The Franchiser (8 page)

Luis went into the ballroom and turned on their big Wurlitzer equipment. Music poured from the ballroom like an element. Flesh rubbed his hands and went to the small room where Clara was giving her student private instruction in the waltz. He rapped on the door. “Five minutes, Miss Clara,” he said softly, and opened the door. “The Blue Danube” was playing on the portable phonograph. A black man only a little younger than himself held Clara in his arms. One hand was up her behind.

“Hoy,” Flesh said.

“Who the dude?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Clara said.

“Who the dude?”

Flesh pointed his finger at the man. “I am your preceptor. Fred Astaire sent me. I give the Waltz Exam.” He lifted the tone arm off the record and set it down at the beginning. “Ready, begin—da
da
da da
da
, da
da!
”

“What’s this shit going down?”

“Waltz!” Flesh commanded.

“Hey, fuck, you crazy?”

“You, Bojangles,
waltz!
”

“Please, Mr. Flesh,” Clara said.

“I want to see turns and rolls,” Flesh said. “I want to see three-quarter time with a strong accent on the first beat.”

“Beat? I’ll beat your ass, cocksuck.”

“I’m telling Fred.”

“Mr. Flesh.”

“No, Clara, Fred has to know these things.” He turned off the record player. “Listen, boy,” he said to the black man, “I understand. Miss Clara tried to bring you along too fast. These things take time. She had you dancing above your station. Miss Clara, dear, get Tom the tom-tom.”

“I’ll kill this honky turd,” the man said quietly.

Flesh turned to Clara. “What is it here, a massage parlor?”

“You don’t understand, Mr. Flesh.”

“I understand,
I
understand. They’ve taken up shuffleboard, nine-hole golf. My dancers sit on seats like catchers’ mitts on big tricycles in St. Petersburg, Florida. They swim laps and play bridge in the clubhouse. They’re into macramé and decoupage and they fold paper to make yellow-bellied sapsuckers and even the ladies have fishing licenses.
I
understand. Where are
you
going?” He had turned to the Negro.

“I want my money back.”

Flesh nodded and moved toward Clara. He reached his hand down into her brassiere and plucked out two five-dollar bills. He handed the man the cash. “She cheated you,” he said. “You’ll stay for the gala.”

“Suck my comb, honky.”

“Doesn’t he know about the gala?”

“It’s a party,” Clara said. “It’s for the students enrolled in the public session.”

“I don’t need no funky party.”

“It’s on the house. Five dollars a tit? Good God, man, are you nuts?” Ben shook his head.

“They white tits,” the man said.

“Like hell,” Flesh said, “they’re black and blue.”

Clara was crying. Flesh put his arm around her. “The gala,” he said softly. “Get yourself ready. If I’m not back by nine, start without me.”

He stood by the Oriental when the show broke. He spoke softly to people as they came out of the theater, careful not to frighten them. He wrote the time and address down for them on slips of paper and folded the slips gently into their hands. He made it sound as reasonable as he could, hinting, though not stating outright, that it was a business proposition. If people thought it would cost them a dollar or two, they were more likely to trust you. He was very careful about whom he approached. Some he asked to go on ahead and others he asked to wait with him, telling them he would be fifteen more minutes at most.

They came into the lobby of the Great Northern. They held their shopping bags from Stop and Shop and their green parcels from Marshall Field’s.

“You let in the ones with the slips, didn’t you, Henry?” he asked the night man.

“Yes, sir,” Henry said.

“Good,” Flesh said. “I’ll be responsible for these folks,” he told the man. He turned to his group. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I think we’re going to have to use all three elevators tonight. Henry, would you unlock the other two, please?”

Henry did as he was asked and Ben carefully directed people to specific elevators. “I’ll ride up,” he said to those he had not assigned an elevator, “with you people.” He was the last one in. “That’s all right,” he said, “smoke if you got ’em.”

The people from the other elevators were waiting for him on the seventh floor. “Good,” he said, greeting them. “Can you hear it? It’s just as I said.” He cocked his head down the corridor in the direction of the ballroom. “Please,” he said, “follow me.” They went in single file toward the music. “Already,” he said, calling back to them over his shoulder as they passed the barber shop, “we’re a sort of conga line. That’s the spirit.” He kicked back with his right leg. He held the ballroom doors open for them.

The spherical chandelier with its adhesive strips of seamed mirrors spun slow as a device in a planetarium, throwing its romantic galaxies against the walls and ceiling and on the seven or eight pairs of dancers on the big dance floor—focusing purples, greens, yellows, blues, and reds, sliding across shoes, jackets, gowns, and arms, and dilating to wider, indescribable colors. Revolving discs of light around the room lasered the chandelier. Clara danced with a serviceman, Al, Hope, and Jenny with regulars Flesh remembered from his last visit. Three older couples moved expertly to “The Night Was Made for Love.” They were like the surprisingly graceful, aged ice skaters one sees on public rinks. He wondered if they had learned their stuff here. Several people sat along the walls in chairs near the high columns of smoked mirrors. Luis and the Fritzel’s and Don the Beachcomber men were fussing over the meats and hors d’oeuvres at a long linen-covered table. A man Flesh could not account for tended bar.

The song ended and Clara turned toward the stage, where the sound system was, and led the applause. “Very good,” she said over the applause. “It may seem ridiculous to applaud a recording, but I want you all to get into the habit of clapping for the band, so that when we go on our outings to Pewaukee or the Café of Tomorrow and a real band is playing, you’ll just do it automatically. It’s very important actually. Musicians are human and if they know you appreciate what they’re doing, they’ll put that much more liveliness and effort into their playing. Remember, people, a dancer is only as good as his accompaniment. You people on the chairs,” she said, “now even though you sat out the last dance I want to hear
you
applaud also.”

“Why’s that?” one of the seated women asked.

“That’s a very good question, Mrs. Gringer,” Clara said. “Do any of you students know the answer to that? Mr. Clone?”

“To show you’re polite?”

“Well,” Clara said, “it shows that, too, of course, but there’s an even more important reason—Mrs. Lamboso?”

“Well, if you’re sitting down while everyone else is dancing, they might think you’re a wallflower or too shy when maybe all it is is that nobody has asked you. This way, if you applaud, prospective partners will see that you take an interest and maybe you’ll get asked to dance.”

“Very good,” Clara said.

“It
is
very good,” Flesh said, “but I thought Mr. Clone had a good point.”

“Oh, Mr. Flesh; ladies and gentlemen, this gentleman is our host for tonight’s very special gala—Mr. Ben Flesh.”

They applauded and Ben nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve brought some guests to join us tonight.” He turned to his group. “The food and drink is over there. Why don’t you all put your parcels on the stage where they’ll be safe. Then you can join the festivities.”

“Maestro,” Clara said. Jenny left her partner, came to the stage, and put on more records. She played “Night and Day,” “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You,” “September Song,” “Two Sleepy People,” “Falling in Love with Love,” “Get Out of Town,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “Blue Moon,” “Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block,” “Love Thy Neighbor,” “Moonglow,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me.”

Flesh smoked the joint Luis had brought him and listened to the beautiful music. The last tingling left his hand. He was suddenly caught up in a complex and true and magnificent idea. He would have to tell them, but could not bear to break into the music or the gorgeous motions of the dancers. One of the people he had brought with him—a woman in her mid-fifties—was dancing with a golden-ager. Her left hand lay gently on his right shoulder. Flesh was touched by the shopping bag she still carried. In her dreamy mood she held the bag by only one beautiful handle and a bottle of ketchup dropped from it, making a lovely splash on the floor. Their shoes looked so vulnerable as the dancers guided each other through the sticky stuff that Ben wanted to cry. Lai-op, lai-op, lai-op. They smeared the ballroom floor with a jelly of ketchup. It was beautiful, the pasty, tomato-y brushstrokes like single-hued rainbows. The high heels of the women smashed explosively against the broken glass adding to the percussive effect of the music. Everything was rhythm. He climbed on the stage and gulped when he looked down and saw the splendid red evidence of the dance. Studying the floor, he perceived from the various footprints, the rough male rectangles and female exclamation points, where each couple had been, their progress, where they had occupied space others had occupied before them, the intensity of color recapturing the actual measure, the music made visible. From these and other signals he felt he understood why what they did was called the “conversation step.” It was a conversation of spatial displacement, the ebb and flow of presence, invasions, and polite withdrawals as each couple moved in to take the place other couples had abandoned. A minuet of hitherings and yonnings, the lovely close-order drill of ordinary life. So civilized. So gentle were men. He explained this to them over the loudspeaker, explained how it was possible to re-create from the ordinary shmutz of a broken ketchup bottle, not just where the dancers had stood, but where they had stood in
time
, that movement was nothing more than multiple exposure. Perhaps, were he musical—he
felt
musical, as musical as Terpsichore; wasn’t she the Goddess of Dance? who would be the Muse of Song? muse, music, ah yes, music; there were no accidents, idiom was fundamental as gravity; who would be the Goddess of Song? it was on the tip of his tongue; oh yes, it had to be…it had to be—
Orchestra!
—he could, by reading their glide, even have told them the
song
that had been playing at the time. There was more. As he studied the dancers he realized that not only—if you knew how to read the signs—did movement remain, a testimony lingering like scent that men had been by, but that it was impossible to teach what all already knew. Everyone could dance. Every motion snuggled to every rhythm, to
any
rhythm. It had something to do, he explained, with the tides, with the universal alphas, with pulse itself. And he tied in menstruation and the throbs and ripples of orgasm. It was beautiful, but they weren’t listening.

He fumbled with the amplifier and found the button that cut off the power, and he stood on his father’s old cutting tables and spoke to them from his heart.

“My dearest ladies,” he said, “my most charming gentlemen. Please, this is very important. What’s sacred is important. You don’t know this, you’ll not be able to follow it all. Try not to blame yourselves. There’s no blame here. We are all swell people. Do you know what’s happening here? (Don’t sidetrack me, God; let me stick to the point, oh, Lord.) Everyone concentrate. I am going to link the world for you. I am going to have it make sense, but you must concentrate. Same here.

“All right. What am I talking about? How, if I’m to link the world,
can
I get sidetracked? Not possible. It’s all relevant. Be patient. Everything will come clear. Then—Who has water? I’m very dry. Luis, pleeth. Jenny, any?

“I stand on my father’s long old cutting tables. Bolts of graduation cloth unwound here like spools of film, the texture of the trim like oil slicks. Costumes were made for ballerinas. We are in a room with a musical
tradition
. Yes, and what made this possible, this room, this night, our gala, were the selfsame songs you danced to earlier, written by pals of my godfather, who was able to leave me the prime rate of interest because of those songs. You
see?
We dance to the prime rate of interest itself. We compound it. Nothing is lost. Follow? That’s one circle. Earlier I spoke of the rhythms, motion. Ah, God, we thank Thee for Thy do-si-dos, our hithers and yons, the wondrous cake walk and hopfrog of reality. We thank Thee for dressage and our Lippizaner life. Clara, you understand, don’t you?”

“No,” Clara said.

“I does,” the black man said.

“Yes, but that’s not my point. Do you know how good the world is? Listen, it’s better than you think and better even than it has to be. I go with Clone. Politeness, gratuitous as flowers, counts. It structures life like scaffolding. Under this stage
is
scaffolding, the carpenter’s hundred wooden X ’s. Would a man do that for money? The
care
, the nails like a driving rain. For
money?
Good Christ, friends, the man built to hold us all, to let us jump.” He jumped. “I believe the amazing world of Kreskin is amazing, and who could invent a card trick or make up a good joke? The lady who dropped the ketchup—”

“That was an accident,” she said.

“No, no, there are no accidents. The lady who dropped the ketchup—I saw into her shopping bag. There are Hefties there, liners for garbage cans. How civilized! Maybe all that distinguishes man from the beasts is that man had the consideration to invent garbage can liners. What a convenience! We die, yes, but are compensated by a million conveniences. Hefties are just the beginning. We perfect ourselves, we reach toward grace—I foresee a time when there will be flowered sheets and pillowcases in motel rooms. This is a deflection to convenience and the magnitude of the human spirit, the leap to comfort. The chemical creams,” he said excitedly, “the chemical creams. You know, the little sacks of powder you put in your coffee. I foresee a day—someone may be working on this right now—when non-dairy creamers shall be mixed with saccharine in the same packet! There you go: convenience! And do you think for one minute that the man now waiting for this great idea’s time to come will have thought it up for mere money?
No
. Unthinkable. It will hit him on an airliner like an inspiration, for the grace of the thing, only that, for the convenience it would make, and if he profits by his idea, why the money will be only
another
convenience. Someday a visionary shall come among us. He will lobby Congress to legalize pot on the principle that it would be a terrific boon to the snack-food industry! Oh, friends, the quality of all our lives shall rise like yeast. I love this world, this comfortable, convenient world, its pillow condition.” He was breathless. But he had more to tell them. Mystery was on the tip of his tongue. He studied them, watched them watching him.