Nothing To Lose (A fat girl novel) (12 page)

There was a second long silence. “You want to get back to me? Think it over?”

“No. I’ve thought it over. I’ll go.”

“Good.” Henry Patten made the arrangements and called him within the hour. “It’s set. The Four Seasons. That’s Thursday, June two at 12:45. Wear a dark suit, no sports jacket. Good luck.”

He arrived early and rose when his host, Hunter Garrison, walked toward him. Garrison was at least six feet four but would have been intimidating at four feet eight. His face was like a missile, pink and beefy, ending in a perfectly bald, round head. His neck draped a half-inch over his immaculate, high collar.

He ordered Tankueray on the rocks with three olives.

“Would you like a side dish of olives, sir?” asked the waiter with a straight face.

“No,” said Garrison, “I’ll eat too many. Just the three.”

Luis, who would have preferred not to drink, asked for the same without the olives.

”Normally,” said Hunter Garrison, rubbing his hands together, “I would consider team sports an essential for the man I need, but with your background, it’s not important. I’m sure you had plenty of competition growing up in a ghetto.” He lowered his eyelids and looked off to the side. “You had to compete to survive. There must have been plenty of clawing and gouging at Stuyvesant High as well.” He took a sip of his drink and looked at Luis over the rim of his glass.

Luis had never tried to hide his background. Why then did he feel so guilty? He was being goaded for a purpose. Well, since no question had been put to him, he would remain silent…and listen. He, too, would take a sip of his drink and look at Hunter Garrison over the rim of his glass. “When I was at Brown,” continued Garrison, “we called you guys the hot pavement sportsmen.”

“Well, Mr. Garrison,” Luis felt more relaxed knowing what was going on, “I never even played hot pavement sports. I was what you might call a sissy. Not a homosexual, but somewhat afraid of the streets. The boys in the neighborhood liked to beat me up.” He said it calmly and without emotion. “And I didn’t like getting beat up. So I stayed in.”

Hunter Garrison relaxed in his chair, as if he had found out what he wanted to know. “I don’t blame you,” he said, and motioned to the waiter that they were ready to order. Luis chose turbot, but in his anxiety he misread it for tournedos and asked for it rare.

“Are you certain, sir?” the waiter asked.

“Yes, rare,” Luis said forcefully. The chairman’s eyes went to half-mast and he was oddly silent for the rest of the meal. He skipped dessert and barely shook Luis’ hand before signing the check and leaving.

When he dialed Henry Patten’s number, he was told by the secretary to hold on. It was a while before Patten got on the line. “It’s not good,” he said.

“Why not? One lunch and he’s sure?”

“Didn’t you sense something? Tell me what happened.”

“He tried to put me off guard, then I said something he liked, he relaxed, we ordered lunch but then he went suddenly ice-cold.”

“What did you order?”

“Fish.”

“Okay, nothing there.”

“I didn’t know it was fish. I thought it was those little medallions of meat and ordered it rare.”

“Uh oh. That must have been it.”

“What’s wrong with liking your fish rare? The Japanese eat it raw.”

“Yes. But not Americans eating at the Four Seasons with Hunter Garrison. He’s a stickler for finesse at the table because most of his business is done over meals. He knew you had made a mistake.”

“Well, what do we do now?”

“We look for another situation,” said Henry. “I’ll get back to you.”

Was it only his imagination that Henry’s voice was less than enthusiastic? He felt uncomfortable. What had happened was trifling and, in any case, couldn’t be undone. Still, he felt he had let himself down. Turbot. Tournedos. Turbine. Turhan Bey. Damn

During the next three weeks, Henry Patten sent him on six interviews. Two of them he refused because the immediate superiors were not men he respected. Four refused him. “I want to know why,” he said to Henry.

The personal idiosyncrasies of executives were legion. Curly hair made them suspicious. Less than six feet made them edgy. Non-golfers weren’t well rounded. Certain religions were liabilities. Of course, no one said this out loud, but it was so. What it boiled down to was that by some uncanny turn of fate, no one that he wanted wanted him. We need someone with more experience, they said, and then hired a kid just out of college. He felt his confidence erode.

“These are the paragons who are running American business?” he asked Henry Patten with disgust.

“You know what you do when you meet a four hundred pound gorilla?” Henry answered philosophically. “You do whatever he wants.”

Luis had been transformed by Princeton. He had grown sure and patient. He had acquired that unblinking gaze that’s often thought judgmental. He never spoke out of nervousness or to fill lulls in conversations. He was kind to women but not patronizing. He had never mooned over a woman or become lovesick. He was very handsome and when he entered a room, he heightened the reality of everyone present. His features had lost the roundness of adolescence. His nose had thinned out, his jaw was more defined and his eyes looked both intelligent and serene. His mouth occasionally tilted ruefully to one side adding a vulnerability that heightened his appeal. Yes, with all of that, he couldn’t find a proper job.

Six months passed. He stopped getting phone calls from Henry and went to another firm but they wanted to know what he had been doing for six months and they weren’t as excited over his prospects as Henry had been. One night on television, there was an ad for Oriental rugs that could be purchased at Burdie’s New York store. “Burdie’s gives you more of whatever you’re looking for,” said the announcer. Luis became very excited and put in a call to Fred Burdette in California where the family lived. “Mr. Fred’s in Europe,” said a nasal English voice. “Celebrating the birth of a son.” Luis was somewhat hurt that Mr. Fred hadn’t let him know he was about to be a father. Maybe the California air made you forgetful. He went to Burdie’s anyway. The next morning, he arrived at the headquarters building on the Avenue of the Americas behind the sign for San Salvador and Costa Rica. He filled out an application and asked to join their executive training program. It felt good to visit a personnel department and ask for a job. No lunches. No playing games. Two days later, they told him they’d be happy to have him on board. His first stop? Burdie’s Georgia – the flagship store in Atlanta. Position? Assistant buyer for linens and domestics. Salary? $28,000 per annum plus a living allowance and moving costs. Could he leave for Atlanta a week from Monday? He could.

He would not have predicted that going to Atlanta would make him feel so hopeful. It was an exotic place for a boy from the projects.

Chapter Eleven

Luis had been at Burdie’s Atlanta for six weeks and he had learned a lot. Ninety percent of what there was to know about buying sheets, towels, quilts and tablecloths could be summed up in three words: ‘white sales’ and ‘seconds.’ White sales, traditionally a January event, now were scheduled several times a year for the simple reason that the promotions tripled the traffic in the department. Seconds – merchandise that was less than perfect and sold at a reduced price – were now programmed into production by every mill. Women liked the idea of paying less. It made them feel astute and thrifty and the flaws in the merchandise were often undetectable.

As assistant buyer, Luis bought budget sheets, comforters and kitchen linens. He spent a great deal of time on the selling floor listening to what women wanted and looking at how they made their decisions. He found quickly that women liked to sleep on flowers more than on stripes and geometrics. And they liked small pink, yellow or white flowers more than blue, or green ones. They liked prints that reminded them of colonial America, by far the favored period of décor.

The women who liked stylized cucumbers and squash on their potholders and kitchen towels were usually bookish types with small breasts. The majority favored roosters, on or off weathervanes. Mushrooms were second in popularity. Not realistic edible mushrooms, but cheerful mushrooms that sheltered elves.

Luis resisted the temptation to buy mill overruns and closeouts that he could sell as special purchases. He made a decision to buy the merchandise women wanted most and sell it at regular price. The strategy paid off. In a recession year, when better linens and domestics lost ground, his department showed a respectable ten percent rise over the previous year. Within thirteen months he was promoted to a full buyer and transferred to Burdie’s Chicago, the flagship store of the Illinois chain.

In this large, complex and partly affluent city, his strategy changed. He wanted to raise the consciousness of every woman whose linen closet harbored a mishmash of sale merchandise that she’d be happy to throw out. Chicago in winter was depressing. The wind never stopped blowing. He could picture winter-roughened skin being dried with limp, faded towels while he had shelves and shelves of thick, thirsty terry. He imagined winter-weary bodies lying down to sleep – one third of life – on worn-out, ugly, mis-matched sheets, while he was stocked to the rafters with lustrous, comforting percales. He shared his insights with the women of Chicago in a full-page ad in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribute. Mrs. Georgia Wilson sleeps on ugly sheets she bought on sale in 1967. What are you sleeping on?

The gist of his message was: saving a dollar or two on something you would be living with for years was a false saving. You deserve better than that. The women took a good look at their beds and had to agree with him. The excellent response to the ad prompted the store to run a series that began with the running header, O’Neill’s Law: the uglier the towel, the longer it lasts. Sleep on a skimpy pillowcase; wake up with feathers in your mouth.

Sales in the department went up twenty-five percent in the first six months. He urged the customers to complain and tell him what they wanted that was not available. To his surprise, he discovered a sizable market that yearned for the return of the all-cotton sheet and towel; it prompted him to run a promotion that had a historic response and made his name known to the powers that be at the Burdette Corporation. The campaign struck at the heart of every woman’s desire to be taken seriously; to have her small requests honored and to be acknowledged for her common sense. The first ad read:

Jane Ferrar doesn’t like the squeak that her polyester sheets make in the summer when it’s hot!

What’s more, she doesn’t like the feel of polyester against her body. “Who’s going to take the small annoyance of a housewife seriously?” asks Mrs. Ferrar?” Burdie’s will. We want Mrs. Ferrar to feel good at night and we’ve asked a renowned manufacturer of luxury linens to make us our own, Burdie’s label, all-cotton percale sheets. But not at his usual price, that would put most of us out of the market. He says he will have to call them seconds. We said, call them anything you like. We all know what seconds are – they’re firsts to the naked eye.

The response was extraordinary. They sold out most of their stock and received future orders for merchandise when it came in. One day, a woman shopper mentioned in passing, “Now if you’d only bring back my mother’s mangle, I could iron my cotton sheets in no time flat.” Luis agreed. He made a deal with a manufacturer of commercial mangles for a smaller model and ran a mangle ad: Burdie’s leaps into the past. He had a weeklong demonstration in which it was proven that you could iron a king-size sheet in ninety seconds.

Luis loved retailing. He ran a lively department with special events and guest decorators, unheard of at the time. He loved the idea of direct results for known efforts and he seemed to have an instinct for merchandising. Women wanted to be understood and comforted and encouraged in their special view of things. Luis did this and he prospered. By 1978, three years after joining the Burdette chain, he was made merchandise manager for soft goods, a post he held for two years. By January of 1980, in an unprecedented leap, he was named president of Burdie’s New Jersey. As exciting as this was, it was far from his final goal. In his mind, New Jersey would be a brief stop. He chose to live in Manhattan and commuted to Newark by train and limousine. The real apple of his eye was Burdies’s New York, the shining jewel in the Burdie’s crown.

The other advantage of living in Manhattan was the availability of women. He had never lacked for companions but now it seemed he was in the hot, white center of the new, take-charge woman.

The first woman he went to see upon returning to New York was his mother in the projects. He showed her the business page of the New York Times with his picture.

“Jew’re the president?” she asked with proper awe.

“Yes, I am.”

“Berry good,” she said. “Berry good.”

* * * *

Part III

Burdie’s

* ** *

Chapter Twelve

It was mid April in New York. One of those days when the sun shines stubbornly through sprinkling rain. A sign, her mother had told her, that the devil was beating his wife.

April Taylor sat with two other applicants – a gray-haired woman, a thin young man – in the waiting room. The fluorescent lights, a generous wattage considering the miserly furnishings, did nothing for them. They looked picked over.