Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  A woman was the cause

  of my first downfall;

  there is no perdition in the world

  that is not caused by women . . .

  In the neighborhood of Triana

  there is neither pen nor ink

  with which to write my mother,

  whom I haven’t seen for . . . ye-ars.

  “¡Ole!”s pour in from the satellite performers half an orbit behind the flamenco dancer. “¡Ole!”s like an agreement, a deal, an oral handshake, a struck bargain. The done/done arrangements of serious negotiation.

  And now it happens. Just now. The flamenco dancer is doing a particularly difficult riff. This murderous tango of a man whose body is one taut line of mood, who, touched at one end of that body should, by the laws of physics if not the conventions of his trade, like the strings on the musician’s guitar, vibrate at the other, but whose art it is to defy physics, to drive his feet like pistons without ruffling a ruffle of his shirt, who does that, whose ruling second skin of costume, revealing still that inch and a half of scar, the material caught in it, in the scar, the magic show-biz gypsy latex, stuck there like the long, dark vertical of a behind snagged in the pants of a fat man rising from a chair on a hot day, does not, does not, display a single qualm of muscle, not one quiver, tremor, shiver, flutter, not one shake, not even his trousers which, snug as they are from mid-thigh to the small of the back, are cut like normal men’s beneath that and actually hang like a gaucho’s in a sort of a flare below the knee, not even his damn trousers jump! It is as if he is the ventriloquist (you must come back; you must return and use everything; you must use up your material; you must move the furniture around); it is as if he is the ventriloquist, only what he throws is not his voice but his feet, his shoe leather; it is as if he is the ventriloquist, has exactly on the physical plane the ventriloquist’s schizophrenic detachment, straight man and comic all together all at once, only it ain’t only his lips that don’t move, it’s everything! His hands are stilled, his calves are quiet, his knees, the ruffles on his shirt, all his torso, and it’s as if he really is detached, actually separated from the interests of his body, only his feet going on about their business like steps drawn on a dance chart.

  Except, as I say, now it happens. The dark fandango of a fellow is grinning. He is grinning; not smiling, grinning; not pleased as punch; probably not even happy; but grinning, grinning. And not just grinning, not simple human cheer or the Cheshire risibles of pleased teeth, but the original, paradigmatic, caught-out, pants down, caught-in-the-act, shit-eating smirk of grin itself!

  Because that is how the flamenco dancer must be rendered, I think. A man who never grins, whose profession it is to keep a straight face, who earns his bread by artful scorn, whose squared back, poseur, gypsy bearing is by ordinary the stately four-four time of toreros and graduating seniors, must be shown with his face naked, his bared teeth and grinning lips like private parts. There must be crossover, what joke writers call the “switch.” There must, that is, be a grafting of one condition upon another, the episodic or eventful equivalencies of pun and slogan, the schizophrenic tensions and torsions—though unless he’s a minor character the flamenco dancer may not be mad, recall—of all discrepant allegiance.

  It’s like this. A flamenco dancer, a tinker, a tailor, a candlestick maker, any human being, cannot be shown in fiction without quirk, wrinkle, slippage—the fall, I mean, from the photographic, all, I mean, the strictly realistic and correct dictionary parameters and ideals of grace. Which explains whiskey priests, golden-heart whores, hung-over surgeons, cowardly soldiers, misers who tithe, mercenaries who develop some long-haul loyalty they cannot understand or even very definitively or coherently explain. “A man,” Hemingway’s dying Harry Morgan says in To Have and Have Not, “one man alone ain’t got. No man alone now. No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.” Which explains, that is, all driven stereotype and fictional cliché. But the instincts of the cliché are correct; only the judgment of the writer is flawed, his critical lapse of recognition, maybe his reading habits. He is like the writer of mystery stories pursuing the idiosyncratic as relentlessly as ever his amateur detective pursued any murderer.

  But I’m not talking about the idiosyncratic so much as I am about the strange—the flat-out, let-stand, mysterious. If there can be no flamenco dancer without the shit-eating grin, neither ought there to be any of the tight hospital corners of explanation. In James Agee’s A Death in the Family there occurs perhaps one of the strangest ghost stories I’ve ever read. Jay, the father, has just been buried. The family returns to the house after the funeral. Here Agee discharges point of view into the disparate consciousnesses of a handful of characters. Upstairs the mother senses a presence in the room—that of her dead husband. Simultaneously, in another part of the house, their little boy feels that his father’s spirit has suddenly returned. Still another relative hears an odd noise from the dead to comfort his mourners. Each character is certain that Jay has come back, is with them again, but, not wanting to upset the others who might not understand, decides to say nothing about the visitation. Agee never explains the startling conviction of reunion each has experienced. Indeed, he never even alludes to it.

  Or Anthony Powell. In his novel From a View to a Death, Powell draws a tight and quite conventional picture of the middle professional class. Mrs. is sixtyish, a bit dowdy, a touch past it but still civilized. Mr. is a professional soldier, a major, retired. They live an uncomplicated home life in a genteel but ordinary house a few miles from town. They drink sherry, they take the Times. And one morning his wife goes into town to do some shopping. I don’t have the book in front of me, but this, at least approximately, is what happens. “You’ll be all right, dear?” “Oh, yes, I’ll read I should think.” “Is there anything you need?” “Cigarettes. I require cigarettes.” “What, don’t you have cigarettes?” “Well I thought I did, but it appears I’ve run out.” “I’ll bring some from Scrapple.” “Most kind. Most decent.” “It’s on my way. It isn’t as if it wasn’t on my way.” “Most considerate.” “And I did wish to see Scrapple. Ask after his wife.” “Mnn.” “What’s that, dear?” “My book. I can’t seem to find that book I was reading.” “What, the one about the campaigns?” “Yes, the campaign one, that’s it.” She sees the book and brings it to him. “Oh,” she says, “that sunlight! Much too bright on the page.” “Yes. It is rather. Yes.” “Shall I draw the drapes then? You could switch on the lamp.” “Most thoughtful. Yes.” And she draws the drapes and the major thanks her, and they kiss good-bye, and she goes out to start the car. He hears it start up and listens to her drive off and rises from the chair beside which the lamp is now burning. He puts the book about the campaigns on the seat of the wing chair so that he won’t misplace it again and walks into another room. When he returns he is dressed in his wife’s clothes, even her makeup, even her hat. He sits back down in the chair and reads the book about the campaigns by the light of the lamp in the drape-drawn room. That is the end of the chapter. Powell never mentions the major’s transvestism again. Though we see him again. And each time we do, each time, observing him closely now, astonished by him, gradually taken with an apparently decent man, we think: This fellow dresses up in women’s clothes; he likes to put on a girdle; he enjoys the brace of a brassiere, the squeeze of a pump. There is that faintly geological feel of crossover, character layered as a cake.

  Not the idiosyncratic, not the strange, maybe not even the mysterious, finally, so much as the queer, protuberant salience of the obliquely sighted. What the periscope saw, what goes on in the corner of the eye, talking pictures in the kaleidoscope, an eye staring back at you, weeping, through the keyhole, the application of a close but possibly afflicted vision, as if writers were color-blind, say, or mental. Because the flamenco dancers and the ghosts and the British majors (ret.) are all used up. We endanger a species simply by mentioning it. So not the idiosyncratic, strange, or mysterious, or even that queer pr
otuberant salience of the obliquely sighted; maybe only surprise. Which I take to be some flipped-coin mix—flipped-coin because it can go either way—of the ordinary in league with the exotic, the strange displacements of the ordinary. The flamenco dancers and ghosts and majors retired are all used up, but we can never be quit of them, or they of us. We must wring them dry as a sheet, put usurer’s pressures on them, dun them with obligation, hit them when they’re down. And, using surprise, surprise always in some un-Hitchcockian way so that surprise is not ever expected, not ever the form itself that is, not ever looked for, some logical, non-Jawsian sense of the thing. Not Boo! from a closet or Happy Birthday! from pals. Surprise inevitable as verdict, ordered as law.

  I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was one of those fine, rare spring days in New York when optimism flows like an energy, when, mysteriously, there is a kind of astonishing democracy in the air, the pollen count zero and the ego and envy in abeyance, not even coveting my neighbor’s wife, not coveting at all, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, this old Scrooge, better than Christmas; not “You, boy! You know the poulterer on the High Street? Fetch a goose, I’ll write you into the will!” Because you figure he doesn’t need it, convinced everyone is a personage anyway, the pimply fellow in dirty jeans, the bag lady, the Howard Hughes type fishing coins from the gutter—all, all personages, all upperly mobile and down from the three-million-buck co-ops across Fifth Avenue, out for a breath of air, a touch of art. Your eye out for Kissinger, your eye out for Jackie.

  On Eighty-first Street, personages were sprawled on the museum steps eating hot dogs, knotted saltbread, sipping soda. Two vendors, their marvelous wagons with their clever compartments like trick drawers in a desk, about twelve feet apart, cry “Hot dogs, hot dogs here,” more to each other than to their customers. They do a brisk business and seem terribly amused, as if all that’s at stake is the side bet they have down on who will turn over the most saltbread today.

  I schlepp up the steps, pulling myself along by the railing, this privileged Porgy for whom even the bag ladies get out of the way. I climb half a mile of stairs. (I love art!)

  Schoolkids, cross-legged on the floor, civil and serious, snug and curiously private in this public place, copy masterpieces into their sketchbooks. Joan has organized a wheelchair. I wave to the toddlers in strollers. “Hi kids,” I say, amusing myself that I know what each is thinking, struggling to say. Not “Hey look at the cripple,” but “Mommy, Mommy, there goes the biggest toddler in the goddamn world!” I’m having a marvelous time, my heart in high for once. Everywhere people back from the gift shop carry Metropolitan Museum shopping bags like so much artistic grocery, and I have, in this perfect temperate zone with its ideal temperature and humidity designed for canvas and pigment, a sense of some best-foot-forward, good-willed world, as if Philanthropy were an actual order of actual politics, as much a rule of reign as the dynasties and kingdoms and tribes whose artifacts and paintings and sculptures seem somehow the place’s generative treasury, not a repository of art at all but native wealth, natural resource, like Saudi oil, Zimbabwe chrome, Argentine beef. So close to the source of things, I am close to tears. It could be the giant toddler is simply overtired, on the edge of crankiness, tantrum. But nah, nah, his heart’s in high, overwhelmed by the good order and best behavior of the citizens of this good country, the schoolgirls seated cross-legged on the floor, concentrating, intense, their lower lips in their teeth to get a line just right, to catch it on the tip of their drawing pens and hold it there, balancing, balancing, careful, gentle as people in bomb squads, till they can thrust it safely onto the drawing pad and be rid of it. (I will tell you something secret about myself. It’s none of your business, but I don’t much care for music, the classics I mean, the high symphonies and opera styles, yet whenever I go to a concert I weep. It’s the cooperation that gets me every time, that dedicated sense of the civil—not the music but the musicians, the useless fiction of harmony they perpetuate. It is this that gets me now.)

  Did I tell you that it is Saturday? It is Saturday, and scattered among the lovers and schoolkids, the Fifth Avenue co-op owners, the freelance tour guides and museum guards and gift-shop marketers and toddlers—use it; use it up—the retired majors and flamenco dancers—are fathers and sons, fathers and daughters. The children—use it; use it up—have lunched on vendor hot dogs and have mustard on their chins, the corners of their lips, bits of saltbread like a light seasoning in the wrinkles of their clothes. The kids are oddly solicitous and gaze where their dads direct their attentions with a courteous, leashed patience, not bored but the opposite, concentrating—use it; use it up—working hard as those schoolgirls cross-legged on the floor, intense themselves, as nervous about line, but it’s their own expressions they’re perfecting, that they must balance even longer than that memory on the tip of that drawing pen, hold and hold like a smile for an old-time photograph, breathing of course, even talking, giving and taking, exchanging ideas, opinion, but everything controlled as the climate in this place, and suddenly I recognize these kids. They are Saturday’s children, and they are here by court order, by official decree, sentenced by a judge and their own mixed loyalties, serving their time like good cons, and the fathers, too, sneaking a glance at their watches, wondering if it’s time yet to go to the museum restaurant, time to get out altogether, figuring how much time it will take up to get a cab to the Russian Tea Room, how long the wait will be, how fast the service, which movie to take the kid to, when it gets out, timing what’s left of the morning, the long afternoon, doing in their heads all the sums of visitation, rehearsing the customs of custody.

  And I get an idea for a story. Perhaps it was my private joke in the wheelchair that set it off, my vision of myself as a giant toddler; perhaps it was all this, well, behaving, this sedate and serious steady-state attention I feel all about me, the suspicion, grown now to conviction, that no one is having a very good time; certainly my sudden awareness of the divorced fathers and their children, doing God knows what sums of custody in their heads, had the most to do with it, but I have an idea for a story.

  It’s this.

  Julian’s—I even have the name—parents are divorced when Julian is eleven years old, and Julian’s mother gets custody. The court grants Julian’s father liberal visitation privileges—weekends, of course, certain specified holidays, Julian’s birthday in even-numbered years. And Julian will spend at least one month of his summer vacation with his dad.

  Only when the story opens Julian is thirty-two years old, his mother and father in their early fifties, and Julian is dutifully waiting for his father’s Saturday visit. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is wrong with Julian. Though he still lives at home, he has grown up to be an intelligent, healthy young man, decently employed, still single but ordinarily sexed, not particularly fixated on either his mother or his dad. The story will concern itself with their afternoon, Julian’s and his father’s, with the mutual anxieties both have about these visits, anxieties not all that different from the anxieties of the parents and children doing those secret sums of custody in their heads. Perhaps they will visit the Metropolitan, certainly they will go to the Russian Tea Room, where their order will be taken by the man in the suit. I expect they will have the conversation fathers and sons usually have on such occasions, the father discreetly pressing Julian for information about his mother, and Julian politely resisting, reluctant to be either go-between or honest broker, and both, from time to time, glancing at their watches.

  The story is not yet written, or even begun, but I am satisfied that it satisfies my criteria, that it has all the elements—the shit-eating grin on the flamenco dancer’s face, the idiosyncratic, the strange, the mysterious, the queer protuberant salience of the obliquely sighted, crossover, and what the periscope saw, surprise, and all the rest of these strange displacements of the ordinary.

  PLOT

  Suppose we do this. Suppose we take for our situation a bank robbery, and suppose, to
remain within clear, clean lines, we decide it shall be a one-man job—nothing elaborate, no Rififi complications, no electronics genius sent from far, no big-deal Indy wheelman, no demolitions expert who can blow up Fort Knox or a box of Kleenex or take the crabgrass off your lawn without disturbing the zoysia, no safecracker with the sensitized fingers of a concert pianist who has never thrown a punch because his hands are his fortune—and no mastermind. Just a guy, a dropout with the drop on the teller and one hand on the arm roughly of the pregnant lady in front of him in line. A meanish fellow in need of money, a man of no particular charm who will kill the woman when her usefulness as a hostage has ended and abandon her body in another state, who will not even stop the car when he shoots her, not because he hasn’t the imagination to elicit last words, and not even because he is unwilling to hear her plead, but because a shot on the highway in a closed car at fifty-five miles an hour will make even less noise than a shot in the woods, and perhaps, too, he is not a good marksman and even he can’t miss the immense close-range target she makes beside him.

  His problem, as I see it, is this: He must dispose of her body before he stops to fill up or to pee or pay a toll or look for a place where the truckdrivers eat. (Well there might be other problems, too, of course. Hadn’t some witness taken down his license plate in the parking lot? The woman was pregnant, terrified, hard to negotiate into his car. Wouldn’t she have slowed him down enough for someone to get a make on him or at the very least on his car? Perhaps. But our man has not thought about this very much. He’s no TV crook with a large wardrobe and a larger manner. Like the poor who can least afford to, he trusts to luck, plays life by ear. He is not dashing or devil-may-care so much as disappointed by plans—merely chronically impatient at one end of things so that he must be massively patient at another. That’s the breaks, he thinks, and is broken. Maybe he doesn’t even need money. He doesn’t need it for an operation. Hospitals will give you operations. He doesn’t need it for his “habit.” Drugs are for suckers, they make him nervous, they give him rash. He doesn’t need it for a down payment on a house in a nice part of town. He’s got itchy feet and has always hankered to live west, to see the mountains, the ocean, border towns where the cowboys lope. He doesn’t need it for clothes and he doesn’t need it for food, for luxuries that are inaccessible only because they have never been imagined or for necessities. Necessities are cheap, easily come by. Even the poor live in America. He needs it because he needs it. I mean because he wants it—and he wants it because other men have wanted it, and he does not have the character to do without what other men will not do without. Finally, he needs it because money is the single necessity that is not cheap.) So here’s this dead woman beside him. He’s surprised there’s so much blood. It flows from her nipple like you were letting in a tub from her. He’s not a reflective man but he thinks there’s so much blood because she was pregnant. They double their blood when they’re pregnant. Hasn’t he heard that somewhere? This disgusts him, the notion that some of the blood might be her kid’s. And there’s some like slime around. He wants her out of his car. There’s too much traffic now to stop and just dump her out. Where’d the goddam traffic come from?