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 and 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.
“
I
want,” the man repeated, “to buy a gun.”
“Yes
sir!
” said Feldman.
He let the word get out that he wanted to see all persons with strange or unusual requests, explaining to his personnel that the only way anyone in charge of an operation like this could develop new markets or make intelligent suggestions to the designers and manufacturers was through experience in the field. He wanted
no one
turned away, he said, no matter how exotic or even out of the question the inquiry might be. These, he underscored, were
particularly
the people he wanted to see.
He had his carpenters build a small office for him near the basement stairwell; a desk and two chairs were moved in and a telephone installed. He established fixed office hours, selecting an hour in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and one in the afternoon on the other days. On Monday evenings, when the store was open late, he let it be known that he would be in his office from seven P.M. until closing.
He began a discreet advertising campaign—small, vaguely worded notices in the Personals column of the morning and evening newspapers. He phoned the ads in himself and told the girl that they were to run beneath those ads that sounded like trouble; in fact, they were not to appear at all on days when the paper did not carry these condensed telegrams of grief. Similarly, he had signs put up in the rest rooms of cheap hotels. A sign with the same vague message, but larger than the others and more decorative, appeared in the bus depot and the penny arcade. All right, Feldman thought, call me sentimental, say I’m a softy, but that’s where it all started.
The first ad ran on a Saturday, and there were already people outside his door when he came in on Monday morning. If the people he had watched in his basement seemed reluctant or shy, these were direct, as if they had long since taken a professional attitude toward their troubles. Like sinners proclaiming their salvation or drug addicts their cure, they spoke of their weaknesses proudly.
“I come up pregnant,” this high school girl told him, “the first time I ever let a boy. It’s my blood. It’s my big pelvis. A womb like a hothouse, my ma says. But that don’t mean I want to have his kid. I need to be cut or whatever they do.”
Feldman nodded agreeably, and while she was still sitting there, called Freedman, already, even as he dialed, giving the small signals and high signs of success, the winks of private joke and communed confidence which even on this first outing he had adopted as his cheery style, letting the sun in on sin and discovering something useful to do with his hands.
“Freedman? Feldman. How you doing? Listen, Doc, I need a favor. I won’t beat around the bush. Time, essence, and what are friends for? The name of a specialist, please…I’m looking for an abortionist…I say an abortionist doctor, Doctor…That’s right. Nobody scabby, no dirty rubber-gloved drunk. Somebody who shaves. No names, please—too shameful at this juncture, but trust me. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need this favor…Okay, all right, check. Spare me the righteousness…Okay, all right, check. I appreciate your reluctance. All I can say is I’ll never implicate you. That’s a promise, kid…All right, my back’s to the wall. It’s Lilly…That’s right. She’s been unfaithful. It’s hard for me to say this, Doc, even to you. A
schvoogy
, a
schvartz
…Well, hell, maybe some of it’s my fault, but I can’t stand by and accept some pickaninny bastard…Right. You will?” Here (to the girl) a Morse code, both eyes blinking like signals at a railroad crossing, the arm going down like a gate, the mouth and tongue in elaborate, exaggerated silent conversation that had nothing to do with Freedman. “You will? What are friends for, indeed? And, Doctor, I hope to God in Heaven above that Medicare is wiped out. That’s what I think of
you
, sweetheart. Wait, let me get a pencil.” (One was already in his hand.) “Is that last letter an
m?
Is it an
m
, I say, or an
n?
” (He had already written down the name.) “An
m
as in ‘miscarriage,’ or an
n
as in ‘niggerbaby’?…What’s that? Must be this connection…An
m
as in ‘miscarriage.’ Doctor, I gotcha. I’ll never forget. This is what they mean when they talk about the relationship between a doc and his patients. You don’t get this sort of thing in England. Listen, Freedman, listen to me. I want you to come into the store and pick out a suit…No, I mean it. Promise me, promise me now. Is that a promise?…Right, good. I'll look for you, Doctor.”