I am the master of all I purvey.
(In the old days, new to ownership, he would take things from counters, filling his pockets with toys, wrist watches, cuff links, pulling a tie that had attracted him, stuffing it into his jacket; more attracted by his merchandise than any customer, unreluctant as an assured guest at a feast, and feeling just that, his own reflexive hospitality — knowing ultimate freedom, the last man on earth, nimbused with luck. There had been complaints, his own people had not known him, thought him a thief, a madman; some customers even, driven by an abstract loyalty to the ceremony of sale, daring to pull against him in ludicrous tug of war, to collar him, to call a cop. But it had not been these fools who had been able to stop his raids, nor even the complex decorum of inventory. Bookkeeping could not deal with him; it knew profit and loss, credit and debit, and made allowance even for pilferage that struck as malice or arrived as need. But it was helpless to explain what he did. There was no place on the ledger, no word for it, unless it was this: “Feldman.” It wasn’t any objection at last but his own: not surfeit finally, but surfeit’s mild adjunct, superfluity, his idea, grown to a principle, that things—all things—were just gewgaws, and that nothing, nothing could ever excuse a disturbed profit. A lost sale was lost forever, something gone out of his life. So he doubled the guard, was ruthless with shoplifters, prosecuted until it cost him thousands and the word got out: that his place was no place to get away with anything, that you might as well try to hold up a bank. And all this, the expense of prosecution, of tight security, was reflected at last in the books. Meanwhile, he had packed in six big boxes and stored in his garage all those things he had taken during the enthusiastic year of his spree, a monument — an objects lesson — that nothing, nothing, nothing was ever lost, that all was recoverable and advantage lay where advantage lay: everywhere, available as atmosphere. And one day he sent a truck to take it out, to bring it all back to the shelves and bins and counters to be sold this time, only keeping one thing back, a wallet, to remind him.)
Now he moved past the cosmetics and began his morning tour — he had not outgrown this — of the main floor, his reviving stroll through an acre of artifact. No one dared address him. They thought it business, some trick or formula he had, some private, infallible rule of thumb. “Nothing gets past that one,” they told each other. Nothing did, but he walked there only because it was refreshing, because the department store’s ground floor offered a panorama of his possibilities. For it was thus that he had come to view his merchandise: as possibility, chance, turned risk, all of it latent with purchase and profit. But it was dreadful too: dreadful to see the high heaps, an infinity of the on-hand, dreadful to know that there was more on the floor above, and more on the floor above that, on up the full six floors, more, more — and across town, more in warehouses, more in trucks even now arriving in the city or just starting out from a dozen distant cities, more in railroad cars and more in the holds of ships and bellies of planes. Feeling the full responsibility of the risks he took for profit, terrified by the threat of ruin, of there not being customers enough in the city or time enough left in his life to sell it all, but made bold by his very fright, comforted by the magnitude of his terror and the slimness of his chances.
He was obsessed by it, the merchandise laid out like a city, patterned, zoned as neighborhood, and missed nothing on the fluorescently tubed yellow wood and glass horseshoe counters. He knew without touching them the feel of the glass, greasy as plastic from the precious contact of shoppers, their leaned, open-palmed surrenders on the countertops, smudged from their groped investigations, their excited jabs at the glass: “There, there—next to the white one.” (The counters, washed each night, bore a now intrinsic blur, ineffaceable as the cloud on an old watch crystal.) And could almost have told which belts had been sold from the tiers mounted like coiled snakes in their clear oblong boxes. And even which ties, perhaps, hanging thick as a curtain before some gay vaudeville.
He stopped to look at the big brown cash registers, complicated as console organs, and to peer at the figures in the windows at their tops, seeing sadly against the broad black strip that ran from one side of the register to the other the rows of white, thick, squarish zeros, the icy decimals big as hailstones. He was released by the sound of the bell registering a sale, and moved on, restored as a prince in a legend.
Trailing his hand comfortlessly through the heaped, dark piles of socks, he looked out over the open rectangles of distant counters and cases and racks, and went toward Men’s Ready to Wear to stand among the mountains of slacks, aware as always of the faint, sweet, oily smell of the massed cloth. He pulled at a rack of suits built into a wall, dollying it effortlessly forward on its big tracks, turning it soundlessly on its thick, greased shaft. He drew in one last deep lungful of the pleasant odor and moved on, the tweeds and herringbones giving him, as he glanced at them in passing, a faint illusion of speed.
In the broad center aisle, between vast counters, he paused before a display table covered with a red moiré satin, grainy as wood, on which expensive gifts had been arranged at random: a captain’s cabin barometer at Fair and Very Dry, the pressure 31.01 and rising; an enormous obscure brush with bristles the color of aluminum; a black leather casket with four drawers like a jeweler’s trays. He scratched at a drawer but failed to open it, and could not locate the key which fit into the bloated, classic keyholes. He handled a carelessly spread tent of printed silk which looked like the master sheet from which ascots were cut. Considering it, Feldman had a sense that it had been there forever, that it would be there always in its wicked obsolescence. He left the table.
Passing counters high with prim stacks of ladies’ blouses — it occurred to him that he was probably losing money on the men; fitfully he regretted their larger bodies, the additional cloth that went into their clothes and ate up profits — he came to an area of domestic, personal hardware (A MONTH O’ SUNDRIES, the sign said) and moved among cigarette cases, boxed wallets like open books, ganglia of leather key rings, lighters, umbrellas, zippered sewing kits, the bright aligned spools of thread like fantasy ammunition. In the aisles were pastry carts of handbags. (Maze, he thought, the tempting obstacles of possession.) There were tables of slippers, step-ins, bootie socks, sequined moccasins, scuffs, woolen hip-length stockings. There were ladies’ belts rising on successively diminished wheels, sweaters and white blouses you could blow your nose in, sheerish scarves as rough to the touch as a human heel, chandeliers of hats, stoles like folded flags, monogramed sachets, crocheted shawls, muliebrial hospital bed jackets that made a ploy even of death. He bent to examine a display case of men’s coinlike jewelry, fashion’s mintage, the small change of cuff links and tieclasps and studs. And peered closely at the stacked octagonal hatboxes, Dickensian, Bond Streety, the grayish cardboard shaggy, linty as money.
Entering Yard Goods, he had to pick his way past bright throw pillows like big candies. There were reels of ribbons, cards of lace, buttons, piping, upright bolts of flannel, wool, silk, horizontal rolls of cloth, packages of zippers, big pattern books thicker than telephone directories. (He was excited by the clutter here, and in the luggage department next to it, the big grips and steamer trunks thickening space as in a crowded customs.
In the Specialty Shop he briefly rummaged among the wicker baskets with their foreign chocolates and hams and sardines, their dry, queer pods and briny rinds. He paused to read the legends on the colored tins of biscuits and the Balkan, closely printed labels — medaled, decorated as some prince’s chest — on the bottles of dark steak sauces. He stared at the jars of caviar and salad dressing, at the curious bottled gems of pimentos, artichoke hearts like preserved organs. He browsed the anthologies of strange cheeses and the glasses of rare jellies with their suspended slivers of fruit like motes in thick light, and thought hungrily of all turned, vexed appetites, soured and satiated by the normal vegetable and the ordinary meat, lusting himself to taste the canned worms and chocolate ants, to savor the snake, coiled as twine in the clear jar, to gorge himself on grasshoppers and make a feast of the lizards’ tongues, tender, sinewless as fish.