“It’s not good,” said Mona after all the others had gone home.
Mona was in a very serious mood and she worried me when she got that way. I was tired. I had a headache. It was hot. The leads still weren’t coming. The salesmen were complaining. Even the Big Three, Phil Coleman among them, were going slow from regular walk-in business downstairs. Fewer people were responding to the newspaper and TV ads. When the economy was bad luxuries like carpet were the first things people stinted on. Everybody complained how bad business was. The stock market was down to record lows. The temperature was up to record highs. Every year people said the stock market had never been so low and the temperature had never been so high. I hadn’t been around when the world was perfect, but it must have been perfect since people kept saying things had never been so bad before.
I didn’t care. I had spent the day thinking about Stephanie. That’ll get you very high and very low.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I said to Mona.
“Then get rid of her.”
We weren’t talking about Marie. We were talking about Sonja the Psychic. When Mona took a dislike to someone, it was time for alarm.
I told Mona that I felt sorry for Sonja.
“She’s broke. She’s working hard. I can’t fire her.”
Mona said she was a bad influence on the girls, scaring them with her spooky talk, but mostly with her big-eyed glances and silences that were getting creepier by the day. She told one of the girls, Tina, that she, Tina, had only a short time to live, and this affected Tina very badly.
“I can imagine,” I said.
“And there’s lots you can’t imagine.”
“Oh?”
“She’s falling for you, you know, as they all do eventually.”
“I never take that too seriously.”
“This time you should, Eli. That one spooks me.”
“Fat Jack said the same thing.”
“Well for once he’s right.”
“But she hasn’t done anything.”
“Do we have to wait until she does?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s been confiding in me, and some of the other girls, saying you two are DESTINED.”
“Me and Sonja?”
“You have no idea how much she hates Stephanie.”
“She’s never met Stephanie.”
“Yes she has. She SEES things, remember? She sees you two married, living happily ever after – after she gets Stephanie out of the way. She says sooner or later you’re going to realize that Stephanie is really ugly, and if you don’t realize that yourself, she’ll do something to prove the point.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, Eli, but I’d take it as a threat.”
“That’s crazy, Mona.”
“Exactly, Eli. This one’s crazy.”
“Come on, Mona,” I laughed. “You think she’s a witch or something?”
“Yes.”
* * *
Fat Jack called to ask if I was busy, which was a laugh, I was never busy, but as a question it was usually a prelude to a rotten task. In fact he always asked if I was busy and I always said yes and he always laughed. We had this joke going about how wrong I was for this job and how wrong I was for practically everything. But he put up with me because – hell, I don’t know.
“Yes I’m busy,” I said.
He wondered if I could take a few minutes of my precious time to walk across the street, to Ben’s Smoke and News Shop, and bring back those Cuban cigars Harry Himself had specially ordered. I thought about that for a while. Am I an errand-boy? No, I don’t do errands. I am an artist, nearly made the second cut off-Broadway and my photo is still floating around. That phone call may still come any day. I am an actor!
Forget that, if we must, but wasn’t I supposed to be some sort of an EXECUTIVE around here? I wore a suit! All right I didn’t, but I could if I wanted to. I was supposed to. Even if I wasn’t an EXECUTIVE I was in charge of an office, a department – I had a STAFF. I had a BUDGET, even though I never knew what it was. Yes, I was head of a DEPARTMENT. I was a department HEAD.
“Well?”
“I’m really too busy.”
“Eli, it’ll only take a few minutes. Please. For me. Do it for me.”
“So why don’t you go?”
“I got customers down here. Please Eli, this time I’m serious.”
Also, and this was strange, he had to run over and drop something off at his synagogue. We did not talk religion here at Harry’s Carpet City, or practically anywhere else in Cincinnati. Not that it was taboo. It was impolite. We were family and religion causes friction around the table. We had Saturday people, Sunday people, and even Friday people, but it was pretty much don’t ask don’t tell. Beginning with the Our Crowd dynasties of Ochs (newspapers) and Lazarus (department stores), of which Emma was a member, the Jews of Cincinnati were Episcopalian.
“I really am serious,” said Fat Jack. “Harry needs those cigars.”
Yes he was, and I couldn’t remember the last time Fat Jack had been so serious.
“Why can’t somebody else go?”
“Everybody’s tied up. Come on, Eli.”
“Is this a test?”
If it was, it wouldn’t be coming from Fat Jack, who’d never fire me, on his own. We had an understanding, that we were brothers, not technically, but brothers, with all the (mostly good-natured) bickering; living out our lives in someone else’s world. Fat Jack played the conventional middle class game, but he knew the absurdity of it all.
I had quit once, a few summers back, against Fat Jack’s advice and it took only a few weeks to get me completely broke, so broke that I finally went tottering to the unemployment office and waited in those lines with other people who were broke just like me, the losers in this war of economics, and here you are in that universe where you’re just a number and always waiting in the wrong line.
You are being processed, branded just like sheep, with the same sensitivity.
Soon, after about three hours, I had to go to the bathroom. I asked the guy in front of me, wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates t-shirt, if he’d save my place till I got back and he nodded okay. In the bathroom I threw up and when I got back my place in line was taken. Pittsburgh, figured.
I inched closer and now there was just one person ahead of me, then it was my turn, and just at that moment I fell back and passed out. When I recovered nobody helped me get up because you’d lose your place in line. So never mind the unemployment – I probably didn’t qualify anyway – but now the job was to get home. Drive? No, not in this condition, woozy as I was. Whom to call? I tried Maishe. He wasn’t home at either place, where he regularly lived or on campus. Next I tried Fat Jack. He was there in 15 minutes and wasted no time telling me I told you so, you yutz!
“You’re not cut out for this life,” was what he said.
But he was there; he showed up.
“No test,” he now said. “We’re only talking cigars, Eli. CIGARS!”
“You know it’s not cigars we’re talking about.”
“You could have been there and back by now.”
“Like any running dog.”
Fat Jack sighed. “Forget it – I’ll go myself.”
“Never mind. So happens I was just on my way over to Ben’s anyway for some pipe tobacco.”
Fat Jack: “We needed all this grief?”