Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on.”

  “All right.”

  “If I could find a buyer I’d sell.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “That’s the thing.”

  “Did you hear about Ruth-Ann?”

  “What about him?”

  “Packed it in. Sold out to Tom-Ted.”

  “Her? I don’t believe it. Where’d you hear?”

  “Mary-Sue.”

  “The auto battery manufacturer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rob-Roy told me the business was doing so well.”

  “Rob-Roy’s giving up the restaurant.”

  “What’ll she do?”

  “She’s going with Chuck-Burger.”

  “Well, listen,” he heard someone next to him say, “this is costing you money.” It was the excuse people made when they wanted to get off the long-distance telephone.

  “So your problems are solved. You’ll have Bernadine on Fridays.”

  “Do I need her? What’s the matter, the place is so big I can’t do it myself? Twenty minutes in the morning and it’s straightened out. It’s good enough.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “Because,” the woman said, “because I miss her. I miss the company.” She was crying.

  “Harris. At the Standard Club. A tartan cummerbund. A powder-blue dinner jacket. The orchestra was playing ‘My Fair Lady.’ ”

  “The summer’s over.”

  “I know.”

  “October, November—they can shove it. The Chicago winter. It’s not a heated garage. All night you’re up wondering will it start, won’t it start? Scraping the goddamn frost off the goddamn windshield with the little goddamn piece of plastic like a tiny red goddamn comb. Cold weather.”

  “At least in Miami that’s one worry you don’t have.”

  “If it ain’t one thing it’s another. In Miami if it don’t hit seventy one day it breaks your heart.”

  “That’s if you’re on vacation. When you live there all year round you don’t worry about it so much.”

  “In the summer you step out the door you get cancer from the sunshine.”

  “Everything’s air-conditioned. In the gas stations the toilets are air-conditioned.”

  “There’s Portuguese man-of-war in the ocean.”

  “Who goes in the ocean? You have a pool. In the winter it’s heated.”

  “Who you kidding? If it ain’t one thing it’s another.”

  The speaker sighed. “They’re we’re agreed,” he said.

  “Did I tell you,” someone said, “they want me to go into the hospital for tests?”

  There was no talk of their children or grandchildren. As if they did not exist. Where were the photographs that should have been passed around? The color snaps, indistinguishable one from another, of four- and five-year-olds, scowling on lounges in pine-paneled dens, their pale skins bluely cosmetized by inexpert photography? Why did no one speak of these children? Why didn’t they speak of their sons and daughters, those scattered accountants and lawyers and professors and journalists? Why did they deny them? (He’d met Audrey of Audrey-Art Underwear, a woman now, old as himself. They existed.) Where was their famous doting, that far-fetched fanclub love? And who talked of recipes, who spoke up for food? Who limned soup and catalogued vegetables? Who advised on meats, the secret special places of the beasts where the sweetness lingered and the juices splashed? Where was one who would describe dessert, who would convey custard and teach sponge cake and the special creams, who dealt in celery as if it were currency? (And where, for that matter, did Wall Street figure, over-the-counter, the American Exchange?) How was business? But most of all, what about the children? Who’d blacklisted them? Why? We exist.

  “Whose rule,” Preminger spoke up, “whose rule was it that there are no guests? Who made that up?” He spoke louder than he’d intended, for he heard his question make a hole in their conversation, his voice overriding theirs like a bulletin. “Who made that rule? Who agreed to such an arrangement? I demand an answer!” he shouted. “Who decided that Sunday rules shall apply all week long? Who banned the children? Who decreed that flesh and blood shall be snubbed? Who’s responsible?”

  “That’s just management policy, son,” a man said quietly. “It makes good sense when you consider that this one pool has to service all three buildings.”

  “Crap,” Preminger yelled back. “Until the last day or so it’s been practically empty. Why would you agree to such a disgraceful idea? Unless you really wanted it that way. Am I right?”

  “Easy, there, fella.”

  “My father would never have agreed to the setup. And he’d have had pictures of us. He’d have passed ’em around. He’d tell you about my days on the circuit.”

  “That’s right,” Ed Eisner said, “he was very proud of you.”

  “Shit,” Preminger shouted, “he never said a word. Like the rest of you. You should see the place. A swinger. He had hair like a pop star.”

  “Come on,” someone said, “Why don’t you take it easy? Are you feeling okay? You want a glass of water?”

  “I feel terrible,” Preminger said quietly. He was very calm now. His outburst had shocked him, and he was deeply embarrassed. “Look,” he said gently, “I am deeply embarrassed.” He stood up. “I wish you’d try, if not to forget, then at least to forgive my outburst. If you no longer wish me to serve as your lifeguard I understand and will, of course, step down. Indeed, in the light of my exhibition just now I seriously question my capacity to supervise this pool. Indeed, rather than charge you for imposing Sunday rules I suppose I ought to thank you. It was probably one of the more fortunate aspects of my position that the rule was imposed. I am, as some of you may know, a terribly unhappy man. I’m thirty-seven, ripe for conventional, even classical, introspection, a cliché of a man. What I would have you understand, however, is that if my case seems overwhelmingly typical, it is nevertheless unrelentingly true. Like all clichés. Perhaps a lot of what’s troubling me has something to do with my virginity. It may seem odd that someone my age should be a virgin. I didn’t want to be one, don’t want to be one. I assure you I have all the normal drives. Yet somehow it never really fell my way, just never came up. I don’t even think about it now.

  “By moving here, I had thought to change my life, to alter its conditions by manipulating its geography, but I see now that this has little to do with it. As I overheard many of you saying yourselves. One’s mental health is like one’s height. Trauma isn’t in it. You’re happy or you’re not. And of course the details of my existence have done little to promote even the aura of tranquility. Though I’ve had my opportunities. I was, for example, a minor figure on the lecture circuit at one time, but my career was manufactured, almost an accident. I was trading on an extremely limited inventory. The fault was largely mine, though not exclusively. Economic factors and the general climate of taste probably contributed at least a little to my undoing, as well as the political circumstances of our serious times. I have no clear ability to judge. Nevertheless I once had a small reputation. Now of course my name is faded. I’m very lonely, and not in the best of health. A few years ago I suffered a heart attack. The doctors all assured me that an attack that comes so prematurely can be a kind of blessing in disguise, for it warns its victims that something is radically wrong with his life. Shit, I knew that.

  “Now I’m having a nervous breakdown. It’s as real as sore throat. A nervous breakdown. Though you know, it’s very odd, I can truthfully say that I feel no different than I did before. I’m as unhappy as I was before, but no unhappier. Nor have I misrepresented myself in any way. Except, of course, for that wild talk about my father a few moments ago. These are all things I would tell you privately did we but know each other better. If it weren’t for my nervous breakdown I wouldn’t be talking to you like this. So I guess the essence of a nervous breakdown is that it makes you go public, like floating an issue of stock. />
  “Now you must excuse me. Stay well. If you haven’t got your health, what have you got?…Your good name?”

  He went upstairs, politely smiling his refusal to those who tried to help him.

  Evelyn Riker’s second letter was waiting for him, slipped under the door. He opened it calmly, astonished that madness was so rational. He could read. He remembered everything. He could turn the key in the lock, change his things, hang them up. He could empty his bladder. Remember to lift the seat, flush the toilet. How was he mad, then? In what did it subsist? Unhappiness. Unhappiness was his only trauma, his single symptom. Misery as fixed and settled as his overbite, as incapable of being altered as of making parallel lines meet in a painting by staring at them. He was weeping. Even as he read Evelyn’s letter—the hope it gave him suffusing him like an injection—he could not stop crying.

  Dear Marshall,

  It was sweet of you to answer, but my goodness, a wire! It must have cost you a fortune. Or are you one of those big spenders for whom money is just a convenience, there to enjoy when you have it but not much missed when it’s gone? I rather wish my husband had been more like that. To tell you the truth, money was one of the biggest bones of contention that arose between us. I don’t mean that Jerry was stingy or I profligate. Indeed, if anything he was more than generous. It’s just that having made a big cash outlay—the condominium, for example—he could never stop worrying about where he would get the wherewithal to justify his expenditures. He was the only man I’ve ever known who worried about what inflation would do to his pension when he had to retire in twenty years! Naturally enough, this quality in him led to bickering between us. I know he didn’t mean them, but sometimes the man would say awful things to me, dangerous things for a man to say to a woman, or for a man to say to anyone, for that matter.

  Yes. He could follow. The words made sense. Then how was he mad?

  One of the biggest blow-ups of all was after he bought a new car one time, a car that was far too big for us, incidentally, and which as a matter of fact I had counseled him against purchasing. I took it out one day, and while I was shopping someone skinned our rear fender and put a nasty dent and scratch in it, about a half inch deep and as long as your arm. A brand new expensive car. Can you imagine how this would make you feel?

  Yes, he could. Then how was he mad?

  When I discovered this after I came back out to the parking lot I naturally hoped that the driver might have left a card with his or her name and telephone number on it. If it had been me—after all, one is insured for this sort of thing—I would certainly have done so. I looked everywhere, but there was nothing. You can’t imagine how sorry I was that there were retractable windshield wipers on this particular model, for otherwise the culprit might have left a message under the wiper blades. Of course I had shut the windows and locked the doors when I went in to do my shopping, so he couldn’t have left it on the seat even if he had wanted to. To make a long story short, I looked everywhere, in the grillwork, even in the gas cap, the crease where the trunk joins the body—everywhere one could conceivably leave a notice. I know what you’re thinking, that I was naive to expect someone to offer information against himself, but that’s the way I am, willing to think the best of others till I’m proved wrong. Well, I was certainly proved wrong that time.

  At any rate, when I told Jerry what had happened he didn’t blow up at me. He was very understanding about the accident and said that such a thing could have happened to anyone. Where the fight started was when I suggested we put in an insurance claim anyway. We had fifty dollar deductible and a scratch like that would cost a lot more to repair. They probably would have had to put on a whole new fender. It wasn’t even the fifty dollars we’d have had to lay out that bothered Jerry. We have a vandalism clause in our policy, and I think the insurance adjuster would have gone along with the idea the gash may have been inflicted by vandals, but Jerry was afraid that after paying the claim they would drop us. He said it was just this sort of nickel and diming that upset insurance people the most. And he stood pat. I couldn’t budge him. I thought it was ridiculous to drive around in a beautiful new car with an imperfection like that, and I told him so, but all he was worried about was that the insurance company would abandon us and that he’d have to pay a higher premium to get reinsured with a high risk company. We had words—hard, bitter words—but Jerry was stubborn. After that, cuts and dents grew on the car like a disease—and I wasn’t the one who put them there—but Jerry would never put in a single claim. I saw that it was a neurotic behavior pattern and—what can I tell you?—the marriage went to pieces. Ultimately he left me. That’s when I became friendly with your father.

  Anyway, I didn’t mean to burden you with all this detail. The point is that I don’t want you to spend your money on telegrams. We’re neighbors. As you say in your telegram, we live a few doors down the hall from each other. Actually, it made me very upset to see that wire. My hands shook so when it was delivered that I couldn’t even open it. I thought something had happened to Jerry. We’re estranged, but the man is still my husband. When you’ve lived with someone for almost twenty years you don’t forget him just like that. Also—I’ll be very candid—there was something too importunate about sending me that wire. What would have been perfectly acceptable in a letter seemed, frankly, “overzealous”—this is the best word I can think of—set down in a telegram. (Perhaps this is what McLuhan means when he says that “the medium is the message.”) Maybe I share some of the responsibility for this. I think I’ve left you with certain faulty impressions, and I really believe I ought to undo these if we are to become friends. We simply have to set out on a footing of mutual understanding and respect. It’s no accident that my first reaction, my instinctive reaction, to your wire (after I saw that it was not bad news about Jerry), had to do with the importunity I have already spoken of.

  If you will forgive my opening up a subject which I know must be a very sore one with you—if you will permit me, this is, to probe areas which your normal filial affections and recent harrowing loss must certainly have left tender—I will be even franker. Perhaps you are wondering why I say my “instinctive” reaction…

  Yes. He was wondering that. That’s what he was wondering. Then it was normal to so wonder. Then how was he mad? He wiped the tears from his eyes. When would they stop? He has lost a pound of tears so far. When would he begin to weep blood, when vision itself, weeping light till none was left to weep, then weeping dimness, then darkness? Then what? Calcium, marrow, all the chemicals of his body, all the juices of his glands. Then how was one mad who could parse sequence like a scholar at the blackboard? Weeping hair, skin, bone, gut, shit, nails and all, weeping his life and, when there was no more left, weeping death and even time.

  …and here I will have to make certain “confessions” which I have not offered earlier—out of fear and jealousy and my own sense, however misguided, of protecting you, I suppose.

  Yes. Protect me, he thought, weeping.

  I never lost your father’s key, and it is not altogether true that I never used it. I did use it—once—the night of Dad’s death. Phil had begun to call me on the telephone at all hours. Sometimes my daughter would answer. She knew his voice, though he was so nervous about what he considered our “relationship” that if I wasn’t home he would try to disguise it or pretend that he’d gotten a wrong number, representing himself to her as a merchant or salesman or some such nonsense. But Sheila is no dummy. She knew his voice and began to suspect things between us that simply weren’t true, a relationship as fictitious as Phil’s voices. He made her very uncomfortable, and I warned him that if this continued I would have to seek other outlets. It wasn’t the neighbors I cared about—I had weathered their gossip and scorn when Jerry left me—but my daughter’s opinions did matter. That was all. The mother of a child from a broken home taking up with a man almost old enough to be her grandfather! That wasn’t the case, it was never the case, but from the peculiar ways Ph
il behaved she had, I suppose, every reason to suspect it was. I told him in letters that his behavior must change. (Letters I did not read to you that day.) But despite my entreaties it didn’t. He tried openly to hold my hand at the swimming pool. If I went into the water Phil went in too, cavorting, swimming between my legs, coming up behind me and diving down and raising me to his shoulders, touching me beneath the water where he thought it would not be noticed, challenging me to races and giving me headstarts so that he could catch up to me and make rough body contact, dunking me, pulling off my bathing cap and teasing—all masquerading as play but clearly the sublimated physical activity of a youth a third his age. It got so bad that I couldn’t go into the water, or I’d use my red guest band to swim at other pools. I couldn’t elude him. He followed me.

  I liked Phil. All this was only toward the end. Even then, when he was calm we got along beautifully. He was a fabulous conversationalist. But he became less and less calm. I decided that I had to return his key. (Which, thank God, Sheila never knew I had.) To return it in a letter, however, seemed too cold and cruel. After all, we would still be neighbors and have to live on the same floor. To pass it to him at the pool was out of the question. I thought someone would see me, or that he might make a scene. I knew that the only way was to bring it to him, and that’s what I did that night—the night he died.

  Sheila was watching TV in her room, and I told her I was going out for a while. I made up some excuse—I don’t even remember what it was. I came down the hall and rang Dad’s bell. There was no answer, though I could hear music playing inside the apartment from Phil’s new stereo, the Beatles, I think. I pressed the doorbell twice more, and when there was still no answer I let myself in with the key.