So he kept up his ersatz enthusiasms and redoubled all efforts, like some gambler letting it ride, and just yesterday he had called all his stock boys and shipping clerks and maintenance men together for a meeting in the back of the store.
He smelled glue and string and rope and wrappings and postage and saucered sponges the color of erasers on pencils. In the shipping room he felt a physical disgust. He heard scales click, whir, a solid, metallic tattoo of postage meter. He saw the open rate books, the thumbed, greasy timetables. A telephone was out of its cradle. He lifted the receiver to his ear. “That you, Simon?” a woman’s voice said. “I see you tonight, honey. I tell my husband Mrs. Shicker want me for a dinner party she giving.” He hung up. Oppressed, he saw the pink third copies of bills of lading and wandered through a maze of senseless shipments with crayoned messages: “#7 of 10,” “3 of 9,” “1 of #4.” He felt a thick sense of half-point signatures, a smudged, bewildering spiral of unfamiliar initials and names: R. L. and J. H. and Herman Shaw. (They were his proxies. They signed for him. Who were they?)
He opened a heavy door. A man lay sleeping on a wide loading platform. Feldman saw his shoes — thick, high-topped, like blunt weapons. He closed the door and continued through a warehouse whorl of bagged lunch and paper cups of gray coffee. Everywhere were the smooth, dark cardboard rails of open packages of candy. (He made a profit on the machines: here a profit, there a profit, everywhere a profit profit.) He saw the safety signs, the conserve-electricity signs, the turn-off-faucet signs, the absenteeism signs: all the crazy placard pep talk of management to labor. It was the landscape of time clock, and he plunged still deeper into it. He breathed the whelming dinge, the hostile, grimy fallout.
They were all waiting for him in the locker room. There were high school boys in tan linen jackets and women in the blue uniform of maids in hotel corridors. A few of the men wore the thick wool of lumberjacks, or wide bright ties down the front of their denim shirts. Feldman paused beside a young boy and held his elbow. “There’s a man sleeping on one of the loading platforms. Get him.”
He climbed up on a long bench. “I like it back here,” he told them. “You’re the backbone. The fortunes of this store rise and fall because of what you do here. Listen, just because you don’t get the medals and the hurrahs of the crowd, that doesn’t mean you’re not appreciated. You’re behind the scenes, you folks on the bench, you understudies. You’re unsung. Permit me to sing you.” They looked up at him, and he saw their pastiness, the abiding solemnity or causeless joy beneath their waxy pallor. Suddenly he had a sense of his own presence and was touched, seeing himself not as someone beyond them, out of their lives, but as someone close. He whiffed their hatred and sensed himself their caricature, demonized by them, stuffed into monogramed white-on-white shirts, dappered for them, given a thin mustache, his fingers fattened, pinkened, softened, remembered as one who wore rings. (Looking around, he recognized a boy who had delivered a package to his office once, while he was having his hair cut. What a story that must have made: “Fat-assed Feldman in a Big Silk Sheet.” And the hair on the sheet — stiff, curled shavings, the association made forever in the kid’s mind with ruthlessness, strength. Passionate hair. Showy, shiny sprigs of it, waved, tufted, patent-leather clumps of it by the large pink ears — a dancer’s tufts, a pitchman’s, Mr. Big’s.) He imagined their projections of his green felty drawers of clothes, their lustful thoughts of the cedary scents, the smooth piping on his handkerchiefs, of where he kept his cuff links, his Broadway agent’s jewels. He was part of them now, food for all their false anecdote. Adding up his curt hellos, his Jew’s indifference. How dare they? he thought. How dare they?
“Who straightens stock on five?” he asked suddenly.
There was a greasy flash of a pompadour as a young boy looked up.
“It’s a pigpen,” Feldman said. “The fucking suits are out of line. Nothing is sized. I counted nine jackets loose on the cases.” The boy stared down at his shoes. “All right,” he demanded, “what’s holding up the deliveries? Why can’t the orders go out faster? Customers are calling up for their merchandise and I see half-empty trucks going out.” They shifted uneasily. “What’s the matter with you? Do I have to get new people back here? I will, goddamnit. Your union isn’t worth boo, and I can hire and fire till the cows come home. You’re breaking things. We’re getting too many returns.”
A man in a red-checked shirt put up his hand.
“What is it?”
“Sir,” he said, “we never have enough excelsior.”
“Balls,” Feldman shouted back. “Excelsior’s twenty-five dollars the ton. Bring newspapers from home. Use the goddamn candy wrappers, the paper cups. Do I have to tell you everything?” He harangued them this way for twenty minutes while they shifted under his gaze. “You’ve been using the postage meter for personal mail,” he said. “That’s stealing stamps. I’ll prosecute, I swear it. I’ll be back to see you in two months. If things aren’t shaped up by then, I’ll fire your asses all the hell out of here.”
They turned to leave, and something in the soft, bewildered shrug of their shoulders suddenly moved him. “Wait,” he called. “Wait a moment.” They turned back, and he descended from the bench. “Life is not terrible,” he said. “It isn’t. I affirm life. Life is not terrible.” They stared at him. “Get back to your duties,” he said roughly.
Ah, but how tired he was of his spurious oomph, of all eccentric plunge and push and his chutzpa only skin-deep, that wouldn’t stand up in court. “I like your spirit, boy,” the skinflint says, surprised by brashness. “I need a man like you in Paris.” Feldman didn’t. He was exhausted by his own acts of empty energy. Unambushable he was, seeing slush at spirit’s source, reflex and hollow hope in all the duncy dances of the driven. He was helpless, however. He had been born without a taste for the available. “No more looking askance at reality” had been his fervent prayer. But ah, ah, there was no God.
It occurred to him that he ought to knock off and go to a cocktail lounge and sulk. He could drink liquor and listen to the jazz they piped in. It might be pleasant. But then, he thought, he couldn’t hear the melodies without thinking also of the words, the college-kid love poems. Not for him. For him there should be new songs, new lyrics. “I got the downtown merchant’s blues,” he sang softly. “My heart is lower than my bargain basement — all alone at the January White Sale.” Stirred, he buzzed for Miss Lane. “Will green be the color this season?” he sang.
Victman was in Feldman’s office with him. He was excited. Eight years ago Feldman had been proud of Victman — his New York man, his Macy’s man. (Today everybody had his Neiman-Marcus man, his May Company man, but Victman was the first.) He had been a hot shot, in department-store circles a wonder merchant. (He had invented the shopping center, and the suburban branch store, and was in on the discussions when the charge plate was only in the talking stages — in department-store circles a household word.) Now Feldman could not look at him without wincing. He looked at him and winced for his $287,000, winced for his failed campaign. (Three columns and a picture in Woman’s Wear Daily when he came with Feldman, articles in the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.)