“They asked me,” Flesh said, “they asked me, ‘Ben, why chicken?’ ‘Everybody has to eat,’ I told them. ‘Each must eat, all must bite the calorie and chew the carbohydrate. We must be nourished. This is a need. The play goes to the man who makes necessity delicious.’
“Mrs.,” he called down to a woman in white shoes, “people have feet. There’ll always be a demand for shoes.” He saw a young man. “They have bodies which have to be clothed. The Washington clothing lobbies are among the most powerful in the country.” And another man: “They’ve got to live somewhere — houses, apartments. A landlord prospers.” He spotted an old lady: “Human feeling, the sense of family—there’s a bond. Greeting cards. The long distance. Cemetery plots. Real estate is real.” And a girclass="underline" “They have to be distracted. Books, records, trips to Nassau on the Youth Fare.” And a teenage boy: “Pornography is a growth industry!” He had his eye on a husband and wife, the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulder: “The course of true love never runs smooth. There are lovers’ quarrels. People fight. They kiss and make up. Say it with flowers. Sweets to the sweet.” There was a boy with glasses: “They have eyes that wear out with all there is to look at. You couldn’t go wrong in optometry!”
And just then he went blind in his left eye.
He was not with the Wine and Spirits Association of America people, not with the Toyota Dealers, not with the Midwest Modern Language Association. He paid top dollar for his room and walked the corridor of restaurants and expensive boutiques, tiny, some of them, as roomettes on trains, that linked the lobbies of the Chase and Park Plaza Hotels. He smiled at everyone. Without a name tag, in his sober suit of natural fibers he must have looked like one of the managers of the hotel, or like Koplar himself perhaps, or even a well-turned-out house detective. Except that there were no more house detectives. They were security personnel now, and some he knew in the better hotels spoke with cultured European accents. Whatever happened to the house detective, whatever happened to the house physician? The hotel dicks were all from Interpol and the docs were revolving pool personnel, family doctors on retainer. Less romantic than the old days of Dr. Wolfe. Oh yes.
He went into one of the shops and bought a purse of softest calf’s leather, paid for it with an American Express card which the girl checked against the February 1974 list of closely printed American Express numbers, American Express Deadbeats of February 1974. It was like a musical comedy. (“Do you take Diners? Master Charge? Carte Blanche? American Express? BankAmericard?” “Yes, sir, oh yes.” He could have paid for it — an $85 purse — with his driver’s license or Blue Cross card. He carried his credit cards in his inside jacket in a Bicycle Playing Cards packet.) He gave the woman Kitty’s address — she was Mrs. Roger Sayad now — and asked that it be sent.
“Will there be a card?”
“Yes. A card.” She handed him a small white envelope and a card. He wrote Kitty’s name on the envelope, tore up the blank she had given him, and enclosed his Sunoco credit card.
“It’s sentimental. This used to be honored at Best Western motels.”
The saleswoman looked at him.
“Among so many conventioneers — I represent only myself this trip — I am seized by the spirit. I am taken with a frenzy for the old days, you follow? My heart leaps up. You follow my heart leaping up?”
She smiled weakly and he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t drunk. And he wasn’t.
But he could tell no one anything anymore. His tears embarrassed them. The kid hitchhiker a few days ago was something else. That story had been one from old times. He went up to his room.
What reminded him, what started the whole damn thing, was the sight of all those businessmen. In Miami Beach — that would have been just four years ago, the prime rate had been 7½ percent — he’d attended two conventions at once, K-O-A and One Hour Martinizing.
Dr. Wolfe.
A pallid wafery man with thinning hair that seemed to grow out from a tuft of widow’s peak and stretch back over his head, growing uphill but somehow the dark individual strands like the ribs of a fan that covered almost all his scalp. A head of hair like a magic trick. Flesh with more was balder. A quiet man who spoke in a low monotonous voice. Dr. Wolfe. In order to hear him Ben found himself leaning into Wolfe’s speech, as if shouldering a stiff wind, heavy weather. With his head bent toward his host’s conversation, there was an odd nautical quality to his step. Flesh felt like a sailor rolling along beside him. They might have been walking upwind on a deck. The faint praise was faint. Dr. Wolfe. “Have lunch with me.” It was more command than invitation. The man was a bore. Ben could not rebuff bores, regarded their conversation as down payment on his own.
“Those K-O-A’ers needed to hear that.”
“Well—”
“It was interesting. But I’m not sure you were correct.”
“I’m new in the business. It was simply an outsider’s first impression.”
“No no, it was stimulating. But what would the presence of motorcycle packs do to our family trade?”
“I didn’t really say anything about motorcycle packs. I wasn’t thinking of opening up the campsites to Hell’s Angels.”
“Once the word got around they’d come, though. They could come singly, or in pairs. They might not seem motorcycle packs, but then, when they were all together, you’d see what you had.”
He didn’t care to argue the point. It was just something that had occurred to him during the open meeting and that he’d offered in the packed Fontainebleau Hospitality Suite during “Give and Take Hour.” “I thought you said you liked the idea.”
“I said it was interesting. It needs to be discussed.”
Ben didn’t care to discuss it.
“We’ll go outside the hotel. I’ve been eating in that pharmacy up Collins Avenue. The prices they charge here are ridiculous.”
“Listen, I’m a little rushed. I’m supposed to be with One Hour Martinizing in an hour.”
“Yes?”
“I’m giving a talk on the subject ‘Come Back Thursday.’ ” Wolfe didn’t smile.
“It’s just up Collins Avenue. By the time we got seats in the coffee shop we’d have to gobble our sandwiches.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“K-O-A’s a family trade,” Wolfe said when they were seated at the counter in the drugstore eating their egg-salad sandwiches. (Wolfe had ordered for them both.)
“What about hostelers?”
“Hostelers are people’s children. They’re decent.”
“Oh.” Flesh had begun to hate the man.
“It’s all very well,” Wolfe said, “for you absentee landlords, but I have to live at the campsite. We’re in Boca Raton. If your proposal went through, if it got in our bylaws, I’d be the one to suffer, I’d be the one subjected to the terror.”
“I didn’t put it as a proposal.”
“There’d be dope, fights. We’d be kept up half the night. My wife can’t take that.”
“It would be up to the individual, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes? It would be the Public Accommodations Act all over again. Civil rights. If I wasn’t in compliance, I’d lose my license.”
“Well, I didn’t put it as a proposal.”
“It was warmly received. And that other. What was it — serve beer on the premises?”
“All I said was that if K-O-A had a small retail food and beverage outlet—”
“That’d be beer. You’d have a problem with the hostelers. A lot of those kids are under age. There’d be false I.D.’s. I see nothing but trouble. For a few shekels. Is that all that matters to you, shekels?”