A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  His first thought was sales. He kept a careful check on the figures, lest the new music—he attributed the changes to this—should wind up costing him money. His research, however, did not indicate that the basement was doing less business, although, and this might be something to look into, the kinds of things that people bought seemed to have changed considerably. Formerly, his basement had done a substantial business in family dry goods. The back-to-school sales and the volume in sportswear (a little out-moded, perhaps, the basement of Feldman’s store being a place where a sort of mercantile sediment tended to collect; it was, for example, one of the few places left in America where a man might still purchase hobby jeans, or fur-collared car coats) had been among the most impressive operations in the city, and almost by themselves brought in enough profit to justify the existence of the basement. Now, however, domestic clothing gradually ceased to move at all, and housewares fell off. But these losses were made up for by a sharp increase in the sale of fetishistic automobile accessories, stereo phonographs, color television, transistor radios and, in the basement’s small Toy department, those miniature roulette wheels and baccarat decks and dice cages that had once done little but collect dust. His personnel were hard put to maintain supplies, and Feldman had, over the long-distance telephone, to wheedle and lean heavily on old relationships, reminding more than one jobber of forgotten favors. The record department itself was apparently unaffected. Mildred Eve’s records did well, of course, once people learned that Feldman was offering them at list price—a fiction, since there was no list on her recordings—but fell off a little when the other stores began to feature them.

  Feldman could not get over the feeling that the basement had metamorphosed. This was all the more dramatic when he realized that in the main store nothing had changed at all. That is, business there continued to fall off, but at a rate so imperceptible that apparently nothing could be done. Feldman wrote it off as his personal lean years and had no energy—audacity? it took audacity to go against the whim of God—to try to change it. Instead, he concentrated on the basement: what could be made of the strange changes he sensed? how could he capitalize? he wondered, staring at the people down there, observing each with a commanding curiosity as if they were foreigners wrapped in saris or the queer robes of chieftains.

  One of the strangest things he noticed was the peculiar decorum of his personnel. Perhaps it was owing to his frequent presence (something was up, they may have thought, and been put on their guard), but their dignity—they could have been salesmen in Tiffany’s—was jarring when contrasted to the rather blowsy bearing of the customers. He played with the idea of finding more lively types elsewhere in the store to change places with them, and experimentally he brought down some glad-hander from his hardware department. But observing the fellow in action, he was astonished that his presence was somehow even more jarring than that of the solemn salesman he had replaced. Hurriedly he had the hearty, peppy Hardware man reexchange places with the solemn salesman. Somehow, discrepancy or no, the serious man seemed more at home, better for the counter and more appropriate, than the flashy fellow from upstairs.

  He was convinced there was a clue here, but try as he might, he could get nowhere with it. Increasingly he sent for sales figures—sent for them, not daring to leave his vantage point near the solemn salesman, pulling salespeople from behind their counters to get almost hourly totals from the various departments in the basement. These he checked against yesterday’s figures, looking for clues and, because he found none, to see at least if the trends had held. Only two weeks had passed since the young man had asked for the recording, yet he was convinced the trends were genuine, and he had the feeling that here in the basement was the true pulse of the store, the true pulse, perhaps, of the economy itself.

  Preoccupied, he had no time for any monkey business at home, and for the first time since his marriage to Lilly, their relationship took on at least the appearance of a normal one. He picked no quarrels, played no games, and at night, exhausted from the day’s labors, simply forgot to invent his lusts. He even lay more easily in the bed, shifting his limbs when they cramped, unrestrictedly turning his pillow, and occasionally rolling over to make an accidental contact with his wife, unthinkable before—and even, occasionally, maintaining it.

  Lilly, meanwhile, mistaking distraction for détente, became more natural too: that is, more unnatural, for her attitude, except for those few times when she openly resisted his domestic games, had always been solicitous and conciliatory. But under the influence of his own apparent relaxation, she too changed. Though she did not fight with him, she became more peckish, expressing her discontents, as if now it might be safe to do so. On the occasion of one of Feldman’s neutral rolls to her side of the bed, she misread his intentions, and thinking he wanted to make love, declined gently. “No, Leo,” she said, “not tonight.” It was the first time she had ever turned down a fuck. Later she herself, dreaming whatever dreams she dreamt, maneuvered herself into his arms, and it was the first time she had ever initiated one. Still preoccupied, he accepted.

  The solemn salesman began to appear regularly in his dreams, conducting his transactions (Feldman could not tell what merchandise he sold, though in real life he sold loose cutlery, odd-lot glassware, tumblers and small sets of Melmac such as bachelors buy) with that nonsense dignity Feldman had noticed in the store, at subdued odds with the uneasy, shifty customers.

  Still he was unable to account for his effectiveness, until one day—was this only the Thursday after the Monday that he had first noticed the man? was that possible?—happening to be in the old bus depot near his store, where he sometimes ate a solitary lunch at the fountain, he passed through the arcade. A woman was playing a pinball game; another was buying a horoscope from a vending machine. A teen-ager had his driver’s license laminated in plastic, and a Negro with a stocking over his forehead recorded his voice. A soldier took four snapshots of himself for a quarter; and another man peered through a thick, greasy collarlike device at a one-minute dime movie of some ancient stripper. The man at the booth, leaning down from a high stool to dispense change, reminded Feldman of his own salesman. Of course, he thought, recognizing the expression at once. And requesting change for his dollar just so he could obtain a closer look, he perceived in himself the same shy shamble, the same odd, crablike sidling of the customers. He felt the two-mindedness of a delicate shame, the ambivalence of a regretted decision freshly made, and thought he sensed what the customers sensed—an uneasy submission of embarrassment to desire. (But what were their reasons? What were his? Just being there? Having to submit to a kind of moral muster before this distant, disapproving godlike man? Of course! And since the music, they had not come in any honorable, aggressive pursuit of bargains. Money was no object. It was as if their needs had been subverted, and they had now the aspect of people who knew they had been worked but could not help themselves.)

  Feldman installed Foot-Eze machines in the basement. He had heard somewhere about vibrating contour chairs and ordered one. He had a coin device attached—fifteen cents—and learned a great deal from studying the guilty, rapt faces of the women and men who sat in it. He did more than ever with vending machines, positioning a whole bank of them against the unused spaces between his elevators. Here could be bought condoms, combs, lucky coins, magnetic dogs, leaded capsules that behaved like jumping beans—all those nervous little purchases of the lonely and poor. Elsewhere there were scales that told your weight for a penny and your fortune for a dime, and a special machine where you signed your name and wrote key words (“wealth,” “death,” “sex” and “God”) on a sensitized IBM card. For fifty cents the card was processed, and a printed letter analyzed your handwriting and your character. There were machines dispensing term insurance covering every imaginable contingency. (Women bought as much protection as men, children as much as adults.) He installed soundproof booths were people could record their voices, but added a new wrinkle. Inside the booth a phonog
raph played a one-minute-fifty-second instrumental version of “Golden Earrings.” The words were framed on the wall just above the microphone, and for a dollar the customer could activate the phonograph and sing with the orchestra. (Many, he noticed, spent five, six or even ten dollars rehearsing.) This machine was so successful that almost at once he had to add another and then a third.

  There was a contrivance that created abstract paintings by centrifugal force, but Feldman removed it after only a few days. A certain larky kind of exhibitionism attached to it. Crowds gathered about the artist/customer to observe him squeeze his paints from the bright plastic ketchup and mustard containers. Inevitably he would perform, cheering them with clowned genius or the burlesque grace of some master chef dispensing herbs. Who needed that?

  There were devices of petty torture. For a quarter you could send a small charge of electricity through the rubbery, bell-wire toes of a chicken. (It was too easy to think of the next step, intensifying the charge and allowing the shoppers actually to electrocute the chicken. That would have brought the cops perhaps, but more, it would too blatantly have advertised what was going on down there. The small, “harmless”—and so labeled—charge was quite enough to sour the ambience.)

  Meanwhile, the songs of Mildred Eve filled the air. (Feldman wondered what she looked like; her album covers, which were flat statements of the sinful primary colors, contained no picture of her.) Her voice, once one got past the lyrics—lust anthems and the throaty hums of orgasms—was good. For all the low profundities of supper-club sensuality, she had a robust, sexual flair, and Feldman was reminded of the young girl lifeguard at the pool where he and Lilly had rented a cabana. A superb, broad-shouldered, powerfully legged girl in a white bathing suit, the dark vertical of her behind just visible under the wet white suit like the vein in jumbo shrimp. Once he had witnessed several of these girls rehearse a water ballet, horny in the chaise lounge at the flashing flex of rump, his heart pounding at the full pull of their strokes and skipping a beat at the last gratuitous twirl of their wrists and fond slap-spank of their hands on the water. It was all gestures like these, caricatured flourishes of style, faintly military—gunfighters fanning the hammers of their guns, commandos shooting from their hips, the smart exchanges of crack drill teams, and the airborne deep knee bends of drum majorettes—that Mildred Eve’s voice called to mind. It was stirring as a bright enormous flag, and Feldman yearned. Mama, he thought, erotic and primed, red-hot, low-down, wild-hipped, fat-titty-juiced mama.

  Yet all this was beside the point. The machines were beside the point; so was the daily more tawdry shooting-gallery atmosphere of the basement, and Feldman had a sense of baited traps set by an explorer in some jungle no white man had ever penetrated. What monsters would come? he wondered. Looking at the shoppers, he thought he could perceive tracks, gored remains of meals eaten hurriedly, the bent-twigged, crushed-leaved evidence of violated water holes. (And indeed, he had just this sense of doing time in the wilderness, the waiting and nervous patience he exercised a preparatory ordeal.) All he knew was that he was on the threshold of something big, and the basement might have been some secret subterranean laboratory where ultimate weapons came into being. He would not even discuss it with Victman, who repeatedly pressed him for information.

  It was odd though, wasn’t it, that what was going to happen—and he knew, didn’t he, though he hadn’t yet phrased it?—would come about, could only come about through the intercession of these same shady customers, cautious, crabbed from dispossession, whose unfrocked presence was the very essence of the shabby. Feldman imagined, when he looked at them, successive routs, long histories of trials and errors. It was the absence of the romantic, or of anything having to do with the romantic, that betrayed them chiefly. Unfrocked perhaps, but never drummed out of any corps, never failed rich men, or prodigies burned out at puberty, or writers on a lifelong binge of block. Their failures somehow precluded their successes. Looking at the women, he imagined they all had names like “Marietta Johnson” or “Juanita Davis,” the irresolute monikers of practical nurses.

  What was strange was that they never went above the basement. Despite their characteristic air of loitering, the pressure Feldman sensed in them of a piecemeal, building nerve, like that of lovers unsure of their influence, they came there directly and stayed there. Feldman waited for them to make their move.

  Lilly, who had no notion of what was going on, who tested her husband’s intentions with a growing irascibleness, as if could she but have his indulgence she could have anything, continued to flex her will. Liver, which Feldman abhorred, appeared on the table. Whole-wheat toast, which had been forbidden in their house, found its way onto the napkin-covered salver at each breakfast. She threw margarine into the fray, and he drank skim milk in his coffee. Saccharin and the diet colas became staples. In a way, she was like someone who had just lost her orthodoxy and, in the first flush of independence, serves only the forbidden fruits. Feldman knew she must be feeling guilty, and wordlessly spread his margarine on his whole-wheat toast, poured skim milk into his Sanka and stirred the saccharin in it with the same single spoon she had given him for his grapefruit.

  Billy, on whom these domestic shifts had not failed to make an impression, laid low. He couldn’t read and he couldn’t count; he couldn’t tie his shoes or tell time (he used his own incomprehensibly complex system: “It’s fifteen minutes,” he would say, always rounding off the odd minutes, dropping them out of his life to the next convenient lower number, “before twenty-five minutes past six o’clock…It’s ten minutes past five minutes before twenty minutes after fifteen minutes to eight o’clock”). He had always been a very Indian in the forest of their household moods, but now he was clearly scared stiff, and it was he—who had thrived on ersatz foods, who would rather eat a handful of barbecued corn chips or a slice of flecked luncheon meat than a piece of pie or a bit of beef—who could not touch his food. He did not trust his father. Obviously, Feldman thought, as close to paternal pride as he had ever ventured, he’s a lot smarter than that great rough pig his mama.

  The thoughts he allowed his family were vagrant, however. He resented them; they diverted his attention from the store. It was odd. In the past, since, that is, the time that his department store had become prosperous, he had been indifferent to its success. Not corresponding to the myth sometimes associated with businessmen, Feldman had not lived for his work—had not lived as much for it, for example, as some of his own employees may have for theirs. He had, despite his having written them all off, sought his life at home, with his family. Not a devoted man, and largely bored by his wife and son, he nevertheless found it unique to be so closely associated with other beings. They took car trips together, Lilly sharing the driving. It never failed to astonish him, as she showed her credit card and signed the slip the attendant handed her when she bought gas, that they would send him the bill and that he would have to pay it.

  Similarly, Billy’s report card, which either parent was authorized to sign, always went back with Feldman’s signature. The notion of his son’s accountability to him, and his—in the state’s eyes, at any rate, since they accepted his signature—to his son, was stunning. That he had been so long a bachelor might have explained it, but he had long been a married man too, and had never accustomed himself to what other men take for granted. He could not get over the feeling that he had gotten hooked up with strangers, and it was just this sense of things—that he would have felt closer to cousins if he’d had them—that permitted his abuse of them. For he was not, damn it, a cruel man—just, like others on the Diaspora, a xenophobic one. Even his bedtime fantasies about other women were understandable if one granted that Lilly was essentially a stranger somehow, only temporarily linked to him. (Well, they would both die someday. It was as if, through the prospect of their deaths, they were already divorced.) But these were thoughts which he scarcely had time for now. Until he got this other thing straightened out, his family would remain submerged a
nd he would be mild, benign, whatever courtesies it cost, let them read into it whatever incipient affection they wished.

  For some while Feldman had considered that the time was ripe. He was unwilling to install any more machines or to make any additional shiftings of stock (he had had brought down to the basement certain items of sybaritic indulgence: rich levantine garments luxurious as the costumes of despots; gigantic celebrational cakes so painstakingly sculpted that their showy frosting could no longer be eaten; jeweled, tropically feathered fishermen’s flies on platinum mountings), afraid that he had achieved an ecological balance so exquisite that any further adjustment would destroy it. Thinking ahead to the time when whatever was to happen would have happened, he congratulated himself. (Accident? What accident? Opportunity knocks. I’m prepared. Feldman’s prepared. I know it will come. I make it come.) So he watched and listened and waited, unexposed even as he paced the basement, primed as a gent in a blind or some bad man in ambush.

  Then one day a man stopped him in the aisle. Wealth, death, sex and God, Feldman thought. He knew it had happened.

  “I want,” said the man, “to buy a gun.”

  He meant, Feldman knew, a rifle, some antiqued walnut thing, sporty as its trophy prey. But seeing the man—he had observed him before: the dark orbit of his felt brim pitched low, crowding an eyebrow in wrought, posed suspiciousness, the thin murderous nose as though pressed by swimmer’s clamps, the pearl-mooned buttons like the medals of gangsters, and gray powerless hands that had choreographed their own goofy, spooky rituals—he understood that the rifle would never be used for sport, save that fancied one of this fool’s imagination. And why did it have to begin with a madman, some jeopardizing clown who would purchase the rifle as he must have purchased each item in his costume (the fedora, the long dark coat with the pearl buttons, the white silk scarf), as he would buy the next (the black leather gloves, if he could just give up the fancy handwork or convince himself that it was even more threatening in wraps), one thing at a time, like a collector? Why did it have to be such a person? Because it had to be. Because the time was only mildly ripe. Because in any new enterprise it is the madmen who step up first. Watching him, Feldman knew that the man had not yet selected a victim. The hatred in his eyes was unspecified, in love with its own posture, an emotion seeking itself in mirrors behind Feldman’s head. One day it might focus, but perhaps not. If it didn’t, it would do its damage anyway, but with its heart not in it.