Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“Say, do that one again.”

“You smoke?” He lifts the lid and the box is empty. He opens it again and there are the four stale cigarettes. “Three dollar. I get you one?”

“Nah, it’s a trick,” I tell him.

Avila’s suite of rooms is as much a stage set as the store windows. Behind the façade of the steel and glass skyscraper the architect has contrived dormers, queer shapes to the rooms, here let in and there let out like a suit off the rack. I am eighteen stories above the street, but I could be on the second floor of someone’s two-story colonial in the suburbs. On the walls of the anteroom (I have no appointment; the secretary has asked me to wait) are great blown-up photographs, grainy as money, large as flags. The furniture here is not like office furniture at all. I recall the waiter’s good suit. It’s too much for me — spring, style, the future.

The secretary says I may go in and I head down a corridor like a hallway of bedrooms. Avila greets me outside a door, a man in his mid-thirties, jacketless in black trousers and vest, long lengths of bright white shirt-sleeve dropping through its arm-holes like acetylene. He shakes my hand and leads me by it into his office — how passive I have become — which looks as if it has been decorated by emptying three or four of those store windows. His desk is a drawerless slab of white marble five feet long and a yard deep on legs of Rhodesian chrome. At the wall to my right is an antique breakfront, old lawbooks behind golden grillwork like a priest crosshatched in a confessional. A cigarette lighter on his desk like a silver brick. A large round stand-less lamp white as a shirt-front bubbles on the marble, and the carpet, long pelts of creamy wool, has the appearance of bleached floorboard. An eighteenth-century French console table doubles itself against a mirror. Only the chair I sit on is invisible to me. Taste. Taste everywhere. A tasteful office in a city pickled in taste.

Avila does not go behind his desk but takes a seat at the other end of the room in a chair upholstered in nubby hand-woven linen. He wears his clothes well. I see him sockless as a Kennedy in wet tennis shoes; I imagine his rich man’s articulated ankles. I see him on his low, wide bed, the giant strawberry print of his king-size sheets. I see him pluck parking tickets from the windshield of his sports car; I see him hand them to his secretary to pay.

“Look,” he says, “I wasn’t expecting you. As a matter of fact, I was just going downstairs for a trim.” He has an actor’s indeterminate haircut. “The barber’s right in the building. Why don’t you come with me? We can chat while I’m in the chair.”

It’s out before I can think. “But it’s perfect. Nothing needs to be done to it.”

“Oh,” he laughs, “appearance is nine-tenths of the law. I have a standing appointment with my barber every day at this time. A divorce lawyer depends a lot upon transference. Like a psychiatrist.”

We are in the same elevator I have just come up in, but the man who showed me the trick is gone, sucked into history. It bothers me that I will never see him again. I don’t know how I know this.

The barbershop is dazzling. Long slabs of yellow Formica jut out the length of one mirrored wall and the width of another like quick-lunch counters in a restaurant. It’s a beauty parlor here, bright as a plastic surgeon’s consulting room. Boxes of Kleenex, jewelers’ trays of combs, dop kits, big pink sponges, blue satin barber sheets, magnums of cologne, an assortment of brushes with tufts sleek as swatches of mink and chinchilla, a definitive collection of Band-Aids, eyebrow pencils like the city desk at Women’s Wear Daily. There are laquers, shallow dishes of tint, a stand of Q-Tips upright in a clear box like a forest above the snowline. There are nests of wig, surgical adhesive, pots of mascara, blushers, eyelash curlers set on their sides and curving into each other like spoons in a service for eight. There are logjams of emery board, hot stringents and cold creams, fingernail clippers like tools in a surgery. Triple strands of fluorescent tube marquee the mirrors. I am excited here: I wish I could smell the lotions and shampoos and suddenly I lift a Max Factor pan stick and lick it with my tongue as if it were a kid’s push-up ice cream.

Avila sits amused and content in a barber chair and a woman in white slacks makes a few passes at him with her scissors and comb. As she steps back to appraise him, I accuse him of his handsomeness; I tell him that his bone structure is his fate.

“What? No. I am very nondescript.”

I see myself caromed off the mirrors, fractured in space like a break shot in pool. I see the checkered reflection of my checkered jacket. It is expensive, even new, but it is gross. I have no taste, only hunger. I have never been fashionable, and it’s astonishing to me that so much has happened in the world. The changes I perceive leave me breathless. I am more astonished by what remains to happen. I have erratic, sudden premonitions of new packaging techniques — breakfast cereal in spray cans, insulated boxes of frozen beer, egg yolk in squeezable tubes. Avila’s barber sheet could be a shroud. I can’t stand looking at myself, so I pop into an empty chair at Avila’s side.

A barber sets his newspaper aside. He approaches me. “Haircut?”

“Leave me be,” I say too loudly. “Can we talk here?” I ask Avila.

“Of course we can,” he tells me mildly.

“ ‘Of course we can.’ Counselor, counselor, what a style you have! Yes, I like it. Niggerizing the neighborhood, spilling confidence like soup.” Going on the offensive shakes off a little of my passivity. “What a professional ethic you got there! ‘Can we talk?’ ‘Of course. What, is it a public library that we should lower our voices?’ Right. Smell that fart? I claim that. That came out of Alexander’s ragtime asshole, Main’s brown bellows. Why should I deny the obvious? No two men’s farts smell alike in the entire universe. Like snowflakes and fingerprints. Learned counsel’s point is well taken. We can talk here.”

“What are you on about?”

“Yes, well, we never did business till now, or you’d know my thoroughness, my eye for detail, my fastidious methods. I take more pains than aspirin. Tomorrow is April first, lest we forget.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Withers is to appear in court.” I raise my voice so that everyone in the shop can hear. “ That’s Withers, the banker. Eugene Withers who could not make good on his alimony payments of twenty-five hundred dollars a month and who was thirty thousand dollars in arrears when our paths crossed in the courts. Eugene Withers, the president of Ohio First Federal Savings Bank, lest we forget. Incidentally, if any of you barbers, manicurists or shoeshine guys do business with him I would suggest a small run on his bank. Pass it on. Withers. ”

“What’s the matter with you?” Avila says. “Where do you think you are?”

“He’s not in town.”

“Well, he’s probably upstate on business. Why don’t you wait for me in my office?”

“You know this for fact that he’s upstate on business? I’m not his ex-wife. I have no fond memories of President Withers in bed to tide me over while the arrears pile up. I call and call his bank. ‘Not here,’ they say, ‘we’ll take a message.’ Where upstate is he? I’ll put in a little person-to-person.”

“Charleen, call the guard, please,” Avila tells his barber. “I want this man out of here.”

“The guard? Call the guard? Charleen, dear, guards are my bread and butter. From baby sitters to electrocutioners, they’re all in my pocket, Charleen. Andy Frain stood up at my wedding. Call, call him, we’re old friends. Now, lawyer, the man’s trial is tomorrow. I want to be there to meet his train, his boat, his private plane. If he doesn’t show, I’ll look him up. See my gun? You want me to make him an April Fool?”