Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  The magazine folks told me that if I’m going to Berkeley, I mustn’t miss the Center for Independent Living, a service organization for the disabled—another support group in the Support Group State. I go where I’m told. I do what they tell me. So I drop in. Rakish, leaning on my cane, I present myself. Boldly, larky in Berkeley, I tell the lady at the desk I’m there for a fitting.

  I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup; he’d have fooled me on To Tell the Truth. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the fellow who showed up in my hotel room that afternoon didn’t look like any Will Hearst I would have imagined, or even, for that matter, like any scion, give or take a few mil, up or down, in or out, here or there, at all. (I’m from St. Louis, I’ve seen Joe Pulitzer, fils.) Though I recognized the type, God knows. Was, once upon a time, the type myself. He was dressed like a grad student. Or no, not a grad student, like someone with his Ph.D. already stuffed and mounted on the wall and working his first university teaching job—slacks, tweed sport coat, and tie loosened at the throat. I could imagine him in the sixties, JFK’s sixties, mine, the sixties of grace and Frisbee, of lunch taken on the quad in shirtsleeves. (Not his sixties, surely—I put him as a man in his mid-thirties—or his cousin’s, though Patty’s sixties were actually seventies, a matter of spilled time.) I saw him, that is, anachronistically, or maybe that’s the only way the rich ever look, athletic and easy as people sockless in loafers.

  It was my idea that he come to the room, though I wanted Tracy, who already knew him, there as a buffer, to ward off the mean spirits of my tied tongue. (This, this is chronic, congenital. I can’t speak to the gifted or the very rich. Possibly I’m not comfortable with the lucky. It’s not my best trait, but let him without sin, etc.)

  I’d been given a choice—to sit in on an Examiner editorial meeting or tool around the city with Hearst in his limo. I picked door number three. I wanted to feed him lunch out of my minibar. And though he consented to come up to the room and even to look at the room-service menu, he seemed antsy, anxious. There was, he said, this terrific Japanese place, Nikko. I don’t do your Pacific Rim foods, am not experimental, and have, well, these like racist taste buds, but it was getting pretty clear, finally, that if I needed Tracy as a buffer between myself and Will Hearst, Will Hearst needed Tracy and an entire restaurant between himself and me. And not just antsy, he was like an actual kid let out of actual school once he’d left that room; Hearst leading the way down the hall, disappearing around a corner, waiting for us farther on, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet like a jogger waiting on a stoplight. (Because if I’m not comfortable with them—the rich, the gifted, the lucky—possibly it’s because we don’t speak the same language; not English, maybe not even money or talent or good fortune, so much as the fried fish of one’s sheer otherness.) We have nothing to say to each other. He agreeably answers all my questions, dumb as they are, boring as they are. (What influence has television had, do you think, on the newspaper business? In what direction do you want to take the Examiner?) He knocks them out of the ballpark, my questions. (I should have asked if he ever had a paper route; I should have asked about his cousin, what the Symbionese Liberation Army was really like.)

  At the restaurant, he tells Tracy about a trip he’s just taken—Tracy and Will are journalist buddies; Jon, Tracy’s husband, writes a daily column for the Chronicle, the Examiner’s rival, so, in a way, they’re family—ninety miles cross-country skiing over a spine of Sierras. And when Tracy mentions that she and Jon have been snorkeling off Indonesia’s Banda Islands, Hearst perks up for the first time all day. For all his graciousness, this is the only time he’s genuinely interested. (This, I get the feeling, is the real direction he wants to take the paper.) Till now he’s not shown that much interest in even the Japanese food. He asks the questions: Which airlines does one take? How long is the flight? What else can one do there? Well, Tracy tells him, there are these Dutch ruins. Dutch ruins, oh, Jesus! How he can’t wait to go! I can taste it.

  But this is supposed to be journalism going on here. I pull him back into the interview.

  It turns out he’s this booster. He wants to see downtown San Francisco even more developed than it already is. When Tracy indicates surprise, he tells her it’s “provincial” for people to carry on about progress. Tracy says parking is already a tremendous problem in the city and wonders what he would do to accommodate even more cars. Well, Will Hearst suggests, they can always take taxis.

  Then the check comes and I perk up. Who couldn’t have cared less about TV’s influence on the press, or whither the San Francisco Examiner, or even Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, I do! Because I sure ain’t going to pay for all that raw fish, and neither, I see, is Will Hearst. Not that this is an awkward moment or anything. It isn’t, not in the least. Tracy picks up the check. She puts it on her credit card. Now this, this, I’m thinking, this is interesting! I know it’s business. I do, I really do. I know he didn’t have to agree to see me, but it’s interesting, almost as interesting as me giving him lunch out of the minibar would have been, and later I’m disappointed when B.K. tells me I’m not being fair, that he’d offered to take all of us out, that she’d had to insist this one was on the magazine. Didn’t I tell you I’m a sucker for a moment? Don’t you know I’d go to almost any length to set one up?

  Jon shows me the “WELL,” a kind of party line for people with PCs. An acronym for Whole Earth ’lectronic Link, a service with maybe 3,000 subscribers and possibly 100 “conferences,” or subjects—Psychology, Sexuality, Macintosh, Writers, News, Politics, Words—anything, really, someone introduces and can get someone else to talk about, the WELL, it seems to me, is exactly like an electronic séance, subscriber calling to subscriber, soul to soul, in some mutual SOS of interest.

  Jon enters his password and is into the WELL quick as Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole. He checks his “mail,” messages left for him under his personal rubric, not the same as his password, which is known but to him and Electricity. He has mail, or, rather, a reply to something he’d said when he’d logged off. “As a matter of fact,” writes cee. “I was just reading about the proposed Erotica Conference. Oh, baby!”

  “There’s a question,” Jon explains, “about whether or not Erotica should remain in the Sex Conference or should be in its own conference, and so there are people discussing this issue.”

  Oh, baby!

  It occurs that the WELL is just about the most California thing I’ve seen yet—I know subscribers can live anywhere; it’s only my hunch that they don’t—more California than the real estate channel I watched in Los Angeles, even than the two-dollar-an-hour parking meters they were talking about in Beverly Hills.

  I take in an AA meeting like a matinee. I’m touched by these people, these cheerers and encouragers, these mutual urgers, stirred by the energy of their engaged sympathies. Because it’s hard, what they’re trying to do, their concern a little like the shouted telekinetics of my day at the races, all those Come on, come on, come ons of pure rooting interest. Only I was rooting for just one horse, and these folks want them all to win. And nervous as someone in the other guy’s church. Because I don’t know the forks, and a little embarrassed, too, by all this goodwill, under the cumulative weight of all that love.

  Hey, my part is small, not even a walk-on. Not even a spear carrier. I have a line, but it’s the same line all the other guests at the meeting have. (I’m not even sure “guest” is the correct term.) Plus, I almost blow it. (I almost really blow it. What I almost say is, “My name is Stanley, and I have multiple sclerosis.”) I get my name right, all right, but mumble the explanation—I still can’t remember it—for whatever it is I think I’m doing there. Nevertheless, the force of their choric, antiphonal “Hi, Stanley!” so takes me back that I’m certain anything I might have said would have been greeted with the same goofy acceptance and understanding. I smile back at them. As if “Hi, Stanley!” collectively executed is just about the nice
st thing everyone ever said to me. These people can’t, in their lives, be as kind as they seem, but together, oh, boy, together they’re as focused and effective as a SWAT team. There really ought to be a way to take your pep rally with you.

  Two nights before I leave, Ellen, my wife’s niece, joins Matt, Emily, and me for room-service chicken. It’s my idea to bring the three together to tell me their life stories. I figure the bunch for latter-day pioneers—not gold miners so much as life miners, panning northern California for their fates. People enjoy talking about themselves, and it’s in the interest of science. I don’t see the harm, I don’t see a problem.

  Ellen, from Indiana, and someone I’d always somehow thought of as my maiden niece, tells about the four years she worked in textile design in New York, about the time she went off to India with a medical student the rest of us thought she was going to marry, about joining him in Canada when he went there for his internship, their breakup a few years later when he moved to Pittsburgh. She applied for Canadian immigration papers and stayed in Vancouver, waitressing in a Mexican restaurant, moonlighting in the artist trade. Then, in 1984, in Europe, she fell in love with a Dane. He invited her to Copenhagen. She sold her Canadian all and went to Denmark with two duffel bags and her portfolio. “This major relationship in my life lasted sixty days,” she says, “maybe ninety.” She moved to San Francisco when married friends invited her to stay with them in their apartment.

  “You people!” uncles Stosh. (Because I mean it. Most trips us tourists take are largely photo opportunities, the documentation of our lives posed next to beauty, standing against history, climbing eccentricity, rappelling down quirk—portrayed, I mean, in contiguity with monuments of victory or loss. But it’s wearing, finally, doing the acrobatic Blarney Stone contortions, figuring the angles at Stonehenge that will snuff out the other tourists and leave the kid, or even just positioning oneself in chummy proximity beside the lifesize cardboard presidents and pasteboard kings. But then California is chiefly an idea. What’s the f-stop for ideas? You must look out for your listening ops, too.)

  “Then my friend Diane met a guy in New York. We’d gone to New York. It was the most depressing month of my life. I didn’t want to go East, she wanted to go. Christmas 1985, I sat alone in an apartment eating an Entenmann’s cake and a bag of potato chips. I don’t do stuff like that. I just saw gloom and doom. Even after we came back. It was a combination of not having any money and not really wanting to be in California.”

  Her friend married the man she’d met in New York, and Ellen moved in with her hairdresser.

  “Straight?” aunts Stanley.

  “I learned more about femininity from the hairdresser than I ever knew in my life. This guy had nicer lingerie than I did.”

  She stayed with him four months. The flat was unheated, not very attractive, but the hairdresser, my niece says, was a gem. He gave Ellen his bedroom and slept in the living room on the couch. When he was drunk, he threw things out the window. Ellen would excuse herself, go into the hairdresser’s surrendered bedroom, and close the hairdresser’s surrendered door.

  My maiden niece’s new boyfriend is a black singer ten years younger than she is.

  She found work in an art gallery. Other things started to go her way. She began to sell some of her work. She’d been meeting people in the Networking State and was given a show at the Diva Hotel.

  “This was my first one-person show. September 14, 1987. A monumental day in my life. Big opening, festive, lots of people. I sold seven or eight pieces. No, more. I got a commission for three pieces. I quit the gallery in November, thinking, I’m on my way. Commissions, all this neat stuff happening, I needed time to paint. So—bummer. In June I couldn’t pay my rent. Couldn’t pay it, didn’t have it.”

  She asked for her job back.

  Through the gallery she met a woman with whom she’s starting a product-design business.

  “We’re getting our business license. Maybe happiness has as much to do with giving up some of your dreams as with having them come true. I mean, I did this to myself. I didn’t have to suffer, but I ended up doing it anyway. I don’t have to do that anymore. My mom’s known about Jules almost the entire time, and this Thanksgiving I told my brothers and their wives. I said, I want you to know this is who I’ve been going out with, and I’ve been going out with him for two-and-a-half years.’ I don’t know what I expected, but it was no big deal.”

  Matt grew up in New Jersey, majored in poly sci, then worked two years in Washington for the Department of Energy writing legal decisions in the Office of Hearings and Appeals. He hated it, but it was an easy job and the first time he had any money. Then he decided to go to graduate school. He moved to Massachusetts when he was accepted by Tufts’s graduate English program. This was 1984. He was dumped by the woman he lived with, and a few weeks later he got hepatitis and had to miss most of the spring term. He was very low. The following year he took only two classes and applied to other schools—Harvard, Berkeley, Rutgers, Brown. He got into all of them except Harvard.

  “So I was trying to decide. I went to look at New Brunswick. It was a very depressing visit. I got on this train to go back, and the train hit a woman and killed her. It sort of sealed the day for me. For both of us. I’d go to Berkeley.

  “The only problem was money. Berkeley is a huge department and accepts lots of students but gives out very little money. So it was a question of whether I could afford to come.”

  He took out $9,500 in loans, got a grant that eliminated in-state tuition, and was forgiven out-of-state tuition for one semester. After paying for one semester and his student fees, plus servicing fees for the loans, he had about $6,000 to live on. “Then, second semester, I was a grader and made $1,200, just enough so I could feel okay about the decision to come.”

  Emily’s story, in a sort of Texas drawl, seems odd for somebody from West Orange, New Jersey, though fitting enough, I suppose, for one who’s lived her life like someone in a ballad. Emily’s farmed, window-washed, gardened, painted houses. She’s waited tables, been an editor. In high school she was a competitive classical pianist, a competitive ice skater. She’s belted in karate. She was grounded her junior year in high school. Once, she says, she was a stowaway. She’s lived in London, she’s lived in Kenya, she’s summered in Spain.

  After graduating from St. Lawrence University, she enrolled in Bowling Green State University’s writing program because once she’d run off to Ohio with a sailor and thought it an exotic state. After taking her degree, she stayed in Bowling Green because she’d become involved with Darryl, a young man with dreadlocks and a ska band. The restaurant she worked in gave you two free drinks when you got off your shift. Emily’s was the morning shift. In the two-and-a-half months she was there, she never got a paycheck. Then, cold turkey, she quit waitressing. She helped manage Darryl’s band but didn’t want to go with it to Cincinnati. She applied to join the Peace Corps but, when that fell through, came to San Francisco. Two of her friends were there, and Emily, like Ellen, came out to live with them. She got to San Francisco in August, about a week before the beginning of the fall term. She would teach. She called on all the colleges in the Bay Area, showing up at Berkeley the day after classes started. The woman at the desk turned to the others in the office and said, “Hey, I’ve got this girl here from Iowa or something, and she thinks she’s going to get a job teaching freshman comp.” She got a job selling puppets. Darryl and the band came to California and settled in Santa Barbara. For a while Darryl and Emily took turns commuting. Then they broke up. What she’d really like, she says, would be to go to Thailand and teach in a Cambodian refugee camp.

  So I’m wrong. Passports are in it, immigration papers. What they did was kick around the country, the world, using geography up like frequent fliers, and at least a little of their moxie, a lot of their patience.

  Not gold mining, not life mining, not panning for fate. And home is neither where you hang your heart nor where your hat is. H
ome is wherever the cookie crumbles, random as chaos, beyond any trajectory you’d ever have guessed. People like Emily, like my niece, live in California like Foreign Legionnaires. Matt came because the college of his choice gave him financial aid. He chose it, really, as one might shop for a house or look for a neighborhood—with all the picky proximities in play, the major centralities, some cautious, good-sense feel about schools and transport, access to churches, to culture and water. They trekked the long continental plank. Above water, they wait on time, on chance, on what happens next.

  Me, I was born in New York, I grew up in Chicago, I live in St. Louis. Most people live inside certain fixed lines laid out like the inviolable markings of a tennis court or baseball diamond. It isn’t any failure of bravery, some less-existential way of doing business, how one conducts the world. In my case, what happens next has already happened. I thought I was a picaro, I am only a tourist. Which is plenty hard work and doesn’t always leave you with enough energy to buy into the other fellow’s passion. It ain’t just the rate of exchange that gets you, the strange food and queer customs. It’s that you’re breathing the other guy’s views, his geology and architecture. Yes, and his real estate, his wholesale and retail, all the difficult, altered metrics of value, what you give to a bellman, what you leave for the maid—whether and if. Every vacation has its perils, does some significant damage, and the cliché has it just exactly backwards that tells you that X is a swell place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. For me, what happens next has already happened.