Understand me. Swim laps, lay off the smokes, restrict your salt intake. If your motive is health, getting right with the underwriters, if you’re sick and tired of sick and tired, I’m all for you. But good shape? At our age?
I made this holy silver-wedding-anniversary vow. If some lady in a strange town, really great-looking, really intelligent, nice and not a hooker, nice and not crazy, should ever come up to me at a party and say, “Hey look, I figure, a swell guy like you, you’re a happily married man with this nifty family I wouldn’t hurt for the world and I expect absolutely nothing in return, absolutely nothing, it’s just that gross, middle-aged guys old enough to be my father turn me on. So what do you say, sailor, when it’s over it’s over, strictly goodbye-dear-and-amen, meanwhile everything my treat, what do you say, my place or yours?” Well, I’ll be honest. I would almost certainly have to think about it. I’ll be more than honest. It hasn’t come up and I no longer expect that it will.
So, in my case, middle age is at least partly ascetic, in the sense that however okay it may now be deemed to be to come out of the closet—Paunch Power!—and however seemly and respectable it may yet become even to die, it is mostly a piecemeal withdrawal of expectation. It’s too late to learn to ski with impunity. I shall never go into the wet suit or snorkle the seas. I shall never break the bank at Monte Carlo, and learning Chinese is out of the question. Neither do I expect to be asked to spy for my country, and I’ll never solo. Nor will I handicap the ponies or get the knack of reading sheet music. I have almost given up hope of ever receiving a standing ovation.
But that’s all small potatoes. Never my area of competence or concern. Ski? Even as a kid it hurt my hands to make snowballs and I’d catch cold pulling my sled. And what do I care about breaking the bank at Monte Carlo? I wouldn’t know what to give the croupier.
They’re strengths in disguise, could be, these holes in my training. They free up obsession and shut distraction off at the pass. All the things I won’t do, or can’t, focus my options, allow me to service only my necessities. They tunnel my hope and—well, it’s like this. As people get older they cease taking polls. More certain of their own, they’re not so interested in other people’s opinions. When fantasy flies out the window reality comes in at the door. He’s not a bad fellow, Reality. Quite nice, really, when you get to know him. For every pipe dream he takes away he leaves an energy, some increment of measured confidence just as heady as the diffuse, winner-take-all vanities of the young. And you do grow negligent of appearances; you do better; you grow weary of them, of all the reflected stances. You take less offense in mirrors and, like sums done in the head, narcissism becomes an inside job.
Like most writers, I’ve always wanted a best seller. Nothing spectacular: eleven weeks, say, at number seven or eight on The New York Times Book Review best-seller list would do me, maybe ten minutes including breaks for commercials at the end of a major talk show, and David Levine to do my caricature. Perhaps an honorary degree from a minor major university. Modest, you see, bucking for average as these things go. (Indeed, as they go every day.) I’m working on a new novel now, perhaps the best, certainly the longest, I’ve ever written, but I doubt it will happen. I don’t write it off—this is the world, everything happens—but I wouldn’t bet on it. For now it’s enough to do the work, to use my craft for my craft, and let the icing take care of itself. Leave me to Heaven, I say, and soak in my middle years as cynical and comfortable and unselfconscious as a man in his tub.
WHY I LIVE WHERE I LIVE
Because, to me, it has always looked like what cities are supposed to look like. Like silhouette architecture in funny papers. Moon Mullins’s downtown, Krazy Kat’s, a warehouse style, a wholesale modality, the furrier’s provenance, the jeweler’s. Gilt lettering in upper-story windows. And brick from the golden age of brick. Brick so high it could be the dumping ground of brick, stacked as counter on a wondrous roll. And because grand juries seem as if they would meet here, returning true bills, parsing corruption: racketeers whose rackets are old-timey and flagrant and tinged with muscle—teamster stuff, laundry trucks that don’t leave the garage, taxis crippled, and tampered axles under the trucks that bring the milk, the bread, the paper. Vending-machine brutalities. Soft-drink killings.
And because I’m an American of the vaguely professional class, a tenured academic, the least mobile of men, and you live where they ask you in this business and get maybe two or three solid offers in a working lifetime, and because I’ve been luckier than most or less brave, perhaps, and have only received one—two if you count the feeler, pursued halfheartedly on both our parts, from the University of California in Santa Barbara thirteen years ago, and we tried it for a summer and didn’t much like it, my wife because it made her nervous to go for bread at eighty miles an hour and me because, as I say, I’m not brave and didn’t know if I’d like my friends.
Which is really why I live where I live.
I live in University City, Missouri, a block from the St. Louis city limits. (The city of St. Louis is self-contained as an island, exists in no county, is, in a way, a kind of territory, a sort of D.C., a sort of Canal Zone, gerrymandered as Yugoslavia, its limits fixed years ago, before the fact, staked out, one would guess, by a form of sortilege, a casting, say, of vacant lots, working farms and nineteen miles of the Mississippi River into the equation, the surveyor’s sticks and levels and measures doing this tattoo of the possible, of the one-day-could-be, shaping a town like a stomach, stuffing it with ellipses, diagonals, the narrows of neighborhood.) University City is not so much a suburb as St. Louis’s logical western addendum. There are over ninety incorporated municipalities surrounding St. Louis, closing it off like manifest destiny, filling it in like some jigsaw of the irrefutable. Mondrian’s zones and squares like a budgeted geometry. And I live where I live because of the civilization here.
On the third Tuesday of every month there is a salon at the home of Eli and Lee Robins. The Insight Lady is there (I shall not blow her cover here but can tell you that she is a heroine of song and story, prose and poetry, and, like her husband—you couldn’t drag her name from me—the older man and downtown lawyer Albert Lebowitz, a native) putting out her insights like hair or fingernail. Deans are there, chairmen of departments in street clothes. It’s all very brilliant.
Eli’s spread (both he and his wife are scientists, but the money is Texas) is smaller, I think, than the palace at Versailles but much grander than Madame Récamier’s. And because, like me, he is a multiple sclerotic, much of the house is tricked out in the customized hardware of the handicapped, all the expensive gymcrackery of safety: stands of parallel bars like private roads, handles that bloom from the doorways like a steel ivy, cunning chair lifts like an indoor Aspen. Eli’s electric cart, Eli’s motor pool. We gather on these Third Tuesdays in the smaller of the two living rooms, the library really but with its phones hard by the furniture—I want to sit on the leather chair and call the couch—it could be some plush boiler-room operation. There are discrete files, the latest in dictating equipment, everything state-of-the-art, everything convenient; and for dark reasons I am at home in this house. (I’m crippled too.) And once a month, at the Robinses’, I feel free to go public, to clumsy my coffee on the furniture, to crumb the carpet and ash my neighbors as myself. But chiefly to talk. At the top of my voice at the top of my form, vicious, a gossip, clever as a fag, with, to save me, only this: that I am never the hero of my anecdotes but always—I’m crippled too—the fall guy, whiner take all. (On New Year’s Eve of 1963, before Eli’s disease, before my own: Joan and I were invited to a party at the Robinses’. I had not really known about them, that they lived in a house as big as all outdoors. I had assumed what I assume about everyone I meet, that their backgrounds are the same as mine, that we drive the same cars, get the same mpg, earn the same salaries, and blue is our favorite color. That we’re all each other’s doppelgängers—how otherwise could we meet in this life?—that we all serve the same
conditions, that we share the world like weather. The main party was going on in the larger of the living rooms, a room like a grand salon on an ocean liner, and though there might have been a hundred people in it, I swear to you it looked empty. We left just after midnight, and outside our third-floor walk-up Loop apartment building I kicked dents in the door of our ’62 Chevrolet Biscayne. I ripped the ring off the steering wheel. I rent my clothes like an Orthodox. Why not? This was grief, this was grief too. It was years before we went back. When we owned our own home. When disease had collateralized us, when demyelination had doppelgänged us again.)
And this is the point, I think. I live where I live for the odd safety there really is in numbers. Are the crippled as comfortable in Santa Barbara? Could I aspire to Eli Robins’s fail-safe gewgaws, his remote-control life, his disease’s nifty setup like a model railroader’s?
I have been keeping track now since the first Third Tuesday and have never seen the same hors d’oeuvre twice. And that’s another thing about St. Louis, about University City. It is the hors d’oeuvre hub and honeypot of the world, its quiche capital. The deli is lousy and the entrées only middling—I mean its steaks and roasts, its chops and chickens—but there are knives, forks, spoons, and stars in its appetizers and something in its soups to float your heart. (It could be the water. Nowhere I have ever been is it softer. In the shower soap comes apart in your hands. It lathers like spindrift, froths and foams like the trick floors of discos. You’re clean five to ten minutes sooner than you are in New York or California.)
There is, I think, an appetizer vision, the aperitif heart, something in the soul or character that bumps up hunger without the means or even desire to satisfy it, a teaser temperament—forshpeiz forsooth, foreplay forever. All I know is that I love that hour to hour-and-a-half before we go in to dinner (it’s no longer Third Tuesday; we’re at Martha Rudner’s, at the Stangs’, the Teitlebaums’, the Gasses’, the Pepes’), when the pâtés are passed, the barbecue chicken wings, the plates of pot stickers, the stinging dips and smarting cheeses, all that spicy consubstantiation, the lovely evening’s high season of high seasoning, and the talk is general and the gazpacho melts in my mouth. And I live where I live, could be, because I am such a good guest, comfortable in other people’s houses as a man in his club and under no obligation to bring wine, flowers, houseplants, the candy gifts and door-prize alms (empty-handed even in a hospital room), taking hospitality for granted as a Greek in an epic, never the first to leave though always the first to leave the dinner table, eschewing tea, coffee, the sugar-silted linen and the sedimental crumbs, no coffee klatcher but the Brandy-and-Soda Kid himself, cordial at cordials and drawn by a drawing room.
Inviting the others, ready to do business, calling “Come here, come here, the fire’s still going. Bring your cups. Come where it’s comfortable. ” And I live where I live because they come when I call them—well, what are friends for?—and know things I don’t. And because I love to hear Julie Haddad, the Deep Throat of real estate, give the latest market quotation on a neighbor’s house, or not even a neighbor’s, a stranger’s, someone the next town over, and Patty Pepe explain the complicated peerage of west-county Jews.
I don’t mean gossip in the ordinary sense. There is little hanky-panky where I live. In the twenty years I’ve lived here only one of my friends has been divorced. No one seems to have affairs. Missouri lust is career-oriented, not sexual. It’s one on oneself, not one on one. We want Nobel Prizes, things within Pulitzer’s gift, National Book Awards, grants, honors, invitations, hosannas. We talk the ego’s bottomless line. Or I do. And I live where I live because there are people who will listen to me speak Self like a challenge dance. Not boasting, understand, not look-Ma-no-hands but something involuntary, reflexive as perspiration, not loose lip, loose tooth, worrying away at this sweet-and-sour tooth I have in this city whose specialty is appetizer and whose shape on a map looks like a stomach. I sound awful but it’s not what you think.
I haven’t seen Bill Gass for a month, say. I bring him out. I draw him forth like a man doing card tricks. I work him close up as a Vegas mechanic, my sleight-of-mouth circumstances and the opening bid of my own poor itinerary in my juggler’s distracted jabber. The same with Steve Teitelbaum, John Morris, Howard Nemerov, the same with everybody. (Not boasting, understand. I know where I’ve been. I need to know where these guys are.) All right, it is what you think; but win or lose, it clears my air.
And this occurs to me. The estimated population of the city of St. Louis on January 1, 1980, was 479,000, that of the greater metropolitan area, 2,410,628. I’ve lived here twenty years and have only two friends who work downtown. How many people living in Houston could say the same? Who in greater Omaha could? Who in Chicago? Boston? the Bronx? (Who, for that matter, in St. Louis?) When I moved here in 1960, the city’s population was just over 750,000. Urban flight shapes my skyline. It cozies connection and snugs my skyscrapers. It’s good, I mean, for the architecture and, the city emptied out, lends a scaled-down look to things. Downtown seems someplace foreign. Or no. Not foreign. An American city, but an American city like some Brechtian projection. St. Louis like the City of Mahagonny. And I live where I live because there’s nothing beautiful to look at in the store windows. Because reality looms in them like a loss leader, furniture prole as low company or the circumstances of people on fixed incomes, the fashions dated as nurses’ uniforms, a dry-goods sort of town, a hardware one. And I look. I do. Once or twice a month, at night, in the warmer weather, we cruise downtown’s empty streets. We park, we window-shop.
Me, most of my friends, we don’t dress well. We are barely presentable. And if we’re out of the shower ten minutes quicker than New Yorkers, we’re out of the bedroom fifteen. We are not laid back. Laid back is studied, sandaled, and lightly leathered, capped and cute. It goes with the hairdo. We don’t have hairdo. I’m fifty years old and dress like someone on Bowling for Dollars, like a guy driving cross-country. Third Tuesdays and downtown. The sweet-and-sour heart.
And I live where I live because I am comfortable, because the climate is equable, because the movies come on time but the theater is road show, second company, because the teams are dull but we get all the channels, because there can’t be four restaurants in the city that require jackets and ties and there’s a $25,000 ceiling on what city employees may earn and I make more than the mayor, the head of the zoo. Because I feel no need to take the paper. Because I feel no need.
And finally because nowhere I have been do so many other people seem to live so well. St. Louis, and University City too, is a city of sealed neighborhoods, gated as railroad crossing, of blocked-off streets and private places, chartered as nation, zoned as meteorological maps, the enclaves and culs-de-sac of stalled weather. Not fortress but subdivision America, everything convenient, stone’s-throw as Liechtenstein. My subdivision, Parkview, is separated from Ames Place, the subdivision just west of it, by a walk called the Greenway (I could throw a ball into it, but it’s almost a mile by car—the closed-off streets, the wrought-iron gates that are opened on some complicated schedule I have never been able to learn), and, like so many other of the city’s private neighborhoods, it is very beautiful. The houses are large. They are brick or stone, two stories or three, with slate roofs, red-tiled, green. Eighty percent of the homes were built between 1906 and 1915 in Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Style. No two are alike, but I have a sense of snowflake disparities, a fraternal-twin aesthetics.
One Third Tuesday a few months back I was telling the Insight Lady’s husband that there was nothing I really wanted anymore, that I was just about consumered out. I have a videotape recorder, the TV camera that goes with it, a pool (Parkview looks like something out of Meet Me in St. Louis, but we’re pooled now as Beverly Hills), quad, the middle-class works. It wasn’t time yet to go into the electric golf cart; there was nothing I wanted. Well, maybe one thing, but . . . I described plaques I had seen on houses in London where authors had lived. A few w
eeks later Al brought over a replica of what I’d described. A dark lead slab with raised copper letters:
STANLEY ELKIN
1967–
He drilled holes into the brick for the screws and mounted it on my house.
I’m waiting for Joan. We’re going to Bobby’s Creole for the barbecue shrimp and then to a movie. I’m sitting on the top stair, next to the railing, at the foot of our walk. Across the street is a triangular park with its honey locusts and tall old pines and oaks. I look toward Pershing at the beautiful homes, seventy-five years old some of them, good as new, better. How lovely, I think. How fortunate we are. Up and down my street, Westgate, the houses make a long gentle convex. Three blocks off, beyond the northern gates, is Delmar Boulevard, a sort of student village, the shops recycled, periodically changed as marquee, head shops where kosher butchers once thrived, the Varsity theater with its 3-D festivals, the Tivoli, which changes its double bill nightly, health-food stores and bike shops, record stores, book, boutiques and the co-op grocery, the open-air market, a gallery, Bobby’s Creole, where we’re going. An odd nostalgia seems to hang over it all, a sawdust chic, grubby and moving. There’s a store that sells old movie posters and Blueberry Hill, a pub where the serious darts players go. I lived off Delmar once, as I do now, when it was a ghetto for Orthodox Jews. But one sort of earnestness is not so different from another. Kids’, old folks’. I’ve come a long way from St. Louis. Three or four blocks.
I live where I live. I have a plaque that says so. I wait for my wife and feel fine, within the gates, enjoying for as long as the tenure holds my tucked-in, deck-chair life.
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