The Franchiser (28 page)

“Mothers often…They don’t always make the party on the exact day that—”

“They were starting their vacation on Sunday.”

“Sunday?”

“The Sunday following the party.”

“Well, I don’t—”

“They were driving to relatives who had a cabin on a lake in Door County, Wisconsin. Paul told me that. I remember his saying that.”

“I still—”

“His wife could have given the birthday party after they came back. It would have been closer to the actual birthday. Paul told me that, too.”

“Really, Ben—”

“She wanted the kid to have the presents.”

“So?”

“So he’d have things to play with in the car!”

Patty was silent. “That’s selfish,” she said finally.

“It’s wondrous selfish.”

He closed his eyes. “Ben,” Patty said, “you mustn’t fall asleep. We really would be in trouble if we fell asleep. We really could get killed up here.”

“I know a man who,” Ben said, “I knew a woman that…There was this fellow that…”

“Ben—”

“…had franchises.—Yeah?—Yes. He bought and sold franchises. He had maybe twenty, twenty-five franchises in his career. He was this small businessman with lots of small businesses. He had a hand in making America look like America.—I don’t get it, what about him?—Him? Not much. He knew these Finsbergs.—The freaks?—Yes.—But what about him?—He once heard about a farm woman who got up every morning at six-thirty to watch Sunrise Semester. She watched programs about American history, Italian literature, about Freud, art history, archaeology, the history of journalism. She watched it all. The French Symbolist poets. Whatever. She thought the professors were preachers.—Preachers?—Because they always held a book! She was
wondrous
ignorant. He didn’t know her, he’d only heard about her, but he had it on good authority, so you can be sure there really was such a woman so
marvelous
ignorant, so spectacular naïve.—Does it count if he never met her?—It has to.—Why?—Because he has to use everything he’s got. Because otherwise…—What otherwise?—Never mind, don’t get personal.—I was only asking.—I know, and I’d help you out if I could. It’s what they all say, of course, but I really would. I’d tell you about his lousy life expectancy. I’d tell you about his sister.—What about his sister?—Well, this guy, this franchiser, had a sister,
has
a sister.—Yes?—She lives in Maine. Outside Waterville. Her husband works for Colby College as a professional fund raiser.—That’s nice. That must be interesting work.—He has no franchises in Maine. They don’t see each other much. The sister’s barren and, he gathers, the guy, the franchiser, that it’s sort of, well, made her, well, very unhappy. I know what you’re going to say, that they could adopt, but for a long time they didn’t really want kids and now that they do, when they did, it was too late. She’s in her fifties. His sister is in her fifties. The agencies don’t like to give women that age…The husband wasn’t doing too good. It was during the Vietnam war. The kids were acting up, trashing buildings, rioting. People didn’t want to give money to a school where kids behaved like that.—But they all behaved like that back then.—People don’t like to give their money away. The husband wasn’t doing too good, too well. Colby’s kind of a small place. No government contracts. No state support. It depends upon alumni gifts.—Yes?—The husband wasn’t doing too well. I don’t remember now how he got into fund raising. Yes I do. He used to be a social worker. That’s the ironic part. He used to be a social worker in Chicago, where the franchiser’s sister lived.—This is an awfully long story.—Not so long. Hang in there. He’d been a social worker. With the agencies. ADC. HEW. HUD. All those letters. He had an in with the adoption agencies. He could have had all the kids he wanted. He could have picked them up in the Delivery Room. But they didn’t want kids back then. At least the sister didn’t. She was jealous, well,
envious
, of her brother. She thought he lived kind of an exciting life. He had all these franchises and he was always on the go. He didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t an exciting life, but that’s what she thought. She wanted to live an exciting life, too. On a social worker’s salary. They don’t make much, you know.—I’ve heard that.—So she worked, too. She saved. They went to Europe on their vacations. To Hawaii. After they’d been to Europe about a half dozen times, after they’d been to Hawaii, she got it in her mind that she really ought to go to school. That if she were educated, maybe then her life would be more exciting. She put herself through college. She was already in her thirties. She majored in—get this—Oriental Studies. Learned Japanese. Took an M.A. in Japanese. So she had this M.A. and would have gone on for the Ph.D. but their savings were all used up and anyway her adviser didn’t think she was good enough for the doctorate. They gave her what they called a ‘terminal M.A.’ Funny name.—I still think it’s a long story.—She was very disappointed and figured she was all washed up in the life-can-be-interesting department. This is when her husband heard about this fund-raising position in Maine. He’d been giving away money and food stamps and stuff all his professional life and he figured that if he was good enough to give it away, then he was good enough to collect it, too. So he asked his wife about it and she was anxious to get out of Chicago anyway because by now all the people she knew that she’d gone to graduate school with had either earned their Ph.D.’s or were writing their dissertations and she felt sort of funny about being around them. You know?—Sure.—But by this time it really was too late for them to adopt, even if she had had the energy. Which she didn’t, hadn’t. For she was worn down to the nub with all that trying to make her life interesting.—I see.—Yes. So he was very serious about the job and when the people at Colby thought there just might be a position for the franchiser’s sister in the Comp. Lit. department, that really reinforced their decision to go.—Did she get the job?—The sister? Yes. She taught Japanese literature in translation.—Well then.—She was a lousy Japanese-literature-in-translation teacher. After three years they decided to drop her. She was pretty good in Japanese itself, but they didn’t offer a course in that. Well, they had some friends in the college but mostly they were what her husband brought in,
his
colleagues, people in the Bursar’s Office, in Admissions, not the faculty itself. That crowd.—Oh.—And just about when the guy was running out of ways to write up proposals and get grants from the government, Vietnam came along and the kids acted up and the alums had a good excuse to stop giving. To make a long story short…—You said it wasn’t long.—I had to say that. It was a white lie. To make a long story short, it looked like the guy was going to lose his job.—Really?—Yeah.—Well, what about the franchiser?—Oh, him. Well, he waited until the last minute.—And?—He gave his brother-in-law $100,000 for Colby College so they would keep him on.”

“Ben.”

“—He wanted his sister’s life to be interesting, too. He felt bad that she envied him.”

“Oh, Ben.”

“—That’s another ironic part. She still envies him. She doesn’t know shit about interesting lives.”

“Oh, Ben.”

“—He never told her about this woman he knew who made up contests for magazines.”

“
Ben
,” Patty said.

“There was this woman—the Contest Lady.”

“Please, Ben.”

“Maybe you know her.”

“Please, Ben.”

“After college she knocked around some, traveling, working a bit, taking lovers—like that.”

“Why are you—”

“But Lotte wasn’t satisfied. Things
bored
her. I never knew anyone so easily bored. Your sister must have been very religious, I think, to be so bored.”

“Religious?”

“Well, she wanted everything to have a point. She had the highest expectations of anyone I’ve ever known.
Wondrous
high. Expectations higher than these mountains, higher than my sister’s. Expectations to give you the nosebleed. ‘Come,’ I’d say, ‘I’m your godlover, I like you, come home, I’ll take you to the ball park and buy you a hot dog.’ But the hot dog has not been packaged that would satisfy your sister. When she bought her cooperative in the East Seventies—Tower East—she bought on the top floor, the thirty-eighth.”

“The thirty-sixth,” Patty said.

“See? She thought it was to be the thirty-eighth. See how high her expectations? See? But there she was, forced to live two stories beneath her expectations. What was that guy’s name she liked so much?”

“Bob Brown.”

“Yes. Bob Brown. You know why she wouldn’t marry him?”

“Because he lived in Oklahoma City. ‘How can I marry a man who chooses to live in Oklahoma City?’ That was her reason. That was what she told me stood between them.”

“Do you know the only time she ever saw the apartment in daylight was when the agent showed it to her?”

“She slept till dark.”

“She slept till dark. She could see how boring things were in the daytime. They stood out more plainly in daylight. Sharper definition. Greater resolution. She never once—
think
of this—she never once saw the view—the bridges, midtown Manhattan. Only by night. And then only until the drapes came. I don’t think she opened them once they were up. She ate her meals at Elaine’s. All she kept in her refrigerator was club soda, tonic water, and shriveled lemons. Elaine billed her. It cost her $8,000 a year for her dinners.”

“She saw her friends there.”

“Yes. Her friends. They’d sit around and play her contests. Those crazy contests she made up.”

“They were funny. Did you ever do one?”

“I’m no good at that stuff. What were some of the good ones?”

“The inventions.”

“Oh yeah. Right. The inventions.”

“The Planet of the Apes.”

“Right. The apes were very advanced but couldn’t see the obvious. Wasn’t that it? Something was always left out and an earthman had to set them straight.”

“Blowing,” Patty said.

Ben laughed. “Blowing. Blowing was terrific. These ape kids would go to the zoo or the park with their mothers and fathers and there’d be this ape selling colored balloons and the kids would make their parents buy them one and then they’d shlep the goddamn balloons along the ground on a string. Until the earthman said, ‘They’re beautiful balloons, why don’t you blow them up?’ And that was how blowing was invented.”

Patty laughed. In the thin air she had difficulty catching her breath.

Ben held his stomach, his sides. “Oh, God,” he said, “it is, it
is
dangerous. We could die laughing up here.”

Patty couldn’t stop. Slime spilled from her nose like blood from a wound. “And when he…he…hee hee hah hah…oh, Ben, sl-slap me or hah hah hah
some
-something.”

“Their fountain pens,” Ben said, roaring. “They had these fantastic fountain nch
nch
pens. Much more advanced than ours. Parker 22’s! But whenever—whenever they wrote any
nchnchthing
they al-always rip r-r-ripped the pa-
pa
per.”

“Till the earthman told them about
ink
. Oh, God, Ben,” she said, exhausted.

Ben was completely lightheaded now. He was no longer convulsed because he had run out of air, out of breath. “They had radios,” he said quietly. “Transistorized AM-FM stereos that never made a sound. Only some static if there was a bad storm. TV’s with blank screens.”

“I don’t remember that one,” Patty said.

“The earthman asked why they hadn’t invented programs.”

“Oh yes,” Patty said. “I forgot that one.”

“The Wild Idea contest.”

“The Physics jokes.”

“They were too complicated,” Ben said. “But she was a hell of a Contest Lady, Insight Lady.”

“Yes,” Patty said.

“She was this fucking princess setting tasks, her ass to the guy who won her goddamn contests.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“How do you think she met Brown? He was out there in Oklahoma City, for Christ’s sake, entering those stupid contests and picking off first prize or honorable mention every week. She finally called him,
summoned
him. And it wasn’t because he lived in Oklahoma that she didn’t marry him.”

“It was.”

“But because she got bored with making up contests. Because your sister got bored with laughter.”

“What?”

“Because finally, if you want to know, just plain being
happy
didn’t come up to her expectations.”

Patty was crying. “Why did she have to kill herself? Oh, God, I miss her,” she sobbed.

“Those grotesque childhood diseases. The bad fairy’s chicken’s pox. The delayed measle and the mopey mump like a pea under her hundred mattresses. (Because she was, too, a princess and did, too, live in a fairy tale.) The colic of a kid’s sky-high fevers and all deferred disease. Her tardy terrible times. Lotte’s laggard, dallying, dilatory death. Let’s get off the mountain.”

“Oh, Ben.”

His bad hand felt as if it were housed in a sandpaper glove. “Because boredom is the ultimate childhood disease, and your sister had too damn many more rainy days than she could handle. Tell me, tell me, how high are
your
expectations? Are they bigger than a bread basket?”

“No.”

“Mine neither. How about boredom? Are you bored?”

“I’m excited.”

“Yes? Good. Long life to you.”

“Ben—”

He pushed himself up to his knees. He was breathless and his balance was bad and Patty had to help him and it was a good thing the horses had not left but were standing just the other side of the trail when, Patty helping him up the slight incline, they got back to it, and lucky that Patty was there to help him work his fingers into the proper sheaths of the glove, for he could feel nothing in his right hand and was unaware, who was aware of the significance of his encounters with princesses from fairy tales, that he had jammed his index and forefinger together with all his strength into a single sheath of the wrangler’s borrowed glove, unaware of this till Patty, Insight Lady that she was, saw the wide salami casing of his jammed hand and helped him with it, splaying his paresthetic fingers that burned if they touched something that was merely warm and turned icy if they touched that which was only cool and could not distinguish textures or else confused them, mistaking the blunt for the sharp, the rough for the smooth, but could feel well enough, when it came right down to it, pain but never pleasure, unaware that he had made this mistake who understood not merely the significance of his old lover’s, Lotte’s, death but the continued presence of the horses as well, that, riderless, freed, one might have expected to return to the stables of the Broadmoor—why certainly! clearly! because we are dudes and they know it and are dude-trained, broken to dude habits, knowing by heart of course the dude-resting and dude-dismounting places on this dude mountain, horses like good dancing partners who by this time could follow anyone, even franchise dudes like me and Insight Lady dudes like her, but not doing us any favors either and not even just doing their job but lessoned in this, made to go right fucking back up the mountain unhayed and unwatered with the wrangler if they return empty-saddled to a class dude place like the Broadmoor!—and lucky, too, that she was there to help him back on his horse, well, a horse, for God knew—not an Interstate, civilized trademark dude like him—whether it was Thunder or Cherry whose back he rode or she rode, and they pulled the reins just as the wrangler had told them to if they wanted to turn the horses and the horses, who were also in nature, too, recall, turned easy as pie and they went back down the trail together, half dude and half horse, just like something else from the fairy tales.