The Franchiser (38 page)
Then the price of cream shot sky-high and sugar went through the fucking roof.
It was early 1975. The banks had begun to chip away at the prime rate, every two or three weeks bringing down the boiling point of money, its high tropical fevers, a quarter percentage point here, a half percentage point there. The temp tumbling like a crisis in old-time films. The price-of-money fix was in. The gnomes of Zurich and the Fed had put the brakes on. Gold, legal to own, went begging. Stocks recovered ground in their long Viet/guerrilla/Hundred Years War.
By his recent good husbandry, Ben Flesh had divested himself of many of his investments, adjusting his strange portfolio, his eggs in fewer baskets now than they had been for years. Money in the bank. The Finsbergs protected. A high wall of the respectable around them while his health failed daily, his own energy crisis unresolved, his body still demyelinating a mile a minute. Like a thaw revealing litter, garbages, horror.
He spoke with two or three Finsbergs daily, pressing them with his new goduncle love, the phone a genuine expense. (He subscribed to a WATS line, got special rates, dialing his coded numbers even at the public phones in gas stations and drugstores.)
Not wanting to nuisance them, as aware as any tentative, cautious, unsure-of-his-ground lover of the thinness of his welcome. So coming at them from another side, not deferent, not submissive. No Lear, no Stella Dallas. Not Père Goriot. Not asking for their healths, giving his.
“My testicles are acting up,” he told Gus-Ira. “They feel weighted. A very peculiar sensory symptom. Annoying. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s as if I had loaded dice for balls. Or like those, you know, Mexican jumping beans.”
“That sounds uncomfortable.”
“Oh yeah. It is. I take a few steps and I feel the locks tumbling in my parts. I come and I feel magnets colliding. I piss and the ball bearings get out of line.”
“Terrible. I heard that Moss—”
“But it’s still chiefly sensory, I think. Oh my balance isn’t that terrific. I trip but I don’t always go down. I can touch my finger to my thumb. But what’s the good of kidding? I’ll be on steroids in a year—two at the outside. All I’m really holding out for is the opening of my Travel Inn. I’d like to get that under my belt. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Now the damned electricians are out on strike. But there’s talk of settlement. It could be open by this summer if they get down to business. Almost everything’s ready, the furniture will be coming in, the TV’s. It’s just the electricians holding us up. It’s going to be terrific, Gus-Ira. My biggest thing yet. I want you and the family as my guests for the opening. Hold July open.”
“That sounds swell, Ben. We’ll certainly try to make it.”
“That’s a promise now.”
“Sure. We’ll try.”
“What’s this about Moss?”
“Moss?”
“You said you heard that Moss something something.”
“Oh. Maxene was telling me that he may have his driver’s license revoked.”
“Yes?”
“The insurance company is talking about canceling his policy. There’ve been some claims against him.”
“ Boy, the nerve of those guys. You pay your premiums—and those are some premiums. Believe me, I know. You pay your premiums, dent a few fenders, and they want to close you down. Sore losers. I can’t get life insurance because of the M.S.”
“Well—”
“The underwriters. Letters from a half dozen of the best neurologists in the country. I’ve seen the letters. Beautiful. Like good references. Like advise and consent on a shoo-in Secretary of State. The companies turn me down.”
“Really?”
“They turn me down. Or want ridiculous premiums. I wanted to take out a million dollars. You know the premium those putz-knuckles are asking?”
“A million bucks? Why would you want to take out a million-dollar insurance policy?”
“My God, Gus,
you
have to ask something like that? For the kids, for
you
guys, but it’s out of the question. They want a hundred twenty-five grand a year to cover me. Fucking whore-hearts. My neuros tell them it’s sensory…Hell, their
own
neuros tell them it’s sensory and they’re still betting I won’t live eight years.”
“A hundred twenty-five thousand. That’s wacky.”
“Goofy.”
“ Incredible.”
“Well, what the hell, I’ll be on steroids in a year, my face out of shape as a whore’s pillow. Lopsided as hobgoblin. Still, I could last years strapped to the wheelchair. But I guess I see their point. The payments. How would I keep up the payments?”
“Gee, Ben, when you talk like that—” Kitty said.
“Don’t you worry, baby, just don’t you worry. You guys are provided for. Have I ever cost you a nickel?”
“I hate to hear—”
“Have I cost you a nickel? Was there ever a time I didn’t pay back? Did I ever once have to come to you and say, ‘Boys, girls, I can’t handle the payments, go to bat for me.’?”
“Come on, Ben.”
“Not once. Not one time. Dad put you under an obligation and
I’m
obligated.”
“Please.”
“No. I’m obliged. All right,” he told Mary, “it ain’t the Ottoman Empire, but Monaco maybe, San Marino perhaps, whatever they call those postage-stamp republics they have over there. Something like that my tidy enterprises. For you, for Lorenz, for Helen, the others.”
“Speaking of Helen,” she said as if she wanted to change the subject.
“No no. Don’t be embarrassed by my love. Please, Mary. Take it or leave it, but don’t be embarrassed. And how do you like this? My old guy rhetoric, my stage-door style? Call me Pop and give me high marks for loyalty.”
“Loyalty? Loyalty to what, Ben?”
“To what? To you. To
you
, Irving. To you like a toast. To
you
. Listen, I’ve taken plenty of loyalty lessons over the years. I’m a Finsberg patriot, hip hip hooray. Maybe loyaler,” he said to Cole, “than you guys have been. Oh, not to me. I don’t complain. All I got to complain are my toes tingling in my shoes like I’m walking barefoot in sandstorms. All I got to complain are my fingernails tickle. That my electricians don’t settle—but I heard the Fed mediators are in on it now. There may be a break soon. I think August at the outside for the opening of my Inn. You can come, right? My guests. There’s never been a Flesh/Finsberg Franchise Gala. What, you think I’d ask you to a Baskin-Robbins opening? You should fly in and look at the flavors before they melt? Though, you know,” he told Gertrude, “it might have been worth it. The
colors
of those ice creams! Chocolate like new shoes, Cherry like bright fingernail polish. We do a Maple Ripple it looks like fine-grained wood, a Peach like light coming through a lampshade. You should see that stuff—the ice-cream paints bright as posters, fifty Day-Glo colors. You scoop the stuff up you feel like Jackson Pollock. There have been times—listen to me—there have been times it’s busy, I’m tired from a trip, my symptoms are crawling in my ears like ants, and I go back of the counter to help out. I roll up my sleeves and I get cheerful.
Cheerful
. I whistle while I work. No kidding,” he told Patty, “I take one look at the ice-cream acrylics and I’m happy as Looney Tunes. I almost forget my teeth have goose bumps.”
“Goose bumps?”
“This M.S. is no respecter of feelings. It blitzkriegs the nerves, gives your hair a headache. You think there are splinters in your eyes and the roof of your mouth has sunburn. But what the hell, the electricians are close to settling, the union representatives are seriously considering the latest proposals, they may bring them to the rank and file for a vote. Then—who knows?—five, six weeks’ work and you can call it a Travel Inn. You’ll be there, of course. I’m expecting all the kids. It’ll be like old times.”
“With Jerome the way he is—”
Jerome? Jerome’s fine. Shipshape. I already invited Jerome. I spoke to Jerome last week.”
“He hadn’t gone in for the tests last week.”
“What tests? He didn’t say anything about tests. He never mentioned tests. What’s going on with Jerome?”
“That’s what they’re trying to determine, Ben. I don’t understand it. Supposedly we’ll know in a few days.”
He called Jerome but there was no answer.
He called Helen.
“Christ,” she said thickly, “who the hell is this?”
“It’s Ben. Did I wake you? Gosh, I’m sorry. It’s only just past midnight here. I didn’t think you’d be asleep yet. You’re what, nine o’clock in Los Angeles?”
“I sound like the time and temperature lady to you, jackoff?”
“Hey, Helen, it’s Ben. It’s Ben, darling.”
“ ‘Hey, Helen, it’s Ben,’ ” she mocked. “Jeepers, douchebag, you’re some fucking bore. I spoke to you a month ago. You told me your knuckles had temperature. What’s up now, you getting electric shock in your snot?”
“It’s about Jerome, sweetheart.”
“Screw Jerome.”
“Helen, have you been drinking? You know how you get when you’re drinking.”
“Mind your business. What do you think this is? You some kind of wise guy? Nuts to you. Wanna fight? Get off the planet.”
He’d been calling them, feeding them his symptoms, the heavy weather, all the isobars and thunderheads of his multiplying sclerosis. (It was crazy, but it was as if the days when his paresthetic hands had troubled him, when his skin crawled in anything but natural fibers, when the nerves in his feet sent out shoots of electric quiver, had been a golden age, the halcyon good old days of manageable discomfort.) Now his body shipped a queer illicit cargo of intolerable contraband sensation. Things no torturer could make up. His body a host to amok feeling—and all still below the level of pain, things
not
pain, as if pain, as he remembered it, was only a matter of the degree of things honed and sharp, tender through sore to pinched, some verb wheel of friction and thorned flesh, only the surgical cutlery of bruise, nip, sting, stitch, ache, and cramp. Pain, he thought, he could take. Or could have afforded the addiction that would have purchased relief. These other things, these new proliferating sour dispensations were something else and lived, thrived—he knew, he’d tried them—beneath all the powerful analgesics—Demerol, codeine, laudanum, morphine. And had held back from his godcousins the really big stuff, the monstrous that he dared not put in words, dared not try them with. Held back all that was unimaginable: sounds that tickled his eardrums; his tongue rubbed raw in his saltwater saliva; the steady, constant Antarctic cold of his hands and feet and eyelids—he could not endure air conditioning and wore thick furred gloves in even the hottest weather—the impression he had that his body was actually striped like a zebra’s, the dark strips of skin and flesh, or what he imagined were the dark strips—he could see that he was not
really
striped—heavier somehow than the light, harder to negotiate in gravity; the sensation he had that he was wet deep inside his body, wet where he could not get to it—like someone with an unreachable itch—where he could not dry it with towels or rub it with toilet paper, though he tried. Though he wiped and wiped himself, he felt always as if he sat in some medium of diarrhea, minced, oozy, slippery shit. Also, his olfactory system was faultily wired so that he hallucinated tastes and smells, confused them crazily with their sources till finally, experimentally breaking the code, he ordered desserts and cakes at dinner if he felt like seafood, seafood if his body craved meat, meat if he had a taste for something sweet. Had not told them any of this who kept on now—he couldn’t say why, couldn’t account for why he did not kill himself, or had not died—by dint of a will and a set of motives he knew to be as illusory and unfounded as his impression that his body was striped.
“I have arrived,” he told Oscar, “at a stage of my life where I must manufacture reasons to keep going,” but not explaining this further, certainly not giving any indications that his love for them might be one of those reasons. But perhaps he did not believe this himself.
Was worried. Concerned. Not hurt (
everything
beneath pain). Even though he knew they knew where to find him, where he hung out to keep his eye on the landscapers and supervise the movers who daily brought the suites of motel furniture, where he oversaw the construction of the swimming pool and sauna and signed for the television sets he had bought over a year before from Nate Lace at the Nittney-Lyon, and kept a weather eye out for any nuance of movement in the impasse with the electricians, and conducted the business of all his remaining baker’s-dozen franchises throughout the country, become a sort of Nate Lace himself now, holed up, at once waiting and doing business. And
still
they didn’t call. Even though they knew of his illness (though not its degree, he having spared them that, spared them, even as he spoke to them, when he, that is, called them, the terrible symptoms of speech itself: that talking, making sounds, seemed to chafe the soft insides of his cheeks, raising blisters). Not even forgiving them. What was there to forgive? They’d told him. They’d grown apart.
“Loyaler,” as he told Irving, “than you guys have been, not even to me, I’m not in it, but to each other. Growing apart. What was it, you didn’t watch your diets? You let yourselves go? Genes, genes like that, like you had, are holy. A responsibility. Once-in-a-lifetime genes. To be protected. What’s the matter? You’re Finsbergs. Don’t you know anything about endangered species?”
“But why complain to me?” Irving said. “Jesus, Ben, I’m the one who held on. Don’t blame me,” racially prejudiced Irving said, “for the mongrelization of this family. Sure, I married a darkie, but damn it, Ben, I’m the only Finsberg who
hasn’t
changed. I look the same. A year older but still charting the Finsberg course, still with the old twin and triplet telemetry and trajectory. It was them. I’m right on target for what would have been the manifest destiny of Finsberg evolution. Gee, Ben, I didn’t grow apart.”
“I know,” Flesh said, “I know, Irving. You’re a good boy, a nice man, but how could I say such things to the others? To the ones who
did
let themselves go? Who
did
grow apart? Forgive me, pal, I’m just letting off steam.”
