Chapter 9
In Which Herb Becomes a Studebaker Salesman
“THIS IS — this is — astonishing, Herb,” said Ben, on the first of Herb’s visits. In his hand he held one of Herb’s prototypes.
This one, the first Herb had created since his marriage to Lorna, represented something quite new. It set a style that would define the course of development for animated coarse goods for nearly two decades. Inside a silver case, very much like the case of a pocket watch, a tiny couple was couched. Slowly, very slowly, Ben twisted the stem and observed the couple’s performance. What the couple did as Ben turned the stem was affectionate, inventive, clever, difficult, and surprising. Herb had spent countless hours developing the routine, doodling on scraps of paper, constructing mechanisms in his imagination, building tiny frameworks of wire and bewildering assemblies of gears and shafts and pulleys and belts in moments stolen from work at the clam-packing plant.
Ben looked up from his examination of the couple in the watchcase and grinned. “This is very — um — creative, Herb,” he said. “Very creative.” He glanced at Herb and then turned his attention back to the couple. “I wonder where you get your ideas.”
Herb colored, and he chuckled to try to hide his embarrassment. Ideas came to him from his imagination, from his dreams and daydreams, from that never-ending lust that a man feels for the girls of his youth, and from observations of women around Babbington. He might notice in a woman a certain way of walking, say a certain swing of the hips, and see it as a manifestation of the woman’s peculiar style, just as one might recognize in the use of a certain blue or a certain recognizable brush stroke a manifestation of a painter’s style, or recognize in the frequent use of a certain grammatical technique a certain manner of thought that underlies a writer’s style. While Herb observed the woman’s walk, he made some inferences about her style, and he asked himself some interesting questions: How would that style show up in the woman’s lovemaking? How would it affect her movements in bed? Such pleasant speculations occupied Herb for many hours every day; they were the salacious equivalent of the kind of speculation that helped make him such a superb salesman: I know certain things about this person. From them, what can I decide about his attitudes, his desires? What can I predict about his resistance to my selling?
“You must be enjoying married life,” Ben said, without looking at Herb.
Herb looked at his hands and said nothing. He was enjoying married life, and he was enjoying sex with Lorna, but something was missing. He was a restrained lover in the big pine bed in the room behind the Mikszaths’, less imaginative, less daring, than he was in his gear-and-pulley work. When Herb was at work on his coupling mechanisms, he couldn’t help wondering whether some of the techniques and alignments he developed were entirely original, whether he had invented anything that had never had an in-the-flesh trial in all the history of mankind. Sometimes he wondered whether some of his inventions were humanly possible. Always he wondered how they would feel. Many struck him as too far removed from the simple and obvious ever to be widely accepted, and many struck him as unacceptable for home use. And sometimes he was afraid that, because these were the products of his imagination and his desires, they might be things that only he could enjoy, things he ought to be ashamed of, and this feeling applied not only to the things that might have been too bold but to those that might have been too sentimental or too silly.
“Dut, dut, dut,” Herb said, as a way of avoiding having to explain to Ben any part of all that he thought and felt.
“What?” asked Ben.
“Oh, nothing,” said Herb. “It’s just something our landlord says. What do you think you can give me for this couple, Uncle Ben? I want to get Lorna a coat for her birthday.”
In Topical Guide 306, Mark Dorset considers Erotic Jewelry: The “Watchcase Wonder”; Language: “Body Language” and “Kinesics”; and Style from this episode.
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🎧 306: “This is—this is—”