The Dick Gibson Show (33 page)

“No.”

“Christ,” I said. “What’s her number at work? I’ve got to get her.”

I called the number the roommate gave me; it was a big insurance company. I told them I was doing a credit check on Bea Dellaspero and they connected me to personnel. Personnel was nice as pie. Bea was twenty-four years old, a typist in the claims department and a good credit risk.

It was something, but I couldn’t live on it. I had to get her to return to the store.

I conceived the idea of running a sale especially for Bea. My printer set up a sample handbill. Across the bottom I had him put in half a dozen simple coupons, with blank spaces where she could write in the names of the products she wanted to exchange them for. She could choose from a list of twenty items, on which I gave about a 90 percent discount. I sent the flier in an envelope to Bea’s address.

Normally I’m closed on Sunday, but that was the day I set aside for Bea’s sale. I opened up at ten o’clock, and I didn’t have to wait more than an hour. When she came in holding the pink flier we were alone in the store.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Fine, thank you.” She was still uneasy about me. “I got your advertisement.”

“I see it in your hand.”

“Oh. Yes.”

She went around the store picking up the items she wanted and brought them to the counter. When she gave me her coupons, I saw that she’d chosen products relating to a woman’s periods or to feminine hygiene. She’d had to: I’d rigged the list with men’s shaving equipment, pipe accessories, athletic supporters—things like that.

“What size would these be, madam?”

“Super.”

“Beg pardon, I didn’t hear you.”

“Super.
”

Super
duper,
I thought. I put the big boxes on the counter and added two bottles of douche from the shelf behind me. It won’t be enough, I thought. She had a pussy big as all outdoors. Imperial gallons wouldn’t be enough. “Let me know how you like the douche,” I said, “I’ve been getting some excellent reports.”

God, I was crazy. You know how it is when you’re smitten. Smitten? I was in love. Married twenty-three years and all of a sudden I was in love for the first time in my life. Whole bales of cotton I would have placed between her legs. Ah love, set me tasks! Send me for all the corks in Mediterranea, all styptic stymies would I fetch!

In love, did I say?
In
love? That’s wrong.
In
love I had been since Old MacDonald’s.
In
love is nothing, simple citizenship. Now I was
of
love, no mere citizen but a very governor of the place, a tenant become landlord. And who
falls
in love? Love’s an ascent, a rising—touch my hard-on—a soaring. Consider my body, all bald spots haired by imagination, my fats rendered and features firmed, tooth decay for God’s sake turned back to candy in my mouth. Heyday! Heyday! And all my feelings collateral to a teen-age boy’s!

So I had been in love and now was of it. Bernie burns, the pharmacist on fire. I did not so much forget the others as repudiate them; they were just more wives. Get this straight: love is adulterous, hard on the character. I cuckold those cuties, the Misses Odata and Locusmundi. Horns for Miss Hartford! Miss Moss is dross. Be my love, Bea my love!

I bagged Bea’s purchases, punched the register a few times to make it look good, and charged her fifty-seven cents for the ten dollars’ worth of stuff she’d bought.

“So cheap?”

“It’s my special get-acquainted offer,” I said. “Also I knocked off a few dollars because you mentioned the secret word.”

“I did? What was it?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

“You know, it’s really a terrific sale,” she said. “I’m surprised more people aren’t here to take advantage of it.”

“They’re coming by when church gets out.”

“I see.”

As she took the two bags in her thin arms and turned to go, it occurred to me that she might never come back to the store. I raced around the counter. I had no idea what I would do; all love’s stratagems and games whistled in my head.

“I’ll help you,” I said, taking one of her bags.

“I can manage.”

“No, I couldn’t think of it. A little thing like you? Let me have the other one as well.”

She refused to give it up. “I’m very capable,” she said. We were on the sidewalk. “You better go back. Your store’s open. Anyone could just walk off with all your stock.”

“They’re in church. Even the thieves. I’ll take you to your car.”

“I don’t have a car. I’m going to catch the bus at the corner.”

“I’ll wait with you.”

“It’s not necessary.”

“It isn’t safe.”

“They’re all in church.”

“Just the thieves, not the rapers.”

“But it’s the dead of winter. You don’t even have a coat. You’ll catch cold.”

“Not cold.”

“What?”

“Not cold. Bernie burns.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not cold. The pharmacist on fire.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m hale.” I jumped up and down with the bag in my arms. “See?” I said. “See how hale? I’m strong. I huff and I puff.” I hit myself in the chest with my fist. “Me? Me sick? There are things on my shelves to cure anything.”

Bea was becoming alarmed. I checked myself, and we stood quietly in the cold together waiting for the bus.

Finally I had to speak or burst. “‘There’s naught so sweet as love’s young dream,’” I said.

“What was that?”

“It’s a saying. It’s one of my favorite sayings.”

“Oh.”

“‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s another saying.”

“Do you see the bus coming?”

“‘Love makes the world go round.’”

“I’ve heard that one.”

“‘Love is smoke raised with the fume of sighs.’” The fume of
size:
super. “‘Take away love and earth is tomb.’ ‘Love indeed is anything, yet is nothing.’”

“I think I hear it coming. Are you
sure
you can’t see it?”

“‘Love is blind,’” I said gloomily. She
had
heard it; it lumbered toward us irresistibly. Soon it would be there and I would never see her again. She was very nervous and went into the street and began to signal while the bus was still three blocks off. I watched her performance disconsolately. “‘And yet I love her till I die,’” I murmured softly.

When the driver came abreast, Bea darted up the steps and I handed her bag to her. “Will I see you again?” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Will I see you again? Promise when you’ve used up what you’ve bought you’ll come back.”

“Well, it’s so
far,”
she said. The driver closed the door.

“I deliver!”
I shouted after her and waved and blew kisses off my fingertips.

D
ICK
G
IBSON
: Remarkable!

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: So’s love, so are lovers. Now I saw them.

D
ICK
G
IBSON
: Saw whom?

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Why, lovers. For if love is bad for the character it’s good for it too. Now that I was of love, I was also of lovers. I looked around and saw that the whole world was in love. When a man came in to pick up penicillin for his wife—that was a love errand. I tried to cheer him. “She’ll be okay,” I told him. “The pills will work. She’ll come round. Her fever will break. Her sore throat will get better.” “Why are you telling me this?” he’d ask. “I like you,” I’d say. “‘All the world loves a lover.’”

For the first time I saw what my drugstore was all about. It was love’s way station. In free moments I would read the verses on my greeting cards, and my eyes would brim with tears. Or I would pore over the true confessions in my magazine racks. “Aye aye, oy oy,” I’d mutter, “too true this true confession.” I blessed the lipstick: “Kiss, kiss,” I droned over the little torpedoes. “Free the man in frogs and bogs. Telltales be gone, stay off shirt collars and pocket handkerchiefs.” All love was sacred. I pored over my customers’ photographs after they were developed. I held a magnifying glass over them—the ones of sweethearts holding hands in the national parks or on the steps of historic buildings, the posed wives on the beach, fathers waving goodbye, small in the distance, as they go up the steps into airplanes. People take the same pictures, did you know that? We are all brothers.

Love was everywhere, commoner than loneliness. I had never realized before what a terrific business I did in rubbers. And it isn’t even spring; no one’s on a blanket in the woods, or in a rowboat’s bottom, or on a hayride. I’m talking about the dead of winter, a high of twenty, a low of three. And you can count on the fingers of one hand the high-school kid’s pipedream purchase. My customers meant business. There were irons in these lovers’ fires. And connoisseurs they were, I tell you, prophylactic more tactic than safeguard, their condoms counters and confections. How sheer’s this thing, they’d want to know, or handle them, testing this one’s elasticity, that one’s friction. Or inquire after refinements, special merchandise, meticulous as fishermen browsing flies. Let’s see. They wanted: French Ticklers, Spanish Daggers, Swedish Surprises, The Chinese Net, The Texas Truss and Gypsy Outrage. They wanted petroleum jellies smooth as syrups.

And I, Pop, all love’s avuncular spirit, all smiles, rooting for them, smoothing their way where I could, apparently selfless— they must have thought me some good-sport widower who renewed his memories in their splashy passion—giving the aging Cupid’s fond green light. How could they suspect that I learned from them, growing my convictions in their experience? Afterward, casually, I would debrief them. Reviewing the troops: Are Trojans better than Spartans? Cavaliers as good as Commandos? Is your Centurion up to your Cossack? What of the Mercenary? The Guerrilla? How does the Minuteman stand up against the State Trooper? In the end, it was too much for me to have to look on while every male in Hartford above the age of seventeen came in to buy my condoms.

Bea never came back—I had frightened her off with my wild talk at the bus stop—yet my love was keener than ever. I still kept up my gynecological charts on her, and celebrated twenty-eighth days like sad festivals. I dreamed of her huge vaginal landscape, her loins in terrible cramp. Bernie burns.

I formed a plan. The first step was to get rid of her roommate. I made my first call to Bea that night.

Don’t worry. It’s not what you think. I didn’t disguise my voice or breathe heavily and say nothing, nor any of your dirty-old-man tricks. I’m no phone creep. When Bea answered I told her who it was straight off.

“Miss Dellaspero? Bernie Perk. I don’t see you in the drugstore anymore. You took advantage of my bargains but you don’t come in.”

Embarrassed, she made a few vague excuses which I pretended cleared matters up. “Well that’s okay, then,” I said. “I just thought you weren’t satisfied with the merchandise or something. You can’t put a guy in jail for worrying about his business.”

In a week I called again. “Bea? Bernie.”

This time she was pretty sore. “Listen,” she said. “I never heard of a respectable merchant badgering people to trade with him. I was a little flustered when you called last week, but I have the right to trade wherever I want.”