A Bad Man (31 page)

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.”

He climbed up on a long bench. “I like it back here,” he told them. “You’re the backbone. The fortunes of this store rise and fall because of what you do here. Listen, just because you don’t get the medals and the hurrahs of the crowd, that doesn’t mean you’re not appreciated. You’re behind the scenes, you folks on the bench, you understudies. You’re unsung. Permit me to sing you.” They looked up at him, and he saw their pastiness, the abiding solemnity or causeless joy beneath their waxy pallor. Suddenly he had a sense of his own presence and was touched, seeing himself not as someone beyond them, out of their lives, but as someone close. He whiffed their hatred and sensed himself their caricature, demonized by them, stuffed into monogramed white-on-white shirts, dappered for them, given a thin mustache, his fingers fattened, pinkened, softened, remembered as one who wore rings. (Looking around, he recognized a boy who had delivered a package to his office once, while he was having his hair cut. What a story that must have made: “Fat-assed Feldman in a Big Silk Sheet.” And the hair on the sheet—stiff, curled shavings, the association made forever in the kid’s mind with ruthlessness, strength. Passionate hair. Showy, shiny sprigs of it, waved, tufted, patent-leather clumps of it by the large pink ears—a dancer’s tufts, a pitchman’s, Mr. Big’s.) He imagined their projections of his green felty drawers of clothes, their lustful thoughts of the cedary scents, the smooth piping on his handkerchiefs, of where he kept his cuff links, his Broadway agent’s jewels. He was part of them now, food for all their false anecdote. Adding up his curt hellos, his Jew’s indifference. How dare they? he thought. How dare they?

“Who straightens stock on five?” he asked suddenly.

There was a greasy flash of a pompadour as a young boy looked up.

“It’s a pigpen,” Feldman said. “The fucking suits are out of line. Nothing is sized. I counted nine jackets loose on the cases.” The boy stared down at his shoes. “All right,” he demanded, “what’s holding up the deliveries? Why can’t the orders go out faster? Customers are calling up for their merchandise and I see half-empty trucks going out.” They shifted uneasily. “What’s the matter with you? Do I have to get new people back here? I will, goddamnit. Your union isn’t worth boo, and I can hire and fire till the cows come home. You’re breaking things. We’re getting too many returns.”

A man in a red-checked shirt put up his hand.

“What is it?”

“Sir,” he said, “we never have enough excelsior.”

“Balls,” Feldman shouted back. “Excelsior’s twenty-five dollars the ton. Bring newspapers from home. Use the goddamn candy wrappers, the paper cups. Do I have to tell you everything?” He harangued them this way for twenty minutes while they shifted under his gaze. “You’ve been using the postage meter for personal mail,” he said. “That’s stealing stamps. I’ll prosecute, I swear it. I’ll be back to see you in two months. If things aren’t shaped up by then, I’ll fire your asses all the hell out of here.”

They turned to leave, and something in the soft, bewildered shrug of their shoulders suddenly moved him. “Wait,” he called. “Wait a moment.” They turned back, and he descended from the bench. “Life is not terrible,” he said. “It isn’t. I affirm life. Life is not terrible.” They stared at him. “Get back to your duties,” he said roughly.

Ah, but how tired he was of his spurious
oomph
, of all eccentric plunge and push and his chutzpa only skin-deep, that wouldn’t stand up in court. “I like your spirit, boy,” the skinflint says, surprised by brashness. “I need a man like you in Paris.” Feldman didn’t. He was exhausted by his own acts of empty energy. Unambushable he was, seeing slush at spirit’s source, reflex and hollow hope in all the duncy dances of the driven. He was helpless, however. He had been born without a taste for the available. “No more looking askance at reality” had been his fervent prayer. But ah, ah, there was no God.

It occurred to him that he ought to knock off and go to a cocktail lounge and sulk. He could drink liquor and listen to the jazz they piped in. It might be pleasant. But then, he thought, he couldn’t hear the melodies without thinking also of the words, the college-kid love poems. Not for him. For him there should be new songs, new lyrics. “I got the downtown merchant’s blues,” he sang softly. “My heart is lower than my bargain basement—all alone at the January White Sale.” Stirred, he buzzed for Miss Lane. “Will green be the color this season?” he sang.

Victman was in Feldman’s office with him. He was excited. Eight years ago Feldman had been proud of Victman—his New York man, his Macy’s man. (Today everybody had his Neiman-Marcus man, his May Company man, but Victman was the first.) He had been a hot shot, in department-store circles a wonder merchant. (He had invented the shopping center, and the suburban branch store, and was in on the discussions when the charge plate was only in the talking stages—in department-store circles a household word.) Now Feldman could not look at him without wincing. He looked at him and winced for his $287,000, winced for his failed campaign. (Three columns and a picture in
Woman’s Wear Daily
when he came with Feldman, articles in the
New York Times
, and the
Wall Street Journal
.)

“Leo,” Victman said, “you ought to listen to this.”

Feldman’s irritation was such that he began to scratch himself. (If he could get just some of his money back, it would be goodbye Victman.)

“Please, Leo,” Victman said.

Feldman looked at him. He winced and said, “Victman, where you going to command a salary like the one I pay you?”

Victman groaned and Feldman winced again.

“
Where
, Victman?”

“You ruined me, Leo,” Victman said.

“Ruin is relative,” Feldman said. (A picture of this man had been in
Fortune
.)

“You ruined me, Leo,” Victman said again.

“I’m the more injured party,” Feldman said. “I can’t look at you without wincing.”

“Yes. I meant to say something about that,” Victman said. “I wish you’d try to control that, Leo. It embarrasses me.”

Yet he was sorry for Victman. He
had
ruined him. If he left tomorrow, though it was impossible that any major store would have him now, there would be nothing in the
Times
, nothing in the
Wall Street Journal
. Mum would be the word from
Woman’s Wear Daily
. Looking at him, Feldman was often reminded of those “Where are they now?” features in magazines. Question: “Whatever happened to Norman Victman?” Answer: “He’s with Feldman. He’s sitting on his ass for many thousands of dollars a year.”

“Victman started talking again, but Feldman wasn’t listening. Victman stared at him. “You can’t stop thinking about it, can you?” he asked.

“You’re on my shitty list,” Feldman said weakly.

Eight years ago Feldman’s fortunes had been at their apogee. He had come up and up, the upstart, and in the last few years had outtraded and outdealt all of them, his store neck and neck with the largest ones in the state. Movie stars in town for personal appearances carried home his shopping bags on airplanes.

And his demon told him that it couldn’t last, that prosperity was short-lived deception, that at last Red China and The Bomb and Civil Rights and The Russians would take their toll: that the world was turning a corner, the blue sky was falling. He saw a terrible fight for survival in which America—white men everywhere—backed against a final wall, would have to scrap its style. (Hadn’t he been there himself, a passionate Jewish guerrilla fighter on the beachheads of the Diaspora? Hadn’t he, the little terrorist, thrown his bombs and Molotov cocktails, and didn’t he understand ardor, zeal, impatience, all the harassing, importuning passions? Wasn’t he, by analogy then, an expert on the little yellow men, the little brown ones, the big black ones?) He foreknew the failing markets and the finished fads, anticipated in some sweeping, dark, Malthusic vision America’s throes, this very city’s—saw it choking on its fat. When others spoke warmly of progress Feldman kept his troubled peace, but he knew they were wrong.

Then he saw Victman’s picture in
Fortune
and read his articles: “The Suburbs: America’s New Market Towns.”

He made the phone calls, sent the wires. Then the flights to New York and the wining and the dining and the feeling him out, and finally the secret meeting between the two men in the motel outside Chicago. “What can you expect from Macy’s, Mr. Victman? You know their setup. Their echelons. Think of those echelons. Think of your distance from the king. How many princes and dukes and archdukes and barons and counts stand between you and the throne?” “That’s true,” Victman said, “that’s true.” “America is West, Mr. Victman. The whole world is, the whole universe is. Dare to dream. I’m talking future with you tonight—empire, dynasty, destiny. Neiman-Marcus, Norman. Consider, conjure. Soon Hawaii will be a state. Guam. The Philippines. Dare I suggest it? Come closer. Formosa. Quemoy. Matsu. Quemoy—keen; Matsu—mmnn. Shh. Shh. Are you the passionate man I think you are? Did you mean what you said in ‘The Suburbs: America’s New Market Towns’? Then get in on the ground floor. This is foundations, first principles. Make a wish on the stars, on the blue horizon. Climb every mountain, Mr. Victman. Pioneers, O pioneers, sir. Come West, young Victman.”

He came, Feldman talking so fast Victman didn’t know what was happening. Of course he came. Expecting perhaps to find mud streets, plank sidewalks, boomtown—assay offices, burlap sacks of nugget and dust, old-timers leading packmules. Finding instead only Feldman’s somber city, a place of half a million looking older and more settled than New York. Then held in check: allowed to fiddle, seek sites, arrange for surveys, market-research reports; consult till the cows came home sociologists, city planners; even consulting architects at some predecision, top-of-the-tablecloth level, positioning goblets, inclining forks. Seen everywhere, overheard everywhere, egged on by Feldman himself, spilling his dreams in restaurants near the tables of men Feldman recognized as competitors and he didn’t. His enthusiasm daily primed, each scheme encouraged, Feldman himself squaring his plans, complicating, flourishing, until the man thought he dealt with some merchant Midas and that on this rock would be founded some new commercial Rome. Until the casual chitchat of millions made even this city slicker’s head spin: “Invest at a hundred dollars a man. That’s the best rule of thumb, I think.” “But that’s fifty-five and a half million dollars!” “Today. I don’t
mean
today. What were those population projections you got from the university? Let me see them, please. But this is only for two generations. It’s a mistake to plan for under three. That’s house-of-cards thinking, pigs who build with straw and sticks.” “Wow!” “Wow indeed.
Indeed
wow.”