Abnormal Occurrences (11 page)

He had not yet been to bed with Annemarie, in fact had not yet really made a move on her. He waited people out. Such was the technique he had formulated over the years, given his basic inability to work his will on others by direct means. This was somewhat more successful in affairs of the heart, for he frequented spirited women, than in his career, where an officeful of competitive colleagues, mostly male, were never impatient with his apparent lack of ambition. He had not risen far in seven years with the same firm, but neither had he had to leave, which could not be said of several aggressive hotshots. On the other side of it, however, most of his current superiors were persons who could be similarly characterized but were even more ruthlessly opportunistic.

He remembered the pamphlet that evening. He had brought Annemarie to his apartment for the first time and had awaited her negative, perhaps even rude response to the decor or lack thereof, for his furniture consisted of what neither of his wives had wanted, along with an item or two from a nearby thrift shop operated by a religious charity, and the walls were bare, except for the calendar in the bedroom.

The meanness of his abode usually evoked a response from the women he brought home. In fact, it was one of the things he counted on to break the ice. The apartment was an expensive one, in an upscale building, with an admirable view of the city. So much could have been made of it! Devlin of course was pleased to ask for assistance. The reason the place stayed eternally in the same shape, however, was that his affairs typically did not last long enough for him to acquire new furnishings or hang pictures reflecting the taste of any particular woman, and he had not succeeded in developing any general convictions about decor, given the diversity in the opinions of his advisors.

But if Annemarie had a reaction, she failed to show it. She strolled to the sofa and sank down onto, into, its worst corner, where the upholstery of the arm was nearly threadbare and the springs within the cushion had long since subsided, and proceeded to stare neither at the room nor the spectacular skyline available through the wide window nearby, but rather at Devlin himself, who was thereby made very uneasy as to his appearance. He was never secure in his choice of clothing to begin with, and in recent months the principal garments had become too tight owing to his slow but relentless acquisition of excess poundage, despite the measures he took with his diet, though to be sure the latter were sporadic. When it came to exercise, he had to admit he was thoroughly delinquent, to the degree that when home alone he often lacked the energy even to consult the television program if it was not immediately at hand, and rather than rise and fetch it from across the room, would roam the channels with the remote, unless the batteries had died, in which case he might well stay in place, however deadly the program on the screen, making a mental note to buy replacements on his way home the following day.

He now unfastened the middle button of his jacket, presumably removing the pinched look there, and asked Annemarie whether she would like a glass of white wine.

She did not want any wine. She had drunk her fill at dinner, about half a glass. Nor did she wish to discuss the movie, the trashiness of which she pronounced undebatable. She had no interest in the view. She continued to fix him with what he assumed was a hostile stare. He sat down in dismay and, considering the frigid atmosphere, not on the couch but in the lone chair. He was preparing to ask about her childhood, a subject he had found appealing to those people who had had a happy one (though in a certain few cases it could be a disaster) when Annemarie, exasperated at his inability to intuit her wishes, made it clear what they were: to go to bed with him without further palaver.

He was shocked, not by a boldness that in recent years had not been unprecedented, but rather by his own total failure to set any kind of pace or fashion any structure for the evening. The movie had been altogether
her
choice, apparently for no better reason than to confirm a presupposition that it had been universally overpraised, and at dinner he had ordered a seafood casserole only so as not to reject her forceful recommendation. The sexual encounter made it a clean sweep, and needless to say, it was she who orchestrated the procedure from start to finish.

When Annemarie left the apartment, firmly rejecting his offer of an escort home, the first thing he did on closing the door was to pad barefooted, towel-wrapped, to the coffee table and sort through the papers and magazines strewn there, in search of the brochure advertising the means by which to attain power over others, presumably without violence. He had saved it to show her for purposes of mutual amusement, but as things turned out, he no longer saw the idea as inevitable farce. Maybe there was something to it. He could hardly do worse than to continue through life as what he had been to date, an object whose effective energy came only from outside, ever the moved and not the mover.

That very night he tore off the attached coupon and wrote a check for $29.95, and next morning, though having already returned to much of the derisive scepticism with which he had first scanned the brochure, he anyway dropped the postpaid envelope into the box on the corner—and went to work, where as always he helplessly deferred to many people far his inferiors in every talent but self-assertion. These experiences, along with more dates (though not with Annemarie, who soon dumped him in the forthright style with which she performed in all areas of life), continued without relief for five long weeks. There was no response to his coupon and check, though the latter had been promptly cashed within five days of his posting it to the address printed on the envelope, a postal box in a town in Iowa he had never heard of.

Devlin might lack in a certain kind of force, but he was not one to play the victim of a blatant swindle. He had once gone so far as to threaten to punch a dry cleaner who had shrunk a sweater, then claimed it had been received in that condition. On his next lunch hour he went to the main post office and sought to find the department in which to file a formal complaint, but the lines at all the windows seemed endless, and while he was waiting he was so pestered by panhandlers, who grew even more importunate
after
they received a contribution, that he left the building. He was well aware that some people were never approached by beggars, and others turned them down with impunity. Presumably these gentry were the same who sent restaurant wine back when it did not please their palates, got apologies from the IRS, and were accepted as ultimate authorities on any subject on which they voiced an opinion, effortlessly intimidating other men with a command of the moment, while intriguing women with the suggestion that more was forthcoming than was, at any time, at hand.

But as it turned out, when he came home from work that evening and collected the mail from the lobby box, among the bills and the throwaways was a long but neither thick nor heavy envelope from Krafft, Inc., the name to which he had written the check for a manual of instruction in the technique of dominating other people.

What arrived was not a manual but a letter acknowledging receipt of an initial payment of 29.95, entitling him to sign up for what was apparently much more than the anticipated instructional booklet, being rather a course of some extent, the specificities of which were not given except for the price, which was 199.95.

Devlin indignantly tore the letter into many small fragments before remembering the promise, in the original offer, promptly to refund any and all payments on request: he had just destroyed what, with his cancelled check, might be needed as receipt. On his knees he reclaimed all the pieces, some very tiny, from the kitchen wastecan, thanking the gods that they had not fallen onto chicken skins or wet coffee grounds. But when the fragments had been painstakingly reassembled and Scotch-taped into a whole, the result was so wretched-looking he could not in good conscience return the letter for a refund: it would hardly look as if he were operating in the same good faith as he expected of Krafft, Inc. Or so anyway it seemed to Devlin, whose second wife had once charged him with confusing scruples with virtues but characteristically refused to elaborate.

Which left him with but two choices. To go no further, and let them keep the 29.95, would be an abject surrender to loss. Therefore with full awareness of the possibility that he was throwing good money after bad, he wrote a check for $199.95 and immediately posted it before there was time for craven second thoughts.

The response of the folks at Krafft this time was, given the current speed of the mails, prompt, not even really long enough for them to have waited for his out-of-state check to clear. So they had put themselves in as vulnerable a position as his own: he could after all stop payment. However, what he got for his 199.95—really now, in total, 229.90—was but two sheets of typescript faintly xeroxed, joined by a staple only one prong of which pierced paper, the other dangling.

Reading the text so poorly reproduced removed any possible doubt. Devlin could only conclude that he had paid more than two hundred dollars to arrant charlatans for that which was utterly bogus. The “course” in how to dominate others consisted of a collection of restatements of the Golden Rule, with twists that in the wrong hands could be treacherous: treating others as they
think
you would treat yourself; giving people what they don’t realize they need until so persuaded; using strangers as if they were close relatives over whom you have a natural advantage. Irrespective of the questionable morality (if that could ever be said), whether these principles would work effectively could be called doubtful. The members of Devlin’s family (two parents, two older sisters) were the last people he would expect to influence—as they had been the first on whom he tried it as a boy. And before he could get anywhere near being able to con others (if that was his aim), he must first get them simply to listen to him, something which seemed to him to be a basic right, not a privilege to be gained by dupery.

It had been conclusively proved, so far as he was concerned, that the Krafft operation was blatantly dishonest. Instead of stopping the check, however, he believed he had a better idea. One of the local television channels made much of consumer advocacy, devoting five minutes of each nightly newscast to dealing with viewers’ grievances against sharp practices by businessmen, doctors and dentists, and of course, lawyers. A cheerfully aggressive reporter, accompanied by a camera operator, would push into an electronics store and, bearding the manager thereof, demand satisfaction for the defective radio fobbed off, at a price illegally misrepresented to be below wholesale, on some impoverished widow. Or a young female assistant producer would go undercover and listen to a plastic-surgery hustler lie about her need for a job on her impeccable nose, videoing the performance with a minicam hidden in a tote bag.

Devlin rang up the station and having been referred to the appropriate department, was courteously listened to by a woman with a kind, even motherly voice. He therefore found it difficult to show indignation when, after hardly listening to his story, she declared that he really had no case against Krafft, Inc., unless something had been offered that was not subsequently delivered.

“But it
wasn’t
,” said Devlin. “They call two pages a
course
?”

“Interpretation,” the woman answered, “is arguable, unless the terms are cut-and-dried. Now, if you’re promised a hundred pages, and you get only two, then you have a case.”

He talked some more but got nowhere, for had he been gifted with persuasive powers he would never have been in this situation.

Yet he was not ready supinely to accept the defeat. In his abusive letter to Krafft he positively reveled in the use of obscenities he would not have put into writing under other conditions, for he had no fear the addressee would complain to the postal authorities. If this was a degrading sort of revenge, at least no third party knew of it, and in fact Devlin did thereafter feel, if not exactly fulfilled, then at least not so bitter as to be emotionally maimed. He even began to think again about resuming the social life to which this unfortunate experience had brought a halt.

He had on several recent occasions seen the same attractive woman in the local delicatessen where these days he was wont to acquire the elements of his evening meal. Whenever observed, she had been buying the cold cooked chicken, a dish that as it happened Devlin knew from experience was dry and overdone, though the adjoining turkey legs were edible enough and the cold roast meats, especially the pork, were unexceptionable. This gave him a subject on which to address the woman, who was as fair as his first wife and as tall as Annemarie and finer of feature. Therefore the next time he saw her at the appropriate counter, he drifted there and asked, as if casually, whether she could recommend the chicken.

She winced at him. “Hardly.”

He was taken aback, but quickly decided to come clean. “I’ve seen you buying it several times. I wanted to meet you. I guess I chose the wrong topic. You buy it for your husband or live-in boy friend. I apologize.”

“All right,” she said, smirking. “It’s for my dog. I know I should cook myself, and sometimes I do, weekends, but during the week I’m too exhausted, frankly.”

Devlin said he had owned several dogs during his life and spoiled them all, and having made what he hoped was a good impression, nodded goodbye to her at the frozen-yoghurt case. Such was the discreet style he had long since fashioned for city life. It was very likely he would encounter her again, at which time they would already have a precedent on which to build. Meanwhile she had nothing, in this stalker era, to give her concern. Nor had he done anything, as yet, that could be used as a pretext for rejection.

When he got home with his sliced corned beef and cole slaw, he found in the box a letter from Krafft, Inc., indeed from someone who signed himself H. Krafft, no title given.

Dear Mr. Devlin:

I’m rising above your abuse, though it is likely such language would be actionable. I do this because my sole interest is in control and not reaction.

Normally, the course in my technique consists of ten lessons in as many weeks, each at the low, low price of $199.95. Believe me when I say that though this schedule might seem endless to you, and the early lessons might not appear to break new ground, experience has taught me that it is necessary for the beginner to proceed slowly, until he is equipped psychologically, emotionally, to handle the extraordinary power he will have at his command by the end of Lesson 10.

Were the situation otherwise, I would not want to be in any way responsible for what might happen were an individual not so carefully prepared. But you, sir, have questioned my honor and challenged a good name that has never previously been sullied. I confess that you have so insulted me as to have relieved me of any concern for your wellbeing. Therefore I enclose, free of charge, Lesson 10. I suspect you will use it badly.

Contemptuously yours,

H. Krafft