Old Lou was coming up the stairs, slowly, each step another obstacle.
“How is everybody?”
“Fine, Lou,” said Mona.
He smiled at the crew. Not a single one of the girls smiled back. They never did.
I once gave them a lecture on that, about being kind. Lou never chose old age and illness. You could be next.
“What the hell happened to manners?” I said. “Everybody’s so damned surly all of a sudden!”
Which seemed to be especially true of the young, and the old. Frankly, I could understand old people getting mean-spirited, they had lived a life and had had to do battle, but it didn’t make sense seeing young people getting so hard-nosed. Even some of the girls who came in here barely out of high school showed signs of bitterness and it made you wonder if they were reacting from abuses of the past or – or whether they were wisely and genetically anticipating the road ahead. Anyway, that helped for a while, that sermon I gave about Lou, and Lou started getting good receptions, but to keep it going I’d have to be Jesus Christ once every month on account of the turnover in this place.
“Anything happening?” Lou said, sitting down at my desk.
I shrugged.
“You look tired,” he said.
“I’m not tired,” I said.
“You look hot.”
“I’m not hot.”
“Well it is hot,” Lou said.
“It’s always hot.”
Lou had pasted a smile on his face, an actual certifiable smile, a first since the stroke. But it was the smile of a man keeping a secret – but not for long.
Of course Old Lou already had a secret. He wasn’t allowed to drive. Declaring him impaired, the city had revoked his license. So how was he supposed to go out on calls without a car? So he drove. Risking jail and who knew what else. But a salesman without a car was like a jockey without a horse. So Lou kept on driving usually upon the roads but sometimes upon the sidewalks.
I said, “What’s so funny, Lou?”
“I’m not allowed to smile?”
“There’s no law.”
“I’m happy, that’s why I’m smiling.”
“Well I’m happy that you’re happy, Lou.”
“I’m not allowed to be happy?”
“Sure you are.”
“I’m allowed to be happy, just like the next man. Aren’t you ever happy?”
“Sometimes I’m happy.”
“That’s the trouble with people today. Nobody’s happy. Especially young people. You’re a young man.”
“That’s what people tell me.”
“Be happy while you’re young.”
I forgot to mention that Lou was a philosopher.
“That’s good advice, Lou.”
Lou’s upper lip was quivering, twisting his pencil-thin mustache into something like a snarl. Another secret about Lou was that he wore a hairpiece, the most open secret in the world, since Fat Jack liked to yank it off his head and toss it around the showroom when business was slow, Lou not complaining since that kind of horseplay certified him as still one-of-the-boys. Though lately, it’s true, he was getting annoyed at being the company’s number one foil. Lately, in fact, Lou was getting annoyed at everything, and who could blame him?
Like any good salesman, he loved to eat; now, since the stroke, forget steak. Forget sex.
One reason I refrained from sending him out on the big calls was that it meant getting down on all fours to measure the entire house, two, sometimes three floors, and sometimes, four, including basement, if, say, it were out in Hyde Park, where Stephanie lived and the garages were more elaborate than most homes. Out there they’d carpet the trees if they could. Anyway, in Lou’s condition, that could be murder, sending him out to measure a big house. Really, it could be murder.
Fat Jack used to tell me that Lou, in his prime, had been one mean son of a bitch. He used to steal other people’s leads.
But in fact Harry Himself had loved that about Lou – meant he was HUNGRY.
Show me a HUNGRY salesman, Harry used to say, and I’ll show you a SUCCESS.
Nobody but nobody could say HUNGRY like Harry Himself. Not even Fat Jack. The trick was to growl the word and Fat Jack was still in the barking stage, as if to prove that he still had a ways to go before he became a replica of Harry Himself. Even more, nobody but nobody could say SUCCESS like Harry Himself. HUNGRY and SUCCESS were words specially minted for Harry Himself.
“Lunch?” Lou said.
“No. You know I don’t like to be with people.”
“We could go to Sister’s Diner.”
“The businessmen go there.”
“How about Stan’s Deli?”
“Yuppies.”
“Granger’s?”
“Artsies.”
“You’re a regular recluse, Eli.”
“I just don’t like to be with people. I hate crowds anyway.”
“Don’t you want to be discovered, Eli?”
“As a boiler room operator?”
“As an actor. I thought you were an actor.”
“Well I am. I play a role every day.”
“So do I,” said Lou. “So does everybody.”
I told Lou if he had something to say he could say it here.
What was it about people that they needed to eat something in order to talk?
“I know you have something to tell me.”
“You know me too well,” he chuckled.
“We’re pals.”
He checked left and right for spies. “Guess what I’ve got in my pocket.”
I gasped. I knew what he had.
“How did you get it?” I asked.
“Never mind.”
“You’ve got to tell me.”
“I’ve got connections. I still have friends, you know.”
“This’ll make you enemies.”
He turned around to block the girls out of sight and showed me the printouts. These papers were a computer read-out of all the people in town and in the suburbs who had just moved in, into new expensive homes. Names, phone numbers, and addresses. A gold mine. Worth – in this business – something like $100,000, maybe more. Just the paper alone. Because these were TOP QUALITY names, every one a sure sale for a house-full of carpet, and expensive carpet.
Lou leaned over and whispered, “How many people would die for this list?”
“I can think of one.”
I wasn’t kidding. I knew the man who had compiled that list, good old Stone Kiley over there at Seats Galore, who also had connections, it was reputed, but of a different kind. He wouldn’t be too happy to discover that someone else had his TOP QUALITY names, without paying through the nose for them, and Old Lou sure didn’t have that kind of money. For months he’d been begging Fat Jack to purchase that list but, or course, Fat Jack refused on the grounds that it was too costly, number one, and that he would never deal with a man such as Stone Kiley, number two.
Stone Kiley, by the way, once had one of his own boiler room guys beaten up for walking off with a much less valuable list, according to rumor. Anything for a list. Targeting people according to location, religion and profession was the plasma of direct marketing and if you had those select names you parted with them over your dead body. The preacher who said a good name is more precious than gold was talking to all of us, but mostly to the sales department.
“Did you buy it, Lou?”
“None of your business.”
He wanted to know if my girls would make the phone contacts for him.
“That would be unethical, Lou.”
Lou got hot. “What business isn’t unethical?”
“My business, and I’m surprised at you.”
“Don’t give me that, Eli. I’m as ethical as the next man.”
“That’s what’s starting to worry me.”
“I’ve always been an honest man – but I CAN’T KEEP UP! You can’t keep up being an honest man all your life.”
I stared at him. I really was surprised. But who was I to judge? Who wrote the pitch about a once-a-year sale – that went on year-round? What about the salesmen who discounted the carpet $700 and then tacked that same amount to the cost of installation before the customer knew what hit him or her? You committed larceny all the time but you didn’t even know it because they called it doing business.
“I need this,” Lou said.
He needed it, he said, if for no other reason than to show the world that he was still Lou Emmett, the Lou Emmett of old. Lou Emmett wasn’t dead yet. He said he knew the talk that went on behind his back. He knew the pity. He knew the ridicule. He knew the “dead salesman walking” joke and even knew that he was a stand-in for Willie Loman. “Nobody does a man any favors,” he said. “A man has to do for himself. That’s my philosophy.”
“Or your life.”
“So you won’t do it for me?”
“Do me a favor, Lou. Give that list back.”
“All right. I’ll make the calls myself. They don’t even have to be verified they’re so good.”
“Give it back, Lou.”
“I can’t. I’ll do what I have to do. No hard feelings,” he said, getting up. “Pals?”
“Pals,” I said as he shuffled out.
Mona said, “What was that all about?”
“Lou is going into business for himself.”
“What kind of business?”
“The suicide business.”