Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  It was the summer I met sky divers, ice-surfers, triathletes, men who roller-skate sand dunes, characters engaged in improbable rides, their motorcycles only for openers. The summer I traveled man’s-man circles on colleagues’ long Leatherette bike backs, a sidekick sidesaddled as a Roman wife. And watched my pressure, took my pulse, timed my clotting factors, and counted to my age when I peed. I had this ritual: I’d start counting when my stream started and stop when it stopped. Unless the numbers added up to thirteen—forty-nine I was a dead man—I divided everything after thirty-nine, my age at the time, by two and added that to the total—fifty-eight I was history—to see how long I’d left to live.

  Back in St. Louis I sprang for a motorcycle of my own—a Honda 175 with an electric starter, though I made the purchase contingent on someone teaching me how to operate the thing, for I’d never actually driven a motorcycle. The man in the showroom, looking more academic than the profs in Milwaukee, was very cooperative and assigned someone to teach me until, he promised, we were all of us confident I could make it past the dozen or so lights, stop signs, and tricky left turns between the agency and home. I wouldn’t, he said, be allowed off the lot otherwise. (Yeah, I thought, sure. I’d heard that one before, reminded of gentle, patient four-bit-an-hour ponies of my youth who’d taken mommy’s money and run, leaped, roughed and tumbled too, or whose heavy necks I couldn’t pull off the ground whenever they felt like licking the track or nibbling their shadows.) Only I couldn’t quite get the knack of it, blowing the delicate tap dance required to shift gears, the precision heel-toe, brush-brush tensions, just using hand brakes to stop alien to a kid checked out in Basic Schwinn whose instincts demanded he stand on what weren’t even pedals. (Because it’s true. Once you learn to ride a bike you don’t forget. Even if it ruins your efforts to learn anything else.)

  I went back on my word and bought the thing anyway. It was important for me to have a motorcycle that year, even if the salesman drove it home while I, a passenger in a pal’s car, held my helmet and lapped the field. And asked, “Get it on the kickstand? Good, let it stand there forever.”

  Copping surreptitious peeks when I passed a window. Checked out in little red wagon, scooter, sled, my very own Big Wheel, vroom, vroom. Till Joan spied me spying. “Have neighbors without heart problems move it into the living room. Use it as a planter.”

  I learned how to ride from the owner’s manual. I’m not Rocky, a listless, up from-nowhere Before blossomed into a splendid, ameliorant After. There ain’t montages in life. What would they show? Boning Up on Oil? Learning Tool Kit? Mulling Maintenance?

  Hey, I was too scared of the thing to ever get any good at it. Or feel settle in my pants whatever altered, transfigured avatar of transubstantiate power those 175 cc’s of engine were supposed to represent. But you know what? When I put on the helmet it covered my bald spot. Strangers threw me high signs, peace signs, V’s for victory, occasional birds. Which, too unsure of my skills to take my hand off the handlebars, I rarely acknowledged, earning me points for my cool.

  We sat on it, the in-laws, my kids, up on its back like people posing on ponies. When I sold it in 1974 it had less than twelve hundred miles on it. I’d tell you exactly, but it didn’t add up to thirteen.

  MY TUXEDO: A MEDITATION

  Forget religious differences, political. Put by the social notions, the racial and economic hang-ups. The fine distinctions aren’t. Not the lump-sum bracket arrangements of the IRS, not the intellectual coordinates of the SATs or any of talent’s false, misleading facets—mechanical aptitude, the tenor voice. There are only two kinds of men finally. Those whose clothes fit and the other kind. Sam, my clothes don’t fit. My handkerchiefs are too small. My ties. One’s shoelaces and eyeglasses. Sam. My shirt buttons won’t hold a crease and my leather belts are rumpled. My canes, Sam. My scarves and my zippers. Sam, Sam, I don’t look good in furniture!

  Because there are certain bodies that slough clothes, that nudge the hang of a shirt off true, the line of a suit or a p.j. Something perhaps actually repudiate to fabric, fashion, some possibly haunted condition of raiment that billows the break in a trouser, the roll of a cuff—ghosts in your shirts, phantoms in your pants. That revokes habiliment’s grace periods and cancels all its five-year/50,000-mile whichever-comes-first warranties—the old, splendid shine of the new, some glorious, chin-up, chest-out protective sheen of clothing’s maiden voyages when we were kids, that almost cloaklike status of new duds that glowed on us spiffy as force fields. (A knife pocket in a boot, I remember. I remember my first long pants and recall a zipper on a windbreaker that ran like a sash from my waist to my shoulder, the forty-five-degree slant endowing me with, lending me, I mean, some sense of the unique that, paradoxically, sits inside the very idea of a uniform, exuding pride, patriotism, the swaggered vibes and wavelengths of mission, like the rakish tilt of a green beret or the colored neckcloths of special forces, say. Kids with messages on their T-shirts must feel this way.) And what looked good in the shop and at least offered a reflection in the department-store mirror, reduced, in daytime’s available light and the one-on-one circumstances of the eye, not just to the out of plumb but to the shabby and old shoe, to all the played-out, sad-ass obsolescence of bus-depot style. And though worse things have happened at sea and I’m a baby to mention it, it’s a deformity of sorts, a small sin against the self, to have, at my time of life, to continue to flaunt my playground ways, my low couture, my hick chic—shirttails loose, flapping, rising like a sort of escaped weather from the back of my pants, the points of my collars rounded, curling in on themselves like petals spoiling, and the illusion, somehow, that I wear badly aligned knickers, collapsed socks.

  It ain’t just faulty body imaging or low esteem that’s spooking me. Because the thing of it is, most people’s clothes fit. Not well dressed particularly, not anything glass of fashion or mold of form, just those light, casual arrangements of the hand-in-glove—extras in movies and athletes in outfields, salesmen on airplanes and fiddlers in dance bands, shoppers at K mart and people on picnics. Most folks’ do. Housewives in shmattes and doctors in lab coats. Because a size is a statistic, a mathematical fact, men’s and the tailor’s historical weights and measures, scientific and fixed as a light-year, the mileage to London. (Because the real Industrial Revolution had nothing to do with steam, the railroads, smoke, soot, and time clocks, Birmingham’s murk, Liverpool’s shumtz like generalized climate, some Tropic of the Urban. It had nothing to do with internal combustion. The sweatshop was the true beginning of modern times; the sewing machine is at the core of civilization—and the rack off which we buy our clothes at the bottom of things. The bespoke broken like a code, and Bond Street and Savile Row only expensive cottage industries now, mom-and-pop operations for tourists, the rich, the neighborhood changing and the march of empire spreading outward from the downtown department stores to the suburban malls, to all the aisles, bins, counters, and crabbed changing rooms of the ordinary.)

  I am, I guess, unfit.

  Or was, used to be.

  A little over a year ago I was invited to Esquire magazine’s golden anniversary do at the Four Seasons, Lincoln Center. Black tie, the invite specified.

  Those tuxedos one rents are like costumes, trick suits, some breakaway vaudeville of the haberdash. They are a sort of tailored palimpsest, cloth pentimenti, a scaffolding, a tux armature of seams and tucks and great squirreled-away swatches of excess material. Look inside one of those suckers—the pants, the jacket—and you’ll find secret suits, smuggled suits, suits within suits, garment strata, actual strip mines of fabric, great Mesabi Ranges of worsted. One size fits all, at least potentially, and how that thing moved when I did is a mystery.

  The fact is I looked fine. I wanted to buy it. It wasn’t the price that put me off—though I was surprised they could ask that much to buy a suit that must already have paid for itself four or five times over—so much as some used-car notion of it I had, the sense, suddenly fastidious, sudden
ly nice, of buying somebody else’s troubles. (Because isn’t love the point of all this? Some romantic return on your investment? This was a garment that had been out all night at proms: this was a suit that had stood up at weddings, that had fallen down drunk, that had ridden in the back seat of convertibles and maybe gotten lucky now and again and watched dawn come up perhaps over the points of interest. This was a suit, that is, that had been around the block a few times.)

  And, anyway, where would I wear it? It could be another fifty years before Esquire had its next golden anniversary.

  In Scarsdale my cousin’s kid was getting married. Big German automobiles in the circular driveway. Roses, orchids in the swimming pool like the floating gardens of Xochimilco. Would-be actors offering drinks, hors d’oeuvres on the lawn. Strolling musicians strolling and a full-piece orchestra in the white circus tent set up over the tennis court. Chefs in the mess tent and the caterer fussing. A New York State Supreme Court justice mingling, muttering the ecumenical vows like an opera singer vocalizing, doing soft scales.

  And twice in ten months now the pleasure of my company requested if only I could come up with black tie, the snoot equipage and swank accoutrement of the social. I was on a roll whose idea of the high life was any party not specifically B.Y.O.B. Like someone, a young married, say, just learning the fundamentals, the ABCs of economic life, I determined to buy rather than rent. Not knowing I was in the vanguard of a trend, that this was the fashionable thing these days, unaware, I swear it, that yuppies were gathering, that tuxedos were in, or otherwise I might not have done it. (I remember my Nehru jacket, which I thought was beautiful. The first on my block and worn only once. I remember the white polyester double-knit dress shirt I bought, and that I also thought beautiful, a high-fashion breakthrough.) On all the cusps of the current, positioned as an ambusher and embarrassed, as ever, by home-court advantage, my unreasonable aversions and inverted prides. Because I had not yet come to understand the real meaning of the tuxedo.

  Now, in recent years I have come to dread shopping, particularly shopping for clothes, all the little humiliations of purchase, the holographic views one catches of oneself in the three-way mirrors, those coming-and-going visions of the bald, diminished, frailing self that are really, God knows, the going-going-gone eyefuls and look-sees, telling as CAT scans, of old mortality and downscale being. I make no mention of that moment of truth when they take your credit card away to see if it will bounce and speak hardly at all of the flimsily curtained dressing rooms, their hard little benches, no deeper than bookshelves, where you don’t so much try pants on as wrestle with leverage (like dressing, I imagine, in a closet)—the gyms of the sidelined, say, the teensy locker rooms of the sedentary.

  So, bamboozled by my body and the other panics, my customized, white-knuckled, fear-of-flying fear, and turning it, if you will, into a kind of trip to the dentist, I put off for as long as I decently could actually going out to buy the damned thing.

  The whole business took maybe ten minutes.

  I’d forgotten, you see, all I’d learned at the tuxedo rental joint seven or eight months before—the great, one-size-fits-all tuxedo principles, the fact that tuxedos are the very medium of the tailor/salesmen in these places, that they do almost only one thing and one thing only, the way, say, oh, the lady behind the gravy-and-mashed potatoes station in the cafeteria lunch line ladles out little mountains of starch, then sets gravy in them like perfect puddles of landscaping, and, most important of all, the almost total absence of choice in these matters, decision surrendered, out of your hands, whatever of option remaining only the shape of your shirt collar, the detailing of your lapels, to notch or to shawl, or just a matter of color, the red cummerbund and tie or the black. (To notch, of course. To black. So no choice at all really. And even the accessories a package—the tie and cummerbund, the onyx studs and onyx cuff links, the black suspenders, the pleated dress shirt. Less choice finally—oh, much less—than the mandatory options on new cars.) You try on the pants, you try on the jacket, a quick once-over with the tape, a few passes with the chalk, and it’s come back Tuesday . . .

  Once, maybe a decade before I bought one for myself, I wrote of a character in a book that he “stands tux’d, his formal pants and jacket glowing like a black comb, his patent-leather shoes vaulted smooth and tensionless as perfect architecture. He might be standing in the skin of a ripe bright black apple. He feels, in the inky clothes, showered, springy, bouncy . . . [can feel] his clean twin sheathing of tall silk hose, can almost feel the condition of his soles, their shade like Negroes’ palms. He is accessoried. In his . . . white dress shirt his delicious burgundy studs are as latent with color as the warning lights on a dashboard. Onyx links, round and flat as elevator buttons, seal his cuffs, and dark suspenders lie on him with an increment of weight that suggests the thin holsters of G-men, and indeed there is something governmental in his dress, something maritime, chief-of-staff. The golden fasteners beneath his jacket could be captains’ bars. A black bow tie lies across his throat like a propeller.”

  It was a fairly accurate description but it was a guess. What I’d missed was the proprietary condition, whatever it is that platforms the heart and smugs the senses of a man in such clothes and somehow lends a guy in a tux his surveyor instincts, like a fellow on horseback, something possessive in the feel of the thing, something hospitable and generous, father-of-the-bride, say, founder-of-the-feast. (Leader-of-the-band. Master-of-the-ceremony.) Something patrician, the long, deep bloodlines of first families and old money.

  I didn’t want to take it off. I never wanted to take it off.

  And am working on my image, up to my ears, till I accustom my friends, in my new jerk status. (Hey, no pain no gain, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and they laughed at Fulton.) Because I’m serious. If the suit fits—and it does, it does—wear it!

  I’m breaking it in. Taking it to dinner parties.

  “Look,” Marilyn Teitelbaum said, laughing, the first time she saw me in it, “look at Stanley!”

  “What the hell’s he wearing?” her husband, Steve, wanted to know.

  “Those things are in now,” someone else said. “I just read in Time.”

  (I didn’t know. We don’t take the paper; I don’t keep up.)

  “You,” said Naomi, “are a ridiculous human being.”

  “He looks all right.”

  “Sure he does.”

  “I’m not sure about the cummerbund,” I said.

  “The cummerbund?”

  “It rides up.”

  “Have someone sew one of those hook-and-eye arrangements onto it.”

  “That’s a good idea.” I said. “They can do that?”

  “They can put a man on the moon.”

  “He’s trying to show us up. It’s a stunt.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m the guy who came to dinner. You can wear this anywhere.”

  “You could go bowling in it.”

  “You wouldn’t look out of place at an accident.”

  “Or a prom.”

  “I think he looks like he’s on a scavenger hunt.”

  (Yes, I thought. Exactly. A scavenger hunt! Teamed up with heiresses, with ingenues yoked. To lark attached, to hoboes in Hooverville. A scavenger hunt! With milkmen at sunrise conjunct. In nostalgia dressed up and playing somebody else’s decade, epoch, it ain’t never too late. Cute as a dancer-till-dawn, as a drunk, as some playboy in love. Top-shod, top-hatted, silk-scarved. Black and white as a photograph, as a screwball nephew in a screwball comedy—Cary Grant in Connecticut. Remember my even more formal, tail-coated, wing-collared uncles, their elaborate heavy clothes like the big leather furniture and burnished paneling of their exclusive clubs? See them, laughless, dour, skin-deep Scrooges? Watch the lifted sieges of their hearts taken by storm by orphans.)

  Yes, Sam. Yes!

  Because clothes do too make the man and appearance is reality, and sometimes all you need to be happy is the conviction that your togs fit, that y
ou don’t clash, that your threads, duds, garb, and trim, your gear and frippery are in good repair.

  No? You think not? No? Then why does a stain on your cuff ruin your evening? And how can a little spilled soup spoil your life? Because we would be gift wrapped as packages! And come on to one another stylish and spiff, pristine and groomed as the close-order drilled, as hand-in-glove, bespoke, and customized, finally, as Goldilocks’s just-right bowl and cereal, her chair and bed, compartmentalized and discrete as wallets, smitten by proportion, scale, and all the tongue-in-groove congruities, by the dress-parade possibilities of a perfect, human geometry!

  And maybe that’s the real meaning of the tuxedo. It corrects nature; it covers up flaw. It’s designed, that is, to hide you. Like a kind of sartorial White Out, like a sort of male muumuu, its pleated shirt never looks wrinkled, its studs nail you together, its grosgrain stripes hold you upright, and its cummerbund turns on a dime, tucks hospital corners into your discordant, discrepant fabrics, the gap between your pants and your shirt. It papers you over, it bastes your body, it blind-hems your flesh and turns you seamless. Or the hiding aggressive, some sexist camouflage. Haven’t I heard that men’s evening clothes—the very term suggests a darkness—are the color they are the better to show off the brighter costumes of the women?)

  Here’s a brief, conversational history of the tuxedo.

  About a century ago the jacket was designed by Henry Poole, a British tailor who adapted it—a tailcoat minus the tails—from a velvet smoking jacket he’d made for the Prince of Wales. It was then known as a “call” or “compromise” or “go-between” coat, and Poole convinced Evander Wall, an American client, that it could be substituted for the more formal tails. However, when Wall tried it out in the ballroom of Saratoga’s United States Hotel, he scared the ladies, frightened the horses, and was asked to leave. In 1886 another American, Griswold Lorillard, wore Poole’s new dinner jacket into the Tuxedo Park Club—he was one of your tobacco Lorillards and his pop founded the club, in Tuxedo Park, New York—and made the papers. (And that, incidentally, is how the pig got its curly tail.) It caught on but saw action mostly at stag parties and didn’t become acceptable in mixed company until just after World War One, Armageddon being a great leveler. Affluence saw the return of full dress and the Depression the return of the shorter coat—the old story of flush times’ amplitudes and overloads, hard times’ tightened belts. (Materialism not just a philosophical opinion about the universe but a theory of bolts and textiles, dry goods, piece goods, lengths, and stuff. A Dow Jones astrology—its houses of fortune, its signs of luck.)