Some of the people he had known at the store had left; some remained. At Mr. Capper’s urging—so he later learned—some of those who remained organized a welcoming dinner for him Tuesday night after work. His own dinner was free, the others chipping in enough to cover theirs and their share of his. It was not a big group as such things went—only a dozen diners and himself. Yet he was glad of it, and glad to find that he could remember the names of most of the people there.
At one point in the dinner, when most of them were through with their entrees and the waiters were waiting for the rest to finish so they could serve dessert, a woman who might have been Lara walked down the hallway outside their private dining room. It was as great temptation to say something or call out, but he did not. Later, when he excused himself to go to the bathroom, he kept his eyes open; but he did not look into the other private rooms, and he saw nothing.
The next day was his first real one back at work. He had been transferred out of Personal Computers—because personal computer sales were slacking off—back into Furniture and Major Appliances. He was a little frightened until he dealt with his first customer, but she bought a sofa and a coffee table, and after that he was all right.
Bud van Tilburg was head of Furniture and Major Appliances, and thus his boss, whom he called Mr. van Tilburg and at whom he always smiled. It was not until several weeks had passed that he connected his transfer with Mr. van Tilburg’s friendship with Mr. Drummond. Then he marched into Mr. van Tilburg’s office and asked man-to-man if he was pulling his weight. Mr. van Tilburg punched up the figures for everybody in the whole department and showed him that he had outsold them all, had outsold the runner-up by well over a thousand dollars. “Getting you was the best break I’ve had in the past two years,” Mr. van Tilburg said.
After that he tried even harder. When he had been in the department before, it had never occurred to him that you could learn about furniture just like you learned about computers and video games.
Yet it was so. There were various fabrics and stuffings, for example; and finishes and methods of construction. Not to mention the innumerable styles: Chippendale, Queen Anne, Early American, Traditional, Jacobean, Italian Renaissance and Italian Decadent, Henry IV, Louis XIII, and French Renaissance—on and on. He learned them all, checking books out of the library so he could study the pictures and memorize what the experts said about each. He learned to tell red oak from white, white oak from maple, maple from walnut, walnut from pecan, pecan from teak, and at last false rosewood from real Brazilian rosewood.
There came a day when he realized as he walked home that he had sold something to every customer to whom he had spoken. It gave him a glow that lasted until he went to bed that night, and of which some trace remained even while he fixed his coffee and ate his sweet-roll the next morning.
He had to cross the park to reach his new apartment, but as far as he was concerned there were only two seasons—spring, during which the department carried lawn and patio furniture, and of course Christmas. Sometimes there were jonquils in the park, and sometimes there were chrysanthemums. Sometimes there was snow—no one ever seemed to shovel the park paths—and he wore the high, fleece-lined boots he had bought at discount in Men’s & Women’s Shoes and carried his working shoes in a brown paper bag.
Thus three Christmases came (in October) and went (in early December). One day in February he spoke for nearly an hour to a fat man of sixty or so who seemed to be interested in bookcases. The fat man left without buying anything, and as soon as he was gone Bridget Boyd came hurrying over from Small Appliances. “Do you know who that
He shook his head.
“That was H. Harris Henry himself!” She sensed his lack of comprehension. “Our president, the honcho of the whole company. You must be in the stock plan.”
He nodded.
“Then you get the annual report. Don’t you even look at the pictures? You’d better start.”
He decided he would not start; he had never felt the least inclination to read the thing, and now it was clearly too late. “You could have told me,” he said.
“How could I? You were with him.” She nibbled her lower lip. “If we ate our lunches together, I could fill you in on the Corporate Structure.”
She pronounced it like that, with capitals, and he turned away.
A week later, an order came transferring him to Antiques in the uptown store. The new job carried a healthy raise but meant he had to ride a bus for twenty minutes, morning and night. In addition, he usually had to spend another twenty minutes waiting for a bus to come. The wait at the bus stop was miserably cold until April, and the buses were unbearably hot from June through August and most of September.
He liked the job, though he had immediately spotted several pieces on the floor as rank forgeries. When his customers asked about those he simply read the description on the tag, prefacing the reading with, “Well, it says.” If he liked the customer, he might also shake his head slightly. Since the items in question were large and showy, they generally sold well enough even with his negative endorsement.
There was one particular piece he wanted himself, a small desk of unimpeachable pedigree that had begun its career nearly two hundred years ago in the service of a British sea captain. As well as he could judge, it had been built in India of native sandalwood, using milk-glass drawer pulls salvaged from a still earlier piece. Three of the drawers retained their original green-baize linings; and when he had nothing better to do, he liked to examine them, always feeling when he opened them he was going to find something in them that he had never found before, sometimes actually bending down to sniff the faded cloth. The old captain had kept his tobacco in the upper left drawer, he thought; the other odors were fleeting and deceptive —so much so that he was never certain he was not imagining them.
One night he dreamed he was actually sitting at that desk. The floor moved beneath him, gently rocking, rising and falling with a motion he saw echoed ever so faintly in the well of black ink into which he dipped a feather pen. “My Dearest Heart,” he wrote. “My good friend Captain Clough, of the
There was a hail, and hurrying feet drumming the deck over his head. He sat up, and in a second or two he was laughing at himself, though there was something within him—some part that was still the old captain—that was not laughing.
The next day an ugly middle-aged woman made him show her the desk. “The chair’s missing,” he said. “It really ought to have the chair.”
“That’s all right,” she told him. “I can get one made for it. It’s simple enough.”
