Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  She is giving me the headache. To break her concentration, I study the menu to get some idea of what I’ve been eating. This is what 450 ghost bucks will get you these days:

  POACHED SALMON AND ARUGULA ROULADE

  With yellow and green french beans

  and sliced mango on baby spring greens

  with creamy honey-lime vinaigrette

  BREADS

  Homemade corn sticks,

  whole wheat walnut rolls, and

  garlic-herb knots with sweet butter rosettes

  CHICKEN BREAST GRILLED OVER ALDERWOOD

  Pommes soufflées in potato baskets

  Grilled zucchini, baby white eggplant,

  fresh baby corn

  And that, Dear Diary, is all there was to it. Absolutely nothing else happened to us that night at the Governors Ball.

  “You really think we should go to the party?” asks Joan.

  “I’m on assignment,” I tell her, “I’m duty bound.”

  “I’m a good sport, do you know that?”

  “You are a good sport,” I admit, which is just about when she goes off to break the dollar to get the change to call the cab to take us to the El Rescate 2nd Annual Academy Awards Benefit at Vertigo in downtown L.A. It’s supposed to be one of the “alternative parties” the younger, more serious movie people are said to favor these days.

  The $150-per-head admission at the door, like the $1,200 we’ve already cost our phantom benefactors for the privilege of going to the Academy Awards and watching the big TV show in person and, later, eating the garlic-herb knots and baby white eggplant—all that bread and veggies to the Stars—has been mysteriously waived. I don’t get to identify myself—as per instructions—to Patrick Lippert in “Joe sent me,” speakeasy inflections, or even flash the tickets Nanci Ryder (whom I don’t know and have never seen and only spoken to on the telephone twice, on which she calls me Stanley—me, Stanley, a crippled-up old man who in just over three months is doomed to have his throat cut and his chest cracked open for the second time in four years; Stanley, not Your Mortalityship or Your Woundship or even Mr. Elkin—Stanley, as if, as if, well, as if I were one of them, the larky freewheeling, high rolling of Earth) has sent over by special messenger to our hotel in Korea town. Indeed, it’s as if they’ve been waiting for us, keeping an eye out. As soon as Joan starts to assemble the wheelchair, two young men, too polite to be anything but bouncers, come to assist us. They take us through a special entrance and into the room.

  Into an astonishing scene, one that I, Stanley, bad health’s good sport, would never have expected ever to have witnessed. Not only too old but out of an altogether different, whatchamacallit, ethos, a different conation and even phylum maybe—my faint, poor pale human to their strident, unselfconscious, powerful, but entirely alien, life force.

  Black tie, according to the invitation, is optional, but that ain’t it, that I’m the only man in the club in a tux, probably, for that matter, the only one in a jacket, or even in pants not artfully, sexually ripped into designer-torn, teasing jigsaw, fig-leaf puzzle patterns, or, as far as that goes, a buttoned shirt. They look vaguely like Oscars themselves, these guys. The women, oddly enough, are more formally dressed, many in gowns slightly reminiscent of hoop skirts. A girl near my wheelchair has to lean forward and flip up the back of her dress each time she sits down. Somehow she reminds me of a cartoon hen settling herself onto a Sunday-funnies egg. And that ain’t it either.

  What it is.

  There used to be scenes in movies. Cut to an all-but-deserted nightclub. It’s (metaphorically) quarter to three, there’s no one in the place, Joe, except you and me. Most of the chairs have already been turned upside down on their tables. Only one couple, oblivious, obviously in love, is still dancing, gliding in the dim, romantically lighted room along the floor to some bluesy, dreamy tune in reeds, soft sax, muted brass, a tinkling piano in the next apartment. Waiters, impatient to go home, fidget, glance balefully at their watches, each other, sigh, toss “What can you do? They’re in love. No one told me to go into my profession” occupational-hazard-type shrugs.

  Now forget about the time (it’s barely midnight) and the waiters (cocktail waitresses do the heavy lifting here) and the one lone couple (Vertigo isn’t crowded, but there can’t be more than eight or ten people dancing). Throw out the dreamy tune, the reeds and sax and muted brass. Forget the tinkling piano in the next apartment. You couldn’t hear it with a radio telescope. Turn off the lowered, romantic lights. In their place substitute strobes popping and flashing like a bright barrage of incoming. On the club’s small stage a heavy-metal band (of an element so heavy, so dense and base that whatever metal it represents has yet to be measured or even identified—black hole, perhaps) issues sounds so loud they would be heard by posts. Every instrument is electrically amplified, even the drums. For the second time that night I pray there isn’t a fire.

  The El Rescate 2nd Annual Academy Awards Benefit is a war zone.

  A cocktail waitress shouts would we like a drink from the cash bar. A hundred and fifty bucks apiece at the door and it’s a cash bar.

  El Rescate was set up to assist a half million Central American refugees in the Los Angeles area with a variety of social services. It seems to me to be charity with a somehow coastal spin, though what is most striking is the pure surrealism of the event, the insufficiency of dancers in the big room, the hyperbolic music. Everywhere there are TV sets running videos of real war zones, their soundtracks silent against the explosive din and bang of the band. Earlier, of course, the sets had been tuned to the Awards, but we weren’t here earlier and it isn’t easy to imagine the scene. One thinks of sports—the World Series, Super Bowls, important away games, home games blacked out in their own cities, of all the taverns in all the towns with their enthusiastic, youthful clientele, whooping it up, making “We’re number one, we’re number one!” with their fingers, crowding about the reporter, mugging for the TV cameras, the CBS local news at ten. It’s impossible to imagine any of these people up for that sort of thing. For all their energy, the come-on of their driving, up-front dress, they seem detached to me, cynical. Like royals, they give off a faint stink of imperial airs. They’re young, but somehow they seem as if they never had a youth. But what do I know, a guy redlined years ago by the underwriters? Probably it’s just more sour grapes, the prejudiced pensées of an embittered ex-contender manqué.

  (And there’s the match-up right there, the carefully arranged marriage of my stipulate, shadchen journalism, not rube/slicker at all, but alive/dead—your reporter all gee-whizzed out in the wheelchair.)

  At any rate, this ain’t, for us, where the action is anyway and, like pols or priests at a party, we do maybe twenty-five minutes, then metaphorically walk back to the hotel in the metaphorical rain.

  Joan’s gone back to the room and left me in the lobby to wait for Steve to join us for breakfast. He’s a few minutes late, but I know he’ll be here soon, is on his way, is even now parking his car. Meanwhile I take my ease in one of the hotel’s deep, comfortable chairs. It’s a cold comfort, but one of the things I’ve learned since losing my ability to get around is, well, patience isn’t it exactly, but a sort of passive curiosity, a compensatory faculty like the sharpened acuity of hearing in the blind, say, their increased tactility. Anyway, I’m peculiarly suited to my disease, content, up to a point, as a baby, absorbed by motes in the light, distracted by the parts of his toy mobile riding the currents of the air. This is the close attention I pay to the world now, my cripple’s nosy scrutiny. I watch people checking out, their clear plastic garment bags holding evening gowns, tuxedos, and although I recognize no one, I figure them, like me, for stringers, singers, boys in the band, on the fringes, that is, of last night’s ceremonies. I hear them double-checking, questioning the desk regarding their bills, the patient, difficult Oriental accents of the clerks. Many of the guests are Korean. These chat up the clerks carelessly, cheerfully, paisans in this foreign hotel. Then I
notice something strange, startling even, comic, even moving.

  Across from me is a well-dressed married couple. They are Korean, probably in their forties. Arranged at their feet are bags from significant shops and stores, their logos, chic, flagrant as modern times. They have been on a shopping spree, and this is somehow oddly touching to me. Then I see that they’re joined by a young man in his late teens. He has shopping bags, too. He’s in blue jeans, wears a light sweater. He laughs and puts his arm familiarly around the man’s shoulder. He hugs the woman. Only the kid is white, American. I can’t quite make out what they’re saying, or even the language they say it in. Why, he’s adopted, I think. They’ve gone and adopted an American kid! And I’m stirred by the improbable ecumenicism of the world, the odd, turned-tables of things, and feel suddenly hopeful, better than I have since I’ve been here.

  But then the boy shakes hands with the two Koreans, waves so long, and leaves the hotel just as Steve comes into it.

  Steve Zwicker is the outgoing chairman of our English Department at Washington University. I like him because he’s sane, a decent man bereft of neurosis and shtick. Unless you count, as I don’t, his fear of, or maybe just his distaste for, flying. (A native Californian, he makes his frequent trips home on an Amtrak sleeper.) I’m fond of the Zwickers. During my sabbatical year in London, we rented our house to them. They didn’t break anything. Steve and I agree about books, movies, have mostly the same opinions of our mutual friends. I go to all his kids’ bar mitzvahs. He visits me in all my hospitals. He’s an immaculate man, wry, sharp as good grapefruit. But chiefly, chiefly his sanity, his even-keel heart, which has less to do with any level, steady-as-she-goes fixity of purpose or unflappability of temperament than with his pitch-pipe instincts, some almost musical correctness of the emotions. Indeed, he has the benevolent, intelligent look of a musician in a symphony orchestra.

  He’s glad to see me. I’m glad to see him. And I have a familiar dividend of well-being, this jolt of bonding I feel whenever I’m with a friend I know from one place in another place essentially foreign to me. Though we share the turf here. It’s my hotel, it’s his hometown.

  Then Joan steps out of the elevator, and we all go in to breakfast.

  I’m not in my wheelchair, have elected to go the distance to the restaurant on my cane—and on Joan’s arm. He’s never seen me in my wheelchair. None of my friends has. My new, exacerbating disabilities are not out of the closet yet, but I’m stumbling badly, have to move along the wall for stability, leverage, playing the percentages with gravity, my waning strength. I notice Steve noticing. But once we’re shown to our booth and seated, we’re all equals again.

  He asks how it went at the Awards, but I haven’t sorted it all out yet and I can only tell him that for all the backstage and gossip I got out of it, we could have stayed home and watched on TV. And I tell him about Galati, and Swifty Lazar—all my fish that got away.

  Then we order. We order melons and berries, plates of lox, bagels, baskets of bread. Joan will have half a grapefruit, a poached egg, whole-wheat toast. Coffee, we stipulate, is to be brought later. I love breakfast. I always have. In my book, it’s the only meal—the long, luxurious leisurelies, at once normal and as ceremonial as high tea.

  We talk. We talk about Molly’s junior year abroad at Wadham College, Oxford University, my daughter the boater, how she earned her oar, her invitations to country houses on weekends, her trips between terms to Italy for the paintings, to Austria for the slopes. She’s between terms now. Hilary’s term ended in March and we went to see her. We tell how she talked the manager at Durrants Hotel into upgrading our accommodations. We talk about our week in Paris together, her pals in the discos, from Oxford, Madison, Sarah Lawrence. As we speak, she’s still in Israel with her connected friend. They’ll be going on to Greece before they return to Oxford for Trinity term. Hilary term, Trinity. We discuss the morality of envying one’s children.

  Breakfast begins coming. The melon is swell, the berries and grapefruit. The lox, piled higher than corned beef in a sandwich in a deli, is more than we bargained for but not more than we can handle, its sheer weight incremental to our appetites. We try out different rolls, share pony pots of jam.

  And talk easily, as comfortable with each other as the closed circle of movie stars at the Academy Awards. Wickedly, we discuss colleagues. I tease Steve about his money. He needles me about the long airplane ride ahead of us.

  “TWA must have dozens of nonstops to St. Louis. Change carriers. Why lay over in Phoenix so long? Why do you have to stop in Houston? Houston. Isn’t Houston on the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “The magazine isn’t paying for it. I am.”

  “That’s not a good argument. I’m unimpressed.”

  “It’s a difference of about $700.”

  “Suppose there’s weather? In terms of time, you’d almost be better off with Amtrak.”

  In July, Steve will no longer be chairman of the English Department. Wayne Fields will replace him. Steve was our first Jewish chairman, and when I see him in the halls I’ll no longer have the opportunity to greet him as I used to do. “Good morning, Reb Chairman,” or “Good evening, Reb Chairman.” But we’ve finished our coffee. The breakfast, which has lasted longer than our dinner at the Governors Ball, and has been, for Joan, for me, much more fun, is just about over. I sign the check. “We have a plane to catch, Reb Chairman,” I tell him, and rise carefully. Clumsily, I walk back into the lobby. I shake hands with my friend and say I’ll see him back in St. Louis.

  While Joan returns to the room to collect the wheelchair and arrange with a bellman about our bags, I prop myself against the cashier’s counter and see to the bill.

  By the time she comes down with the chair, I’m more than ready to sit in it. The bellman takes our bags and Joan pushes me toward the hotel’s driveway, where we wait for the cab that will take us to the airport where we’ll go to the gate to catch the plane that will bring us back to the town where we live in a house that stands on a street not far from the world that Jack built.

  THE REST OF THE NOVEL

  For conveying ideas, novels are among the least functional and most decorative of the blunt instruments. (Could this be a universal truth, some starry, operative mathematical principle? Most stars are decorative too, of course, their function merely to peg the universe in place like studs in upholstery, servicing the elegancies, strumming its physics like a man with a blue guitar, fleshing all the centripetals and centrifugals, stringing the planets like beads, some beautiful pump of placement, arranging night, moving the planetary furniture, and fixing the astronomical data, but less useful, finally, in the sense that a handful more here or a dollop less there could make as much of a never mind as corks or rhythm, less useful, finally, than mail or ice cream.) And if, a few times in a way, novels like Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast or Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath come along to legislate, or raise a consciousness or two, or rouse a rabble, to make, I mean, what history or the papers call a difference, why that’s decorative, too, I think, a lip service the system, touching the bases like a superstitious braille, pays art—like, oh, the claims made a few years back for the “We Are the World” folks when it was really the Catholic Relief Services already on site during the Ethiopian famine that did the heavy lifting.

  Well it’s not the novelist’s fault. Not that they don’t deserve some of the blame, leaking encouragement like someone paying out line to fish, some of your have-cake-and-eat-its like a little miracle of the loaves. And there are still a few big mouths who stake claims for the ameliorative shamanism of—hark! this is interesting: not the book so much as the writer—the practice of fiction—the loyal, Nutso Art Jerk Groupie, like some devoted cultist, the last Deadhead, say, worrying like holy beads the shoelace on his wrist he thinks is a bracelet making confrontation with an Elvis Presley impersonator.

  Isn’t it pretty to think so, though? To take oneself as seriously
as one’s readers sometimes do? To believe, if only briefly, and if only by the light off the gloss of the brittlest mood swing, in the justice or even the palpability of one’s cause, to Don Quixote principle, any principle, and raise to the level of purpose what in the final analysis is only what given egos, fashionably or not, fashion or no, frozen in mere season’s hipped au courantness, perceive as beauty.

  Because aesthetics is the only subject matter, because style is, and all calls are judgment calls. Because ideas are even scarcer than those fabled two or three stripped plots, those fabled three or four basic jokes, art a fugue ideal finally, the hen’s-teeth variations, genre revolving around itself, the spin-off, like a few chips of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

  Because ain’t, when you come right down, the rest of the novel like the rest of the novel, as all detective stories are like all other detective stories, dick-fic a piece of the mother-lode main? Not just who done it but how it’s done, how it’s always done, the who-done-it as orthodox and ritualized as positions in ballet in which, like the do-re-mes, all music has its source, from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe. Almost as if a detective’s relentless, endless questions along the stations of his investigation, the forced march of his focused, inquisitive rhetoric, were the natural music of the world, or as if such men were tone deaf to intrusion, to all the hectoring socratics of their quest. And the hell this plays with character, all the battering-rammed intent of obsession, the armored callus of the soul, the boring tyrannicals of personality. To say nothing at all of the other played-upon players in the game, their passified, invaded lives and suspect, squirmed evasions. Form, I mean, creates cliché. It horses stereotype. Think of Mr. Falk’s Columbo and you have almost encyclopedically the finite limits of the genre—only his rumpled raincoat and his smarmy awe and merely partially put-on turnip-truck airs and naïves, only the feigned clutter of his personal human laundry, only that final question delivered at the door and springing, it would seem, from the goldened-over grove of his slapped and mythic forehead a studied idosyncratics all he has for character, shtick in lieu of life and charm and will, tic in lieu of depth, as if Hercule and Holmes and Dalgleish and Marple were really, give or take an eccentricity, ultimately the same invulnerable party, their very invulnerability almost a product not so much of their slick sleuthfulness as of their authority, the fascist bent of their being, and their recyclability as characters, their cloned and clannish serial essence, not even the motives of the criminals changing—love-greed or cash-greed—only always the victims and cases, sometimes the weapons. In it, amateurs or not, professionally, which is to say objectively, which is to say marginally, indifferent and blind as Justice herself, with no more rooting interest in who did what to whom than, ideally, the jury impaneled to determine the guilt or innocence of the party arrested. In it professionally. So standing outside the loop of the novel itself. Which is, of course, no place for any proper protagonist to stand at all. Their invulnerability protected, too, not just by the almost apostolic authority of their badged office but crazily, by, well, profit motive, so that sometimes even after their authors age and sicken and die, their characters live on, doomed like ghosts to sequel their lives, their impersonate lives assuranced, too, by the genre in which they ask their bruising, devastating questions, questions that, in real life, would earn, at least for the amateurs and busybodies, the private eyes and mercenaries, blows, bullets, all the wrenching, gut-kicked pile-on of a cornered rage; even the Mike Hammers, Sam Spades (colored into character by first-person rhetoric), and laconic dirtied Harrys a sort of race of stunt men finally, their asses covered by camera angle, so that for all the knocks they take to the head, for all their stand-in saviorhood, they are guaranteed survivability, too, as though the life/death arrangements of their furious, spurious danger were only a kind of faked sportsmanship, like taking fish with a net, say, or shooting game from out the window of an airplane.