The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [31]
“What are we doing here?”
“Shopping. Get a cart, get moving.”
She does as she’s told, but as soon as she starts pushing the cart, he stops her.
“Eighty percent of shoppers turn right,” he says. “Like you just did.”
In a low voice he continues to talk as she maneuvers the cart past the produce section toward the sliced meats.
“What do you smell?”
She inhales, closing her eyes. “The flowers,” she says, opening her eyes again and looking at the small island of potted plants. “And there’s a kind of sweet, citrusy smell. I guess that’s coming from the fruit.”
“You guess wrong. Stay aware of the smells as we go.”
So what? They pipe in smells or something. Ursula already knew they probably played tricks like that. But even so, with Chas next to her, whispering conspiratorially in her ear, she finds herself walking more tentatively, as though the linoleum floor might be mined.
“Here,” he says, “watch this woman. Don’t let her see you watching.”
They pretend to price the ricotta cheeses while to their right an obese woman with a pink, shell-shocked face and a huge violet jogging suit spends two minutes comparing salamis, finally selecting the longest. Chas turns and faces Ursula squarely.
“What did that woman just put in her cart?”
“Are you going to say it’s some kind of phallic symbol?”
“Train your mind, Ursula. Don’t categorize and dismiss. Think rigorously. Look. A long stick of salami can give the illusion of security and safety because many slices can be cut from it. It’s a phallus, yes, but a phallus like none other that woman has ever known. It’s her dream phallus. It offers long-term security, not just fleeting gratification. This phallus sustains her,” he says, his tone fierce, urgent. “It lasts and lasts.”
A dream phallus. Maybe this guy really did used to be a professor of some kind. She eyes the glistening, packaged meats, mainly to avoid his nailgun eyes. They don’t look appetizing, those meats. She recalls the smell of bologna, the slimy, metallic taste of it on her tongue. Not for the first time she decides to become a vegetarian. They start moving again, the cart gliding effortlessly ahead.
“All right,” he says, “what do you smell now?”
“Coffee.”
The scent draws them into the next aisle. It comes primarily not from the prepackaged coffee but rather from the gourmet stuff in plastic dispensers.
“What’s the paradessence of coffee?” Chas asks her.
Paradessence? She came across the word essence in a couple of the marketing books she skimmed, usually attached to some glib distillation of the product’s selling points. But paradessence? What could that mean? Something paradiselike, perhaps.
She takes a shot. “I guess something about how it wakes you up, maybe. Or the way it warms you up on a cold morning.”
“Waking and warming,” Chas says. “Very close. Now think. Locate the magic. Locate the impossibility.”
“ ‘The impossibility’? I don’t know. Being warm. That’s kind of like being sleepy, I guess.”
“The paradessence of coffee is stimulation and relaxation. Every successful ad campaign for coffee will promise both of those mutually exclusive states.” Chas snaps his fingers in front of her face. “That’s what consumer motivation is about, Ursula. Every product has this paradoxical essence. Two opposing desires that it can promise to satisfy simultaneously. The job of a marketer is to cultivate this schismatic core, this broken soul, at the center of every product.”
Chas starts walking again, leaving her frozen in place. After a few steps he stops.
“What’s wrong?”
“Ice cream,” she says. The two words are no longer familiar to her ears; they sound like a foreign language.
“What? Where?”
“What’s the paradessence of ice cream?”
Chas closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “You tell me. Hint number one: Licking and sucking. Balls on wafer shafts. Twin mounds on a tray. Served with bananas and cherries.”
“Sex?”
“Eroticism, that’s half of it. Now the other half. Hint number two: Malt shops. Small towns in summertime. Running to the ice cream