The Franchiser (26 page)

And no small talk even at dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurants. The menu her muse:

“Oh, look,” she said, “look at the
menu!
” They were in the Penrose Room at the top of the old building with its view of the Rockies beyond a solid wall of glass. “
Feel
it. The paper like a certificate of stock. Blue chip. If you look close you can see the tiny colored threads that run through it like a precious aspic of lint on money.”

“I can look close but I can’t feel it,” Ben said.

“Look at the cursive font distinctive as signature, the prices like distinguished addresses.”

“My hand.”

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “it’s as if printing costs determine the range of one’s appetite and fix it forever. Movable type and the destiny of hunger. When this menu was designed, it was designed once and for all. The chef and the man from graphics in consultation. Preordained, don’t you see, by what would look good on the document, for that’s what such a menu becomes—a document—legal and binding. Yes. A contract, if you please. ‘What do you do best?’ the graphics man must have asked. ‘Decide now, because you can’t change your mind later. The cost of this thing is like putting out a magazine.’ And he would have to have told him. Don’t you see what it means? Image and printing costs are responsible for the tradition of mediocrity in American restaurants.”

“But if the chef is doing what he does best—” Ben said.

“And how long must he do it? Chained to a years’ old assembly-line expertise, he must finally get bored, the quality
has
to suffer. How can he experiment? Where can he try out new recipes?”

“The food’s supposed to be very good here,” Ben said.

“Oh, Ben, don’t be naïve. Idiom only is informed. ‘Stop,’ it tells us, ‘where the truck drivers do.’ Do you suppose a truck driver’s palate is more knowledgeable than a rich man’s?”

“But you said—”

“It’s because they don’t usually have printed menus in such places. A mimeographed sheet shoved behind a hard clear plastic, and tucked like a snapshot into corner mounts in a photo album. Yes. And the blue-plate special in blue. You’ve seen him, surely you of all people, Ben, with your seventy thousand miles a year, you’ve seen him, the owner of the diner or the cook at the truck stop up on the last stool at the counter an hour before closing with his stencil in the typewriter and his hunt and his peck, doing tomorrow’s menu.”

“Usually such places the food is lousy.”

“The food, perhaps, the principle no. I don’t know this for a fact but it’s my guess that the Michelin people rarely list restaurants where the menus look like the Magna Carta.”

“Try the Rocky Mountain Rainbow Trout,” Ben said.

She was looking off in the distance. Ben followed her glance. Apparently she was studying a table of seven people near the western wall of glass.

“Never so much the family,” she said, “as when sitting together in a restaurant, the group leavened by an outsider, the daughter’s boyfriend or the son’s pal from university, say. A grandfather there, a father to pick up the check, a younger son ten. It’s the simultaneity of ease and showing off which makes the effect work.”

“You’re an expert on atmosphere,” Ben said. “But if you want to know, it’s the simultaneity of generations which does that.”

“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“I wanted to tell someone,” he said. “I wanted to tell someone what’s in store for me, and all you do is give me Significance drill.”

“You told me your symptoms. You gave me Gibberd’s prognosis. It’s very hopeful.”

“I want my remission back,” he said and burst into tears.

If she understood she chose to ignore it, unless the fact that she walked on his left—his right hand was the paresthetic one, his right arm the numbed one—both her arms wrapping his in the doggy stance of a woman without insights, like a gum chewer or a teenager window-shopping with her date. If he had looked into her face at such moments he would have seen it scrunched, beautifully cutened, her cheek high up on the sleeve of his sport coat and her eyes closed. If such cheerleader conditions were meant to make him feel the letters bloom on his jacket, her efforts were wasted. He felt mocked, a jackass old man fifteen years her senior. (Her Senior, yes.)

They walked around the lake while she continued to chin herself on his left arm.

“That’s the ice rink,” he said. “They train for the Olympics in there.”

“I was just thinking,” she said.

“What?”

“Do you remember the menu in the Penrose Room?”

“Qh, Christ, Patty.”

“No, really. Do you?”

“Yes, sure, but—”

“The Gothic typeface.”

“What about it?”

“I was thinking about the masthead on
The New York Times
.”

“TheNew York Times.”

“Well, that’s Gothic. Many newspapers use it. That’s because it looks like Hebrew. All newspapers are a sort of Scripture. Gothic type must have evolved from monks trying to duplicate the look of the sacred texts.”

“I thought we might watch them,” Ben said.

“What? Oh. All right.”

Next to the auditorium was a sort of annex where the skaters limbered up or worked on figures which they could study themselves performing in mirrors along the entire length of one wall and the width of another. The room, rather like the practice room in a ballet studio, was the length of a bowling alley and perhaps seven lanes deep. Ben and Patty went up to the long glass spectator windows and looked in.

There were only three skaters working out in the practice room, which, with its thick ice flooring and the mirrors everywhere reflecting it, would have to be very cold, it seemed to Ben, unbearably cold. All three were girls. They wore leotards and their strong slim legs in the rich thermal nylon were the color of graham crackers or the crust on white bread. One girl began suddenly to spin, her momentum accelerated by her arms, which she drew slowly in toward the sides of her body until they were pressed so tight against her that she seemed literally to be supporting her twirling weight by the points of her elbows. The elbows should stop her, he thought. It seemed in defiance of some physical law that her body should continue its furious coil while her elbows held her so tightly. Ben could not tell whether her eyes were open or shut in the blur of her propulsion, but he guessed that they must be open or the mirrors would be pointless.

“My God,” he murmured.

“Yes,” Patty said.

The girl reduced her speed by extending her arms in a sort of Indian petition, then spun even more fiercely as she pulled them back in. Oddly, she looked like someone stylishly, melodramatically cramping. She looked an expertly demonstrated toy, a Yo-Yo perhaps, whipped about its cat’s-cradle track of string. They followed her gyroscopic feints, her speedy yaws and peppy bucks and pitches. Then the girl stopped herself suddenly with the blade of one skate, sending up a showery splash of silver ice like vapor burning off at the base of a rocket.

“Oh oh,” Patty said, and pointed to a newcomer on the ice, a girl who skated out pushing a strange device in front of her at present arms. It was exactly like a kid’s compass, only it was as tall as, taller than the girl.

“She’s going to make—Look,” Patty said.

The girl stopped in the center of the practice room, fixed one spiked leg of the compass on the ice, widened the arc of the second leg, and proceeded to trace an immense and perfect figure 8.

“Could you have imagined?” Patty asked.

“That instrument?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Good Lord, Ben, I’d never have dreamed. Oh,” she said, “oh, the world’s closed systems, it’s thousand thousand dialects and shoptalk. Thank you for showing me this.”

“I didn’t know about it myself.”

“Let’s go into the arena. Do you suppose they’ll be practicing?”

There were at least twenty-five people on the ice. Ben and Patty stood near where the timekeeper would have sat at a hockey game.

“Look,” she whispered, “some are wearing shoes. They’re the coaches. They must be the coaches.”

“I guess,” Ben said.

“It’s amazing.”

The skaters moved, propelled by an invisible torque, their incredible strength disguised by the rich caramels of their hose, their fetching costumes like a kinky lingerie, each hard-muscled ass yellow-ruffled, white, the gorgeous paydirt of their tough crotches—“They must
shave
themselves!” Patty said—a state secret, cunningly guarded. On their high skates they were tall as goddesses, and Ben ferociously watched them, angrily studying their silent fury, his own heart pounding at their long quiet glides and sudden swoops, the transcendent self-possession of their punishing narcissism. He wanted to kill them, to climb high, high up into the arena, take Texas Tower potshots at them from beneath the broadcasting booth. He wanted them to collide, to explode against each other, and though they came close, must in their floating, driving imminence have sniffed the ice-shrouded odor of each other’s personal gall, they always swerved at the last moment, almost driven off, bounced off the secret laws of right-of-way like people come up against force fields in science fiction. It was as if he were watching natural traffic patterns, a misleading random decreed by instinct.

He could not understand his anger, which went deeper than jealousy, closer to the bone than envy. There was despair in it, the accusation of a wasted life, of the wrong moral choices. He wanted to lacerate himself with it and edged away from his friend.

“Listen,” she said. “Listen.”

The coaches, only a couple of them men, had been shouting instructions to their skaters in a jargon that sounded to Ben like military code, secret password.

“Your threes, your threes and brackets.”

“Go to a mohawk.”

“That’s it. Choctaw. Choctaw.”

“Double lutz.”

“Rockers. Rockers.”

Now the coaches were silent and all one could hear, what Patty had asked him to listen to, was the steam-engine hiss of the skates, the
shhh shhh
of ice being torn at its surface by the speeding blades. It was the flat unconsummated sound of surf. Tea kettle and shore, train engine and the whistle of standing, sibilant jet.

“So?”

“It’s the sound of water, Ben, in all its states at once.”

“Why are they so dedicated? They’re like Brides of Christ.”

“They’re wonderful.”

“Yeah, yeah, they’ll live forever. Not one of them smokes and they practice eleven hours a day and they’ll dance on my grave. They’re not out of fucking high school. What are they doing here? Who pays their way?”

“I wish I could skate,” Patty said.

“You can’t? That’s good news. Let’s go back. We’ll drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and stay up all hours. It gives me the creeps this place. It makes me old and multiplies my sclerosis.”

In the room Patty rolled two joints. She handed one to Ben and kept the other for herself. “Too much is wasted,” she said, “when you pass it back and forth.”

“Is that an insight?”

“It’s an observation.”

Ben had had grass before, of course. He had turned on with several of the people who ran his franchises. He had always found it pleasant. Now he discovered its analgesic properties. His hand—he knew it was an illusion—felt almost normal to him. He was not so conscious of the grainy quality of all surfaces. They lay in bed and Ben stroked Patty’s naked back with his bad hand. “This is very nice,” he said.

“Twice as many women as men are homosexuals,” Patty murmured comfortably. “This is because from toilet training on they are required to touch themselves at both ends.”

“Is that an observation?”

“It’s an insight. Let’s speak insights, Ben. I’ll do one, then you do one. It’s your turn.”

“No. You could have had that one saved up. Give me a different one.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Me? I trust everybody.”

“All right,” she said, “
The Last Picture Show
turned our culture around and started the nostalgia business. That and that song—‘American Pie.’ ”

“That’s a lousy insight.”

“You do better.”

“Okay. All your insights relate to music.”

“They don’t. What about the salad dressing? What about the menus and the thing about twice as many, what did I say, twice as many girl queers? They have nothing to do—to do with music.”

“Those are exceptions. Many of your insights relate to music.”

“That’s because—”

“That’s because Julius Finsberg had this theatrical costume business. Because he dressed all those musical comedies.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s right. There’s a lyric in my godblood la la.”

“All right. But it doesn’t count unless you do one about the culture.”

“The culture.”

“The culture—salad dressings, menus, top of the pops.”

“It wouldn’t be fair,” Ben said. “It wouldn’t be a fair contest.”

“Try. You can do it, Ben.”

“I know I can do it. What, are you kidding? It wouldn’t be fair to
you
. I’m Mr. Softee, I’m the chicken from the Colonel. Cock-a-doodle-do and the sky is falling. I’m the Fred Astaire man. I’m the Exxon dealer, we thought you’d like to know. It wouldn’t be fair to
you
. To you it wouldn’t be fair. I’m a—What was I saying? I was going to say something. Oh yeah. I’m a cultured man. I’m One Hour Martinizing and the Cinema I, Cinema II in the shopping center. I’m America’s Innkeeper, I’m Robo-Wash. I’m Benny Flesh, K-O-A, and Econo-Car International. I’m H & R Block, but it’s seasonal. The culture?
I’m
the culture! Ben Flesh, the Avon lady, Ben, the Burger King. Or maybe you meant something more academic? Sure. Okay. Howdoyoudo? I’mEvelynWoodofEvelyn-WoodReadingDynamics. Pleasedtomeetcha. Wannaread
WarandPeace
onyourlunchbreak? The culture. Sweetie, I’ve got ice-vending machines in every Big Ten campus town in the Midwest. Want, want to know something? My hand don’t work but I’m—hah hah, this’ll kill you—Mister Magic Fingers.
Yes!
”

“How’s business, Ben?”

“Insights, insights, let’s see. Insights. Ho. Hah! Ho ho. Yes. It’s coming to me. I think he’s got it. Oh yes. Sure. Wonder Woman fights crime with her bracelets, right? Well, what is this if not a variation on the old theme that diamonds are a girl’s best friend? The envelope that film comes back in—I’m Flesh of Fotomat—is really only a sort of origami of paper boxes made in the image of the suitcase. Think, Patty, think. The yellow outside envelope has a little punched-out paper handle. Then there’s a wide white envelope inside—this is the suitcase proper—with little photographs printed on it. These are emblematic of the travel stickers one finds on steamer trunks. If you open it up you’ll find a little slip, a pocket where the negatives go. Just like the puckered pockets on the raised lid of a suitcase. Just
like
it. Why? Why
this
shape? Because, because, my dear Patty, because a photograph is a holiday thing. More pictures are taken on summer vacations than at any other time of the year. There’s a relationship between travel and photography. So, there’s this subliminal suggestion on the photo lab’s part that pictures and trips and the paraphernalia of trips—luggage, the suitcase—are all interrelated. We say ‘take a picture,’ we say ‘take a trip.’ The film ‘comes back’ from the drugstore. Eureka! Eureka City! What we’re dealing with here—film, vacations, life’s golden goddamn highlights—is memory, the illusion of eternity, the hint of resurrection. Memory ‘comes back,’ too. Pictures ‘come back’ and people ‘come back’ from their trips. That’s why they pack those damn photographs in those damn envelopes like that. So that’s, that’s one insight.”