“Good?”
“We can’t accept any new applicants.”
“Why?”
“Why. They’re cutting down on federal aid to education. I don’t want to lower our high standards.”
“You shutting us down, Mr. Flesh?”
“Yeah, we’re closing out of town. We ain’t taking it to Broadway.”
“Then what was that pitch all about?”
“In the morning I want you to call Nate Lace. He’s at the Nittney-Lyon Hotel in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”
“Who’s Nate Lace?”
“No one. A liquidator. An old pal. When’s the session over? When’s graduation?”
“Chibka has two more private lessons. The group session goes another three weeks.”
“Three weeks, yeah. Get Lace. I want him for Commencement speaker.”
“Mr. Flesh?”
“Look at me in this suit. You ever see anything so ridiculous?”
“What’s going to happen to us?”
“Yeah. Well, to tell you the truth, I think I can find a spot in the Follies for Luis, but you don’t fit into the big picture. If you really love him, let the lug go.”
“What are we going to do, Mr. Flesh?”
“We’re going to liquidate. Fire sale. Everything must go. We’re closing down the Carioca.” She would be forty in maybe three years. Her figure was nice. He liked the long line of her legs, her flat chest and tough prettiness. “Listen,” he said, “you know how lonely it’s supposed to be at the top? Let me tell you, it’s lots lonelier at the bottom. I don’t know what you’re going to do, Clara. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Al or to Jenny or to Hope or Luis. Is that really his name? Shit, sister, there are shopping centers in Niles, in Buffalo Grove, La Grange, Glencoe. Bring your taps. Teach ballet to six-year-old Jewish kids.” She was crying. “Come on,” he said. “Clara, don’t. What are you doing? Hey. Stop.” He moved closer to her, and not knowing what would happen he held his arms open to her. She came toward the middle-aged man. He held her unsteadily. “I come from Fred Astaire,” he said softly, “everybody dance.”
He tried to lead, and when he slipped from time to time on the puddings of scattered food or in the liquor, she caught him and held him up. He made a low hum in his throat as they danced. He liked the sound. He sang to her from his guttural hum. “I’m taking off my top hat, I’m taking off my topcoat, I’m taking off my tails.”
“What was that stuff?” she asked. “That speech you made?”
“Who knows? My father’s spirit’s in this room. I feel it.”
“Your father?”
“Yes. He’d be, what, seventy-five years old now. Hey, Daddy, you see how things change? This here’s Clara.”
“Hi, Mr. Flesh,” Clara said.
“Did you see how they spilled things? Boy, I tell you,” he said, “the public. Hey, Papa. You know something? I broke the law. I’m a possessor. I could be put in jail. Almost fifty fucking years old and I could be put in jail. I bet you never broke a law.” He let Clara go. “I’m sorry, Papa.” He was crying, shaken so hard by his sobs it was difficult for him to breathe. “I’m sorry you died in a crash,” he sobbed, “I’m sorry to have taken Fred Astaire’s name in vain, sorry my dancers live in a time when no one wants to learn the steps, sorry to God for a freedom which I helped shape by accepting all the credit cards — the Diners Club and Master Charge and BankAmericard and Carte Blanche and all the oil company things. Sorry for my rotten health of body and heart. Ah shit, Papa, it’s a hell of a way to start a fiscal year.”
“Are you all right?” Clara asked.
“No,” he cried, “no. No. I’m not.” He wiped his eyes and began again to dance with her. When he let her go he put his hand into the pocket of his tuxedo jacket. “Here,” he said.
“What?”
“Your money. The two fives I took from you earlier.”
“You gave that back to him.”
“I did? Then what’s this I’m holding?”
“What’s what you’re holding? Where?”
III
1
Where has he seen these men? Their sport coats are the nubby textures and patterns of upholstery from credit furniture supplements in Sunday newspapers. They are crosshatched, double knits, drapery, checks like optical illusions, designs like aerial photographs of Kansas wheat fields, Pennsylvania pastureland, or the russets of erosion in western national parks. The pockets of their blazers are slashed, angled as bannister. Change would fall out of them, he thinks. The flaps are mock, shaped like the lower halves of badges. Their notched, pointed collars ride their shoulders like the conferral of wide, mysterious honors, the mantles of secret orders — and Flesh supposes they belong to these. He has never seen such shoes. Many are glossy white loafers, the color and sheen of wet teeth in ads. Gratuitous, useless buckles vault the white piping that rises from their shoes like welts. The jewelry and fixtures in the center of their false straps could be I.D. tags, or metal tablets, or slender sunken scutcheons. He sees no belts in the tight cuneiform-print trousers, in the plaids like colored grids, like cage, windowpanes, that climb their legs like ladders. The pants hold themselves up, self-supportive, a flap of fabric buttoned to a rim of itself like flesh sealed to flesh in operations. He marvels at their bump-toe shoes, their thick fillets of composition heels like shiny mignon or rosy cross sections of pressed geology. At their shirts like Christmas ties.
Where has he seen such men? Sitting beside him when he had ridden on airplanes, with their slim gun-metal attaché cases open on their laps like adult pencil boxes. (He has no attaché case, travels even lighter than they.) Huddling with maître d’s behind the velvet ropes in restaurants. In convention at Miami Beach and San Diego in low season. With widows in the public rooms, restaurants, and oyster bars of good commercial hotels. With unmarried women a dozen years younger than themselves who chew gum. Yes. Yes. And always together, always in pairs or pairs of pairs, their flings a cooperation and conspiracy, their style a fever. (Though it wasn’t “fling.” They would have entire wardrobes of such clothes, their closets actually hazardous, flammable, with Fortrels, Dacrons, low-banked acetates, back-burnered polyesters, double knits.) And made brave, it could be, by the very resiliency of their clothing, the flexible permanent press that snapped back into place like rubber bands, that would not hold a wrinkle or keep a clue, as though they wore, these loud and husky men, garments blessed by gods, an invulnerability they perhaps took seriously, a vouchsafement of safety that made them louder, easily tripping their anger as galosh-shod boys might stomp in puddles. Not so he, Flesh, in his wools and silks and cottons, his earthy, dry-clean-only fibers, his easily trampled crops of clothes. Nor Lace the Liquidator, that creased and rumpled, raveled man.
Oh why, why, why do I mourn them? Why do they touch me so, wrapped in their crazy laundry? These Necchi men and Falstaff distributors, this pride of Pontiac dealers and Armstrong linoleum licensees? Am I not one of them? And if my kindling point is higher, what doth it avail a man to keep his cool if his eyes boil, for the truth is, I cannot look at them without something profound in my throat forcing the maudlin hydraulics of the heart. Maudlin and sober still. These are my Elks, my Vets of Foreign Wars, my Shriners and Knights of Columbus and Pythias, my Moose mobs and Masons of all degrees. Oh. Oh. Variety Club is the spice of life. They do good work: tool the cripple, and patiently teach the retarded their names, bus the underprivileged to the park and usually it doesn’t rain. God’s blessing on them. Mine. All praise to the raising of their hospitals, to their raffle good will. Just, damn it, make them careful where they drop their ashes or swing their cigarettes! One live ash on a single pant leg and we could all go up. It would be the Chicago fire in Columbus, Indy, Wichita — all the landlocked campuses and home offices. (Home offices, yes, those legislative capitals of our trades where we, patriots to machines, to goods and services, pilgrims to the refresher course, all those wee congresses of American style, where last year’s figures and this one’s plans and promos hang out, where we honor the founders and applaud the record beaters, inspired and instructed, seminar’d, on-the-job-trained in Hamburgerology, the new models, sign placement, the architecture of the access road, lapping it up, taking it in, community relations, how the Civil Rights Act of ’68 has opened the way to the black dollar, which credit cards to honor, and all the rest. Business and Sociology, the first on our block to key the restroom, guard the fountain, cage the clerk. Inspired by their inspiration, enthused by their enthusiasm, standing when others stood and humming the bouncy anthems of our firms, tears in my eyes in the face of all this blessed, sacred, smarmy hope even if I know, as I do know, what I know. And loving it all anyway, my cellophane-window nameplate, the long capitals of my name and place of business.)