Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  He didn’t have that kind of money.

  They knew that. They suspected that. Why didn’t they do this then? Why didn’t they take out an option to buy the unit?

  Harris broke in. “Give it to him straight. The heir here wants to hear lump sums.”

  “We’ll give you six thousand dollars for an option,” Fanon said. This would wipe out his father’s debt, with enough left over to take care of the maintenance payments while the will was being probated. Then, when he had clear title, they would pay him fifty thousand dollars, less the six they had advanced on the option.

  “What about the furnishings?”

  “Well, that’s what the extra five thousand is for.”

  “That stuff cost my father twenty.”

  “Go sell it.” Harris said. “See what you’d get.”

  “I’m getting screwed. It’s a ridiculous offer. You’re offering me fifty thousand for sixty-five thousand dollars’ worth of apartment, then taking back six thousand for maintenance.” It was true, but strangely he did not feel its truth. He had a sense of the awful depreciation in things. He understood—or rather, understood that there was no understanding—the crazy fluctuations in value. It was as if a spirit resided and moved in objects, tossing and turning, a precarious health in things, irregular, fluxy as pulse and temperature and the blood chemistries. The market went up and it went down. Rhetoric feebly tried to account for the unaccountable, but its arguments were always as whacky as the defenses of alchemy, elaborate as theories of assassination. Value’s laws were undiscoverable, undemonstrable finally, as the notion of life on distant planets. (When he was still lecturing, hadn’t he once paid a thousand a month for a cottage on Cape Cod which couldn’t have cost more than ten thousand to build? In those days, didn’t his own fees vary anywhere from one to three hundred dollars a night for the same lecture?) Perhaps nothing more than mood lay at the bottom of it all. They were cheating him, but there was nothing personal in it, and he did not feel badly used. He turned down their offer anyway.

  Harris considered him evenly. “You owe me two thousand one hundred dollars. If you have already remitted, kindly disregard.”

  “I’ll pay,” Preminger said.

  Harris shrugged and took off his yarmulke.

  “I’m moving in,” Preminger said. It hadn’t occurred to him till he said it. He knew his life was changed. “Mr. Fanon?”

  “Yes?”

  “Were you the one who called me?”

  Fanon nodded.

  “Did you make these funeral arrangements?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Another two thousand?”

  “More like three.”

  “I’ll pay,” he said. “I’ll pay whatever I’m supposed to.” He felt valetudinarian. A graceful lassitude. All he wanted was to be in bed in his father’s apartment. Thank God, he thought, he had the key. They would have to kill him to take it from him. His life was altered. Later he would make the arrangements. Everything would go smoothly. A life like his, even an altered one, could be lived in Montana or in Chicago. It made no difference.

  A limousine called for him on Sunday and took him, the only passenger, to the chapel. Then he rode alone in it to the cemetery. For a time he tried to speak to the driver, miles forward of him in the strange car, but the man’s perfect manners and funereal deference made it difficult. Preminger turned oddly condolent by the man’s performance, attempted to reassure him and said a strange thing: “It’s all right. I’m not tumbled by grief. My father and I weren’t close these last years. I’m from out of town. Someone else made these arrangements. I’m not overcome or anything.”

  “You don’t know what you are,” the driver answered.

  So instead of talking he took stock of the appointments in the Cadillac, the individual air-conditioning controls, the electric windows and a panel in the door beside him that slid back to reveal a cigar lighter. There were three separate reading lights in the back. What was curious about luxury was the low opinion it gave you of yourself because you had not anticipated your needs as cleverly as people who did not even know you. He could not get used to the stern ideals manifest in the car’s appointments. This is what some people expect, he thought, and felt depressed not only because he did not expect these things himself but because he could not think of anyone he knew who did. The driver, casually using the strange gauges and controls which to Preminger, spying them from the distant back seat, were as complicated as instruments in remote technologies, seemed unconscious of the car. They could have been riding in a ’58 Chevy.

  Then he knew what was so awful. How comfortable he was—as if master upholsterers had taken his measure, fitting the car to him more perfectly than any chair he’d ever sat in. The climate was equally perfect, post-card temperature, the low humidity of deep sleep. Subtle adjustments had been made for his clothing, all that he carried in his pockets, where his hair thinned revealing scalp, environment molding itself to him, to the skin of his wrists and his ankles within their light sheath of stocking, to his toes in their woody envelope of shoe. It was as if his chemistry were known, published like secret papers. Someone had a fix on him. Though they rode in silence, the sounds of the thick traffic outside velvetized to mellow plips and hisses, he felt seduced by arguments. He could literally have ridden like this forever. He wanted never to reach the cemetery, always to follow his father’s hearse through the traffic of the world, the limousine’s headlights shining in broad day, a signal, right of way theirs like something constitutional.

  On the way back his mood shifted, and he struggled to recover it, feeling nostalgia for that hour’s ride to the cemetery. When the driver opened his door in the driveway of South Tower he told Preminger to wait—it was almost a command—and unlocked the trunk of the car. “This is for you,” he said, extending a manila envelope. “The deed to the plot’s in there, and the death certificate and contract with the cemetery. Wait a minute.” He walked behind the car again. “Here’s your yahrzeit, here’s your bench.” He handed Marshall a jelly glass of wax gray as old snow. A tip of wick grew like a poor plant through the surface of the wax. Then he gave him a sort of cardboard bench.

  “What’s this?”

  “For sitting shivah,” the driver said.

  Marshall took the bench and held it up. It was very light. He could see notches marked A and B, dotted lines, a legend that said FOLD HERE. A sort of wood grain was printed on one surface of the cardboard like the corky flecks on a cigarette filter. “It’s paper,” he said indignantly.

  “Low center of gravity,” the driver said. “It’ll support three hundred pounds.”

  Upstairs he placed the bench beside the television set in the living room, across from his father’s leather couch, and put the yahrzeit candle unlit on top of the refrigerator, where he remembered seeing one when his parents mourned. He wondered if he intended to sit shivah.

  Someone knocked. A woman stood at the front door in a long housecoat, holding a bowl of water. “I apologize,” she said breathlessly. “This should have been outside the door when you got back from the cemetery.”

  “What is it?”

  “You wash your hands. You’re supposed to do it before you go in the house. It’s just a ceremony, it’s only a ritual,” she said, excusing either him for not knowing or herself for bringing it too late. She held the bowl out to him. “Just splash your hands. To tell you the truth, I need the bowl back.” He dipped his hands in the water. “I’ll see you later,” she said.

  Back in the apartment he sat down on the low bench, his knees as high as his chest in a vague gynecological displacement. All around him his father’s new furniture glowed seductively. He thought of himself as bereft, shipwrecked, settled at sea on a spar, or on—at last—the desert island of his propositions. He had brought nothing with him; he’d had nothing to bring. Such speculations as those in his lecture were no game (he would amend the lecture), but the dream inventory of the already abandoned. What such people di
d to pass time, scheduling desires like trains, had somehow filtered down, returned like bottles to civilization. Perhaps he thought as criminals thought, longing out like cards on the table, his lists the ordered priorities of such fellows, the idle bookkeeping of the shitty condition.

  Yet even he had options. He could quit his bench, turn the place back into the good hotel it had been the night before—or even accept sixty-two cents on the dollar and get out entirely. Or try for more. (Like all ultimatums and binds, the management’s was riddled with loopholes.) How free the will! Till the moment of death how open-ended a man’s life! It was at last astonishing that there was so much suffering, so little revenge. Sit shivah? Why, he should stand it tiptoe, climb all over it. He was in his father’s skin now, plunging into Pop’s deepest furniture, but all along the attraction had been that it was someone else’s, that he’d been granted the dearest opportunity of his life—to quit it, a suicide who lived to tell the tale. (But to whom?) Wrapping himself in another’s life as a child rolls himself in blankets or crawls beneath beds to alter geography. But where was everybody? When would the doorbell ring?

  Answering his wish, as if his new freedom brought with it special powers, it actually did ring. Just before he opened the door he pulled off his shoes, remembering that he was supposed to mourn in stockinged feet, and rushed to ignite the yahrzeit. Dressed now, the woman who had brought him the bowl was standing there. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have to speak with you.”

  “Come in.”

  Closing the door behind her, she stepped into the apartment and looked around. “I’m sorry about your father,” she said nervously. Preminger nodded solemnly. Though he’d never seen her before her brief errand, there was something familiar about her. A large woman in perhaps her early forties, she wore her hair in a weighty golden beehive and seemed as imposing as the hostess in a restaurant, a woman men kidded warily. He could see her with big menus in her hand and wondered if she was a widow. She was the age of the men and women who’d been his parents’ friends when he was in high school, in that long-gone postwar prime time when his father earned more than he ever had before or since, when his parents had begun to take vacations in the winter—Miami, cruises to the Caribbean, others that grazed South America’s long coast, nibbling Caracas, Tobago, Cayenne. Seeing this woman, he recalled those trips, how proud he’d been of his parents, how proud of the Philco console television and Webcor wire recorder and furniture and fur and stock brochures that had poured into their home in those days, a high tide of goods and services, a full-time maid and a second car, his father’s custom suits, his mother’s diamonds lifted from their settings and turned into elaborate cocktail rings like the tropical headgear of chorus girls in reviews. It was at this time that there had begun to appear new friends, this woman’s age, people met on cruises, in Florida, at “affairs” to which his parents had eagerly gone, bar mitzvahs and weddings—he’d seen the checks, for fifty or a hundred dollars, made out to the sons and daughters of their new friends, children they’d never met—and dinner dances where his father pledged two or three hundred whatever the cause. Proud of all the checks his father wrote, of all the charities to which they subscribed—to fight rare diseases, to support interfaith schools, the Haganah, the Red Cross, Schweitzer, Boys Town, the Fund for the Rosenbergs, the Olympic Games Committee, the Democratic Party and Community Chest—proud of his parents’ whimsical generosity that bespoke no philosophy save the satisfaction of any need, the payment of any demand.

  Indeed, in a curious way he associated their new prosperity (they’d always been prosperous but this was something else) with the appearance of these new friends, a cadre of big handsome men in glowing custom suits, white-on-white shirts. He recalled the monograms stitched into their breast pockets exposed at poker tables, the elaborate thin blue calligraphy closing in on itself in sweeping strokes and loops, their thriving wives. (Had people ever been that happy?) Liquor was served as once fruit had been (though fruit was still served, great overflowing bowls on the coffee and end tables), and coffee cakes baked to order like birthday cakes, and the coffee itself from tall, glistening electric warmers, from Silex and Chemex—it was coffee’s Industrial Revolution—a whole range of new and marvelous machines. Prouder still of his parents’ hospitality, a streak of it in them a mile wide, that sent him on a hundred errands, around the corner, down to the drugstore to lay in when they’d run out five hundred aspirin for the headache of a single guest, that authorized his rare use of the car to fetch their friends and even their friends’ friends from airports and train stations. Where had that hospitality, in his parents so punctilious, gone in him? To what had it been reduced? As the woman stood before him now he could think of nothing so much as of where he would get fruits to give her, coffee, luscious cake to swallow. He felt shamed, consternated, like someone caught out in farce, wondering in these first seconds how he could stall her while he phoned delicatessens, sent messages to appetizer shops to bring back treats.

  He threw himself upon her mercy.

  “I’ve nothing to serve you.”

  “I’m on Weight Watchers.”

  “I don’t even know if there’s bouillon. I haven’t been cooking.”

  “It isn’t important,” she said. “At a time like this it’s us who should be doing for you.” Suddenly she moved forward and took him in her arms; then, astonishingly, this brisk woman of the earlier errand began to sob hysterically. By stepping forward she had reversed their roles. He pressed her against him, thinking, I can’t give her grapes, but I’ll stand here and let her hang on. Was this dignity, he wondered? The comforted comforting. Was he Ethel Kennedy reassuring a shaken Andy Williams, Coretta King grim and brave at the peace rallies?

  “There, there,” he said.

  Tall as himself, the woman buried her running nose in his ear. His ear was no tangerine, but surely this was hospitality of a sort too. She gripped him fiercely and moaned and he pressed her harder and patted her back and moved her hair with his hand, and before he knew it he had an erection. Could she feel it? He extricated himself gently. “I’m going back to my mourner’s bench,” he said. The woman blew her nose in her handkerchief and moved to the neutral corner of his father’s sofa. There she continued to sob, though more quietly now. He waited politely and thought, surprising himself, that this had been his first sexual contact in a long time. And with a woman who, though at the most only five or six years older than himself, was in his mind the physical and spiritual counterpart of those guests of his parents when he was in high school, and so through some trick of associative displacement was old enough to be his mother. He recalled how those women had pleased him, inspired his lusts, their laughter over cards overheard through his bedroom door open just a crack (concupiscent, their mah-jongg concentration in its sheer physical huddle; beneath the folding card table their stockinged knees would be touching) sending him signals like whores in daylight gossiping in kitchens or doing their nails, and he blushing simply to overhear recipes recited, as though those treats they prepared for their husbands were code for the exotic movements they made in their beds. He understood why they appealed to him, coming as they did into his parents’ lives with his father’s rising fortunes, their presence associated with the TV, and the new gadgets and the other merchandise. Perhaps his own low-level sexuality had to do with being broke, his hard-on—another odd displacement only now subsiding—with his being in his father’s house again. Which made him an Oedipus of the domestic for whom jealous of his father’s place meant just that: place.

  “May we speak?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was such a shock to all your father’s neighbors, to all his…friends.”

  He nodded gravely, hoping to say something that would spark additional condolences, suddenly needing to hear them, to encourage the proper—all forms of regret were proper, always in season, like basic black—as a necessary
aspect of his position, not hiding in commonplaces so much as seeking circuits in them.

  He cleared his throat and began.

  “Well, one thing—he certainly lived a full life.”

  “Fifty-nine? Fifty-nine is a full life?”

  “I mean he lived life to the brim. Each day was a new possibility. He got pleasure out of things. He never lost his curiosity about life. That’s why he retired young, I think. To give himself a chance to feel new things. Always to keep on discovering, keep on learning.”

  “He didn’t know what to do with himself.”

  “He took pleasure in the apartment. The way he fixed it up.”

  “The bills beat his brains in.”

  “He passed in his sleep,” he said. “Painlessly?” he added uncertainly.

  “Who’s to know?” she said. “When your heart falls downstairs you probably feel it pretty good.”

  “At least he couldn’t have suffered long,” Preminger said.

  “He died alone. If you’re alone when something like that hits you, you get plenty scared.”

  Out of commonplaces, Marshall shrugged and sat silently.

  “I like to think,” she said finally, dropping her devil’s advocacy, “that at least his last months weren’t entirely all that terrible. There could have been a little sweetness. Toward the end. Frankly, that’s why I’m here.”

  “I see.”

  “Not the only reason, of course,” she added hurriedly. “If there’s anything I can do don’t hesitate to ask me.”

  “That’s very kind, Mrs.—”

  “Riker.”

  “Mrs. Riker.” He’d been in Chicago two days and was beginning to understand that there were things people could help him with. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “there is something. I don’t have my car yet and don’t know the neighborhood. Do you drive? Maybe tomorrow or the next day you could take me around to the supermarket and I can lay in some supplies. I mean when you go shopping. I don’t want you to make a special trip. I could go with you, perhaps.”