“I’m also sick when you’re here.”
She laughed. Then she sighed. “Oh, Eli.”
“Do you still love me?” I dared.
“I care about you. Very much.”
What the hell did that mean? Was that something new I’d take home with me? Was there a space between CARE and LOVE? How much? Did VERY MUCH bring it closer to the real thing? Was love a magic word or could two people make a life out of CARING VERY MUCH?
“That wild college professor, does he remind you of me?”
“Yes he does. He’s handsome.”
“But more handsome.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Smarter.”
“No, you’re just as smart, in your own way.”
“Wittier?”
“No. In fact you’re much funnier.”
“So he’s only wilder? That’s all I’ve got to beat?”
“You don’t have to beat anything, Eli. Just stay as you are. Have you found a facsimile for me?”
“No, Stephanie, you’re one of a kind, as we say in the rug business.”
“You think of me as a carpet?” she laughed happily.
“I think of everything as carpet. It gets that way.”
“What sort of carpet am I?”
“Oriental.”
“Is that the best?”
“Supposed to last a lifetime.”
She was entirely mellow now, and not in the California mode.
“I guess it was crude of me to bring up another guy. Only I thought you had forgotten all about me. You never wrote.”
“Neither did you.”
“You never called.”
“Neither did you.”
“I was sure you had found someone else,” she said.
“I was sure you hadn’t.”
She sighed. “I like it here. This is OUR place, isn’t it, Eli?”
“You said we’re never coming back.”
“That’s because you were acting so foolish.”
“I was only being wild.”
She laughed, then turned serious. “I saw that green ribbon on your desk. The one I once left in your apartment.”
“I didn’t know I still had it,” I said.
“I saw it on your desk, Eli. Don’t be ashamed of being sentimental. I’m glad I’m still in your heart. But life…”
“Uh-oh…”
“But life goes on,” she said.
Chapter 13
The last person I wanted to see when I got back was Old Lou. Always after a get-together with Stephanie I wanted to be alone. Especially if it was a good one, so I could extract the gold, and especially if it was a bad one, where I could sort through the wreckage. This time, on the wreckage front, I was left with LIFE GOES ON. What a thing to say!
Even worse than Lou at a moment like this was Fat Jack. I had to pass the showroom on my way up.
Fat Jack was giving a speech.
Saying: “The most important thing in life is SELLING.”
He spotted me trying to sneak through the crowd. “This is for you too, Eli.”
Phil Coleman and the other salesmen smiled. They suspected I wasn’t one of them.
They thought I was a spy.
Maybe I was a spy to the extent that I loved to watch people and considered myself not above or beneath them, but merely detached, an observer, as any good actor had to be – and frankly, it amazed me that not all people were actors. What else made any sense? In my New York days I worked with a waiter named Big Stan who said he wasn’t, WAS NOT waiting on tables as a means to support an acting career. He was a waiter because he WANTED TO BE A WAITER. That was his profession. He was proud of his profession. Was it possible, therefore, that there were bus drivers who wanted to be bus drivers, and ditto for cabbies, construction workers, janitors, window washers, maids, valets, insect EXTERMINATORS, hatters, plumbers, carpenters – weren’t they all just biding their time until their agents gave them a call? Weren’t they all spies? Obviously not. I had it all wrong. Which was good. It would be a world without food and water if we all pursued the same task. Fortunately we all sorted ourselves out, like bees and ants, and went scurrying into different jobs and professions for the general GOOD. We thought we were individuals but all we did was supply the demand.
As for me, nature had decreed that there was a greater need for boiler room managers than for actors.
* * *
Fat Jack said every man here was behind on his quota… “And that’s the problem. The fact that you’re HERE. The fact that you’re here means that you’re not THERE. Outside. Selling.” It was understood that walk-in trade was never as lucrative as OUTSIDE; walk-in customers were usually in the market for something to cover the hallway – a lousy rug! Morris Silver could handle that by himself, if he wasn’t in the middle of a tall story. In the carpet business all that counted was wall-to-wall. “I want HUNGRY salesmen,” Fat Jack said.
Fat Jack was a terrific orator, maybe not of the Shakespearean cut, but he was a terrific speaker; you could tell that by the way he held his audience, in this case the sales force, spellbound. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word. If not spellbound, then every man here certainly was asleep, Morris Silver grumbling, “Same old garbage.”
Hot shot Phil Coleman whispered back, “Show some respect for the young.”
“Yeah the young,” said Morris. “You young guys. Yeah, you really know what it’s all about.”
Phil Coleman laughed. “You’re just jealous.”
“Yeah I’m jealous. I’m so jealous.”
What I liked about Morris Silver was how he disagreed with everything you said by agreeing with everything you said, a rare and wonderful skill. Like someone would say to Fat Jack, “That’s a nice suit you’ve got on.” Morris Silver would say, “Yeah, that’s some nice suit you got. Yeah, real nice.” Or someone would make a complimentary remark about the President of the United States and Morris Silver would say, “Oh yeah, he’s a champ. A real jewel.” In his own way, though, Morris Silver was a great thinker, equal to, say, Freud, as when he once told me, in fewer words than Freud ever used – in fact he summed it all up for Freud when he said, “For you guys, what more is there to life besides pussy?”
* * *
When I got upstairs Lou was already sitting at my desk. I told him the most important thing in life was selling. I said Fat Jack had challenged me to come up with something more important, like maybe ACTING, WRITING, LEARING, PHILOSOPHY, CULTURE in general, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
“You’re not being sarcastic, are you?”
No I wasn’t. I was becoming a believer.
“Maybe Fat Jack is right,” Lou said. “If you don’t believe selling is the most important thing, maybe you shouldn’t be here. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing…”
Fair enough. He had me there. True, I did not believe in what I was doing. Chalk one up for Lou.
I said, “What’s the matter, Lou? You seem down in the dumps.”
It wasn’t like Lou to come at me so directly, saying, in effect, if I didn’t like it here I shouldn’t be here, and frankly I was hurt and insulted. We were pals. But of course we weren’t pals. We were pals so long as he needed me and I needed him. He needed me for leads and I needed him for…who knew? What was he to me except a salesman, a pretty mediocre salesman at that, and not the most pleasant individual, prone to outbursts of temper, against others, at real or imagined slights, understandable, to be sure, for his age and in his condition, and maybe that was it, I was scoring points being nice to a man nobody else had patience for, I was being GOOD. For all I knew, I didn’t even like him – and he didn’t like me. But we’d never find out because we were kind of thrown in together. The more pathetic he became, the more I stuck by him. Maybe, lacking any real purpose here, I had made Lou my purpose. Maybe. Or maybe I was performing, world’s greatest actor that I was, using the boiler room as a stage, expecting applause.
If it can’t be Broadwa
y or Hollywood, it’ll have to be the boiler room. Let it be the boiler room.
Anyway, it wasn’t like him to attack me.
Once in a while he’d say I was a fish out of water.
But that was the extent of his nastiness.
“I’m not in a bad mood,” he said.
But Lou, it turned out, was not only in a bad mood. He was in bad trouble. Someone had contacted him about that list of QUALITY customers he had purloined, and wanted it back, of course – pronto. Lou had refused. But whoever had called him had threatened him. Threatened to do harm if he didn’t return that list. Lou, circling his wagons, had threatened to make Xerox copies of that list, said he would distribute these duplicates to every salesman in town, rendering the list useless, turning, therefore, gold into dust.
“Are you crazy?”
“I’ve already started going out on calls,” he said, chuckling, and I should have gathered as much from that new bow tie he was sporting, not to mention that carnation in his lapel, and his sweet-smelling breath all of a sudden and the cologne which announced him a mile off, all signs of a salesman back in action!
“From that list?” I asked.
He was beaming. “Made a six thousand dollar sale yesterday.”
That was six times more than he had ever made from the best of my leads.
“Didn’t Fat Jack wonder where you got the lead?”
Lou said nothing for a while and I couldn’t imagine what he was holding back.
“I told him you gave it to me.”
Calmly, I told Lou never to do that again.
“I was only making you look good.”
“Don’t make me look good, Lou.”
“I thought I was doing you a favor.”
“Don’t do me favors. Not these. What’s gotten into you?”
“Survival.”
“That’s no answer.”
“How about SALES? That’s the answer. Fat Jack keeps saying it and you keep not believing it but that’s why we’re here, Eli! We’re here to sell. In case you didn’t know it, I’m a salesman. Selling is what I do. I don’t sell, I don’t exist.”
“You can’t be that desperate.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Lou – they’re going to come after you.”
“Who?”
“The boys who called you, Lou, and who were they, by the way?”
“It was just one guy.”
“Who?”
“Some guy.”
He wouldn’t tell.
What I couldn’t tell him was that if he kept going out on wall-to-wall jobs, that by itself would finish him. I’d been out with bigger, stronger and healthier guys and watched them huffing and puffing and nearly collapsing from the rigors of measuring – whereas Lou was extended to the max simply to negotiate his way across the showroom.
“I appreciate your concern,” Lou said.
“I thought I knew you, Lou.”
“People are full of surprises,” he said.
Mona didn’t know what was going on, of course, so as Lou got up to leave, she said: “I think I have a lead for you, Lou. I can’t verify till next week, when her husband comes back from…”
“That’s okay, Mona. Take your time. I’m in no hurry.”
After he left, Mona said, “Was that Lou talking, or was it my imagination?”
“He’s not hungry anymore, Mona. At least not for our leads.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t want to know.”
* * *
Sonja the Psychic said, “So that was Stephanie.”
She was being sugary, for starters.
“Yes it was,” I said.
“I know I promised to be good, but mind if I say something?”
“I hope it’s nice.”
“Yes it is. You’re too good for her. She doesn’t appreciate you.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“You deserve better.”
“Thanks.”
“She thinks she’s hot stuff.”
“That’s enough, Sonja.”
“Don’t you know what she’s really like?”
“Yes I do.”
“Men are so blind. What will it take to open your eyes?”
Chapter 14
I was in my apartment in Mount Adams. The stars were out and the Reds were in LA. They usually sank in the West. Upstairs Kevin Ivy was humping his secretary, Felice. (She was black, his wife was white, very white.) I heard her climax. If it’s Felice, it must be Wednesday. Felice was ferocious in bed. Not that I knew this firsthand, so to speak, but it was enough just to listen to her. She made wonderful sounds and she never failed to ignite me when she finally let out that big yell. You couldn’t help but get turned-on vicariously. After it was all done she’d walk down the stairs, unsteadily for she usually climaxed in succession, sometimes three in a row (is that a record?) and offer me an inviting smile as if the two of us had shared something as well.
Kevin was a lawyer and so damned proper. All his friends were lawyers. Even judges. Every other night, except Wednesdays, dozens of his proper friends spread themselves out upstairs, drinking beer, including the redhead Gloria who’d always come down when I was alone, rip off her clothes and rape me. She bit. She was a biter. That was one way I was sure who was in bed with me. I could understand biting in the heat of passion, but she took a nip sometimes when it was all over and I had started to doze, or was walking her to the door, and she did complain about that, about my napping, but anyway, I kept telling her to quit the damned biting but she said it helped her. She needed it for arousal. She said I ought to try it too, in which case, I said, we ought to get down on all fours and wag our tails. She always climaxed and it was always good sex for me, too, though I didn’t know and didn’t want to know a thing about her, hardly even knew what she looked like with the lights out all the time. She was a redhead, most probably. Maybe she was married. We’d come together, she’d get dressed, and leave and get proper again. Gloria was a lawyer. She kept imploring me to enter her anally, which I’d never do, first of all because it was against the LAW. This was Cincinnati where they fined you and sometimes arrested you for JAYWALKING. Imagine sodomy or something. I wondered what Gloria was like in court.
The other neighbor upstairs, by the way, was a guy named Malcolm Wayworth. Talk about proper, and UPSTANDING. He was an insurance salesman, short, wore a crew cut, and nobody in all of Cincinnati was more polite than he was, and that was saying something. In a polite contest, Malcolm Wayworth took the prize. He never failed to smile and say good morning, or good evening. He was married to a sweet, petite lady you almost never saw, but when you did, she was hiding a black eye or something. Every now and then you’d hear noises upstairs.
They didn’t live directly above me, that would be Kevin Ivy, so the noises must have been pretty loud, and the sounds were of violence. Couldn’t be, though, could it, that that upstanding citizen was beating his wife? An INSURANCE SALESMAN? Stephanie had been here once when that racket was going on upstairs and she wanted to know what it was, and I said they were probably moving furniture.
Listen, she said, I think I hear a woman. He’s BEATING HER! Aren’t we going to do something? So we went upstairs, knocked on the door, and his wife answered. She was black and blue and her eyes were very red. I asked if everything was all right and she said yes it was. Malcolm came to the door as upstanding as ever and apologized for the commotion, though never saying what it was. When we were downstairs again Stephanie was distraught over the fact that we were so HELPLESS. We couldn’t do anything. “Don’t you feel we should have done something?” she said. I shrugged. I said whatever had to be done I was ready to do. But there was nothing to do. Even the WOMAN denied that she was being beaten and she’d probably deny it to the police, all the way to court. I didn’t say (from my own experience) what could happen once you interfered between two people. To be your brother’s keeper was fine, I was all for it, but it wasn’t that easy. Anyway, you
can’t go knocking on every door. Anything can be going on inside, kissing or killing. Stephanie said, “Well I think it’s OUTRAGEOUS that we can’t do anything to stop that man.” I agreed. I said if I ever caught him in the act…but I never would of course, and that poor woman would go on getting beat up. I knew that, Stephanie knew that, Malcolm knew that, his wife knew that, but that was how it was, something like the law of the jungle, yes, even here in Cincinnati. Stephanie made me promise to catch her alone one day and ask her. Which I did. I tried. I said, “Does your husband…Is your husband…Are you?” She stared me in the face, quite affectionately, and said, “I’ll manage,” and walked away.
Stephanie, when I reported this back to her, wasn’t comforted. She didn’t come right out and say so but I could detect this much, she was annoyed that I wasn’t taking action. Right, I ought to go upstairs and punch him out for ALLEGEDLY beating his wife, have him call the cops, have her say her husband never touched her, and have the cops check my records. Or, go in there, throw him a punch, and kill him – which could happen. It wasn’t like the movies. In real life you hit somebody, it could be lethal. Yes it could. So you had to be careful, very careful, before you became your brother’s or your sister’s keeper. Domestic violence is tricky business. Ask any officer of the law. This much Stephanie did say, “I’m SURPRISED that you can live here under these conditions.” As if conditions were perfect elsewhere. Maybe in Hyde Park – and I was willing to bet there were a few wife beaters there, too. Stephanie said, “And he looks so meek, that evil little man!” I said that’s the thing about evil, it usually comes with a false front. But she couldn’t get over how HELPLESS we were.
* * *
I was watching the Reds against the Dodgers. How I hated those Dodgers. Los Angeles. California. Where PhD college professors were WILD. They were losing, these Reds, to those wild PhD Dodgers. They were down three zip at the bottom of the first and the Dodgers still had men on base, when the phone rang and it was Stephanie, saying, late as it was, she wanted to come over. Would I mind? Of course I wouldn’t mind.
The Girls of Cincinnati Page 7