He crossed to the large glass tanks of candy, staring at them as at treasure: the mint lentils and nonpareils, the dollhouse bricks of jelly and licorice boats, the chocolate stars and strings of pectin marjels, wafers, candy canes, the huge almond-pitted blocks of scored chocolate — all the sweet, hard crystals, all the fondants. He placed his fingers in the trough of a scale and lifted out a sugary residue, a kind of candy gravel, succulent dust.
And this is only the first floor of it, he thought.
He turned, stumbling, passionate, and got onto the enormous chiseled X of the sculpted escalator, having more than a king had, having everything. Rising slowly above the plains of goods, seeing it all at once now, the customers ringed and lost in his wilderness of product. Desperate with his unreliable risk, his inventory heavy as the planet. This was the last time he would see it today, and though he wished he might never see it again he knew that tomorrow morning he would have to look once more.
By the time he had risen two or three more floors, however, he was an altered man. His spirits, oppressed on the main floor, became higher the higher he rose. This often happened. There was something hospitable in danger. He began impatiently to climb the moving stairs. Barely glancing around him, he rose above China, above Appliances, above the children’s department, the men’s, the women’s, climbing toward levels of the store which were insular and half deserted. Here’s where the real trading’s done, he thought, standing in the furniture department among its scatter of dining- and living- and bedroom suites. He saw a woman testing a chair, a man at a desk, pretending to type and making imaginary compensations for the height of his typewriter, an engaged couple sitting aggressively on a bed. They all seemed unconscious neighbors in some odd, enormous house. Feldman was undiscouraged by the quiet here. If it had been noisier below, much of the stir had been aimless, a buzz of browsers, a falsetto, idling rasp of wills in abeyance. Here, though, he sensed purpose, the pious silences preceding high purchase, almost a condition of privilege when money changed hands, like those moments a family has alone with its dead before the coffin is closed. (In these regions he had sometimes fired people on the spot if they lost a sale. “If they get this far,” he said, “they want it.”) Now he paused, caught by something sanctified, basilican. He sniffed the air. A sale — the man at the desk. Observing him, Feldman saw the ceremonial poses, the last bemused, executive glance into the empty drawer. (“Have them try it on,” he told his salesmen. “Whatever it is. Have them act it out. Pull them to the mirrors. Let men who’ve never hunted see themselves with guns in their hands.”) The sale would be made; it was money in the bank. He smelled decision, impulse — the guilt that went with every yielding. (There were days when the store stank of all the accreted, powerful discharges of submitted-to temptation; other days when the place smelled of resistance as of stone.)
Feldman did not wait for the salesman to write up the order, but rushed away, almost as if he needed to be unaware of something good happening to him so that when it came to his attention later, it would carry a special increment for having been delayed. He rarely thought of his character, but took a certain comfort from such measures, seeing them as respectable evidences of his soundness, a willed humbling that qualified him for fortune.
In his effort to hurry away, Feldman took a wrong turn and found himself on a descending escalator. Feeling exactly like one drifting earthward in a parachute, he saw the looming women’s-wear department and was seized by an old idea.
There had been, in his adolescence, a spate of films about department stores — comedies about stern old merchants who found it difficult to understand their carefree rakish sons. Sometimes it was the fathers with the eccentric good will and the sons who were serious. These films had been Feldman’s literature. They embraced, he thought, everything that was possible in human character, and watching them, he had glimpsed the irreducible polar concepts of human existence — stodge and lark, duty and holiday, will and sense. Inclined to the one or the other, he was sympathetic to both, the good arguments of reality and the good jokes of hedonism. He saw that life could betray decent men and that beauty took beatings. The comedies were turned into torments for him. In the darkened theaters, biting his nails, seeing the tragic implications of either alternative, he felt himself the most vulnerable human in America. His own father was obliterated; his own self was. (It sometimes occurred to him that in modeling himself in those old days on those characters’ character, he may have slipped his own. Perhaps, he thought, Feldman was all artifact now, supposititious, and the real Feldman, meant for one fate, had found another.)
With puberty, however — Feldman’s puberty had been late, his drives unserious; perhaps in serving two personalities, he had actually stalled biological time — he discovered something else: that the conflict between the father and the son had been only a natural irritation, the personality of the one demanding the personality of the other, imposing a petty distance that wrote no one out of anyone’s will and generated no avenging codicils; discovered, well, the girl. And because the people he had become loved her, he loved her too. Loved her helplessly.
He had never seen anyone like her and never would perhaps, but it was enough, as it would have been enough for some knight of old time, for him simply to have an idea of her. Now he named all those girls Jean Arthur, and he loved her still, looked for her still, listened for her funny squeaky voice, seeking her feisty intensity. (He recalled her as a girl Communist, someone trying to organize the help in the store; other times he saw her in a Salvation Army bonnet, adorable with her cheeks in mumpy, musical pout, filled to bursting with trumpet geschrei. He loved her tics, remembered how cute she was in men’s pajamas, or when she was drunk and mispronounced words. He loved all her irrelevant passions, her tough — cutest of all when making a tiny fist, throwing things, huffing and puffing, her hair in her mouth — working girl’s integrity.) She defined innocence for him at a stage in his life when everyone else his age was falling from grace into a despair, so that for Feldman, who had come from a despair — his years as his father’s captive, his inability when embracing the style of the one son to annihilate ultimately the style of the other — it was like awakening to a grace, like an infant angel smothered in his crib. In this way his timing had been thrown off, and he left moony and smitten — not catching the joke, actually believing such women existed — and all love was love fallen short of itself, doomed through his credulity, and himself given over to an unwilled but permanent adultry, made to serve like the forced slave of Amazons.
Perhaps the department store itself — the real one, the one he owned, that terrified him — was only a sort of the creating of the conditions in which his dream might be realized, a fatuous placation like that of the New Guinea cargo cults which constructed bamboo airplanes on the tops of hills in the hope that they would attract real planes with their heaven-launched gifts. Idiot! Lovestruck! he thought. So this is what lies at the source of my will. So this is what my profit motive rests on. He felt like a sucker, comic as a cuckold. In fact he was a cuckold: where is she anyway? who has her? “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” he thought, “I wonder who’s showing her how.” But despite what he knew to be the reality, he held on to a helpless hope that he might yet find her.