Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  Preminger nodded.

  “So when I say participate, I mean participate,” Salmi said. “It ain’t all sweetness and it ain’t all light, and all worlds go broke and every hope wears a thin tread and punctures like a tire. The forecast is not terrific and the times they are a-changing. What happened to Dad, my dear young orphan, happens also on a scale so massive as to be incomprehensible to finite minds like ours. Death is built into the universe like windows in walls.”

  Moved, Preminger sat silently on the rug. He was not embarrassed by the speech. None of them were; he heard them breathing, sighing, felt the calm induced by truth. No one hurried to break the silence Salmi had shaped. Here, at last, was his father’s eulogy, the shivah perfected. If he hadn’t thought they would take it as a stunt he would have crawled to the mourner’s bench and sat on it.

  “But cheer up,” Salmi said quietly, “take heart, my friends. Land maybe ho, my good Marshall. If all is losing, all’s not yet lost. We’re organized. We gamble against the house—do you like the joke?—but we’re informed of the odds. Most of them”—he indicated the residents throughout the buildings—“think we’re too self-important, ‘Squeak squeak,’ they say for Mickey Mouse. ‘Neigh,’ they go for horseshit, our neighbors and neighsayers. But perhaps we haven’t explained ourselves properly. We may not have made ourselves clear.”

  “Trust the people,” Mrs. Ornfeld said.

  Salmi turned fiercely to Morris Barney. “You could write an editorial. I’ve told you this a hundred times. Lay it on the line, let them know. Wake them up!”

  “My press is free,” Barney said.

  “Yeah, yeah, sure.”

  “They don’t want to read that stuff, Herb.”

  Salmi turned back to Preminger. “Well, I’m an old war-horse,” he said apologetically. “I make these speeches. Look, there are committees—Entertainment, Activities, the newspaper. A few like Buildings and Grounds and Units and Budget are largely watchdog to see that the management keeps up its share of the bargain. But there are others—the Good Neighbors, Emergency, Security, Education. New Residents I foresee will soon be absorbed, since we’re one hundred percent occupied. My colleagues have mimeographed sheets which explain the function of these committees. They’ll leave them with you. You’ll look them over. Sixty-one,” he said wearily. “The median age in this room is that. It feels like ninety. Oh, boy. Oh, well. Read the stuff. Think and study. See where your talents lead you.”

  “I will.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “Thirty-seven,” Salmi said. “You’re the youngest resident, you know that? Younger even than the children of the two couples whose children still live with them.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah,” President Salmi said, “you’re the hope of the future, the new generation.”

  “Was my father on a committee? Is that why there’s an opening?” Preminger asked. “Do you want me to carry on his work?”

  “Your father was here for the ride. He rode us piggyback.”

  “I’d like to do some special pleading,” Morris Barney said. “My understanding is that Marshall is studying for his doctorate. He probably has a flair for writing. I could use a guy like that on the paper.”

  “Not so fast,” Mrs. Ehrlmann said, “a college man’s natural place would be on my Education committee.”

  “Thirty-seven and built like a horse,” someone else said, “a shoe-in for Security.”

  “I have a heart condition,” Preminger told the husky man who had spoken.

  “I hoped this wouldn’t happen,” Salmi said. “Let’s not bum’s-rush this man. It’s enough right now to get a commitment of interest from him. Are you interested?”

  “I am,” Preminger said earnestly. “It’s a question of where I’ll be able to do the most good.”

  “Sleep on it, Marshall,” Salmi, rising, said.

  “I will, but I think I can give you assurances now.” It sounded grand. Such words had never been in his mouth before. He could taste them. He could give assurances, pledges, wheeling and dealing in the stocks and bonds of the civil. He spoke from the highest plateau of the civic and formal. Men in groups, he’d noticed—till now he’d never been one—no matter their private status or lack of it, regardless of their ordinary one-on-one style, often spoke with a fluency that surfaced like submarines in the middles of seas. Where did they come from, these facts at the blunt fingertips, these figures sitting on the tongue like names and primary colors, all the law-court style like foreign language converted in dreams? Were we political then, our causes and positions mysterious and concealed and only waiting on us to be revealed at rallies and assemblies, or even in mobs? He’d thrilled to the articulate accounts of eyewitnesses breathed into microphones offered like cigarettes, to all the passionate summations of the rank and file and spiels of the momentarily possessed, fearing in their charmed patter only the failure of his own. How had he, thrity-seven, a Ph.D. candidate and heart patient—yes, you’d think that would count for something, add at least to his vocabulary of pain and fear—waiting on his next attack (and an ex-seventeen-thousand-dollar-a-year lecturer at that, though the lectures had all carefully been worked out in private and delivering them had involved no more than simply reading aloud), managed to avoid his share of public speaking? Why had there been no issues in his life? “I think I can give you assurances now,” he repeated, trying to stand. He loved whoever loved him. If there was fury in him, vengeance and retaliation like the wound springs and coils in bombs, there was also gratitude—what they offered was rebuff’s sweet opposite—and eye-for-an-eye obligation like a perfect bookkeeping. He stood before them and held his hands like pans in a scale. “It isn’t a question of sleeping on it. All that’s at issue is which committee can make the most of me, of whatever minimal talents I possess. Later this evening I intend to put through a long-distance call to a colleague in Montana. I shall ask him to forward my belongings to my Chicago address—this as an earnest of my commitment to make a life here.

  “You may not, however, be aware of the exact status of my proprietorship in Harris Towers, and I feel under a certain obligation to apprise you of it. In all fairness, I am not yet technically an owner—nor shall I be until my father’s will has been probated. Shirley Fanon has apprised me, however, that my prospects are positive, and that so long as I occupy these premises and fulfill my financial obligations to the condominium, I enjoy the full rights of surrogacy.” They looked a little restless. He tried again. “Before you go,” he said, “I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let me try to thank you. You’ve shown your kindness by coming here tonight. I haven’t given you coffeecake or offered you drinks or any of the hospitality I’m certain I would have received at your hands in your homes. The cupboard is bare. Whatever I had your Emergency Fund Committee provided and it’s all gone. I plead lassitude.”

  Now they seemed not only restless but uneasy. He couldn’t help himself; he couldn’t stop. “I’ve lived provisionally here,” he said. “Like someone under military government, martial law, an occupied life. This isn’t going as I meant it to. I’m a stranger—that’s something of what I’m driving at. My life is a little like being in a foreign country. There’s displaced person in me. I feel—listen—I feel…Jewish. I mean even here, among Jews, where everyone’s Jewish, I feel Jewish. Does that make sense? Something in me was left out. Damn. I mean, why is it that the only place I can think to be, to live, is here? I mean, you just told me: I’m the youngest of nine hundred thirty-eight people. It isn’t as if I earned this place the way the rest of you did. Or even had it in my mind as a goal. I saw it once with my father when it was still a hole in the ground. To tell you the truth, I didn’t trust it. I thought it was like buying property in a swamp, that my dad was being taken and the buildings would never go up. I thought it was a scheme. I didn’t like the looks of the coat of arms sewn on the salesmen’s jackets. I have no good imagination,” he said.
“Nobody cheats me, but I feel it coming. But what Dr. Salmi said about the possibilities here, that was very meaningful to me. I want to do my share. I will do my share.” He looked around to see if they had understood him. No one seemed to know what to say.

  Dr. Salmi did. “It ain’t the All-Star Game,” he said. “It ain’t church. We see to it there are no fire hazards, that people, they throw a party in the party room, are responsible for cleaning the place up afterwards.”

  “Yes,” Preminger said, “that’s what I want.”

  “That the grandkids come for a visit they don’t scream in the halls and run the elevator all day up and down so you can’t get it when you need it.”

  “Of course.”

  “That the bricks don’t come down on our heads when we walk by outside.”

  “Yes.”

  “That people park only in the space assigned them and the guy who plays accordion for our dances takes a ten-minute break, ten minutes, no more, every hour on the hour. That the newsprint for the paper comes wholesale from a friend’s cousin and a good chlorine level is maintained in the pool at all times.”

  “Sure,” Preminger said.

  “That we got a community here and an investment to protect,” President Salmi said, his eyes fixed narrowly on Preminger, “and that when someone sells he sells to the right sort—no Chinks, no PR’s, no spades.”

  When they left he put their mimeographed sheets aside, wanting neither to throw them away nor to find a place for them—like his father’s, the dead man’s mail, which continued to come.

  For a week or more he gave himself over to the chores involved in setting up a household. He wrote letters to his bank in Montana and closed down his account, arranging for a cashier’s check to be sent him. He consulted with Shirley Fanon about the steps he’d initiated to probate his father’s will. He called the phone and electric companies and had everything put in his name. He stocked up at the supermarket and bought some clothes. He packed his father’s things away and put up a notice on the bulletin board in the game room saying that whoever wanted anything of his father’s could come up, look through the stuff and take away what he needed. (First he’d checked with Fanon to see if it was legal. “Sure,” the lawyer told him, “none of that’s in the inventory. Give it all away if you want.”) No one came for three days. Then an old man showed up who did not even live in the building. He had ridden buses, he said—an hour and a half from the Southwest Side. How had the notice come to his attention? Preminger never understood. He had brought shopping bags, and Preminger helped him to fold his father’s expensive clothing, the nifty bellbottoms and wallpaper prints, the psychedelic ties and turtlenecks and wide belts and leather vests, into them. He had to give the old man carfare to go home.

  He rode buses himself, down to the near North Side or out to Lake Shore Drive or up to Evanston, occasionally drifting even further, to Chicago’s gilt-edged northern suburbs, Winnetka and Wilmette and Kenilworth, all those expensive citadels which simply to see triggered wonder at the immense wealth in America, at the vast depth on its bench. Who were these people? How could they have gotten so much money? How could there be so many of them? Their homes made his mouth water. They looked like fraternity houses, country clubs, embassies. Tudorial, stately, with high green hedges and curving driveways like painterly exercises in perspective. Blue Lake Michigan sucking up to their backyards. Attached to their carriage houses and wide garages were basketball hoops, gleaming cat’s cradles of white net, taut and tapered as hourglasses. He imagined lean, expert girls in blue jeans, home from Radcliffe, Holyoke, Smith, setting them up, pushing them in, playing Horse and 21, with their tan, continent boyfriends who had once been pages in the Senate. The cropped lawns, green as felt on gaming tables, made him gulp, and an occasional sound from the swimming pool of splashing water like polite applause made his heart turn over. Lake Michigan and a pool. Twice, when he saw strings of Chinese lanterns set out for parties, he had to shut his eyes.

  He came to shop, it being simply good sense, he told himself, as immutable as that rule of the highway that one eats where the trucks are standing, that one should buy where the rich do, go to their bakers and butchers, find out how they come by their vegetables and which fruits they are eating. (And it could be justified economically. Weren’t things more expensive in the slums? Wouldn’t a single Rolls-Royce, properly cared for, last all one’s life, mellowing, blooming with use, ever perfecting itself, cheaper in the long run than the three Fords, two Chevies, pair of Dodges, one Pontiac, two Buicks and trio of Oldsmobiles that was the average man’s portion?) But the fiction that he had come merely to shop wore thin, though to preserve it he always brought something back with him—a Black Forest chocolate cake, a Spanish melon, tins of Dutch herring, Russian caviar, pickled rinds. Now, when he went on these excursions, he went obsessively, growing angry and genuinely dangerous.

  He had been safer in Missoula. Even if it had its better neighborhoods and occasional mansion, Missoula was still the West, where wealth was expressed in land no man could walk in a day, and which, for all its vastness, looked no different square yard for square yard—perhaps poorer, actually—than the place where one lay down one’s picnic, and where the stores were franchises one had grown up with: Penney’s, Woolworth’s, Rexall’s and Howard Johnson’s, a two-bit Hanseatic democracy of the ordinary. Chicago was different in kind. In the neighborhoods filled with their Village and Paoli and Chelsea chic that he tramped through, Chicago grieved him, tore at his spirit and opened old wounds he was helpless to stanch. He roamed Rush Street, Old Town, Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue like someone seeking pornography, desire and need clobbering his spirit, drooling before the lush goods in the shop windows, eyeing the young housewives and fashionable women like a soiled madman. He was jealous of the well-dressed children, envying them their door-manned prerogatives and elevator buildings and begrudging them what he imagined would be their French and their quick minds, their nannies and good manners. A sycophant, whenever one bumped into him he apologized, diseased at the figure he cut in front of them. He walked lasciviously past brownstones, studio apartments, tall high-rises beehived with bachelor pads, the shared flats of stewardesses, young lawyers, radio announcers, journalists and photographers, sketching in their perfect taste and lovely freedom, their ease as they idly drummed a steering wheel, double-parked in small, open convertibles, persuaded of their ability with wine, their stereophonics and terrific records. (Tapes; they would be tapes now.) In a leathercraft shop he was annoyed with himself because, unlike the slim owner in the jeans and turtleneck, he was not a homosexual. He watched the young man greet a woman just returned from Europe, looked on as, laughing and talking, the faggot embraced her. Why, he likes her, he thought, he really likes her. Yet she doesn’t mean a thing to him. See how his eyes were open when he kissed her. Mine would have been shut tight and my cock would have been out to here. He hated himself because he was not artistic, light, healthy, easy. If such a girl kissed me I would ask her to marry me.

  For more than a week he went to such sections of the city, hunting them like a ghost, restless, yet coveting tweed rather than flesh, wools and leathers more than body and form. Perhaps he yearned for an encounter, but in their bars and cocktail lounges he was silent. Nothing happened, he had no adventure, and after the first strong flush of sexuality he was as before—as he had been all his life—calmly admiring, sedately appreciative, his very hopelessness satisfying his lust by quenching it, by stripping him of illusions and granting him a sort of amnesty. All his life he had disposed of his sexuality this way. His tastes and greeds kept him single, fashion’s narrow bigot.

  In despair he turned back to the condominium, hopeful of a ride with Mrs. Riker to the High-Low, the Stop-’n-Shop, the I.G.A., washed up on the condominium as on some shabby strand of the average. Never letting on and nursing his grudge like a gent, but for all that some wild and even noble revolutionary instinct smoldering in him. It wasn’t fair, it wasn
’t right. Why couldn’t he have the things he wanted to have instead of the things—and those in probate—he had? Secretly he was niggered, chinkified, PR’d. If President Salmi knew his thoughts he’d find a way to break the will.

  While the cupboard filled and he waited for his possessions from Missoula, he occupied his time by examining libraries—Northwestern’s was not far—purchasing stocks of paper, ballpoint pens, pencils, a new dictionary, a thesaurus. He priced electric typewriters. He even began to work up some ideas for a new lecture—on condominiums—and though he actually wrote about a dozen pages (perhaps twenty or so minutes of platform time), he worked desultorily and with no conviction that he would ever finish it. Indeed, he was more conscious of himself than ever. He knew he was lonely and began to miss his father, fantasizing a dignified life for the two of them in the apartment together. Actually he knew more people here than in Missoula. What had his life been like there? The same, he decided, certainly the same, yet somehow he hadn’t noticed. Maybe this was a good sign. Perhaps unhappiness wakes you up, a signal to the spirit like a chronic cough. All right, he was up.

  He wondered how he’d managed to pass time since his heart attack. If he really was awake at last, then didn’t that make him a sort of Rip Van Winkle? Had he slept twenty years? Who’d robbed him in the night, then, of the beard he’d earned in his long sleep? How did he recognize the cars? Why was he not astonished by the jets circling his head in their holding patterns above O’Hare? Why weren’t the styles strange to him, the length of women’s skirts and the cut of men’s pants? How did he know the name of the President, and why didn’t television frighten him? In aspects other than the impersonal he was a true amnesiac, the public life realer to him than his own. Here he was, a thirty-seven-year-old graduate student—how did he know his age? who’d been keeping track of it for him?—lacking only his thesis for his Ph.D. in…what? (He knew, but could not remember why he’d gone into the field. He had no interest in it. He was no scholar. The collapse of the job market had been the one fortunate aspect of his academic career. Why impose him as a teacher on students who probably had more interest in his subject than he had?) He was certain only that he had been no better off in Missoula than he was in Chicago. It was solely this which kept him from returning there at once.