Aghh, he sounded like a night-club comic. But what if all the tasteless jokes were true? What if they were true? Lilly made them true. She made them come true. She was like a fairy. Lilly the joke fairy. Poor Lilly, Feldman thought. Till death us do part, you. And why? Just give me one good reason!
Because during the war, when he was putting his store together, when 4-F — the homunculus wrapping his heart — he was getting rich, he had no time: 80,000 miles in ’42, 112,000 in ’43, 100,000 miles in ’44, 128,000 in ’45, in ’46, 215,000 miles and in ’47 even more. Getting the stock, traveling where the goods were, riding the trains — endless, endless — riding the planes, bumping full colonels, the whole country on the take, “table” a dirty word, and under it where the action was. A United States Senator told him once, “We know what you’re up to and we don’t mind a bit. During a war these things have to happen. It’s an abstract factor but very important. It keeps up morale. You sell your wares, and the people on the home front, the factory people and the civil servants and the fillers-in, buy them and it gives them strength. Most people get their strength from the things they own. We have to keep up the balance between guilt and strength to get them to produce. The war news isn’t enough. That just takes care of the guilt. So we know how you manage and we don’t mind a bit.” But the Senator was wrong. Because genius went beyond mere bribery, beyond shaking hands all around on an insinuation, beyond favors and winked eyes and the inference of evil like a secret between friends — though he did all that too, did all of it, though mostly in the beginning, folding bills into hundreds of palms, using cash like a password or a message from spies. (Cash, cash, the whole country crazy for cash, the only thing they’d touch, wanting no records, his far-seeing countrymen, those practical folks. What the hell, it couldn’t last forever. Nothing could last forever, not even greed.)
Because the Senator was wrong. Because genius was genius. There was something physical in it too. Feldman took risks. (What, are you kidding? All those miles in all those airplanes in the forties? The cities blacked out, radar not perfected yet? Remember those plane crashes in the forties?) He was there, ubiquitous, making his pitch. Looking over the operator’s shoulder while she sewed the last seam; among the toys, sneezing over the teddy bears; his feet the first ones up on the sofa when it came from the shop. In the small-arms factory too. He was the first merchandiser to sell government surplus on the open market. And during the war! The first department store in America to offer a magazine-subscription service. Food departments. Virginia Sugar-Cured Ham departments. Setting things up. Collecting his merchandise. Inventing it. Johnny on the spot, picking over America, the rummage champion of World War Two, hearing the rumors, getting the word (“St. Louis has shoes”; “There are baskets in Vermont, dishes in Portland”; “Carolina has hats”). Tours through the plants. (And not just those innocuous preserves where they turned out the belt buckles for civilian consumption — the other parts too, to see what he could use. His suits on those days had holes in the lapels and over all the breast pockets from the badges he had to wear.) And this isn’t just New York City and Chicago and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and St. Louis we’re talking about. We’re talking about places in Nebraska and the Dakotas and southern Indiana and Montana and Idaho and small towns in Dixie. Places with lousy accommodations for travelers and rotten food. And you can’t always get there from here. He got there. Feldman got there.
But he was busy and didn’t meet girls. Except those who worked for him. And life wasn’t exciting enough, kissing the ladies in the big black hats and black dresses, the buyers in long black gloves, those boozers and flatterers and users of make-up and smellers from perfume. Feldman’s buyers. (After he had set up the possibility of buying, established that there was something to be bought.) Feldman’s girls, who were taken to lunch. And got fucked at the gift shows, wooed in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, in the showrooms of the McAlpin Hotel in New York, in motels that were no bargain along the highways on the outskirts of those two-bit towns Feldman had rummaged. (Well, didn’t I tell you? Genius is more than just being able to put down a cash bribe. Cash, cash, that’s all most people know. Take a little risk, have a little fun. And pussy leaves less record than cash. Feldman’s buyers were famous.)
But he had a sense of humor and wished to parody his situation. (It is in the long sad tradition of my people to pluck laughter from despair.) And then he met Lilly in New York City in 1949 in the Pennsylvania Hotel at the wedding of the son of his handbag supplier. She was the kid’s aunt. She was infinitely boring, but she didn’t have on a big black hat, and she had never been to a gift show. Feldman had never been so excited. He needed something special or he would go mad. (The war over four years. Nothing for him to do. The way he saw it, those fools in Washington would never bomb Russia.) Lilly’s unspecialness was spectacular. He grew breathless contemplating it. What a mismatch! The two people stuck with each other — if they married — miserable together for the rest of their lives. Miserable in some important domestic way that Feldman had never known. A mystery. They would tear each other up. That would mean something. A little grief would mean something. Excitement, excitement, give me excitement. Give me Sturm and give me Drang. Wring me out. Let me touch bottom. I don’t care how. Thrown from the rocks, keel-hauled or shoved off the plank. Let me go down, down to the depths, further than fish, down by the monsters, the spiky and fanged. God, give me monsters. Scare me, please!
He married Lilly.
And one monstrousness was that she wouldn’t go along with a gag. Nor would she pluck laughter from despair. Despair depressed her; it gave her heartburn, like steak in a restaurant.
At this time — it was before he invented the basement — Feldman was a game player, a heavy gambler. He bet the horses, the ballgames, the fights, the elections, the first early launches of rockets. And though he mostly broke even, or better — he was lucky with money — he found that to be a bettor, to deal with bookies, accepting another’s odds as fixed and beyond his control as the value of a share on the market, was to make of himself a consumer like anyone else. He would have quit long before he ultimately did but for Lilly’s nervousness in the matter of his gambling. It worried her and she urged him to give it up. Her anxiety kept him going, but Lilly’s anxieties — her fear of bookies, the association of them in her mind with a gangster style that had ended with the end of Prohibition — were part of her character. She worried for the safety of relatives in airplanes flying to Miami, for the careers of nephews, the betrothals of nieces and cousins. She was not anxious only about her own life, assuming safety and happiness and good luck like guaranteed rights. Feldman saw that he was not getting his money’s worth from the gambling and abandoned it. On the other hand, he thought, if he could get her involved, concerned for her own losses, that would be something.
He made up games. Lilly played reluctantly. Sometimes they played gin rummy for wishes. The stakes weren’t high, a twentieth of a wish a point. Lilly was a good cardplayer, and Feldman did not always win. He sweated the games out. Even at those small stakes, ten to fifteen wishes could change hands in a single game. When he lost, however, Lilly’s wishes were always insignificant, unimaginative. She might ask him to bring her a glass of water, or to sing a song, or to clap his hands five times. Feldman insisted that she try harder, that she think of more damaging things for him to do.