Firmin by Sam Savage Page B

are many people who are much worse off than I am. I have this from no less an authority that Peter Erdman, author of The Self as Other . In that book Dr Erdman recounts true tales of enormously fat people who can stand in front of a mirror and see an image of themselves no thicker than a Paris mannequin, and others, emaciated, who look in the mirror and see fat bulging like jelly rolls. They actually see this. Now that’s crazy. With me, the problem has never been in the mirror - no one ever lives there but the same chinless fellow - but in the image of myself away from the mirror, the one I see when I lie on my back and look at my toes and tell myself all the wonderful stories, when I engage in what I call dreaming, taking the senseless stuff of life and giving it a beginning, middle, and end. My dreams contain everything - everything, that is, except the monster in the mirror. When I dream a sentence like ‘The music died away, and in the silence all eyes were on Firmin, who stood aloof and unflinching in the doorway of the ballroom,’ I never see an undersized chinless rat in the doorway of the ballroom. That would have a very different effect. No, I always see someone looking very much like Fred Astaire: thin waist, long legs, and a chin like the toe of a boot. Sometimes I even dress like Fred Astaire. In this particular scene I am in tails and spats and top hat. Legs crossed at the ankles, I am leaning casually on a silverpommeled cane. Do you find it difficult to hold your eyebrows in that position? Sometimes, when I drop in for a cup of coffee with Norman, I am wearing a tan cardigan and tassel loafers. I lean back in my chair, throw my feet up on the desk, and we talk books and women and baseball. Next to that picture I have posted the phrase A GREAT CONVERSATIONALIST. And sometimes, still looking a lot like Astaire - but now dissipated, world-weary, a Lucky Strike hanging from my lip, like a Frenchman - I am pounding away with desperate fury at an old Remington. I love the sound the carriage makes when I tear out one page and furiously crank in the next. I could go on and on, tell you about the knock on the door, the way Ginger comes in, shy, carrying a cheese sandwich she has made for me, the look in her eyes. I could even tell you what is written on the pages that are piling up next to the typewriter.
     
    There is a passage in The Phantom of the Opera where the phantom, a great genius who lives hidden from sight because of his great ugliness, says that the thing he wants most in the world is simply to stroll in the evening along the boulevards with a beautiful woman on his arm, like an ordinary bourgeois. To me that is one of the most moving passages in literature, even though Gaston Leroux was not a Big One.
     

Chapter 7
     

     
    E very week the paper brought more depressing news about the so-called renovation of Scollay Square. Many local businesses had already closed, following enormous going-out-of-business sales, and now stood dark and empty behind plywood sheeting, while others had simply burned to the ground. Even so, Norman kept at it. And we still had good days, though none like the old days. Fewer customers even on the best days, and on rainy days Norman did not even bother hauling out the feather duster. I occasionally saw customers blowing the dust off the books before they opened them, but he seemed never to notice. He slogged on, but you could tell his heart was not in it.
     
    I slogged on too. With business down I had more time to work on dream structures. They were enormous dreams, like novels. I sometimes spent days on a single scene. Maybe it was a picnic at Revere Beach. Maybe it was the summer of 1929, and the stock market is about to crash and nobody knows it. What are they wearing? What kind of shoes? What sort of underpants? How do they cut their hair? What does the car look like? What do the seats feel like? How much does gas cost? Have they brought along a book? What are the