A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  Perhaps the department store itself—the real one, the one he owned, that terrified him—was only a sort of the creating of the conditions in which his dream might be realized, a fatuous placation like that of the New Guinea cargo cults which constructed bamboo airplanes on the tops of hills in the hope that they would attract real planes with their heaven-launched gifts. Idiot! Lovestruck! he thought. So this is what lies at the source of my will. So this is what my profit motive rests on. He felt like a sucker, comic as a cuckold. In fact he was a cuckold: where is she anyway? who has her? “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” he thought, “I wonder who’s showing her how.” But despite what he knew to be the reality, he held on to a helpless hope that he might yet find her.

  “Somewhere I’ll find you,” he sang in his head. “Someday my prince will come,” his heart answered. (That was another thing: even his ballads were old-fashioned. Most of them came from operettas. He didn’t even adjust the lyrics to his condition, but hermaphroditically sang for both sexes. It was a vestige of the old schism in him between the stuffed shirt and the prodigal.) “I am calling you—ooh—ooh—ooh—ooh—ooh—ooh,” he sang mutely, soul seeking soul, love’s sonar. “Someday he’ll come along,” he rendered, “the man I love.”

  Now, looking for Jean Arthur in earnest, he roamed the store, loped it—Feldman striding, darting, squinting, peering. There was a labored, frantic quality now (“Through the dark of night,” his head sang, “I’ve got to go where you are”), exactly like one partner to a comic appointment just missing the other in a revolving door, or losing her behind a pillar or a potted fern. “Some enchanted evening,” he warbled silently, “you will meet a stranger.”

  He sat down to catch his breath in front of a tiny vanity table in Ladies’ Hats. He had not made his search in several months and he was rusty, unused to the strain.

  He looked at himself in the table’s oval mirror. The tricky glass—hat sales up fourteen percent since it was installed—gave back a thinned, lengthened Feldman. Aware of the ruse (he had commissioned optical specialists in Baltimore to do his mirrors), he compensated by filling his cheeks with air. Too much, he thought, and let out a little. There, that’s what I look like. But he couldn’t be sure (only the mirrors in the employees’ toilets were accurate), and he stood up and gave himself half an hour to find his true love.

  Picking girls who wouldn’t know him, he approached their counters in disguise. Now he was one sort of son, now the other. In Ladies’ Nightgowns he grinned shyly at the young woman behind the counter. By holding his breath for a minute and a quarter, he was able to bring a blush to his face.

  “It’s a shower gift for my secretary,” he gulped. “She’s just about your size, ma’am. I guess I could get a better idea if you could sort of hold it up to your—to your—if you could sort of hold it up to yourself. Gee,” he said, “wow. I mean that’s very beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Its washable,” she said wearily, “it’s wrinkle-resistant. It won’t stain.” She took up her order pad. Feldman hesitated. “You throw it in the washer same as you would a bedsheet. It’s one of our sexiest items,” she said, looking at a point somewhere above his left shoulder. “Is that a charge, dearie?”

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “I do not,” she said.

  “I’m Leo Feldman, and you’re fired.”

  “I need this job,” she recited. “I’ve got to have an operation on my internal female organs. I’m saving up.”

  “Out, dearie,” he told her. “You’re washed up, same as you would a bedsheet.”

  He went to the toy department—he should have looked there first; hung up on kids, she’d be, the darlin’ angelface—where he spotted a gentle-looking blonde with a cute, snub little nose he associated with figure-skaters. The girl he had in mind would be soft-spirited, her female internal organs ripe and luscious as the top strawberries in a basket. He hung back a moment to form a plan, then went up to her.

  “I need about a hundred toys,” he began. “They’re for an orphanage. These kids have had tough lives; most of their parents are in prisons or asylums. A lot are from broken homes where neither the mother nor the father was deemed morally fit to retain custody. Many of these children were with their folks when they were killed in auto accidents and train wrecks or burned to death in fires. You can imagine what it’s like for them.”

  “Yessireee,” she said flatly. “Have you seen our new war line? WW Two?” She scooped up some metal tanks and pieces of artillery and placed them on the countertop. “Everything’s scale,” she said. “There’s a bomber that drops artificial napalm. We’ve got a model of the atomic bomb exactly like the one that killed seventy-four thousand people in Nagasaki.”

  Feldman tipped his hat.

  “There’s a terrific special on rubber knives.”

  “I’m Leo Feldman,” he said.

  “This is interesting,” she said, and lifted down a sort of chemistry set. “It’s the new germ-warfare kit. It’s perfectly harmless, but if you dust this powder on a wood, stone or metal surface, it grows a fungus. There are gases too. They don’t do any damage, but the smell is terrible.”

  “You’re transferred to Lingerie,” he said curtly.

  Mooncalf, he accused himself. Stargoose! Cometshmuck! He walked away, shaking himself to remember who he was. But by this time he knew, and what he looked like without a mirror. Not the wiseguy, not the dullard; he was the old man himself, the stern paterfamilias of damn fools and creeps—the loveless grump of the world.

  In this mood, in his office, Feldman read his messages and opened his mail.

  There was the usual number of charities. At his level they did not always ask for contributions but invited him to join committees. He set these aside for Miss Lane to reject with the excuse that while time did not permit, etc., etc., they could use his name on their letterhead (although to a few he had her fire off righteous declarations of opposition in principle). On one letter he recognized his name on the list of sponsors printed down the side of the stationery. My second notice, he thought, and threw it in the wastebasket.

  He had become a sort of public spirit. So prominent was his name on so many letterheads that the real community leaders had no idea of how little he actually did. They embraced him, welcomed him warmly to their executive class, and once they had almost made him Man of the Year. Where, Feldman wondered, was the vaunted anti-Semitism in the upper reaches of his society; where was the famous aloofness and coolness he had counted on? He couldn’t, he supposed, rise to the presidency of an insurance company, a railroad, a steel mill, a utility, and there was no real future for him in Detroit, none in the north woods—he worked in softer fabrics—but the gray-haired ranks of all philanthropists remained ready to open for him. Money talked: it talked to money. There wasn’t a country club in the state—not a hunt club, not a horse club or a talk club or a fuck club—that was closed to him. He could drink bourbon over ice in any of them. He could part his hair in the middle, and no one would laugh. He could wear a vest, a pocket watch, retire behind steel frames. But there was something tame and flat in wealth. He knew there was nothing he could buy, except his comfort, that would please him. He knew more: there was nothing he could give. The thought of sponsoring museums where people came to look six seconds at a given work of art and took home a deeper impression not of beauty but of all the things in the world that did not belong to them depressed him. It spoke ill for wealth if all that one could usefully do with it was give it away. There was something repressive in money finally, something inhibiting. Rich men used it as a lesson to poor men, dispensed it—whatever the sums; he had seen the restrictive clauses in those grants, the ironclad regulations—cautious and painstaking as chemists doling out the proportions of a boring formula.

  An executive—what was that? That was nothing to be. He had no heart for empire; only for the day to day, hand-to-hand, rough-and-tumble of imperialism, of which, sadly, empire was the single issue. Bu
t already, failing the Diaspora, he was dug in. Poor little rich boy, he mocked himself. Don’t mock me, he stormed. Only the damn miser counts his blessings. Pain has degrees. There are numbers on thermometers. Gloom isn’t staved with reasons. Look, he thought, clinching it, at that department on the fourth floor, for God’s sake, with its gifts for the man who has everything: personalized cue balls, solid gold zippers, framed thousand-dollar bills. Why, that, in his life, was what he had been reduced to: gestures gestured by the man who has gestured everything. He got by on joyless joie de vivre and forced life force.

  Last week he had made a speech in his book department, introducing Vice-Admiral Marlow (“Sea Power”) Bellingstone, USN Ret. He had read the man’s autobiography and wired his publisher, promising to split expenses if he could get the Admiral for an autographing party. He took out a half-page ad and called the local naval-recruiting office for a color guard. (The Navy would have nothing to do with the Vice-Admiral, and Feldman had had to settle for Billy in a sailor suit.) Standing on a raised platform draped with bunting, Feldman had addressed the crowd.

  “It is my high privilege,” he told them, “to pipe Admiral Bellingstone here aboard the Feldman. Many of his provocative views are familiar to you. His idea about extending the twelve-mile limit until sea mass exactly displaces land mass and each nation has its mirror image in the water—do I read you right, Admiral?” The Admiral saluted. “—is already known to most Americans. His career-long fight with the Pentagon to recognize Britain, rather than Communism, as the real threat to this nation is equally well known. So, too, are the Admiral’s efforts to restore our country once again to its rightful place as leader in the world’s whaling community. ‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ as the Admiral puts it in his book, ‘to let foreign Denmark put one over on us in this department.’”

  Feldman lifted one of the Admiral’s books off a tall stack. “An admirable work, Admiral,” he said, and touched his forehead in salute. The Admiral saluted back, and Feldman turned again to the crowd. “Less familiar, perhaps, but gone into here in careful detail is the Admiral’s fascinating proposal to form a team of naval historians and sea geographers to try to establish once and for all the historicity of Davy Jones’s locker. The Admiral’s belief that if we find it we’ll probably also rediscover the lost city of Atlantis could be one of the brilliant serendipities of the twentieth century.” (Even as he spoke, Feldman took the measure of his own outrageousness and disapproved. There was a lot of talk about the poor man hanging while the rich man got off scot-free, but there were other inequities. How much nonsense a rich man could speak!) “I am reminded, as just in passing I peruse the Admiral’s useful index, of his frightening warning about the danger of salt leakage from the ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway. In the Admiral’s phrase, we are ‘bleeding the Atlantic’ In just seventy billion years—do I have these figures right, Admiral?—the Great Lakes will turn saline. What are we supposed to do then?

  “Friends,” he said in conclusion, “I don’t want to keep the Admiral too long from his pensées, so I’ll turn him over to you right now, but I must just mention one more of his ideas that was particularly exciting to me. I’m talking about his research regarding the dangerous integration of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Panama Canal, what the Admiral calls ‘The Mongrelization of the High Seas.’ Maybe he’ll tell us a little more about that one himself. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome aboard Vice-Admiral Retired Harlow ‘Sea Power’ Bellingstone, USN.”

  The madman blinked, talked crazily for twenty minutes about his theory on mermaids—they were not good swimmers—and Feldman sold three hundred books.

  Or the bananas. From time to time Feldman had noticed news stories about merchants who, through misplaced decimals and literally interpreted metaphors in incautious ads, had been forced to part with valuable merchandise. A woman in Hartford bought a used car for four hundred potatoes. In Idaho a furniture store had to let a dining-room set go for “only a very little lettuce.” It was always big, good-humored news, and worth a picture even on the front page: a housewife, bent, smiling under a one-hundred-pound sack of potatoes; a gag photo of the Boise furniture man staring glumly—“That’s one on me”—at a shriveled garden lettuce, one browning, crumpled leaf of which protruded from his lips; a woman with her mouth open, and a beefy fellow with his hands over his ears who had just sold an air-conditioning unit for a song. It was as if a real bargain, things being what they are, were a blow for the underdog, from which all might take heart. The lucky seemed to give the unlucky hope, cheer, a belly laugh.

  A year before, Feldman had given his TV salesman a day off and run an ad for a floor-sample color television set with a twenty-five-inch screen. The price was three hundred and fifty bananas, and he had arranged for someone from his photography department to stand by with a camera. When the store opened, Feldman was behind the counter, waiting. In ten minutes there was a man before him, holding his ad. “You advertise the sale on the twenty-five-inch color TV?” the man asked.

  Feldman looked at the ad closely. “Yes sir,” he said, “but that’s just a floor sample.”

  “I know that,” the man said.

  “Yes sir,” Feldman said.

  “You still got that set?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I want to buy it.”

  “Don’t you want to see it demonstrated first?” Feldman asked. “The first color show doesn’t come on until ten this morning.”

  “No, that’s all right. It’s guaranteed, ain’t it?”

  “Yes sir,” Feldman said.

  “That’s good enough for me,” the man said. “Three hundred fifty, right?” he asked cagily.

  Feldman smiled. “That’s right.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Feldman said. “Let’s have them.”

  “It’s a charge,” the man said.

  “A charge?”

  “Here’s my charge plate.”

  “What is this, buddy?” Feldman demanded. “Are you trying to get away with something? That ad says bananas!”

  In the end he had to let the set go for three hundred and fifty dollars, but the photograph of him making out the sales slip was uninspiring.

  A month later he tried again. In a prominent ad in the Sunday papers he promised to sell an electric typewriter for “peanuts.” He was shooting for the wire services, and in fact it was a reporter and his photographer who showed up first. The reporter claimed the machine and handed Feldman the peanuts.

  “What,” Feldman said, extending the peanuts in his outstretched palm and turning toward the photographer, “peanuts? Where are the lawyers? Will this stand up in court? Well, well, that’s one on me.”

  His heart wasn’t in it. But he did it.

  As he did everything. “That Feldman,” anyone might have said, “there’s a man who’s alive.” As if eccentricity and a will set to scheme like a bomb to go off had anything to do with life. As if aggression and the maneuvered circumstances did.

  Look at him, his ringed, framed concentration like a kid seeking a lost ball in high grass. An aesthetic of disappointment, a life of wanting things found wanting, calling out for the uncalled for. But the shout down from the mountain was always the same—that the view wasn’t worth the climb. It was what one heard: “War is hell,” says the General. The movie star quoted: “All those retakes. Always on a diet. The lies about you in the columns. The crank mail.” Or the truth about spies: “People don’t realize. Mostly it’s just boring legwork. It’s dull, routine. I don’t even carry a gun.” And the loneliness of the Presidency, and the endless ceremonial obligations of the King, and the brief, doomed flare of the athlete’s prime, and all the small-print, thick-claused rest. People didn’t realize. That it wasn’t who one was, or even what one was, or if one made an effort or only took what came. What counted, finally, was whether you were lucky or not, whether the gods, the stars in their ornate sequences, had given you timing. There were lucky men. How
often—this seemed strange now—had he had occasion to say, “I am one. I am.”

  So he kept up his ersatz enthusiasms and redoubled all efforts, like some gambler letting it ride, and just yesterday he had called all his stock boys and shipping clerks and maintenance men together for a meeting in the back of the store.

  He smelled glue and string and rope and wrappings and postage and saucered sponges the color of erasers on pencils. In the shipping room he felt a physical disgust. He heard scales click, whir, a solid, metallic tattoo of postage meter. He saw the open rate books, the thumbed, greasy timetables. A telephone was out of its cradle. He lifted the receiver to his ear. “That you, Simon?” a woman’s voice said. “I see you tonight, honey. I tell my husband Mrs. Shicker want me for a dinner party she giving.” He hung up. Oppressed, he saw the pink third copies of bills of lading and wandered through a maze of senseless shipments with crayoned messages: “#7 of 10,” “3 of 9,” “1 of #4.” He felt a thick sense of half-point signatures, a smudged, bewildering spiral of unfamiliar initials and names: R. L. and J. H. and Herman Shaw. (They were his proxies. They signed for him. Who were they?)

  He opened a heavy door. A man lay sleeping on a wide loading platform. Feldman saw his shoes—thick, high-topped, like blunt weapons. He closed the door and continued through a warehouse whorl of bagged lunch and paper cups of gray coffee. Everywhere were the smooth, dark cardboard rails of open packages of candy. (He made a profit on the machines: here a profit, there a profit, everywhere a profit profit.) He saw the safety signs, the conserve-electricity signs, the turn-off-faucet signs, the absenteeism signs: all the crazy placard pep talk of management to labor. It was the landscape of time clock, and he plunged still deeper into it. He breathed the whelming dinge, the hostile, grimy fallout.

  They were all waiting for him in the locker room. There were high school boys in tan linen jackets and women in the blue uniform of maids in hotel corridors. A few of the men wore the thick wool of lumberjacks, or wide bright ties down the front of their denim shirts. Feldman paused beside a young boy and held his elbow. “There’s a man sleeping on one of the loading platforms. Get him.”