The Franchiser (43 page)

And now, in the fullness of his expended fortune and of a time that went back to a time before his disease had declared itself—so ambitious had he been in those days, Ben, the empire builder, the from-sea-to-shining-sea kid connecting the dots, Howard Johnson to Burger King, Burger King to IHOP, IHOP to Midas Muffler—he had made it—what? A sort of place. A feeder or way station of place—Chattanooga, Atlanta, Disney World. A sort of place as Collinsville, Illinois, was a sort of place outside St. Louis. (As the Sunoco service station which went up only after Ben had built his motel was.) As all suburbs were only a sort of place throughout the world. Throughout the solar system. (As the moon was only a sort of place because of its relation to earth.) Everywhere place sucking sort of place into its orbit.

And this, on the day he opened, is the sort of place it was:

First of all, nothing spectacular. In keeping with the sort of place it was before the furrows of Interstate had been turned.

From the outside a bracket of double-storied buildings like immense rows of mailboxes in a lobby. Brushstrokes of gold stucco the color of drying sand veneered the pile of cinder blocks that framed each unit—a wide wall of intersecting Thermopane set in aluminum splints the color of warships.

The corridors were just wider than the passageways in steamers and a long runner of carpet deep and rich as flowerpot supported a design like the thick geometry on a bandanna.

The rooms endlessly repeated themselves behind each door on either side of each corridor on each floor of each building. Eleven rooms long at the top and bottom of the bracket (times two times two), sixteen rooms long on one floor of the long center building (times two) fifteen (times two: here were the pair of suites) on the other.

Two beige headboards like the carved, distressed lengths of a child’s casket were mounted like trophy at the level of one’s belt on the wall and presided above an illusion of bed—box springs, mattress, thick metal frames set into large inverted “nails” like the panties on lamb chops—that was sustained by bright caramel paneled, olive bedspreads studded with a long, unbroken ganglion of print stem and leaf and flower, a Möbius strip of fabric vegetation repeated on the thick lined drapes (the lining vaguely the texture of good shower curtains). There were two captain’s chairs upholstered in a tough Naugahyde the shade and texture of the cushion on a physician’s chair in a consulting room. The cushions, like the mounted headboards, were inseparably joined to the chairs, as almost everything in the room was locked or bolted to something else. (A wooden wall mounting like a forearm and fist—the wood, like all the wood in the room, the color of the skins of Idaho potatoes—clenched a lamp. The mirror, the notches of its frame like those in harmonicas, was locked flush with the thin wallboard. The room’s two paintings—one tenuously abstract, bold, black-stroked bark, a jagged vertical timber against a clouded, milky silver; the other strongly representational, a tobacco-colored barn that seemed to float on a field of 24-carat wheat, scratchy black trees like the tank traps on Normandy beaches, a sky blue as water in a swimming pool, Van Gogh’s huge black birds like widely spreading W’s—were screwed steadfastly into the wall above each headboard. A lamp on thick linked chain looped like immense fob from two fixtures in the ceiling. The television set was locked in its clawed metal tee and seemed tied to the wall itself by a broad-gauge rubber cable.) The only other furniture was a wide nightstand between the two beds; a table next to the drapes whose octagonal top bloomed from phlebitic newel; a long low dresser with two deep drawers and a composition top—the same that surfaced the night-stand and table—which looked exactly like the leather corners on a desk blotter. There was a chair on casters. There was a two-headed lamp on the nightstand. There were electric sockets like surprised hobgoblin. There was a plastic wastebasket the color of chewing gum. There was a telephone exactly the shade of ham in a sandwich, with a red message bulb blossoming from it like a tumor. There was a thermostat with a knob for High, Medium, and Low; there was a wake-up buzzer, a grill for the heating and air conditioning, a carpet the color of coffee grounds, a Bible opened to Psalms 105 and 106. There was a rough ceiling the texture of sandpaper magnified a hundred times. There was a white plastic ice bucket and four plastic glasses in a plastic tower. And a dashboard of bathroom fixture, bottle opener sunk like a coin-return slot into a wide projecting vanity, its contact paper a ruled cirrus of grain not found in nature. A shiny toilet-paper dispenser with an extra roll in the chamber. Butterscotch slabs of tile like so many pieces of toast above the bathtub and a foolscap of successively smaller towels and cloths folded like flag in a vertical rack. A spotlight of heatlamp. A grill like a speaker set in the wall. Outside the bathroom was an open recessed closet with chrome-plated pipes and slotted key rings of hanger. The metal door with its locks and chain link of bolt, its reversible multilingual
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hanging from the doorknob by the narrows of a perfect punched-out pear. And the framed glass fine-print innkeeper statutes of the state of Georgia, two long columns like the tiny font in accounts and dispatches from the front in old newspapers—one big Welcome and a hundred codicils of warning. The Room.

In the small lobby with its registration desk the carpet is patternless, a blend of deep russets and failing greens pale as money. A crown of chandelier above the furniture. A palimpsest of dark low Mediterranean table, notched, carved as old chest, wood nailed across woodlike artisan’d slabs of condemnation. Two lamp tables beside the couch, higher but with the same vague apothecary effect, the tables studded with rounds of brass the size of shotgun shells, the lamps that stand it a sequence of diminished and expanded wooden pots and dowels. (It is a Hindu confection of a universe—the world on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on a lotus, the lotus on the sea.) The long faint and patient curve of the brown velvet couch between the lamp tables no greater than the natural slouch and slump of a man’s shoulders. There are four red lounge chairs of a slightly purplish cast like the cherries in chocolate-covered cherries. Velour, they seem to refract light, but it is only the oil slick of conflicting weave, weave set against weave like a turbulence of fabric. Where the buttons are set in the chairs’ soft backs, cracks radiate like geologic flaw. At the other end of the lobby—the furniture makes walls, creating an illusion of parlor—are four deep vinyl chairs exactly the shade of ripe tomato and glossy as shined shoes.

Rising above the southern wall made by two of the strange velour lounge chairs a large display board is fastened to the wall. The ledge at the bottom, like the ledges in banks where one makes out deposit and withdrawal slips, holds brochures like a miniature newsstand (points of local interest, Disney World literature, and, under glass, seven typed index cards with the addresses and times of worship of Ringgold’s churches: Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, First Christian Church, Church of Christ, Church of Jesus Christ the Son of God, Church of God the Father of Jesus Christ). Above the ledge is a jagged globe of the world like a flattened, fragmented eggshell—Africa west of the United States, Australia between South America and Madagascar. The map is shaded, shows the off-white of sea level, the pale green of plains, the deep greens of hill country, the rusts of high ground. To the left of this a wheel radiates six 100-mile concentric circles of map that spin about Ringgold, Georgia, the center of the world.

He is more comfortable in the public rooms, the dark lounge with its mural Chickamauga and carriage lamps and the plain lumber of the bar like the gray timber of outhouse. Feels there the anticipation preceding a party, or, no, the sense rather of readiness, preparedness, some soldier security in the ordnance of bottles—the Scotches and bourbons and blends and gins, the handsomely formed bottles of liqueurs with their lollipop liquids, the brandies like the richly colored calligraphy on beautiful invitations (and thinks, too, of ink in old ledgers, letters, checkbooks), the vermouths and wines. The labels on the bottles are like currency. Even the glasses with their upright cords and sheaves of swizzle stick. Even the bowls of peanuts and pretzel. The bar itself a fortification, the gunmetal IBM cash register like some weapon of ultimacy, the cocktail napkins like gauze, like bandage, the infantry of glasses. The uniformity is reassuring. (The competent barman in his gold jacket, a very veteran of a fellow with all the sergeant major’s crisp demeanor.) The clean ashtrays, eighteen inches apart, with their closed blue Travel Inn matchbooks. Everything. The handles of the draft beer like detonators. The refrigerator units for cans and bottles. The ice machine. The cocktail shakers. The round measured jiggers on each bottle. Everything. Even the black cushioned ledge eight inches wide that travels the edge of the bar like a soft coping. Everything. The pleasant scent of the booze, a masculine cologne smelling oddly of air-conditioned afternoons in a cinema. Yes. All is readiness, all the equipment of business and seduction and solace. (Flesh is no drinking man, but even he can appreciate the peculiar decorum here, the clean, surgical rituals of such place. More than anything else there is
that
quality in the lounge, an aura of spiffy, readied operating theater. He supposes banks have this sort of potentiality before they open for business in the morning, that planes do before they board passengers for the day’s first flight.) Whatever, it is pleasant to take the air here, to see the spotless precision of the stools, correct as chorus line, disciplined as dress parade. (It is the way, too, his motel rooms look before anyone occupies them.) To take the air, deep-breathing the rich oxygen of contending liquors.

And likes, too, the restaurant—the Dixieland Room—the tables with their dinner-party aspect, the white overhanging tablecloths pleated as skirt and the bright blot of the deep blue napkins pitched as tent, discreet as wimple beside the place settings, the perfectly aligned silverware. He is pleased by the clean plates, the cups overturned on their saucers, and admires the tall mahogany salt-and-pepper shakers, the tiny envelopes of sugar in bowls at the center of the table by the netted red glass of candleholders. He likes the ring-a-rosy of captain’s chairs that circle the large round tables, enjoys the solid confrontation of chairs about the tables set for four and two, notices with something like surprise the knock-kneed angle of the chair legs. And sits to a sort of practice lunch, reads, the butter set before him, stamped
BUTTER
, the letters so smudged they look like Hebrew characters.

He walks the grids of the new plaid carpet.

He looks about him at the strange, dark, implemented walls. (No effort has been made to fit the restaurant’s decor to its name. The plans had been drawn up long before, before the two-day trip became a three-day trip.) They bristle with weapon, with ancient farm equipment, with plow and ax and hoe, with things he cannot name, all earth’s agricultural backscratchers, all its iron-age instrument, its homely spade, pick, harrow, sickle, and pitchfork, all its cultivant tool, its cusps and its blades like the housekeys of ground and rock and dirt.

Yes. He is pleased. He is proprietary. More than with anything he has yet franchised. He owns all this. Owns the spare, no-nonsense meeting rooms with their accordion walls. Owns the long banquet tables and metal card chairs that wait for the Kiwanis of Ringgold, for Ringgold’s Jaycees and Vets of Foreign Wars, for its ecumenical prayer breakfasts. Owns the swimming pool with its thousands of gallons of water pale green as lettuce, the blue-and-white rope floating through the blue-and-white buoys. Owns the turquoise-trimmed diving board, the surface of the board studded with friction, the shiny ladders that grow from the deck like great staples. All the contour pool furniture, the lounges of sunbath and the lanyard weave chairs, the beach umbrellas that rise through holes in the round all-weather tables on notched broad-gauged spindles and blossom above their scalloped fringe into a dome of bright pattern like wallpaper in kitchens. Owns the big Ford shuttle bus. Owns the playground equipment. Owns the 170 or so telephones. (He was, he realized, nowhere. If by nothing else he knew this by the hollow ratchety sound of the dial tone, the shrill feedback of voices like echo in tunnels. A phone company in exile. Mary was dead, the one who couldn’t menstruate. Mary was dead. She had complained of a tummyache, and when, after a week, it had not gone away, she entered the hospital for tests. She died on the operating table during the exploratory. They found a compost of ova, compacted, rubescent, hard as ball bearings, a red necklace of petrified gametes like a lethal caviar.) Owns—partly owns, rents the space for—the vending machine big as a breakfront—the Convenience Center. Behind the forty windows of the big console are collapsed bathing rings, water pistols, joke books, puzzles, nose clips like chewed bubble gum, swim caps, beach balls, lighter fluid, packets of Confederate money, decks of cards, nail clippers, Chap Stick, panty hose, toothbrushes, Modess tampons, Tums, hair spray and hand lotion, sewing kits, aspirin and Alka-Seltzer, Pepsodent and rubber combs, Vitalis, deodorants, shaving cream, razors and blades, Aqua Velva and a mystery by Peter M. Curtin.

Owns the Travel Inn Grand Sign like a big blue flag trimmed in a curving fringe of bright 150-watt bulbs. A thick metal shaft, or “flagstaff,” supports the sign, its long looped neon like glowing rope. A huge T burns at the top of the pole on a squat wick and is caught in a web of flaring bolts of fluorescence. It is the ultimate trademark, so huge it is potted in its own landscaping, a long mortared planter five bricks high.

He owns it all. Yet in a certain sense, though it’s his, it’s his by charter. A dispensation, some paid-for grace-and-favor arrangement like Maryland, say, before the Revolutionary War.

Richmond is a hard taskmaster. There is a ninety-three-acre Travel Inn University in eastern Virginia where his manager has been required to attend classes in motel management. Two weeks before the opening a team had been sent down to Ringgold to conduct field-training sessions for his employees. There have been dress rehearsals, dry runs.