A Bad Man (29 page)

I am the master of all I purvey.

(In the old days, new to ownership, he would take things from counters, filling his pockets with toys, wrist watches, cuff links, pulling a tie that had attracted him, stuffing it into his jacket; more attracted by his merchandise than any customer, unreluctant as an assured guest at a feast, and feeling just that, his own reflexive hospitality—knowing ultimate freedom, the last man on earth, nimbused with luck. There had been complaints, his own people had not known him, thought him a thief, a madman; some customers even, driven by an abstract loyalty to the ceremony of sale, daring to pull against him in ludicrous tug of war, to collar him, to call a cop. But it had not been these fools who had been able to stop his raids, nor even the complex decorum of inventory. Bookkeeping could not deal with him; it knew profit and loss, credit and debit, and made allowance even for pilferage that struck as malice or arrived as need. But it was helpless to explain what
he
did. There was no place on the ledger, no word for it, unless it was this: “Feldman.” It wasn’t any objection at last but his own: not surfeit finally, but surfeit’s mild adjunct, superfluity, his idea, grown to a principle, that things—
all things
—were just gewgaws, and that nothing,
nothing
could ever excuse a disturbed profit. A lost sale was lost forever, something gone out of his life. So he doubled the guard, was ruthless with shoplifters, prosecuted until it cost him thousands and the word got out: that his place was no place to get away with anything, that you might as well try to hold up a bank. And all this, the expense of prosecution, of tight security, was reflected at last in the books. Meanwhile, he had packed in six big boxes and stored in his garage all those things he had taken during the enthusiastic year of his spree, a monument—an objects lesson—that nothing, nothing,
nothing
was ever lost, that all was recoverable and advantage lay where advantage lay:
everywhere
, available as atmosphere. And one day he sent a truck to take it out, to bring it all back to the shelves and bins and counters to be
sold
this time, only keeping one thing back, a wallet, to remind him.)

Now he moved past the cosmetics and began his morning tour—he had not outgrown this—of the main floor, his reviving stroll through an acre of artifact. No one dared address him. They thought it
business
, some trick or formula he had, some private, infallible rule of thumb. “Nothing gets past that one,” they told each other. Nothing did, but he walked there only because it was refreshing, because the department store’s ground floor offered a panorama of his possibilities. For it was thus that he had come to view his merchandise: as possibility, chance, turned risk, all of it latent with purchase and profit. But it was dreadful too: dreadful to see the high heaps, an infinity of the on-hand, dreadful to know that there was more on the floor above, and more on the floor above that, on up the full six floors, more, more—and across town, more in warehouses, more in trucks even now arriving in the city or just starting out from a dozen distant cities, more in railroad cars and more in the holds of ships and bellies of planes. Feeling the full responsibility of the risks he took for profit, terrified by the threat of ruin, of there not being customers enough in the city or time enough left in his life to sell it all, but made bold by his very fright, comforted by the magnitude of his terror and the slimness of his chances.

He was obsessed by it, the merchandise laid out like a city, patterned, zoned as neighborhood, and missed nothing on the fluorescently tubed yellow wood and glass horseshoe counters. He knew without touching them the feel of the glass, greasy as plastic from the precious contact of shoppers, their leaned, open-palmed surrenders on the countertops, smudged from their groped investigations, their excited jabs at the glass: “There,
there
—next to the white one.” (The counters, washed each night, bore a now intrinsic blur, ineffaceable as the cloud on an old watch crystal.) And could almost have told which belts had been sold from the tiers mounted like coiled snakes in their clear oblong boxes. And even which ties, perhaps, hanging thick as a curtain before some gay vaudeville.

He stopped to look at the big brown cash registers, complicated as console organs, and to peer at the figures in the windows at their tops, seeing sadly against the broad black strip that ran from one side of the register to the other the rows of white, thick, squarish zeros, the icy decimals big as hailstones. He was released by the sound of the bell registering a sale, and moved on, restored as a prince in a legend.

Trailing his hand comfortlessly through the heaped, dark piles of socks, he looked out over the open rectangles of distant counters and cases and racks, and went toward Men’s Ready to Wear to stand among the mountains of slacks, aware as always of the faint, sweet, oily smell of the massed cloth. He pulled at a rack of suits built into a wall, dollying it effortlessly forward on its big tracks, turning it soundlessly on its thick, greased shaft. He drew in one last deep lungful of the pleasant odor and moved on, the tweeds and herringbones giving him, as he glanced at them in passing, a faint illusion of speed.

In the broad center aisle, between vast counters, he paused before a display table covered with a red moiré satin, grainy as wood, on which expensive gifts had been arranged at random: a captain’s cabin barometer at Fair and Very Dry, the pressure 31.01 and rising; an enormous obscure brush with bristles the color of aluminum; a black leather casket with four drawers like a jeweler’s trays. He scratched at a drawer but failed to open it, and could not locate the key which fit into the bloated, classic keyholes. He handled a carelessly spread tent of printed silk which looked like the master sheet from which ascots were cut. Considering it, Feldman had a sense that it had been there forever, that it would be there always in its wicked obsolescence. He left the table.

Passing counters high with prim stacks of ladies’ blouses—it occurred to him that he was probably losing money on the men; fitfully he regretted their larger bodies, the additional cloth that went into their clothes and ate up profits—he came to an area of domestic, personal hardware (A MONTH O’ SUNDRIES, the sign said) and moved among cigarette cases, boxed wallets like open books, ganglia of leather key rings, lighters, umbrellas, zippered sewing kits, the bright aligned spools of thread like fantasy ammunition. In the aisles were pastry carts of handbags. (Maze, he thought, the tempting obstacles of possession.) There were tables of slippers, step-ins, bootie socks, sequined moccasins, scuffs, woolen hip-length stockings. There were ladies’ belts rising on successively diminished wheels, sweaters and white blouses you could blow your nose in, sheerish scarves as rough to the touch as a human heel, chandeliers of hats, stoles like folded flags, monogramed sachets, crocheted shawls, muliebrial hospital bed jackets that made a ploy even of death. He bent to examine a display case of men’s coinlike jewelry, fashion’s mintage, the small change of cuff links and tieclasps and studs. And peered closely at the stacked octagonal hatboxes, Dickensian, Bond Streety, the grayish cardboard shaggy, linty as money.

Entering Yard Goods, he had to pick his way past bright throw pillows like big candies. There were reels of ribbons, cards of lace, buttons, piping, upright bolts of flannel, wool, silk, horizontal rolls of cloth, packages of zippers, big pattern books thicker than telephone directories. (He was excited by the clutter here, and in the luggage department next to it, the big grips and steamer trunks thickening space as in a crowded customs.

In the Specialty Shop he briefly rummaged among the wicker baskets with their foreign chocolates and hams and sardines, their dry, queer pods and briny rinds. He paused to read the legends on the colored tins of biscuits and the Balkan, closely printed labels—medaled, decorated as some prince’s chest—on the bottles of dark steak sauces. He stared at the jars of caviar and salad dressing, at the curious bottled gems of pimentos, artichoke hearts like preserved organs. He browsed the anthologies of strange cheeses and the glasses of rare jellies with their suspended slivers of fruit like motes in thick light, and thought hungrily of all turned, vexed appetites, soured and satiated by the normal vegetable and the ordinary meat, lusting himself to taste the canned worms and chocolate ants, to savor the snake, coiled as twine in the clear jar, to gorge himself on grasshoppers and make a feast of the lizards’ tongues, tender, sinewless as fish.

He crossed to the large glass tanks of candy, staring at them as at treasure: the mint lentils and nonpareils, the dollhouse bricks of jelly and licorice boats, the chocolate stars and strings of pectin marjels, wafers, candy canes, the huge almond-pitted blocks of scored chocolate—all the sweet, hard crystals, all the fondants. He placed his fingers in the trough of a scale and lifted out a sugary residue, a kind of candy gravel, succulent dust.

And this is only the first floor of it
, he thought.

He turned, stumbling, passionate, and got onto the enormous chiseled X of the sculpted escalator, having more than a king had, having everything. Rising slowly above the plains of goods, seeing it all at once now, the customers ringed and lost in his wilderness of product. Desperate with his unreliable risk, his inventory heavy as the planet. This was the last time he would see it today, and though he wished he might never see it again he knew that tomorrow morning he would have to look once more.

By the time he had risen two or three more floors, however, he was an altered man. His spirits, oppressed on the main floor, became higher the higher he rose. This often happened. There was something hospitable in danger. He began impatiently to climb the moving stairs. Barely glancing around him, he rose above China, above Appliances, above the children’s department, the men’s, the women’s, climbing toward levels of the store which were insular and half deserted. Here’s where the real trading’s done, he thought, standing in the furniture department among its scatter of dining- and living- and bedroom suites. He saw a woman testing a chair, a man at a desk, pretending to type and making imaginary compensations for the height of his typewriter, an engaged couple sitting aggressively on a bed. They all seemed unconscious neighbors in some odd, enormous house. Feldman was undiscouraged by the quiet here. If it had been noisier below, much of the stir had been aimless, a buzz of browsers, a falsetto, idling rasp of wills in abeyance. Here, though, he sensed purpose, the pious silences preceding high purchase, almost a condition of privilege when money changed hands, like those moments a family has alone with its dead before the coffin is closed. (In these regions he had sometimes fired people on the spot if they lost a sale. “If they get this far,” he said, “they want it.”) Now he paused, caught by something sanctified, basilican. He sniffed the air. A sale—the man at the desk. Observing him, Feldman saw the ceremonial poses, the last bemused, executive glance into the empty drawer. (“Have them try it on,” he told his salesmen. “Whatever it is. Have them act it out. Pull them to the mirrors. Let men who’ve never hunted see themselves with guns in their hands.”) The sale would be made; it was money in the bank. He smelled decision, impulse—the guilt that went with every yielding. (There were days when the store stank of all the accreted, powerful discharges of submitted-to temptation; other days when the place smelled of resistance as of stone.)

Feldman did not wait for the salesman to write up the order, but rushed away, almost as if he needed to be unaware of something good happening to him so that when it came to his attention later, it would carry a special increment for having been delayed. He rarely thought of his character, but took a certain comfort from such measures, seeing them as respectable evidences of his soundness, a willed humbling that qualified him for fortune.

In his effort to hurry away, Feldman took a wrong turn and found himself on a descending escalator. Feeling exactly like one drifting earthward in a parachute, he saw the looming women’s-wear department and was seized by an old idea.

There had been, in his adolescence, a spate of films about department stores—comedies about stern old merchants who found it difficult to understand their carefree rakish sons. Sometimes it was the fathers with the eccentric good will and the sons who were serious. These films had been Feldman’s literature. They embraced, he thought, everything that was possible in human character, and watching them, he had glimpsed the irreducible polar concepts of human existence—stodge and lark, duty and holiday, will and sense. Inclined to the one or the other, he was sympathetic to both, the good arguments of reality and the good jokes of hedonism. He saw that life could betray decent men and that beauty took beatings. The comedies were turned into torments for him. In the darkened theaters, biting his nails, seeing the tragic implications of either alternative, he felt himself the most vulnerable human in America. His own father was obliterated; his own self was. (It sometimes occurred to him that in modeling himself in those old days on those characters’ character, he may have slipped his own. Perhaps, he thought, Feldman was all artifact now, supposititious, and the real Feldman, meant for one fate, had found another.)

With puberty, however—Feldman’s puberty had been late, his drives unserious; perhaps in serving two personalities, he had actually stalled biological time—he discovered something else: that the conflict between the father and the son had been only a natural irritation, the personality of the one demanding the personality of the other, imposing a petty distance that wrote no one out of anyone’s will and generated no avenging codicils; discovered, well, the girl. And because the people he had become loved her, he loved her too. Loved her helplessly.

He had never seen anyone like her and never would perhaps, but it was enough, as it would have been enough for some knight of old time, for him simply to have an idea of her. Now he named all those girls Jean Arthur, and he loved her still, looked for her still, listened for her funny squeaky voice, seeking her feisty intensity. (He recalled her as a girl Communist, someone trying to organize the help in the store; other times he saw her in a Salvation Army bonnet, adorable with her cheeks in mumpy, musical pout, filled to bursting with trumpet
geschrei
. He loved her tics, remembered how cute she was in men’s pajamas, or when she was drunk and mispronounced words. He loved all her irrelevant passions, her tough—cutest of all when making a tiny fist, throwing things, huffing and puffing, her hair in her mouth—working girl’s integrity.) She defined innocence for him at a stage in his life when everyone else his age was falling from grace into a despair, so that for Feldman, who had come from a despair—his years as his father’s captive, his inability when embracing the style of the one son to annihilate ultimately the style of the other—it was like awakening to a grace, like an infant angel smothered in his crib. In this way his timing had been thrown off, and he left moony and smitten—not catching the joke, actually believing such women existed—and all love was love fallen short of itself, doomed through his credulity, and himself given over to an unwilled but permanent adultry, made to serve like the forced slave of Amazons.