At some point it had become important to him to have a new couch. He had first ignored and then pretended to ignore his wife’s hints about redecorating.
When she raised the subject openly he had resisted and explained to her that the circumstances of their life were comfortable and correct, and, in fact, lavish if compared to the median state of man at any time, and at this particular time in any place that she might mention.
As he spoke on that first occasion, he both knew and did not know she would eventually prevail. As he became more comfortable with the duality, he explained it to himself in this way:
“Though she is wrong, it is fitting that there be certain aspects of life in which she can prevail.
“In most of married life she follows my command. Now equity and common sense—even were there no affection—suggest that I occasionally recognize her claims. How galling, in fact,” he reflected, “to have no part in life in which one can prevail.”
He reminded himself, then, to be gracious, and to find it in himself truly to ratify her claims, rather than merely to appear to do so.
“For does she not, by her lights, make these decisions (as she feels) for our mutual benefit? Yes,” he thought. “Yes, she does—in no way unlike myself—in electing this or that improvement in favor of our mutual domestic life.”
And so he told her she could redecorate, and was ashamed of his chagrin when she took his capitulation as a matter of course, and launched into a recital of plans which obviously had been not only thought out but well-nigh implemented long since.
“This is my task,” he thought, “not to ‘grant,’ no, but to recognize that to grant is, in this, outside of my gift.”
And yet he struggled to resist the simultaneous feelings of pride in his very humility and condescension in the residual conviction that his wife chose to find important the right to legislate regarding trivia.
“Yes. After all of it,” he thought, and, “This is as it should be. She is just a woman.”
But his thoughts of the changes to come worked on him. And he sat on his leather chair, and looked at his couch, at the old comfortable couch where he’d lain so many evenings after work, which cradled him those many Saturday afternoons when he’d slept, his workweek done.
He looked across to the couch, and he saw not the couch but the couch-to-be. And he found he was impatient.
The old couch, the old room, looked to him passé. He found it important to have the new designs completed and installed, but he could not determine why he found it so.
“As I attempt to analyze it,” he thought, “I recognize this (I must say) basic, and I could say, ‘savage,’ need to be accepted by the community.”
Here he made a note on a leaf of his letterhead notepad.
The note read:
Advertising must appeal, as is its essential nature, to the fear that one is to be excluded. It must both awaken and suggest how to allay this fear.
The heading on the notepaper sheet read, “National Pencil Company. Atlanta, Georgia.”
The voice of the prosecutor dwelt on that word each time he said it. “How lovely it is,” Frank thought, “that people can communicate so. He does not pause so much as inflect, and he does not inflect so much as signify—in a way which, were we to reproduce and dissect his rhythm and pronunciation, would be absent. For science cannot discover it. It is a spirit,” he thought. Frank heard the prosecutor drone on: “… that it is usurpation for a company to descend to the South and call itself ‘National.’”
Frank smiled, in an experimental trial of the irony. “And that is what they’re going to kill me for.’”