“It’s a good location,” Bruce said, a little taken aback by Milt Lumky and his outspokenness. He was more accustomed to enthusiastic, sincere-type salesmen who never told the truth.
“I’ve know Susan for years,” Milt said somberly. “She’s a fine person. I always wondered about her, though. How she is outside of the business.” He picked at one of his teeth, scowling. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t you agree with me that she’s attractive as hell?”
“Yes,” Bruce said, in a noncommittal manner.
“I always had it in the back of my mind to try to take her out some evening. For dinner or something. And try to penetrate that efficient pose and find out what she’s actually like. Can you believe it that she used to be a school teacher? It’s like finding out that the man who delivers your coal is Albert Einstein doing what he likes best. Of course, Einstein is dead. I read Time, so I know those things. It pays to keep up with world events. Don’t you think so? You never know when it might help you close a big deal.”
“Do you live around here?” Bruce said.
Lumky said, “Yes, goddamn it. My territory includes the entire Pacific Northwest, if you can believe it. I’ve been living up in Oregon, but that means too much driving. So now I’m living here in Idaho. Sort of in the middle. I go from Portland, down to Klamath Falls, then east to Pocatello. This is miserable to live in.” He lapsed into silence. “I really hate it here,” he said at last. “Idaho oppresses me. Especially the drive between here and Pocatello. Did you ever see such a wretched broken-down pure shit road? In any other state it’d be a county back road for farmers with wagons of melons. Here it’s the federal through route. And those bugs down around Montario. Those satanic yellow gossamer flappy silent all-stinger bugs … did you ever hold a dead one up close and get a real good look at it? The god damn thing leers. How a bug can leer without teeth or gums or lips I don’t know.”
“I was born in Montario,” Bruce said.
“I’d keep that to myself,” Lumky said.
“If you had your choice,” Bruce said, “where would you want to live?”
Lumky snorted. “I’d live in L.A.”
“Why?”
“Because when you drive into a drive-in and buy a malted milk the girl who brings it has an ass like Marilyn Monroe’s.”
That answered his question, certainly.
“Don’t think I just sit around brooding about women’s asses,” Lumky droned on in his hoarse voice. “Matter of fact I haven’t thought about it for a year. That’s what living in Idaho does to you. And there’s nothing to do or read or see. There’re a couple of good dirty, spitty dark bars here, but that’s about all. Maybe it’s the cowboy hats that get me. I never trust anybody in a cowboy hat. I always think they’re a nut. I wasn’t cut out to sell typing paper. Can you see that? Is that obvious? Remember that next time when I come around and show you the summer specials. Just tell me no and I’ll go away. I don’t give a damn if you buy anything or not. In fact I hope you don’t. It means I have to write up an order. I don’t even know if I still have my pen.” He felt about in his coat. “Look,” he said. “The fugging thing leaks all over. What a mess.” He buttoned his coat again, morbidly.
“You’d like Reno,” Bruce said.
“Maybe so,” Milt said. “I’ll have to drive down there sometime and see. What do you aim to do working for Susan?”
He said, “Get in something to sell. Get rid of the second-hand junk.”
“You’re right,” Milt said.
“I’d like to carry new portables, but the drugstore’s already gone into that.”
“I’ll tell you what you should go in big for,” Milt said. “And I don’t handle it so you know I’m not trying to talk you into anything.”
“Go ahead and tell me,” Bruce said.
Milt said, “Imported portables.”
“The Italian thing? The Olivetti?”
“There’s a Japanese portable coming on the market. Electric. The first one in the world that I know of.”
“Smith-Corona puts out an electric portable,” he disagreed.
Milt smiled. “But that has a manual carriage return. This Jap machine is all electric.”
“How much?”
“That’s the big problem. They were going to have dealers and sell direct. Import them on a direct basis. But a couple of the big U.S. typewriter manufacturers got scared and started negotiating. Meanwhile, the machines have never gotten onto the market. They’re holding them up until they work out the franchise basis. There’s supposed to be at least one warehouse of them around here somewhere.”
“I never heard that,” Bruce said, his trading blood aroused.
They discussed it awhile, and then they finished their coffee and walked back to the R & J Mimeographing Service.
At the curb, Bruce saw a car unknown to him, a light gray sedan with an old-fashioned but highly classic radiator grill. The car had an archaic quality to it, but its clean lines implied recent concepts in design. Leaving Milt he walked over to inspect the car. A three-pointed star insignia attracted his attention. The car was a Mercedes-Benz. The first he had ever seen.
“There’s a car I wouldn’t mind having,” he said, drinking in the sight with satisfaction. “It’s about the only foreign car I can see. Look at the leather inside there.” To him, thick leather seats were the last word in elegance.
Milt said, “That’s mine.”
“It is, is it?” He did not believe him. Surely the short, rumpled paper salesman was kidding again.
Producing a peculiar-looking key, Milt unlocked the right front door of the Mercedes. In the back of the car piles of paper samples had been stacked up; some had slipped down onto the floor. “I’ve got thirty thousand miles on it,” Milt said. “I’ve had it all over the fourteen Western states and never had a bit of trouble with it.”
“Is it an eight?”
“No, no,” Milt said sharply. “A six. This is a real road-holding car. It’s got swing axles in the back. Synchromesh in low. They cost new about thirty-four hundred.”
Bruce opened and shut the door. “Like closing a safe,” he said. The door fitted perfectly.
After Milt had locked the car again, they walked on into the office. “I thought if I got a car like that,” Milt said, “I’d enjoy all the driving I have to do. But it doesn’t make much difference. A little. What I really need is another job.”
“You want to come in and work here?” Susan said, overhearing him.
“That’s the only thing worse,” Milt said. “Retail selling. Of all the degrading occupations in the world.”
She gave him a pale, serious look. “Do you feel like that? I wish I had known. I had no idea. What do you think it does, corrupt?”
“No,” he said. “It just corrodes your self-respect. You start looking down on yourself.”
“I don’t consider that I’m in retail selling,” Susan said.
“Sure you are. What are you in, if not?”
“Performing a professional service.”
Milt smiled. “That’s a laugh. You know better than that. You want to sell something and make money like everybody else. That’s what this street is for. That’s what I’m for. That’s why you hired McFoop here, to make your business pay.”
“You’re too cynical,” Susan said.
“Not quite cynical enough. If I was cynical enough I’d quit this business. I’m just cynical enough not to like what I’m doing. Remember, I’m a great deal older than you, so I know what I say. You just haven’t been in business long enough.”
Bruce had no doubt that Lumky was kidding. But Susan took it all absolutely seriously; she went around the rest of the day with the grim tense look on her face, and with such preoccupation that at last he asked her if she was all right.