Read Online The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Stanley Elkin
Ads: Link
in a crystal ball, and he could look down and see the land, the straight furrows in the plowed ground like justified print, the hard-edged Euclidian geometry of survey and civilization. From his Cadillac he could get just the barest sense of this, a ground-level geophysician.
Mr. Flesh stands tux’d, his formal pants and jacket glowing like a black comb, his patent-leather shoes vaulted smooth and tensionless as perfect architecture. He might be standing in the skin of a ripe bright black apple. He feels, in the inky clothes, showered, springy, bouncy, knows in remissioned tactility around his shins, his clean twin sheathing of tall silk hose, can almost feel the condition of his soles, their shade like Negroes’ palms. He is accessoried.
In his old-fashioned white dress shirt his delicious burgundy studs are as latent with color as the warning lights on a dashboard. Onyx links, round and flat as elevator buttons, seal his cuffs, and dark suspenders lie on him with an increment of weight that suggests the thin holsters of G-men, and indeed there is something governmental in his dress, something maritime, chief-of-staff. The golden fasteners beneath his jacket could be captain’s bars. A black bow tie lies across his throat like a propeller.
The studio is in the Great Northern Building on Randolph Street, in a loft. (Or this is how it seems. He knows there are floors above this one.) He remembers the days when the seventh-floor corridor had been flanked with the branch offices of costume jewelry and watchband firms, a barber shop, lawyers’ offices, his father’s theatrical costume business. Now, except for the barber shop, there is only the studio ballroom and the rooms for private instruction made over from the old lawyers’ suites. A sort of stage is at one end of the large room. He knows it is only his father’s long old cutting tables shoved close together—nailed and covered over with Armstrong vinyl asbestos Chem-tile. He knows that the waterfall of velvet that flows over the lip of the “stage” conceals only the carpenter’s reinforcing scaffold, scaffold like a wine rack; that the flats, flies, tormentors, teasers, and borders that ornament the stage with perspective are only a plywood contact paper studded with a kind of gritty sheen like the surface of a ping-pong paddle.
He knows it is a losing proposition. Yet feels good anyway. Reassured by Randolph Street invisible at his back behind the opaque drapes, by the restaurant, a Henrici’s he can almost feel, the Woods Theater, the Oriental, the novelty jokes and tricks shop he remembers from his youth across the street, the out-of-town-paper stand on the corner, the proliferating porno bookstores he finds so appealing, as all muted lust is appealing to him, bringing out qualities of shyness and the awkward, the peremptory imposition of respected distances, boundaries, the territorial waters of self. Like his students. Wallflowers who bought their courage with their lessons, who came out—as if it were an accredited finishing school—at the parties and balls and galas they threw themselves every few weeks at the end of one session or the getting-to-know-you beginning of the next. Getting to know again and again—the turnover never as great as the recidivism—those they knew from before. He had seen them, expansive as the fathers of brides at the punch table, or stopping the hors d’oeuvres tray as it went past carried by an instructor, demanding that their guests, themselves hosts, eat, drink, at last forcing the instructors themselves into accepting a hospitality that was by its very nature communal, and disguising this by a boisterous, reflexive generosity. Ballroom dancing? They had taught themselves to solo.
Clara was with a private student. She had said that she would turn the student over to Jenny or Hope, but Flesh insisted that she finish the hour. He had left the Office of Admissions and come into the ballroom. He sat down in a
Mr. Flesh stands tux’d, his formal pants and jacket glowing like a black comb, his patent-leather shoes vaulted smooth and tensionless as perfect architecture. He might be standing in the skin of a ripe bright black apple. He feels, in the inky clothes, showered, springy, bouncy, knows in remissioned tactility around his shins, his clean twin sheathing of tall silk hose, can almost feel the condition of his soles, their shade like Negroes’ palms. He is accessoried.
In his old-fashioned white dress shirt his delicious burgundy studs are as latent with color as the warning lights on a dashboard. Onyx links, round and flat as elevator buttons, seal his cuffs, and dark suspenders lie on him with an increment of weight that suggests the thin holsters of G-men, and indeed there is something governmental in his dress, something maritime, chief-of-staff. The golden fasteners beneath his jacket could be captain’s bars. A black bow tie lies across his throat like a propeller.
The studio is in the Great Northern Building on Randolph Street, in a loft. (Or this is how it seems. He knows there are floors above this one.) He remembers the days when the seventh-floor corridor had been flanked with the branch offices of costume jewelry and watchband firms, a barber shop, lawyers’ offices, his father’s theatrical costume business. Now, except for the barber shop, there is only the studio ballroom and the rooms for private instruction made over from the old lawyers’ suites. A sort of stage is at one end of the large room. He knows it is only his father’s long old cutting tables shoved close together—nailed and covered over with Armstrong vinyl asbestos Chem-tile. He knows that the waterfall of velvet that flows over the lip of the “stage” conceals only the carpenter’s reinforcing scaffold, scaffold like a wine rack; that the flats, flies, tormentors, teasers, and borders that ornament the stage with perspective are only a plywood contact paper studded with a kind of gritty sheen like the surface of a ping-pong paddle.
He knows it is a losing proposition. Yet feels good anyway. Reassured by Randolph Street invisible at his back behind the opaque drapes, by the restaurant, a Henrici’s he can almost feel, the Woods Theater, the Oriental, the novelty jokes and tricks shop he remembers from his youth across the street, the out-of-town-paper stand on the corner, the proliferating porno bookstores he finds so appealing, as all muted lust is appealing to him, bringing out qualities of shyness and the awkward, the peremptory imposition of respected distances, boundaries, the territorial waters of self. Like his students. Wallflowers who bought their courage with their lessons, who came out—as if it were an accredited finishing school—at the parties and balls and galas they threw themselves every few weeks at the end of one session or the getting-to-know-you beginning of the next. Getting to know again and again—the turnover never as great as the recidivism—those they knew from before. He had seen them, expansive as the fathers of brides at the punch table, or stopping the hors d’oeuvres tray as it went past carried by an instructor, demanding that their guests, themselves hosts, eat, drink, at last forcing the instructors themselves into accepting a hospitality that was by its very nature communal, and disguising this by a boisterous, reflexive generosity. Ballroom dancing? They had taught themselves to solo.
Clara was with a private student. She had said that she would turn the student over to Jenny or Hope, but Flesh insisted that she finish the hour. He had left the Office of Admissions and come into the ballroom. He sat down in a
Similar Books
