Leslie A. Fiedler
AN EXPENSE OF SPIRIT
I should perhaps begin by telling you that I am accus–
tomed to live, as it were, with my left hand. It is not impossible
that you have seen, through the flawed glass window of the shop
where I work, my back bent toward some customer in the meaningless
similitude of worship. You will have seen our mouths moving and
our gestures: mine pleading, the customer's assured and pre-emptory,
for at that moment she is queen, though queen only of me; and
you will have guessed our words, inaudible to you in the bright
shabby street. I am a shoe salesman, a shoedog my colleagues prefer
to say, too frail and timorous to work ever in the great downtown
stores, where each pants-leg is creased to an ultimate sharpness, each
skull, ferociously brushed and brilliantined, shines in the subdued light,
and the quick crackle of conviction spreads from the insolent smile,
the jaunty stride, noiseless on the thick carpeting.
Even in our shop, one of the smallest on a second-rate business
street, even behind our show-window proffering its few outmoded
styles
in
a hopeless jumble, I do not completely fit. "Please, BrandIer!"
the Boss cries to me from time to time,
((please-at
least the glasses
change! Those- those-" He can never find a word for the large
black-rimmed spectacles behind which ,my face attains a pinched
and solemn dignity that offends him.
"Try,
at least, a snappy pair
pince-nez!" But he can do nothing, for the Union protects me,
and he
is
really, in a bitter and uncomprehending way, proud of
the difference I assert.
I am a writer.
As
yet I have published nothing, and I am not
brash enough to predict that I ever shall, though I have had some
encouraging correspondence with one publisher and another, enough
to assure me that I am not wholly without merit. There
is,
you will
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