Читать книгу The Silence on the Shore - Hugh Garner - Страница 16

CHAPTER NINE

Clark had started on this new job on Monday but had sold only two floor polishers all week. The small commissions had kept him in eating money, but had not been enough to pay his rent. Now, on Friday morning, he had decided to hit an apartment and rooming-house neighbourhood off north Jarvis Street. Having to walk and carry his demonstrator made his arms ache, but this was nothing compared to the ache in his ego caused by having to lug the thing in and out of the rooming house twice a day. One thing about selling gas heaters — he hadn’t had to carry a demonstrator.

He hadn’t been seen yet by the woman in the room next to his, but the landlady had spotted him sneaking down the stairs one morning with the polisher in his hand. She hadn’t said anything about it, but she had smirked a little, in the way he thought a spider would smirk at a fly that was approaching its web. If he had to pay his room rent in trade, that was all right with him: he was full of a superabundance of that commodity.

The apartment house he chose as his first calling place of the day was just run down enough for some of its tenants to need floor polishers. He walked into its old-fashioned foyer and rang the buzzer of an apartment on the top floor. When the answering buzz sounded in the door lock he scurried inside, walked to the back of the building, and climbed the rear stairs to the second floor. During June he had had some good days, but too many sales had trailed off into disappointments marked by finance company cancellations and turned-down orders. Most of his sales had been to people whom even the finance companies wouldn’t trust, members of a new substratum of society: the dé classé installment purchaser, who can no longer buy anything at all without cash.

He chose an apartment door at random and knocked. He was sure it would be another turndown and was prepared for it. Mr. Cartwright, the district sales manager, had stressed the selling points of the polisher on his blackboard the previous Saturday, but hadn’t intimated what a glut on the market polishers had become. Clark had memorized the sales pitch, but usually he had not got past the opening sentence: “Good morning, ma’am, I represent the Household Aid Corporation —”

From inside the apartment came the sound of women’s voices, one fairly young and hoarse and the other older and pitched in a querulous key. He had learned there was no use trying to make a sale to two women together, for if one showed an interest the other was bound to take the contrary view.

He was ready to move on down the hall when the door suddenly opened and he found himself face to face with a woman in her early thirties, holding a thin housecoat to her throat.

“Yes?” she asked, in a deep hoarse contralto.

“Good morning, ma’am, I represent the Household Aid Corporation,” he began automatically, then stopped.

“Yes?” she asked again, waiting for him to go on.

He had almost forgotten how to continue. Her pretty face, blonde hair, and the hungover look on her sleep-creased face didn’t help. “We are distributing — to certain chosen clients in selected neighbourhoods — and at twenty dollars less than the retail price, one of our famous Household Aid floor polishers. All we ask is that you use it for —”

“Is that it?” the young woman asked, leaning against the door frame and pointing at the polisher. She smiled at him openly, and the handle of the polisher grew damp beneath his hand.

As she continued to stare into his face, he brought the appliance around in front of him and placed the brushes flat on the floor, stepping back until the handle was held at a suitable angle.

“You’ll notice the ease of handling,” he said. “We claim that this machine — with its own oil-sealed motor — will take the drudgery out of all your floor cleaning. It works equally well on hardwood, tile, linoleum and —”

“Bring it in, Buster,” she invited, stepping back from the doorway. She led him through an inside hallway, and he spied a blown-up photograph of a young girl on the wall above a telephone table. The girl was leaning against a concert grand piano, and he recognized her now as the woman who had invited him in. Now he realized that he had begun the day in a neighbourhood in which theatrical and radio and television performers lived.

The woman led him into a living room that was furnished in several variant styles, as if from the property room of a theatre. In a corner stood an upright piano bearing along its top a row of empty and near-empty highball glasses. In an easy chair sat a fully dressed fat woman of about fifty, holding a half-empty glass in her hand.

The younger woman sat down on a large puce-coloured sofa and said, “This is Buster, Rita. He’s a representative of the Housewives’ —”

“The Household Aid Corporation,” he corrected her, smiling at the older woman.

“Buster, this is my good friend Rita.”

He nodded and said, “My name’s Clark. That’s my first name. My last name’s Cronin.”

“That’s a lousy name,” the young woman said. “I like Buster better, don’t you, Rita?”

“Sure, Buster’s better.” She laughed an unpleasant high-pitched laugh.

Clark noticed that both of them were drunk; this should be a cinch as soon as he got a signature on the sales order sheet. Pointing to the rubber shock absorber around the polisher he said, “It’s guaranteed not to harm —”

“Listen, Buster, save all that for later, will you?” the young woman interrupted. She took a bill from her purse that was lying on an end table and carried it across the room to her companion.

“Hurry it up, Rita, will you, hon. I’m gonna have the shakes if you don’t get back soon.”

Rita got up and shoved the money into a pocket of her trench coat. “Be back in half an hour,” she said as she left.

When they were alone the young woman stretched out on the sofa and stared at Clark, “You make much money on this job, Buster?”

He laughed. “I’ve only had it a week.”

“What did you do before you got this job?”

He decided to make a play for her sympathy. “I was in hospital,” he said.

“That’s too bad. What was wrong, Buster?”

“It was — well, you could call it a breakdown.”

“Nerves, eh? Is this your home town?”

“No, I’m from the country, ma’am.”

“A farmer?”

“My father is, ma’am.”

“Jee-sus! And don’t keep calling me ma’am, it makes me feel about a hundred. Call me Kitty. And for God’s sake sit down somewhere.”

He sat down in an overstuffed leather chair.

“That’s better,” she said. Pushing herself up on an elbow she asked, “How much did you say that thing costs?”

“Forty-two fifty.” He just had to make this sale. “We don’t even ask you to pay a down payment, only six small monthly payments of seven dollars and nine cents. I pick up the first payment when you’ve had the polisher for a few days trial, then our collector picks up the others every month.”

“No down payment, you say?” She laughed bitterly, stretching back on the sofa. “Who’re you trying to kid, Buster! There’s always a down payment in this world.” She sat up straight again and said, “You know, Buster, you’re not a bad-looking guy.”

This sounded like the come-on, but he hesitated to move in.

“You got a girl?”

He gave a small laugh. “Not right now.”

“That five dollars I gave to Rita for a bottle was all the money I got” she said. She hunched along the sofa so that her movements opened her housecoat. “You got any money, Buster?”

“No,” he answered, staring at her.

“Maybe you’re smarter than I took you for,” she said, adjusting her housecoat.

He asked, “Say, Kitty, are you an actress?”

“I don’t know what I am anymore, Buster.”

“Are you out of work?”

“No. You wouldn’t exactly call it being out of work.”

“Is that your picture in the hall, standing against a piano?”

“That used to be me, a million years ago,” she answered. She swung herself to the floor and walked over to the piano. “I can’t wait for Rita,” she said. She poured the dregs from all the glasses into one, and tossing back her head gulped it down. When she had recovered enough to speak she said, “It’s not very sanitary but the alcohol kills the germs.” Then she flung herself back on the sofa.

This would be a good time to get her signature. “Listen, Kitty,” he said, pulling some order forms from his inside pocket, “just sign one of our free trial receipts. There’s no obligation.” He walked over to her, but she jumped to her feet.

“Listen, Buster, Rita’ll be here in a minute. How about you coming back this afternoon, eh?”

“Sure. If you’ll just —”

“You got a nice smile, Buster,” she said, pressing herself against him.

He turned her chin up and kissed her. She grabbed his wrist as he tried to put his hand down inside her housecoat.

“Not now, Buster. Later, eh?” She led him into the hallway. “Come back later, will you, sweetheart?”

“Right after lunch,” he promised. “I should really get you to —”

“It can wait, Buster, if you can,” she said, winking at him.

He laughed. “I can wait, Kitty, but not too long.” He tried to pull her to him again, but she sidestepped.

“I’ll be waiting for you, Buster,” she said, opening the door and shoving him into the hall.

The door was closed gently, and he stared at it, then down at the order forms in his hand.

He sat in a neighbourhood park for a while, smoking and thinking of Kitty. He should really go down to Cartwright’s office and get another demonstrator, but what the hell, there was time enough for that tomorrow. Anyway, Cartwright would ask him for a signed order form. By afternoon Kitty would be drunk enough to sign anything — and agree to anything too, he’d bet.

He’d have to promote a car somehow. Without a car he wasted too much time on the job, and the floor polishers were heavy. Not having a car had taught him something that he hadn’t realized before: some would-be customers were mistrustful of him because he wasn’t driving an automobile. He knew now that a car was not only a status symbol to the middle class, but was also a mark of division among the workers, dividing the merely poor from the poverty-stricken. A big car might enhance the economic and social status of the professional man, but a member of that class could do without one through eccentricity or choice. That wasn’t true of the working man; to him the lack of a car meant only one thing, poverty.

He wondered why he always thought of himself as working class. Probably because he had belonged to it in his childhood, the son of an often unemployed plasterer. Though he thought little and cared less about sociology he was aware that the working class was shrinking. He supposed that now he could call himself middle class, the same as everybody else did, unless they were drawing home relief.

After sitting for a half hour or so in the park he began walking back toward the rooming house.

The grandiose plans he had made for himself after leaving the army hadn’t jelled. After quitting the gas-heater job he had fallen a week behind in his rent. He’d been saved that time by a chance meeting with an old army buddy who was trying to get rid of three hot typewriters. Clark had taken them on commission, and had sold one to the gas-heating company, one through an ad in the evening paper, and he’d gotten rid of the third, while drunk, by selling raffle tickets on it to the members of a college journalism class. The whole deal had netted him forty dollars, but that was gone, along with the fourteen dollars and change he had made in floor polisher commissions that week.

It felt good to walk along the bright summer street without the weight of the polisher pulling at his arm. On the way up Adford he met the French-Canadian woman from the third floor with her children. He smiled and said hello, but she only answered with a frozen little smile. There might be something doing there if he played it right.

He was halfway up the stairs when Grace Hill came out of her quarters and called to him.

“Yes, Mrs. Hill?” he said, leaning over the banister.

“You been eating in your room,” she said accusingly.

“Just some delicatessen I bought downtown,” he said. “What’s wrong with that?”

She ignored his question and said, “I see you haven’t got your polisher today?”

“It was a demonstrator. I just sold it.”

“You can make money working at that job?”

“I get by.”

“You can’t live on pies and — that junk you eat in your room,” she said. “How come you don’t have your meals out no more?”