Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  “Why?”

  “He pulled out. He sees it isn’t for him.”

  “What happened? What did you do?”

  Salmi smiled. “I said there’d be a whispering campaign. I told him I’d tell people that what he really introduced was ‘She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’—real golden oldies. I said I’d let everyone know he’s incontinent, that he makes weewee in the swimming pool. That even if he managed to save you he’d pee all over you.”

  “Jesus,” said Preminger. “The Making of the Lifeguard, 1971.”

  “Don’t worry about it. They didn’t really want him. He was the sentimental favorite. When you get to be our age, sonny, you can’t always bring yourself to violate your feelings.”

  So Preminger, newly orphaned Montana scholar, the faint smell of smoke from the back room still lingering in his nostrils, through bald power plays released a college boy to return to active duty and at thirty-seven years of age and for the duration of a capricious heat spell, became the duly elected lifeguard pro tem of the Harris Towers Condominium on the North Side of Chicago. It was the first elected position he had ever held, his single incumbency and, he had to admit, his best prospect, the only game in town.

  What was astonishing to him was how quickly and completely he assumed the badges of his office, how comfortable they made him feel and how powerful. He’d had hints of something like it before: several summers back, on his one trip to Europe, he’d left his hotel and been wandering the streets of Rome when, turning a corner, he’d come suddenly upon the Colosseum. He’d seen pictures of it, but always before he’d merely glossed its reality, the Colosseum as a possibility not actually registering; yet there it really was in the street, as anything might have been in the street; it wasn’t—this struck him as odd—even guarded; he might have pulled off a piece of one of its shaggy stones and slipped it in his pocket and gone off with it, a piece of the actual, honest-to-God Colosseum in his pocket. Important things actually existed and they had the effect on you they were supposed to have, a Lourdes efficacy in nature and history that was astonishing; yet one rarely took the fabulous enough for granted. He discovered afresh how vulnerable, like all men, he was to play, to signs and the simple power of images, what tremendous realities adumbrated in a toy. Strap a holster about your waist and the body automatically adjusts, the center of gravity shifts, the pelvis boasts and you sway, lope, bowleggedness in the centers of the brain. Sing sea chanteys in a canoe and feel love’s moods in parks.

  There really was a whistle. There really was a high wooden platform chair with a beach umbrella blooming from it. There were sun lotions and mysterious silver pastes for the cheekbone beneath each eye, like the warpaint of Indians. There were quires of Turkish towels, neatly folded and giving off from their stacks a sort of glowing energy like that which came from place settings in restaurants before anyone has eaten. There were sunglasses for the King of the State Troopers. There was a first-aid kit. In it were bandages, adhesive, Atabrine tablets, salt tablets, smelling salts, Mercurochrome, iodine, salves seasoned with antibiotics. There was a syringe and, God help him, a hypodermic already fitted with a single ampoule of morphine. There was digitalis.

  He sat on his high platform and surveyed the pool, his eyes sharp, his concentration immense. He might have been riding shotgun in a helicopter over the Pacific hunting astronauts, or in a small plane above the Alaskan tundra looking for survivors. Or he strode along the pool’s concrete apron—his feet wet, slapping down smart footprints as he went along—or occasionally stooped, hunkered down, lowering his hand into the seemingly blue water to palm a handful and draw it toward his mouth, licking his tongue into it like a dog to taste the chlorine level. (Though they had an agreement. A janitor saw to the actual maintenance of the pool, while Preminger reserved the right to spray down its concrete deck with the hose.) His great pleasure made him guarded, suspicious of himself, wary lest he abuse the authority to which he had so quickly and luxuriously adapted. Not only religious, he thought, not only God-fearing, but at rock bottom an incipient Fascist as well! What a rogue! I must vow to use my power for good.

  And he actually made some such vow, determining to play ball with the residents, to look the other way when they brought drinking glasses down to the pool, things to nosh—strictly forbidden—or when they went in without first using the footbath. On his own initiative he even suspended Sunday rules from time to time and told oldsters whose grandchildren had come to visit them that he would admit them to the pool. He was a stickler for water safety only—something which, with these old-timers, was not a problem anyway. Bridge and kalooky players, mahjongg enthusiasts (there was something curiously Oriental in the way they silently passed the tiles back and forth to each other, studiously picking over the ivory like children examining pieces of Lego) did not chase each other around the outside of the pool or push one another into the water. They did not leap two and three and four from the diving board or play Cannonball, jumping up and clasping their knees to their stomachs to pounce upon the heads of the other swimmers. In fact, they did not even go into the water much—once in the morning, perhaps, to wade in the shallow end and maybe again in the afternoon to tread water for a while and get their suits wet. A few of the more ambitious women and some of the men would occasionally dog-paddle or sidestroke a length or two of the pool, but except for these times when Preminger was all business it was pretty much a sinecure. With their cooperation, born of age and of that in them which was inflexibly sedentary, he managed to run a pretty tight swimming pool.

  Only the grandchildren, infrequent visitors now that school had begun, gave him any trouble, and on these he unleashed all the authority he could muster, in fact all that with their grandparents he had kept stifled out of a deference not so much to their age as to his own character. With these children, however, awed as he was by his responsibility for their safety, he was ruthless, discovering in his shouted instructions and commands, and in the pitch of the whistle he blew at them, a barely controlled hysteria. “Out of the pool. Sit in that lounge chair for ten minutes!” “No running, no running. I’ve already warned you.” “Shallow end, shallow end!” The mothers and grandparents beamed at the disciplinary figure he projected, a manifestation at last of something they had threatened the children with for years, the man who would do things to them if they did not behave in restaurants or went too close to the cages in zoos. Yet when he saw what the score was, how he was being used as a bogyman, he rebelled by determining to settle an old score: the ancient saw about how long one must wait before going into the water after eating. His mother’s generation held that at least an hour had to pass before one could safely swim without cramping. Nothing had changed. Forgetting that it was they who had installed him in the first place and that his expertise, like his helmet and lotions, came from the office itself, they turned to him as their lifeguard, to arbitrate when the children’s nagging became too much for them. The boldest thing he did during his tenure was to assert, once and for all, ex cathedra, that there was nothing in it, that the incidence of cramp during digestion was no greater than afterwards, that time wasn’t in it at all, that being wet wasn’t. To his astonishment they abandoned at once a position they had held all their lives.

  But at last even the presence of the children grew familiar, and he became indifferent to all but the most flagrant violations of safety, indifferent to everything save his own still surviving image of himself as their lifeguard. Though it was just here that he hedged. Harris had had Fanon draw up a disclaimer of responsibility for the safety of the residents during this special session of the pool. This each resident had been made to read and sign before being permitted to enter the pool area. Seeing in the document a loophole which might have left him holding the bag should anything happen, as if responsibility traveled a circuit and had if it were not at one point along the line to be at another, Preminger wrote in above Harris’s a disclaimer of his own: “And while Marshall Preminger, acting lifeguard, will do
everything in his power to maintain order in the pool and save the life of anyone who through carelessness or accident finds him- or herself in difficulty, it is nevertheless understood that the said Marshall Preminger is not legally responsible for the safety of the swimmers.” (And did they see, he wondered, what a guy he was, how his lifeguard’s italics saved him, how while exempting himself from legal responsibility—just good common sense, just good business practice, just wise stewardship—he did nothing to repudiate the more important guilts?)

  But no one drowned. It never came up. Only once did he find it necessary to leave his platform to help someone. Lena Jacobson, standing in perhaps four feet of water, had suddenly begun to dance and moan. “I’m cramping,” she cried. “I’m cramping.” She looked toward the platform.

  “Are you in trouble?” Preminger called.

  “It’s nothing to write home about,” she said, “but I’ve got this terrific cramp in my right leg. It pinches. If you’d be so kind?”

  “Hold on,” Preminger said, “I’ll get you.” He climbed down from the platform and entered the pool at the shallow end, wading heavily toward the center rope near which Mrs. Jacobson stood. “Take the rope,” he said. “Hold on to that.”

  “You know I didn’t even see it,” she said, “in the excitement I didn’t even see it.”

  Meanwhile he continued to wade toward her, the resistance of the water forcing him into a sort of odd swagger.

  “Just in time,” she said when he had come up to her. “That was a narrow squeak.” He took her arm and they strolled toward the steps. It was exactly as if he were taking her in to dinner. Meanwhile she chatted amiably to him. “I’ve been walking in swimming pools all my life and nothing like this ever happened before. I can’t get over it. One minute I’m having a good time and the next I’m not. It’s just like, you know, life.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t panic.”

  “No. I kept my head. I got a cool head on my shoulders.”

  “How’s the cramp now?” He helped her up the steps.

  “I can’t even feel it. It’s like it fell out of my foot. There’s just a little tingle like pins and needles.”

  “That can be worked out with massage,” Preminger said.

  “Would you do that?” she asked. “If you don’t want to touch my varicose veins I could put on my slacks.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Preminger moved her to a chaise longue where he had her stretch out her legs. He pulled a chair up beside her and began to knead the right calf. Two or three people had gathered to watch. “Step back, please,” Preminger said, “give this woman some air, will you? Show’s over, folks.” They didn’t budge, and he returned to Mrs. Jacobson’s right leg, extemporizing massaging leverages as he went along. First he pulled two fingers down the back of her calf, then pinched in a lateral line, then jabbed in a vertical. He plucked at her varicose veins.

  “If it hadn’t been for this one here,” Mrs. Jacobson told the bystanders, “I might not be alive to tell the tale. It was like crabs got me. It was terrible. All I wanted was to sit down in the water. I tell you, my entire life passed before my eyes. Oh yeah. There. That got it good. That’s right. I saw my childhood home in Poland. I relived my courtship and how we came to America and the place where we lived in Philadelphia. I saw the look on the mover’s face who broke my mama’s furniture when we came to Chicago, he should be moved himself in a truck a thousand miles. I saw our wedding.”

  “You married the mover, Lena?” a woman asked.

  “I married Jack. I saw our wedding.”

  “Hey, Lena,” a man said, “did you see your wedding night?”

  “Shh. He’s only a boy,” she said, indicating Preminger, bent over her right leg. She laughed and touched Preminger’s shoulder. “He wants to know did I see my wedding night.”

  “What else did you see?”

  “I saw my mother’s recipe for lokshin kugel. I saw the good times and I saw the bad.”

  “It’s better than a picture book.”

  She maneuvered her left leg into Preminger’s hands. “She says it’s better than a picture book. I saw all the good kalooky hands I ever got and Paulie grow up and move to California.” She swung her legs over the side of the chaise longue and sat up. “Listen, this is some lifeguard we elected. Darling—I can call you that because I’m an old woman and you’re a young pipsqueak—I’m telephoning Jack what you did, and if he don’t say whenever you’re downtown you can park for free in the garage I don’t know my old man.”

  “Lena, you tell Jack what he did, he may come and do the boy an injury.”

  “You hush. She says Jack will do you an injury.”

  In fact he was invited to dinner. What he found surprising was how much he looked forward to it, and how disappointed he was when it was postponed. Jack Jacobson called him from the office. “Listen,” he said, “we talked it over. We invited you to come over for supper. What does it mean for a snappy young man to eat supper with a couple of old fogies? You’d be bored stiff. Give us a few more days on this. We’ll get some people together. My daughter Sylvia flies back from Cincinnati the middle of the week. She should be there. Let’s make it Friday night. That way no one has to go in on Saturday. You got something planned Friday night?”

  “No,” Preminger said, “not Friday.”

  “Then we’re in like Flynn. Friday it is. I called you first because it’s in your honor,” Jacobson said. “Leave everything to me. I got some people I especially want you to meet.”

  Friday he closed the pool early and went upstairs to prepare for the dinner party. He showered carefully. Two weeks in the outdoors had given him an excellent tan. The swimming had done him good. A lot of his pot had disappeared and he could see his major ribs. Dressing scrupulously in a blue summer suit he’d had cleaned for the occasion, he carefully removed the lollipop headed pins from a crisp new shirt and placed them in a glass ashtray. He was amused by the cunning ways new shirts were folded, he was very cheerful.

  But the party was a letdown. Sylvia, a pretty woman about his own age whom Preminger assumed to be divorced, had a date that evening and had to be downtown by eight-thirty. Preminger resented that no one had thought to fix him up. He’d assumed that people like these, family people, were always on the lookout for eligibility like his own. Yet no one had approached him with the names of likely girls or pressed for his attendance at their tables. Willing to serve as the bait in their legendary machinations, this was the first time he had been to any of their homes. The other guests were all from the condominium, and he couldn’t imagine who it was Jacobson had wanted him to meet.

  “How about you, Preminger?” Jacobson asked, “you good for another bourbon and ginger ale?”

  “Is there club soda?”

  “Club soda. Ho ho. We got a real shikker in this one. He drinks like a goy. Lena, we got any seltzer for Buster Crabbe?” Buster Crabbe was only one of the names of swimmers he was to go by that evening. Johnny Weissmuller was another. And once Esther Williams.

  “Ask him if he’ll take Seven-Up.”

  “Water, I think.”

  “Water he thinks,” Jacobson said.

  “A busman’s holiday,” Lena said.

  Jacobson brought his drink. “Want a piece of candy? Make it less sour?”

  The decor in the Jacobson’s apartment was nothing like that in his father’s. They had moved from a large apartment on the South Side and brought all their things with them. Seven rooms of furniture crammed into five. Preminger was certain the heavy pieces were absorbing all the air conditioning in the hot apartment. In a while Jacobson, sweating, told Lena to open a window.

  “Won’t that work against the air conditioning?”

  “It ain’t on,” Lena said. “Air conditioning gives Jack a cold.”

  Preminger hated people who got colds from air conditioning.

  “Only place I don’t catch cold from air conditioning is in Chinese restaurants in California,” Jacobson said.
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br />   “I see.”

  “Don’t ask me why.”

  The conversation was pretty much what he heard at the pool, from the women names he was not familiar with, and from the men dark, illiberal talk of stores broken into and advancing hordes of blacks. He was astonished to learn that many of the men carried guns. Jacobson showed him one he wore inside his jacket. Someone else moved his hair with his fingers and showed him a scar. He kept silent, but even without his saying anything they seemed to know his position and sought constantly to provoke him.

  “You’re a college man,” one said. “I suppose the talk up in the ivory tower is that the shvartzers are abused, that we been robbing them blind for years, that we’re slumlords and get them to sign paper they don’t understand. Am I right?”

  “They try to see both sides,” Preminger said mildly.

  “Both sides. Hah. You hear that? Both sides. I work with these people. I worked with them all my life. Yeah, yeah, and in the old days I lived next-door to them. They’re shiftless. On one side they’re shiftless and on the other side they’re worthless. There’s your both sides.”

  “What’s the matter,” someone else said angrily, “the Jews weren’t oppressed for years? They were oppressed plenty, believe me. But they didn’t go crying to the NAACP.”

  “They went crying to the B’nai B’rith,” Preminger said.

  “You compare the B’nai B’rith to the NAACP? The Jews are the best friends the Negro ever had.”

  “We vote Democratic. We got a name for ourselves all over the world as nigger-lovers.”

  “Just more anti-Semitism,” someone said sadly.

  “I’m not going to change your minds,” Preminger said. “Why don’t we just stop talking about it?”

  “That’s the ticket,” Lena Jacobson said. “He’s young, he’s an idealist. Leave him to heaven.”

  During dinner they wanted his opinions on Vietnam, on welfare and minimum hourly wage laws. What concerned them most, however, was the campus situation—SDS, the Weathermen. Why were they so angry? They saw him, he realized at last, as a representative of the younger generation. He was there to be baited.