Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods

LIGHTNING RODS

HELEN DeWITT

A New Directions Book

HURRICANE EDNA

One way of looking at it is that it was just an unfortunate by-product of Hurricane Edna.

If youre in sales you know that life has its ups and its downs. He was living in Eureka, Mo., a district hed been given only because nobody else wanted it, and with reason. He was supposed to be selling the Encyclopaedia Britannica to people who simply couldnt see how their lives would be transformed by instant access to the Micropaedia and the Macropaedia . He had been there six months and hadnt made a single sale.

One day it occurred to him that the problem was he was selling something people could do without. How much better to sell something people knew they needed anyway! Something that didnt make people give you weird looks! Something like vacuum cleaners. Because he just knew the problem wasnt with him. The problem wasnt even with the product. The problem was with the people.

He wasnt the kind to let grass grow under his feet, so he walked straight into the nearest Electrolux office.

Geographically speaking, it might not have been an office most people would have identified as even in the vicinity. Asked to name a state thats close to Missouri, very few people come up with Florida; those few tend to change their minds when they look at a map. Which just goes to show how easy it is to be misled by our assumptions, overlook the obvious, and jump to conclusions.

What most people assume is that you can answer a question like that just by looking at a map. And what they overlook is the fact that when you start a new job its important to give it everything youve got.

Its important to give that new job 101%, 25 hours a day, 366 days a year. You simply cant afford to have any distractions. If the reason you gave up your old job was that it was not sufficiently remunerative to enable you to meet your commitments, you may well find yourself with some debts which it would be distracting to deal with at this time. Its absolutely vital to start the new job in an area where any difficulties you may have experienced in the past are unlikely to lead to unwelcome distractions. He needed to be based in a locality presenting no foreseeable distractions, and he selected the nearest Electrolux office which would enable him to meet that need, and he walked straight in.

When youre in sales youve always got one thing to sell, and thats yourself. He walked in and started talking about what he could do for Electrolux sales and they said Youre that good. All I ask is the chance to show what I can do, he said, and they said All right, hot shot, lets see what you can do, and they gave him a district.

He familiarized himself with the product and moved to Eureka, Fla., and rented a trailer. The next day he got cracking.

By the end of the week he realized this was not going to be as easy as it looked. Because every single house he went to had the same story to tell. They already had an Electrolux, theyd bought it just after Hurricane Edna, and it was one of the best things theyd ever done. The customer would then insist on dragging out the faithful Electrolux and singing its praises. Yessir, the customer would say, reckon Ill break down before this thing does.

In fact, the place was every salesmans nightmare: a festering swamp of market saturation. A rep had come through and cleaned up in the wake of Hurricane Edna and every single item he had sold was still there in good working order.

He tried, obviously, to point out that time doesnt stand still, enhancements had been introduced, but once again Hurricane Edna blew him out of the water. The customer would explain loyally that she wouldnt dream of replacing her old model, you should have seen what we had to deal with, she would explain, the Electrolux had handled things you wouldnt normally ask of a vacuum cleaner.

He managed to make one sale to someone who had just moved into the area.

The result was that he spent a lot of time in the trailer trying to get up the energy to go out. He would lie in bed with a magazine, or sometimes he would watch a video, or sometimes he used fantasies of his own.

His first fantasy was about walls. The woman would have the upper part of her body on one side of the wall. The lower part of her body would be on the other side of the wall.

Sometimes, in fact most of the time, the upper part of the body would be fully clothed. There would be nothing to show what was going on on the other side of the wall.

Sometimes the woman would be naked from the waist down. Most of the time she would be wearing a short tight skirt that could be pushed up and underpants that could be pulled down. Sometimes he would have trouble deciding whether it was better with or without the pants. The high point was pushing the skirt slowly up to reveal a firm, tight, unsuspecting ass. Later a cock would go in and the vantage point of the fantasy would shift to the other side of the wall, where you would not know from the fully clothed upper body of the woman that a cock was hard at work on the other side of the wall. For some reason or other she would need to pretend that nothing was happening.

The problem with the fantasy was that it was hard to get the wall right. Could she be leaning across the counter of a kitchen that opened into the dining room? But then you would see what was behind her. Could there be a roll-down blind? But why would it be rolled down? And anyway you would still be able to see. Could she be leaning out an upstairs window? A partially opened window with the blind down. She stuck her head out, say, to talk to a neighbor. The window was too stiff to open any higher. Meanwhile her lodger, say, comes up behind her, slides his hands up her thighs, slides up the tight skirt, gives her an unexpected bonus on top of the rent. From the vantage point of outside the window you would see her talking brightly to a neighborbrightly but with a strained expression.

This was a solution that seemed to work at the time, and yet later he would feel dissatisfied, as if some essential ingredient of the fantasy had dropped out. Was the problem with the neighbor? Would it help if it was her boss? An important client? Or was the problem on the other side of the wall?

He would get up and go out and tackle another street. To be fair, he never once had anyone who didnt look pleased to see him. He would go up to a door and ring the bell. Someone would come to the door, and there would be the usual initial hostility when they saw it was a salesman. One mention of the word Electrolux and it was a different story.

Electrolux! the target would exclaim. Why didnt you say ? You just come right in. Now what can I get you? Coffee? Tea? A soda? Now can I interest you in something to eat? What would you say to a piece of pumpkin pie with ice cream? Or Ive got a chocolate cake. Or how about some chocolate chip cookies?

Half an hour later he would escape clutching as likely as not a little Ziploc bag of chocolate chip cookies in a sweating hand.

When he was a boy he used to wish every day was Halloween. There is an old Chinese saying: May your enemys wishes come true.

He would force himself to visit every single house on the street. Hours later, awash with coffee, stuffed with pumpkin, apple, cherry, pecan, chocolate meringue, lemon meringue, banoffee and blueberry pie, ears ringing with the praises of the Electrolux and stirring stories of its battles after Hurricane Edna, he would make his way back to the trailer, stopping only to pick up a magazine or two.