He never eats at the hotel (for while the hotel bill is being covered by Fuad’s business partners, he must pay for his own food); instead he buys food at falafel houses and at little food stores, smuggles it up to the hotel beneath his coat for days before he realizes that no one cares. And even then he feels strange about carrying the bags of food into the dimly lit elevators (Salim always has to bend and squint to find the button to press to take him to his floor) and up to the tiny white room in which he stays.
Salim is upset. The fax that was waiting for him when he woke this morning was curt, and alternately chiding, stem, and disappointed: Salim was letting them down—his sister, Fuad, Fuad’s business partners, the Sultanate of Oman, the whole Arab world. Unless he was able to get the orders, Fuad would no longer consider it his obligation to employ Salim. They depended upon him. His hotel was too expensive. What was Salim doing with their money, living like a sultan in America? Salim read the fax in his room (which has always been too hot and stifling, so last night he opened a window, and was now too cold) and sat there for a time, his face frozen into an expression of complete misery.
Then Salim walks downtown, holding his sample case as if it contained diamonds and rubies, trudging through the cold for block after block until, on Broadway and 19th Street, he finds a squat building over a deli. He walks up the stairs to the fourth floor, to the office of Panglobal Imports.
The office is dingy, but he knows that Panglobal handles almost half of the ornamental souvenirs that enter the U.S. from the Far East. A real order, a significant order from Panglobal, could redeem Salim’s journey, could make the difference between failure and success, so Salim sits on an uncomfortable wooden chair in an outer office, his sample case balanced on his lap, staring at the middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too bright a red who sits behind the desk, blowing her nose on Kleenex after Kleenex. After she blows her nose she wipes it, and drops the Kleenex into the trash.
Salim got there at 10:30 A.M., half an hour before his appointment. Now he sits there, flushed and shivering, wondering if he is running a fever. The time ticks by so slowly.
Salim looks at his watch. Then he clears his throat.
The woman behind the desk glares at him. “Yes?” she says. It sounds like Yed.
“It is eleven-thirty-five,” says Salim.
The woman glances at the clock on the Wall, and says, “Yed,” again. “Id id.”
“My appointment was for eleven,” says Salim with a placating smile.
“Mister Blanding knows you’re here,” she tells him, reprovingly. (“Bidter Bladdig dode you’re here.”)
Salim picks up an old copy of the New York Post from the table. He speaks English better than he reads it, and he puzzles his way through the stories like a man doing a crossword puzzle. He waits, a plump young man with the eyes of a hurt puppy, glancing from his watch to his newspaper to the clock on the wall.
At twelve-thirty several men come out from the inner office. They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big, paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc as his sister swears by zinc and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell.
It is one o’clock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“Excuse me,” says Salim, “but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting?”
She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. “He’s at lunch,” she says. He ‘d ad dudge.
Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. “When will he be back?”
She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. “He’s busy with appointments for the rest of the day,” she says. He’d biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day.
“Will he see me, then, when he comes back?” asks Salim.
She shrugs, and blows her nose.
Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless.
At three o’clock the woman looks at him and says “He wode be gubbig bag.”
“Excuse?”
“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”
“Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”
She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoid-beds odly by teddephode.”