FICTION
Paul Breslow
ROMANCE OF THE BUYER
We were buying everywhere those days: what had begun
in a roadside shed ended ... in a city, in triumph, in renewal. Cities
are made for buyers. They glow in the center of my vision; and their
light is the sum of benign attracting marvels, the aura of all a buyer
could obtain, the radiance of offerings (and the promise of attach–
ments) falling upon the buyer's inner eye.
I celebrate the city, I said aloud. I celebrate its appliances and
forms, beauties and cargoes, durables and elations . The meaning of
buying will come clear in the city.
You buy the way you feel, Annette said, and you feel the way
you buy. She wet the tip of a finger on her tongue and traced the
curve of her eyebrows. Where's the whale gone? she asked. Why
can't I see the whale?
We were standing on an outdoor deck, overlooking the whale
pool, at the New York Aquarium. The first session of the Web of
Buyers would begin in a few hours, in Manhattan, in the hotel we
had left to escape, for a while, from the crowds. I had been assured
that there were crowds, but I had failed to see them.
I don't despise the starting place, I said. They sold forage sor–
ghum seed, bayberry tallow, Mason jars. I liked the place.
Annette moved a few steps away from me, holding on to the
topmost piperail, as if for safety on a rolling ship.
It was only a shack, I said, set down upon the ground like a
table, without subsurface foundations . There was a deeper earthi–
ness, I recalled, in some of its merchandise: links in the food chain,
digging tools with spare handles, substances for use in cesspools,
vermin repellents. These were commodities rightly called
goods,
and
I respected them, but I found it difficult to buy them. Many of them
were essentially replacements, and I had never owned anything that
they could replace. Worse yet, I began to believe that I was sur–
rounded by emblems of other people's needs. I bought a dozen Mason
jars; and later that day I began the campaign.
We can't see the whale, I said, because it's in its element.
