The Franchiser (34 page)

Well, he did. He thought he did. What had happened to him. (His unbecoming, he meant, pulled back through geologic time to neanderthal condition. Perhaps his jaws would clamp and he would be unable to walk upright or use tools. Cold, cold, the descent of Ben, his pre-Leakey, pithecanthropic fate.) And yes, was pleased, was certain that whatever was waiting for him in Riverdale—he hadn’t called; “if it’s at all possible,” the message said; he hadn’t called, was that why? was “if it’s at all possible” the loophole of extenuation that could have kept him in Oklahoma City had he called and discovered what? that no one was worse off than himself?—it would be better than what he left behind. For all he had left behind—the lion’s share of his clothing, of course, his valises, the motel room he continued to pay for even though he would not be occupying it, his precious car, the latest of the late-model Cadillacs—was his itinerary. Which was what he had in lieu of a life. His ridiculous itinerary like an old treasure map, his itinerary, no master plan or blueprint but only his itinerary like a mnemonic string round his finger. Only that. His itinerary. He could have wept.

When the plane landed in St. Louis for a fifteen-minute stopover, he briefly considered deplaning, calling New York, for if it wasn’t necessary that he come, then his coming was all the more an admission of his, Flesh’s, need to come. If he was ready to admit that, then he was ready to admit it all. That his life hadn’t worked. How awful. How terrible.

He had flown first class, and while they were still on the ground he asked the stewardess for a drink. It was against federal regulations, she said. He could not be served till they were in the sky. “Sorry.”

“I understand. It’s all right. I will be served in the sky,” he said.

And was drunk—martinis—when he landed at LaGuardia. (Only two cocktails were permitted a passenger—more federal regulations—but he worked out a deal with a man across the aisle who didn’t drink.) And whiled away the two hours not with the headset or the magazines but by looking out the window, studying an America he was too far above to see. Studying the American heavens over Oklahoma, over Missouri, over Illinois, over Indiana, over Ohio, over Pennsylvania, seeing (or not seeing) from one angle what he knew so well from another, and feeling—wasn’t it odd?—its ultimate homogeneity, a homogeneity squared, the final monolithism of his country, the last and loftiest franchise, the air, the sky, all distinctions, whichever remained intact, whichever he had been unable to demolish in his capacity as franchiser, as absent, as blasted away as the tactile capacities of his poor mother-fuck fingers and his lousy son of a bitch hands.

“Cole?” Ben said.

“It’s Lorenz, Ben,” Lorenz said.

“Hi, Ben.”

“Hello, Gus-Ira.”

“I’m Moss,” Moss said.

“What’s happened?” One of the godcousins shrugged. “Jerome?” Ben said.

“Maxene,” Maxene said.

“I don’t get it,” Ben said. “What’s happened?”

“Folks change, Ben.”

“Is that you, Noël?”

“Yes,” Noël said.

“Jesus,” Ben said. It wasn’t anything he could actually put his finger on—but what was, eh?—but in the two or three years since he had last seen them all together they had changed. Though they were unmistakably brothers and sisters, even unmistakably twins and triplets, and even just possibly still unmistakably identical twins and triplets rather than simply fraternal, something had altered, the coarsening of a feature here, the flattening of another there; and now that they no longer looked absolutely alike he had, for the first time since he had known them, difficulty telling them apart. When he had mistaken Lorenz for Cole, Moss for Gus-Ira, and Maxene for Jerome, a few of the sibs had begun to make those nervous overtures of the nostrils and edges of the mouth prefatory to crying. (Christ, he thought, their identicals are in remission.)

“Hey,” Ben said, “hey.”

“It’s just that I’m pregnant,” Gertrude said. “That’s all. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m pregnant, I’d still look the same. When Ethel was pregnant with Anthony-Leslie she changed, too. Then afterward she, she—” Gertrude’s jaw trembled.

“Hey,” Ben said.

“I was never the same afterward,” Ethel said.

“It’s got nothing to do with pregnancy, Gertrude. It’s got nothing to do with pregnancy, Ethel. I never got knocked up, but it’s the same story. With me it was teeth. I had a couple of bad teeth that had to be pulled. The dentist made a bridge. I couldn’t get used to wearing it. My mouth—I don’t know—My mouth changed. It settled. Like a house.”

“Your mouth looks fine,” Ben said. He wasn’t certain whom he was addressing.

“Yeah? Does it? Yeah? I go into a men’s room and they think I’m the cocksucker.”

It had to be Oscar. He had seen Irving in St. Louis and “the cocksucker” was what they called the mincing, epicene Sigmund-Rudolf, whose disease it was to act like a fairy but be none. It had to be Oscar. It was like being a participant in a brain teaser, set down live in some puzzle condition. Three men of equal intelligence stand in a straight line one behind the other. They may not look around. A fourth man comes by. He has five hats, three white and two black. He puts a hat on each man and says he will give a hundred dollars to the man who can first say what color hat he’s wearing. The first man in the line tells him the color of the hat on his head and wins the hundred dollars. What color is his hat and what is his reasoning? Cole, Lorenz, Gus-Ira, Moss, Jerome, and Noël had been accounted for. The person had said “men’s room.” Ben had seen Irving just weeks ago in St. Louis. Sigmund-Rudolf was called “the cocksucker.” It had to be Oscar. So now he lived on the high pure level of the logical. Ben Flesh like the featureless and perfect character in a conundrum. It had to be Oscar.

“It’s true,” Kitty said. “Something happens.”

“Kitty?”

“Uh huh.”

“Hello, Kitty.”

“It’s true. Hello. Something happens. You prime it out. In your thirties. You go off like milk.”

“Well, I think you all look just fine,” Ben said. It was so. They would be what now? The youngest thirty-four, the oldest forty. Why, he was only forty-eight himself—though he thought of himself as older—and they had somehow become his contemporaries. Yet it was so that they looked fine, their paunches and heft only signals of the good uses to which life had put them. Evidence. The smoking guns of their existence. And if this made them less magical, it made them, for him, only a little less magical. (Then he
did
love them.) To them apparently a miss was as good as a mile, however.

“Well,” Gus-Ira said, “at least we all feel lousy. We’ve discussed it. Identical lousy.”

“Nonsense,” Ben said, wanting them, he discovered, as much like the old them as they wanted it themselves. “You’ve still your Finsberg esprit de corps.”

“We’ve gone back to jungle,” Mary said. “Nature has reclaimed us and green crap pushes up through the cracks in our sidewalk.”

“I came eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said. He was asking for an explanation.

“Another thing,” Jerome said.

“The clothes,” Helen said.

“We don’t even have” Jerome said

“our figures,” Maxene said.

“I don’t think Ben wants to—” Lorenz said.

“A size here, a size there,” LaVerne said.

“It makes a difference”

“in the styles.”

“That’s when we first noticed,” Kitty said.

“Because,” Helen said, “oh, not that we always dressed alike, but
when
we did—”

“When we were kids and still all living together,” Mary said.

“Yes, then,” Helen said, “but afterward, too. On special occasions.”

“Yes. Well,” Noël said.

“Because there is something in color,” Patty said, “because there is something in color related to size, implicit in pattern demanding its shape. How would a curly tail look on a rabbit, do you suppose? Or the stripes of a tiger on the fur of an ape?”

“Hey,” Ben said.

“We grew—” LaVerne giggled, “
apart
.”

“Stop it,” Oscar said.

“Right,” said Moss.

“You don’t fool us, sisters,” Gus-Ira said.

“Bastards,” Cole said.

“Yes, well, what do you expect?” LaVerne asked.

“Lotte broke the fucking
set
,” Noël said angrily. “That’s what you’re thinking.”

“Ah,” Ben said.

“So cut out the sizes crap,” Sigmund-Rudolf said. “Cool it about the Dress Code.”

“They want one of us to die,” Noël said. “They think that would change things, even the score in the Magic Kingdom.”

“Don’t be silly,” Gertrude said. “That’s not what we mean. It isn’t.”

“It isn’t,” the girls said.

“We grew
apart
,” LaVerne said again.

“Only Ben. Only you’re the same, Ben,” Ethel said.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m not the same.”

“You are,” Oscar said.

“I’m sick,” Ben said.

“Sitting down,” Noël said, “it’s an invisible disease.”

Ben looked at Noël sharply. “You
are
silly,” he said. “Gertrude’s right, it isn’t what they mean.” He was speaking to all of them.

“Nobody wants anybody dead,” Mary said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“How do you live, Ben?” Gus-Ira asked. He supposed it was Gus-Ira. He was straining to keep them separate.

“You know how I live.”

“No. How do you live? Where do you go?”

“You know how I live. You know where I go.”

“We’ve grown apart,” LaVerne said.

“This one’s in Texas, that one’s in Maine,” Cole said. “And once a year, twice, you check in, drop a card, touch base. We get a call, meet for dinner, have a few.”

“It was better,” Sigmund-Rudolf said, “when you were still getting it from the sisters.”

“I never minded that,” Oscar said. “That wasn’t important.”

“No,” Helen said.

“I came eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said.

“How
do
you live? Where
do
you go?”

“I live along my itinerary,” Ben said.

“Joey,” Kitty sang softly, “Joey, Joey.”

“Yes,” Ben Flesh said, “sure. My life like a Triptik from the AAA. Here today and gone tomorrow. What is all this? Why are you behaving so? You know about me. I love you, for God’s sake. What is all this?”

“The showdown. Only the showdown.”

“The little stuff, Ben. Tell us the little stuff.”

“Outdoorsman,” Jerome said, “give us the inside dope.”

“Only what your life is like. Do you take a paper? What do you do about laundry? Is there Sarasota in you? Some winter quarters of your heart, hey?”

“I take
all
the papers,” Ben said quietly. “I buy magazines from the newsstand. I watch the local eyewitness news at ten. Everywhere they have blue flu I know about it. Where garbage isn’t collected. There’s something for you, if you want to know. There’s no garbage in my life. Except what collects in the car. The torn road map and the Fudgicle wrapper, the silver from chewing gum. But by and large I’m garbageless. I miss it, you know? The maid comes in and makes up the room. The Cokes come from machines in the hall and the dirty dishes go back to Room Service. Mail’s a problem. I use the phone. I don’t vote. Not even an absentee ballot. I could never meet anybody’s residency requirements. The franchiser disenfranchised. I file my taxes, of course. I use my accountant’s business address as my domicile. This? Is this what you mean? What you want? I have neurologists in twenty states, internists in a dozen, dentists in four. (One of my suitcases is just medical records.) There’s same-day service, so laundry’s no problem. Dry cleaning isn’t. But my bowels don’t know what time it is and buying clothes can be tough if there have to be alterations. Where do they deliver, what happens if the fit’s no good? Nah, there ain’t no winter quarters. Am I getting warm?”

“Riverdale,” one of them said.

“What?”

“Riverdale. You could have used Riverdale. As your domicile.”

“As easily Riverdale as your accountant’s business address.”

“I was never asked. Nobody asked me.”

“Oh, Ben,” Patty said.

“Well, it’s not the point really,” Lorenz said.

“What’s the point, Lorenz?” Ben asked.

“Did we have to
ask
you? Is
that
where you were standing? On ceremonies like a station of your itinerary?” Mary said.

The girls fussed over him. One took his hand. Another hugged him, a third kissed his cheek. But Ben was more interested in what the brothers were doing. There seemed just then to be a conspiracy of tolerance among them, the soft ticking glances of a deferred cruelty. These looks darted from each to each like a basketball passed around a circle. Maybe it was what one of them had said it was, the showdown. It seemed a theatrical term, but it was a theatrical family. He nodded to the girls, acknowledged their concern for his feelings, but moved carefully away from them and toward the brothers.

Ben and the family were in the big living room. There were theatrical posters behind framed, glare-proof glass, the musical comedies and dramas that Julius had dressed. “I did come eighteen hundred miles,” Ben said. Then it occurred to him how far they must have come. As LaVerne had said, they’d grown apart, as Cole, this one’s in Texas, that one’s in Maine. The Finsbergs had long ago taken their show on the road. There were second companies, third, eighth, and eleventh all over the country by now. Only two of the women and three of the men still lived in New York. Helen had moved to London last year. They must have traveled a greater distance than the circumference of the earth to get here. Thousands had been spent on air fares. “What’s the occasion?” he asked.

“The occasion?”

“Why are we here?”

“Didn’t you know?” Ethel said.

“It’s the unveiling.”

“The unveiling.”

“Of Estelle’s stone.”

“And Lotte’s.”

“But they died years ago, at least Lotte—Isn’t the unveiling usually on the first anniversary of the—”

“Yes,” Helen said. “But there was that business of the suicide.”

“The girls were very angry,” Gus-Ira said.

“Angry?”

“The boys, too,” Mary said. “You were furious, Sigmund-Rudolf.”

“Angry? Furious?”