s one conquest you don’t need.”
Speaking of conquests, Fat Jack strolled over to Marie, whispered something, and they marched out together.
“What’s that all about?” Mona whispered, baffled and flustered.
“Nothing,” I said.
“She’s trying,” said Mona. “She really is.”
“She’s not being fired, Mona. That’s not what this is about.”
“Oh? What is it about?”
“Never mind.”
Mona was the mother of us all, up here in the boiler room. If Mona had an inkling of what’s going on in the world, she didn’t let on. She was no Born Again Christian. No reason to be born again when the first time took. She attended church regularly. She worked without complaining, ever, about anything. She was not dumb, not at all, she had neighborhood wisdom and if there were troubles beyond her scope, made no difference as long as she was home in time to make dinner.
Marie came back and asked if she could talk to me outside in the hallway. Okay. There, in the hallway, she said, “Mind if I take the afternoon off?”
“You’re not feeling well?”
“Something like that.”
Who could blame her? If I were a girl and Fat Jack propositioned me, I’d be sick, too.
After she left I phoned Fat Jack to tell him that he owed me ten bucks. But he wasn’t in, either.
Chapter 6
“You owe me ten bucks,” he said, grabbing me around the neck and twisting us both to the ground in the Linoleum Department, never mind the customers who came for carpet when instead a fight broke out. “Forget the money. I’ll take this in payment.” He grabbed a pair of scissors from the counter and cut my tie in half. Back home I had an entire collection of half-ties, mementos.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Ask her. It’s a done deal.”
I really didn’t believe him. Marie was no innocent, but she did have working class values, didn’t she? A hundred bucks and she was his?
It really shouldn’t be that easy, and maybe that’s another reason why I was so nuts about Stephanie.
For her, yes, you would have to write a symphony, maybe Beethoven’s Ninth. (I’m not sure, though, if it worked for him personally, Beethoven, possibly celibate to his grave.)
“The deal is this,” Fat Jack said about his arrangement with Marie.
“Do I have to hear?”
He grabbed me by the collar. I grabbed him right back.
“Yes you have to hear,” he said. “You have to grow up.”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s already started, and she was great. Eli, the greatest piece of ass I ever had.” What terms we used to ascribe the beautiful art of lovem
aking – piece of ass. What happened to courtliness, chivalry and romance? When did we get so crude? But who was I to talk? I had my own reputation.
“You’re a jerk, you know,” Fat Jack continued, shaking me by the lapels and me shaking him right back. “She spent half the time crying, about how much she was in love with you. She said she was doing it for the hundred bucks because she thought that’s what YOU wanted.”
This made me sick. “She was doing it for me?”
“Forget that.”
“Forget that? Did you give her that impression, that I was in on this?”
“I never said a word about you.”
“Did you straighten her out?”
“It didn’t matter.”
“Well it matters to me that she thinks…”
“She’ll do anything for you, Eli.”
“Did she take the hundred bucks?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Of course she did. Eli, girls were made for fucking. Who knows that better than you, cockhound of the Midwest.”
“Come on.”
“That’s all they’re good for.”
“Your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter…”
“That’s different. We’re not talking family, you yutz. We’re talking girls.”
“Oh them!”
“You’re judging me? You whose conquests number in the hundreds? The THOUSANDS?”
“None of my doing.”
“Oh – it’s that you’re so irresistible they can’t keep their hands off you?”
“No, it’s a winning streak. You should have been around when I had the acne.”
“So now it’s catch-up time?”
“No, Fat Jack. It’s just a hot streak, like the Reds when they’ve got it going.”
Fat Jack wouldn’t understand about the Cincinnati Reds since he was the only local who cared nothing for baseball. For the rest of us the Reds were the beginning and the end. Our lives were tied to the Reds. Fat Jack once got a couple of free tickets and gave them to me and I took Stephanie to the game. Stephanie loved baseball though she wasn’t sure what team they were playing against or even what league they were in. She asked, during the game, if the Reds were as big as the Yankees and I said, who are the Yankees? Which set her straight, I think.
The Girls of Cincinnati Page 3