The Adjustment

TEN



A GOOD DEAL TEN IN HOME FURNISHINGS



PARK AND I had taken to sitting around Stanley’s late mornings. A couple of able-bodied men could have found other pursuits on a weekday, but it was important the boss be able to find us if he managed to rouse himself sufficiently to roll out of bed and pick up the phone. And so we played gin rummy and read the morning editions of both papers over coffee until lunchtime, after which we drove over to the Collins manse whether summoned or not and did our best to get the old bastard into a fit condition to leave the house and make a showing at the plant, if only to stave off the rumors that had, inevitably, begun to circulate regarding his fitness to lead the company. The rumors mostly involved sickness and senility rather than addiction to opiates, but that time was probably coming before long.

A redhaired man with a lopsided tilt to his head and an extraordinarily long neck came in one day around eleven and sat down at the counter. The counterman that day was an old Dutchman we called Fritz, and he didn’t answer much when the man tried to engage him in conversation.

“I’m so worried about the whole business I’m thinking of moving up to Oregon and building a bomb-proof house. Half of ’em died of radiation sickness, did you know that? You’ll have to have a house lined with lead.”

Fritz stuck to his grill, faced away from the man without answering or even grunting. “Don’t let Fritz hurt your feelings, he’s just sore because the krauts lost the war,” I said.

Fritz spun and pointed his spatula at me like an épée. “Shut your piehole, Ogden, I’m from Holland, you know goddamn well my name’s Pier.” Then he turned back to the grill again.

The redhead turned to me now. “Do you understand what I’m talking about? We’re walking around pretending everything’s normal but the fact is the commies are probably working on a bomb right this very minute, and you know where the first one’s going to be aimed at? Right here at Wichita, because that’s where the aircraft plants are. And who knows where you can go that’d be any safer?”

Park smirked and rolled his eyes, but I just nodded in the fellow’s direction. I’d seen guys get like this in the service, monomaniacal and antsy and trying to convince the world of their private obsessive delusion, until the whole thing collapses into despair and sorrow. This guy was headed for a nervous breakdown and no amount of believing him or not would slow him down one little bit.





IT HAD BEEN a couple of weeks since the last letter, and my nameless correspondent was on the move. His latest missive was postmarked Bismarck, North Dakota, and this time he was brazen enough to write me on stationery from the Bismarck Hotel.

Dear Sarg





What I hear your maried. I sure hope shes a sweet piece of poontang cause oh buddy Im going to give it to her like nobodys busness after I kill you dead.





from





your pal





What kind of addlebrained shitbird, I asked myself, writes self-incriminating letters to his intended victim? Either he was an incompetent moron or a bona fide lunatic. In either case he had a fair amount of accurate information about me, and I was wondering where he got it. If he was a relative of one of the girls from Rome I didn’t see where he’d get that, but an army man or a vet with good connections might easily find things out. I was thinking maybe I’d make a visit to the VA myself.





ONE AFTERNOON NOT long after that I asked Mrs. Caspian if I might accompany her out to her car. As we walked I realized that her failure to look me in the eye and refusal to speak more than the absolute necessary minimum were not matters of rudeness or contempt but of shyness. In the daylight of the parking lot her face showed bright blushing red, and when I asked her if I had any enemies in the department she turned, met my gaze, and blurted, “Oh, yes, Mr. Ogden, all of them.”

The spring daylight revealed something else: Mrs. Caspian was not unattractive at all, her body now appearing to me full and womanly rather than fat, her face expressive and almost pretty. The effect was not unlike that in a movie where a plain girl takes off her glasses and is revealed to be a beauty.

“Is there someplace we can talk alone?”

There was a look of panic in her eyes. She looked down at her shoes as though thinking hard, then looked up. “My apartment.” She wrote an address down on a chewing gum wrapper. “Meet me there in an hour.”





SHE HAD CHANGED from her business clothes into a light spring dress when I got to her little second-story apartment in Riverside, and there was a tray with a coffee pot and two cups on the coffee table. I sat down in the middle of the couch, thinking there was no way on God’s green earth that I was going to seduce this woman, or that she was even up for it. But I had that wonderful feeling you get right before you screw a woman for the first time, that childish anticipation that permeates the air of a room. Very rarely had that feeling failed me, and she sat down next to me rather than in the easy chair and crossed her legs in a way that showed a great deal more of them than I’d seen previously.

“Now Mr. Cave and Mr. Baines, they don’t much like your being around but they’re just following along. Mr. Kohl and Mr. Linhart, though, they talk about you behind your back all the time. Call you . . . ” She could barely bring herself to say it. “They call you ‘Old Brown-nose.’ I had to ask them what it means. It means . . . ”

“I was in the Army, Mrs. Caspian.”

“Oh. Of course.”

I thought I’d ratchet things up a little and get a better idea of whether she was going to tumble. “Is Mr. Caspian at home?”

“Oh. Well.” She was sweating now despite the pleasant breeze coming in through the window, and waved a magazine in front of her face. “He’s a salesman, he sells vacuum cleaners, Hoovers, not door to door, he’s an official sales rep, and he’s got the whole territory of Kansas and northern Oklahoma, too, so of course he makes regular trips to places, in fact he’s on the road about three weeks a month, excepting weekends, when mostly he’s home.”

It was more than she’d said to me since I’d met her. I put my hand on a pudgy, dimpled, pretty knee, leaned in, and kissed her.

Mr. Caspian, it seemed, had not been fulfilling his conjugal duties on a regular enough basis even on those nights when he was home. His wife responded to my pass so enthusiastically that we barely made it to the bedroom. Mrs. Caspian liked it every which way, and she made so much noise I had to ask if the neighbors downstairs would hear.

“They’re old and deaf,” she said, in between loud yelps.

If she didn’t care, I guessed I didn’t either. She was a big gal, with a big voice, and afterward I asked her about that.

“Oh, yes, I’m a trained singer. I still sing in the choir at St. Mary’s.”

“No fooling?”

“I sure am. If you think Collins is bad, you ought to see the backstabbing that goes on in a cathedral choir.”

She wasn’t the kind of Catholic girl whose sense of guilt made sex more exciting; Mrs. Caspian didn’t seem to have any sense of guilt about it at all. She had a look of quiet contentment that was quite at odds with the face she habitually showed me.

“Penny for your thoughts, Mr. Ogden.”

“I think at this point you might as well call me Wayne.”

“Oh, no, if I do then I’ll slip up and call you that at work, and then everybody will know. Trust me, it’s happened before.”

“You’ve done this sort of thing, then, before?”

“Never at Collins, but at my last job. I had to. My gosh, even when Mr. Caspian’s home he barely gives me what I need.”

“You think he messes around on the road?”

“I think he doesn’t like sex is what I think.”

I tried to imagine what that would be like and failed. “If you’re Catholic, what do people think about your not having any kids?”

“They think we’re among those poor unfortunates that the Lord made barren, and they pray for a miracle.” She raised her left foot off the bed and wiggled her toes. “You know, Mr. Ogden, I’d say until this afternoon our department was the least scandalous in the whole company.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s all men, except me, and none of those fellows like me that way. But just look at the rest of the place. Mr. Collins himself getting that girl in trouble and sending her away to have it gotten rid of.”

“How did you find out about that?”

“I’m real nosey, Mr. Ogden. And people think I don’t listen so they say things when I’m around. But I do listen.”

Mrs. Caspian spent the next half hour regaling me with the misdeeds and peccadilloes of upper and middle management. If half of it was true, which I doubted, then our little aircraft manufacturing concern was a cesspool of vice and iniquity unrivaled since Nero’s Rome. When I asked her about our esteemed comptroller Mr. Huff she regretted having nothing to give me. “Because he’s really the one who’s got it in for you and Mr. Collins. Nobody has anything bad to say about him, though. He’s a big shot in the K of C and he’s on all those charity boards and my gosh, have you ever seen his family?”

“I never have.”

“Four of the best looking kids you ever saw. And when he was in the hospital he got over three hundred get-well cards.”

“Appendectomy or something serious?”

“He was attacked and beaten up pretty bad.”

I sat up. “How’s that?”

“Oh, it was during the war. He was out for a walk and some hoodlums jumped him.”

“You don’t say. In broad daylight?”

“Oh, no, it was at night.”

“And I suppose it was on a downtown sidewalk.”

“No, he was walking in Riverside Park. Past midnight, I think. He said he does it sometimes to clear his head. Why are you smiling like that?” she asked.

“Mrs. Caspian, you’re okay in my book.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ogden,” she said, and she took my hand and guided it below her belly again and gave me the kind of smile only a straying member of the cathedral choir can give.





HIRAM FISH NO longer worked for Mrs. Collins, he informed me over the phone, having fallen out with the old virago over the reimbursement of his medical expenses. He wanted me to know that there were no hard feelings and that he was available for any sort of work Mr. Collins might wish to have him undertake, including but not limited to surveillance and surreptitious photography.

“What kind of camera do you use for that kind of work?”

He cleared his throat and I remembered the Speed Graphic I’d batted off the hood of his car. “It depends upon the situation,” he said.

“Suppose I want to take a picture at night without the subject knowing he’s been photographed?”

“Gosh, I sure don’t know. I always use a bulb at night, and they sure know after that goes off.”

“You think you could figure out a way? We might have some work for you if you can.”

“I’d be most happy to look into it,” he said, sounding like the preening gigolo he strove so hard to resemble.





I WOKE THE next morning with a toothache. It was a right rear molar and it’d been bothering me off and on for a month or more, and now it hurt so bad I was afraid I might need a root canal or worse, an extraction. I thought about going to see Dr. Werner, our old family dentist, but I remembered in him what I now recognized as a sadistic streak—he was a skimper on the Novocain, and he used to sneer whenever a young patient cried out. He was born in the old country, and would have made a great Nazi in the movies. I didn’t want to pay out the nose, either, so I headed over to the VA hospital on Kellogg and waited for an hour with half a dozen other guys until my name was finally called.

The ex-army dentist who examined me lectured me on the evils of sweets and the importance of good dental hygiene before putting the gas mask on me and drilling away at what was still, in his estimation, a manageable cavity. Dr. Werner hadn’t approved of the laughing gas, as he thought it might lead to narcotic use, and I saw now that the old Kraut had a point; if I wasn’t literally laughing I sure felt like it. There was a sense of separation from my body, as well as a sense that I was doing cartwheels while still seated and immobile in the torture chair, and I made a mental note never to start using Hycodan myself, a thought that came a half-second after the thought that maybe it would be worth trying out some of the old man’s pills. No, thanks, I’ll stick to peddling the stuff.

I was walking through the atrium, mouth full of gauze, when I ran into Bunk Fletcher, a kid I’d grown up with and hadn’t seen since I was inducted.

He was out of the army and working for the VA as a file clerk. Despite my temporary speech impediment, we fell to talking and he invited me up to his office to jaw and drink Uncle Sam’s watery coffee.

He was showing me the filing system and I asked him, just for laughs, to pull my file. He did it, and I was impressed with its thoroughness and accuracy. My whole military career, at least the comings and goings, and all the pertinent medical data were there, along with an identification photo that may have been the dourest image of me ever captured on film. All my transfers, from Fort Dix all the way to Rome and finally my discharge, were right on there. My current address, as well as my last one, were in there, too, as well as the fact that I worked at Collins, even in which department. It got me thinking how easy it would be for the military to find me if for some reason I wanted to drop off the face of the earth.

“This the only copy?” I asked Bunk.

“There’s one on file in Washington, updated from your local file.”

“What if someone wanted to see it?”

“They’d have to have a pretty good reason. We keep a pretty tight lid on these things.”

A real tight army lid, he meant, and I knew better than anybody how easy those were to pry off. If you knew how.





SALLY SURPRISED ME when I came in that night with a houseful of new furniture from Bellow’s. The front half of the parlor contained an oak dining room set, with a credenza along the wall. In the rear half, which she now insisted on calling the living room, sat a new davenport and, to my horror, an overstuffed fauteuil that had replaced my father’s old reading chair.

My father was a genial and quiet man who had a life of the mind quite separate from his daily mathematical routine, an important corrective against seeing life as a ledger. When I enrolled in Wichita University my father urged me to study business, a subject that interested me not at all; by the time I was in the army selling tires and gasoline and running whores, though, I was immensely grateful to him for the advice. He read every night in that chair, and on nights when I was home so did I. I was not happy to see it gone.

My silence had put a scare into her, and her voice was very quiet when she asked me how I liked it. Typically, she hadn’t run through in her mind all the possible reactions to her expensive little surprise. I didn’t want to be an ogre, but I couldn’t pretend to be happy about it.

“How much?”

“A little less than a thousand, in installments. It was a bargain, if you look at what these pieces all cost individually. And they gave us a special extra five percent discount, with you being a vet and all.”

“Where’s the old furniture?”

“They took it away.”

“And did you get a trade-in? A discount for the value of the old furniture?”

“I didn’t think to ask.”

I walked out without another word.





I FOUND THE manager standing in the back of the furniture store selling a bedstead to a young couple who looked as though they were saving it for the wedding night. The boy’s eyes looked like they were going to pop right out of his skull if he didn’t dip his wick pretty soon, which was understandable given the healthy young specimen of femininity at his side. I’d made it clear to the other clerks that the manager was the only one I’d do business with, and I must have looked serious because they kept their distance. The manager was getting flustered, and finally he met my steady glare.

“Can one, ah, one of our salesmen help you, sir?”

“You’re the manager, you’re the one I need to see. I’ll wait.”

“Is this about an adjustment?”

“You might say that.” I made a point of keeping my voice low; nothing betrays weakness like an emotional outburst. “Your boys cheated my wife in my absence, and I’m here to see it set right.”

The young couple exchanged glances.

“I’m sure if there’s been some kind of misunderstanding one of the salesmen can help, they’re authorized . . . ”

“I’ll wait. You sell the lovebirds their nuptial bed and we’ll talk afterward.”

“Actually we’re going to wait a day or two and think about it,” the boy said, and the girl whacked his elbow.

“I want to get it now, Herbie,” she hissed as Herbie pulled her away by the arm.

“Sorry if I cost you a sale,” I said, without the least trace of sorrow in my voice.

“That’s quite all right, couples often need to ponder a major purchase, especially just starting out. Now what was the problem with your wife?”

“It’s not a problem with my wife, it’s a problem with your sales force. They had a whole houseful of perfectly good furniture hauled out of my place this afternoon with no credit given in return.”

“Of course we’re dealers in new furniture only.”

“I don’t give a damn, you know perfectly well you don’t give good material away to the Salvation Army. You sell them someplace, now I want some of those pieces back, and I want compensation for the rest.”

“As far as I’m concerned, sir, you’re not entitled to any. If your wife had mentioned compensation at the time we would have informed her . . . ”

“Listen to me. What’s your name?”

“Stan Franklin.”

“All right, Stan, I notice Bellows has an ad once a week in the Eagle but not the Beacon. Old man Bellows got something against the Jews?”

“Mr. Bellows happens to be my father-in-law, and he doesn’t feel that the Beacon’s readers are our type of clientele.”

“I mention it because I know the Eagle wouldn’t run a story about a naïve mother-to-be, the wife of a vet, getting gypped by one of their own advertisers, but I bet the Beacon would jump at it. Of course, that wouldn’t matter to you, since none of your customers read the Beacon.” TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS off the price of the furniture, and my dad’s old chair would be delivered in the morning. I was a little disappointed that old Bellows caved in so quickly when his son-in-law phoned him. What I’d really wanted was to smash one of their expensive tables to pieces and beat Mr. Stan Franklin to a bleeding pulp with one of its legs, after which I might allow the remainder of the sales force to flee before I soaked the place in kerosene and watched it burn to the ground. Maybe, I thought, I needed a drink.





THREE SOAKS, TWO men and a woman, were swozzled over at Norman’s blind pig. Norman introduced them but their names wouldn’t stick in my head so I ended up calling the woman Honey, the taller of the two men Stretch, and the fatter one Tub. Neither of the men seemed to like his nickname much, but neither said anything at first. The woman warmed to hers, spilling out of her girdle with her eyes at half mast, mascara running with sweat and possibly tears from earlier in the evening.

Tub and Stretch were vying for her favors, and my arrival had made them question the short-term wisdom of that rivalry. The presence of an interloper called for a united front, lest Honey decide against both of them. Norman was a friend, so I let the rubes’ veiled insults roll off my back at first.

Later, though, an innocent mention of my war record on Norman’s part set Stretch off on a long, rolling diatribe about returning servicemen and the easy ride we had. When I didn’t challenge his assertions he got madder and started dropping hints that I might have fabricated my service record. I didn’t really give a good goddamn what these idiots thought about me, but the bourbon was starting to make me feel mean.

“You may be right, Stretch. You know my wife got a whole five percent off a dining room suite this afternoon, just by virtue of me having been overseas? Shit, if I’d know about the five percent veteran’s discount at Bellow’s Furniture Emporium I’d have signed up before Pearl Harbor.”

Stretch made a face like someone had just cut a fart, and he looked away from all of us, sniffling in distaste.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Lots of guys got classed 4-F. Nobody thinks the worse of you for it.”

“Who says I was 4-F?”

“Fallen arches, maybe?”

“I’ll be damned if it’s any of your business. Just maybe I was essential personnel.”

“Say, folks, how about a round on the house?” Norman said.

“What’s your line, Tub?” I asked, trying to salvage the situation.

“I’m an assistant mortician,” he said. I felt a little pity at the thought of him draining the blood out of bodies into a little floor drain in the center of a dark, antiseptic room. I wanted him to get Honey’s favors for the night, to know the touch of a living woman’s hand for a change.

“That’s interesting work. I was in the Quartermaster Corps; we used to furnish the army morticians with all their gear.” I looked at Honey. “It’s more complicated work than you might imagine.”

Stretch squirmed in his chair. “That’s no way for a man to make a living, touching corpses. What kind of woman would want your hands on her knowing where they’ve been?”

“What do you do, Stretch?”

“I,” he said with a drunk’s exaggerated, pious dignity, “am an insurance adjuster.”

“So your racket is cheating people out of money they’re legitimately due at the lowest points of their lives.”

Stretch rose to his wobbly feet and, teetering, grabbed the back of the chair for support. “That’s a damnable lie, sir. I make sure cheats aren’t soaking the insurance company, and I keep everybody’s rates low. That’s what I do, sir.”

“You’re a jackal,” I said, and at that he took a swing at me. I stood and dodged it and gave him the bum’s rush to the stairs. Behind me Honey let out an incredulous whoop as I kicked Stretch in the pants. He tumbled headlong down the staircase and hit his head hard on the door, cracking one of its glass panes. He turned, thrashing, but I had the door open before he could get his feet planted, and when he hit the gravel I gave him a swift kick to the belly while upstairs Honey cackled with delight. He vomited, narrowly missing my shoe.

“Now take a f*cking hike before I crack your skull wide open,” I said as I headed back upstairs.





THE ADRENALINE HAD burned off some of the alcohol, and I had Norman pour me another bourbon. The violence had flushed some toxin out of my system and I felt good, really good, for the first time in days. Tub and Honey, his hand up her skirt provoking a heady giggle, seemed to have forgotten about me. They finished their drinks and got ready to leave.

“Mister,” Honey said at the top of the stairs, her hair and makeup wrecked, “you sure gave old Nate what for.”

Norman busied himself with KP and I apologized for kicking Stretch down the stairs.

“That’s all right, I get tired of listening to that son of a bitch anyway.”

“I guess Tub’s going to get himself some tail tonight.”

“You think so?” Norman seemed surprised.

“Are you shitting me? Those two horndogs were about to come to blows over the old floozy.”

“Huh. ’Cause she’s married to Nate, the fellow you kicked down the stairs.” He got the bottle and poured me another, then sat down and grimaced. “My hip. Hurts like a son of a bitch and the doc says there’s nothing to be done.”

“You ought to try some Hycodan. Only problem is you can’t take a shit or pop a hard on.”

“I think I’ll stay away from that, thanks. I knew some hypos when I was young and it never went too well.”

“You don’t have to shoot it up, it comes in a pill.”

“Still and all. One of my few pleasures left in life is my morning dump. And if some dame came in here and wanted me to jump her I’d like to leave the possibility open.”

“Hell, get yourself a whore.”

“I’m not comfortable with the idea of paying for it. Last time I did that I caught myself a hell of a dose.”

After lecturing Norman about the proper relationship between rubbers and harlotry I sat contemplating my glass, feeling the warm elation of the evening’s violence dissipate, replaced by a dull, empty aching. The worst part was the realization that the ache was one I’d been feeling for weeks or months without ever noticing it. “Did you ever want to kill someone?”

“Sure,” he said. “Lots of times.”

“Ever think about really doing it?”





I BID NORMAN good night and drove home woozy. I walked into the house ready to report to Sally the happy outcome of her misadventure at Bellows Furnishings, but it was one-fifteen in the morning and she had gone to bed long before. That was a shame, because I wasn’t mad at her anymore. The new dining room table was still set for dinner for two, which made me think for the first time that evening that I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. I opened the icebox and found two steaks on a plate.

Though my domestic skills were few, I could fry a steak. I got out a cast iron skillet, the same one Sally had tried to brain me with, and melted a couple of pats of butter. When that started sizzling I dropped the larger of the steaks into the skillet and while it was still good and rare slapped it onto a plate and ate it at the head of the dining room table. The wooziness had begun to dissipate by the time I finished, and I crept down the hallway to the bedroom. There I was surprised by lamplight and a neatly made bed. “Sally?” I called out, knowing that it was pointless; she was off somewhere, teaching me a lesson. I undressed and went to bed, and despite my late meal and the unaccustomed amount of bourbon in my belly I slept soundly and without dreams.