An executive — what was that? That was nothing to be. He had no heart for empire; only for the day to day, hand-to-hand, rough-and-tumble of imperialism, of which, sadly, empire was the single issue. But already, failing the Diaspora, he was dug in. Poor little rich boy, he mocked himself. Don’t mock me, he stormed. Only the damn miser counts his blessings. Pain has degrees. There are numbers on thermometers. Gloom isn’t staved with reasons. Look, he thought, clinching it, at that department on the fourth floor, for God’s sake, with its gifts for the man who has everything: personalized cue balls, solid gold zippers, framed thousand-dollar bills. Why, that, in his life, was what he had been reduced to: gestures gestured by the man who has gestured everything. He got by on joyless joie de vivre and forced life force.
Last week he had made a speech in his book department, introducing Vice-Admiral Marlow (“Sea Power”) Bellingstone, USN Ret. He had read the man’s autobiography and wired his publisher, promising to split expenses if he could get the Admiral for an autographing party. He took out a half-page ad and called the local naval-recruiting office for a color guard. (The Navy would have nothing to do with the Vice-Admiral, and Feldman had had to settle for Billy in a sailor suit.) Standing on a raised platform draped with bunting, Feldman had addressed the crowd.
“It is my high privilege,” he told them, “to pipe Admiral Bellingstone here aboard the Feldman. Many of his provocative views are familiar to you. His idea about extending the twelve-mile limit until sea mass exactly displaces land mass and each nation has its mirror image in the water — do I read you right, Admiral?” The Admiral saluted. “—is already known to most Americans. His career-long fight with the Pentagon to recognize Britain, rather than Communism, as the real threat to this nation is equally well known. So, too, are the Admiral’s efforts to restore our country once again to its rightful place as leader in the world’s whaling community. ‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ as the Admiral puts it in his book, ‘to let foreign Denmark put one over on us in this department.’”
Feldman lifted one of the Admiral’s books off a tall stack. “An admirable work, Admiral,” he said, and touched his forehead in salute. The Admiral saluted back, and Feldman turned again to the crowd. “Less familiar, perhaps, but gone into here in careful detail is the Admiral’s fascinating proposal to form a team of naval historians and sea geographers to try to establish once and for all the historicity of Davy Jones’s locker. The Admiral’s belief that if we find it we’ll probably also rediscover the lost city of Atlantis could be one of the brilliant serendipities of the twentieth century.” (Even as he spoke, Feldman took the measure of his own outrageousness and disapproved. There was a lot of talk about the poor man hanging while the rich man got off scot-free, but there were other inequities. How much nonsense a rich man could speak!) “I am reminded, as just in passing I peruse the Admiral’s useful index, of his frightening warning about the danger of salt leakage from the ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway. In the Admiral’s phrase, we are ‘bleeding the Atlantic’ In just seventy billion years — do I have these figures right, Admiral? — the Great Lakes will turn saline. What are we supposed to do then?
“Friends,” he said in conclusion, “I don’t want to keep the Admiral too long from his pensées, so I’ll turn him over to you right now, but I must just mention one more of his ideas that was particularly exciting to me. I’m talking about his research regarding the dangerous integration of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Panama Canal, what the Admiral calls ‘The Mongrelization of the High Seas.’ Maybe he’ll tell us a little more about that one himself. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome aboard Vice-Admiral Retired Harlow ‘Sea Power’ Bellingstone, USN.”
The madman blinked, talked crazily for twenty minutes about his theory on mermaids — they were not good swimmers — and Feldman sold three hundred books.
Or the bananas. From time to time Feldman had noticed news stories about merchants who, through misplaced decimals and literally interpreted metaphors in incautious ads, had been forced to part with valuable merchandise. A woman in Hartford bought a used car for four hundred potatoes. In Idaho a furniture store had to let a dining-room set go for “only a very little lettuce.” It was always big, good-humored news, and worth a picture even on the front page: a housewife, bent, smiling under a one-hundred-pound sack of potatoes; a gag photo of the Boise furniture man staring glumly—“That’s one on me”—at a shriveled garden lettuce, one browning, crumpled leaf of which protruded from his lips; a woman with her mouth open, and a beefy fellow with his hands over his ears who had just sold an air-conditioning unit for a song. It was as if a real bargain, things being what they are, were a blow for the underdog, from which all might take heart. The lucky seemed to give the unlucky hope, cheer, a belly laugh.
A year before, Feldman had given his TV salesman a day off and run an ad for a floor-sample color television set with a twenty-five-inch screen. The price was three hundred and fifty bananas, and he had arranged for someone from his photography department to stand by with a camera. When the store opened, Feldman was behind the counter, waiting. In ten minutes there was a man before him, holding his ad. “You advertise the sale on the twenty-five-inch color TV?” the man asked.
Feldman looked at the ad closely. “Yes sir,” he said, “but that’s just a floor sample.”
“I know that,” the man said.
“Yes sir,” Feldman said.
“You still got that set?”
“Yes sir.”
“I want to buy it.”
“Don’t you want to see it demonstrated first?” Feldman asked. “The first color show doesn’t come on until ten this morning.”
“No, that’s all right. It’s guaranteed, ain’t it?”
“Yes sir,” Feldman said.
“That’s good enough for me,” the man said. “Three hundred fifty, right?” he asked cagily.
Feldman smiled. “That’s right.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Feldman said. “Let’s have them.”
“It’s a charge,” the man said.
“A charge?”
“Here’s my charge plate.”
“What is this, buddy?” Feldman demanded. “Are you trying to get away with something? That ad says bananas!”
In the end he had to let the set go for three hundred and fifty dollars, but the photograph of him making out the sales slip was uninspiring.
A month later he tried again. In a prominent ad in the Sunday papers he promised to sell an electric typewriter for “peanuts.” He was shooting for the wire services, and in fact it was a reporter and his photographer who showed up first. The reporter claimed the machine and handed Feldman the peanuts.
“What,” Feldman said, extending the peanuts in his outstretched palm and turning toward the photographer, “peanuts? Where are the lawyers? Will this stand up in court? Well, well, that’s one on me.”
His heart wasn’t in it. But he did it.
As he did everything. “That Feldman,” anyone might have said, “there’s a man who’s alive.” As if eccentricity and a will set to scheme like a bomb to go off had anything to do with life. As if aggression and the maneuvered circumstances did.
Look at him, his ringed, framed concentration like a kid seeking a lost ball in high grass. An aesthetic of disappointment, a life of wanting things found wanting, calling out for the uncalled for. But the shout down from the mountain was always the same — that the view wasn’t worth the climb. It was what one heard: “War is hell,” says the General. The movie star quoted: “All those retakes. Always on a diet. The lies about you in the columns. The crank mail.” Or the truth about spies: “People don’t realize. Mostly it’s just boring legwork. It’s dull, routine. I don’t even carry a gun.” And the loneliness of the Presidency, and the endless ceremonial obligations of the King, and the brief, doomed flare of the athlete’s prime, and all the small-print, thick-claused rest. People didn’t realize. That it wasn’t who one was, or even what one was, or if one made an effort or only took what came. What counted, finally, was whether you were lucky or not, whether the gods, the stars in their ornate sequences, had given you timing. There were lucky men. How often — this seemed strange now — had he had occasion to say, “I am one. I am.”