Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

Still…Jane Löes Lipton. Ah. I hadn’t met her, but from what I could gather from my peers’ collective inarticulateness when it came to Miss (that much was established) Lipton, she was an “authentic,” an “original,” a “beauty,” a “prize.” And it was intriguing, too, how I happened to keep missing her, for once invited to the Comte’s — where I behaved; where, recovering my senses, I no longer coveted my neighbor’s wife and re-dedicated myself to carrying on the good work of my genes and environment in honorable ways — I had joined a regular touring company of the rich and favored. We were like the Ice Capades, like an old-time circus, occasionally taking on personnel, once in a while dropping someone off — a car pool of the heavily leisured. How I happened, as I say, to keep on missing her though we were on the same circuit now, going around — no metaphor but a literal description — in the same circles — and it is too a small world, at our heights, way up there where true North consolidates and collects like fog, it is — was uncanny, purest contretemps, a melodrama of bad timing. We were on the same guest lists, often the same floors or wings (dowagers showed me house plans, duchesses did; I saw the seating arrangements and croquet combinations), co-sponsors of the same charity balls and dinners. Twice it was I who fell out of lockstep and had to stay longer than I expected or leave a few days early, but every other time it was Jane who canceled out at the last minute. Was this her claim on them, I wondered? A Monroeish temperament, some pathological inability to keep appointments, honor commitments (though always her check for charity arrived, folded in her letter of regret), the old high school strategy of playing hard to get? No. And try to imagine how this struck me, knowing what you do about me, when I heard it. “Miss Löes Lipton called to say she will not be able to join your Lordship this weekend due to an emergency outbreak of cholera among the children at the Sisters of Cecilia Mission in Lobos de Afuera.” That was the message the Duke’s secretary brought him at Liège.

“She’s Catholic?” I asked.

“What? Jane? Good Lord, I shouldn’t think so.”

Then, at Cap Thérèse, I learned that she had again begged off. I expressed disappointment and inquired of Mrs. Steppington whether Miss Lipton were ill.

“Ah, Jane. Ill? Jane’s strong as a horse. No, dear boy, there was a plane crash at Dar es Salaam and Jane went there to help the survivors. She’s visiting in hospital with them now. For those of them who have children — mostly wogs, I expect — she’s volunteered to act as a sort of governess. I can almost see her, going about with a lot of nig-nog kids in tow, teaching them French, telling them the Greek myths, carrying them to whatever museums they have in such places, giving them lectures in art history, then fetching them watercolors — and oils too, I shouldn’t doubt — so they can have a go at it. Oh, it will be a bore not having her with us. She’s a frightfully good sailor and I had hoped to get her to wear my silks in the regatta.”

Though it was two in the morning in Paris, I went to my room and called the Comte de Survillieur.

“Comte. Why couldn’t Jane Löes Lipton make it month before last?”

“What’s that?” The connection was bad.

“Why did Miss Löes Lipton fail to show up when she was expected at Deux Oiseaux?”

“Who?”

“Jane Löes Lipton.”

“Ah.”

“Why wasn’t she there?”

“Who’s this?”

“Brewster Ashenden. I apologize for ringing up so late, but I have to know.”

“Indians.”

“Indians?”

“Yes. American Indians I think it was. Had to do some special pleading for them in Washington when a bill came up before your Congress.”

“HR eleven seventy-four.”

“ Qu’est-ce que c’est? ”

“The bill. Law now. So Jane was into HR eleven seventy-four.”

“Ah, what isn’t Jane into? You know, I think she’s become something of a snob? She has no time for her old friends since undertaking these crusades of hers. She told the Comtesse as much — something about finding herself.”

“She said that? ”

“Well, she was more poetic, possibly, but that’s how it came down to me. I know what you’re after,” the Comte said roguishly. “You’re in love with her.”

“I’ve never even met her.”

“You’re in love with her. Half Europe is. But unless you’re a black or redskin, or have arranged in some other way to cripple yourself, you haven’t a chance. Arse over tip in love, mon cher old comrade.”

We rang off.

In the following weeks I heard that Jane Löes Lipton had turned up in Hanoi to see if there weren’t some way of getting negotiations off dead center; that she had published a book that broke the code in Oriental rugs; that she had directed an underground movie in Sweden which despite its frank language and graphic detail was so sensitive it was to be distributed with a G rating; and that she was back in America visiting outdoor fairs and buying up paintings depicting clowns and rowboats turned over on beaches for a show she was putting together for the Metropolitan entitled “Shopping Center Primitive: Collectors’ Items for the Twenty-Third Century.” One man said she could be seen in Dacca on Bangladesh Television in a series called “Cooking Nutritious Meals on the Pavement for Large Families from Garbage and Without Fire,” and another that she had become a sort of spiritual adviser to the statesmen of overdeveloped nations. Newspapers reported her on the scene wherever the earth quaked or the ships foundered or the forests burned.

Certainly she could not have had so many avatars. Certainly most was rumor, speculation knit from Jane’s motives and sympathies. Yet I heard people never known to lie, Rock-of-Gibraltarish types who didn’t get the point of jokes, swear to their testimony. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. If most was exaggerated, much was true.

Ah, Jane, Candy Striper to the Cosmos, Gray Lady of the Ineffable, when would I meet you, swap traveler’s tales of what was to be found in those hot jungles of self-seeking, those voyages to the center of the soul and other uncharted places, the steeps and deeps and lost coves and far shelves of being? Ah, Jane, oh Löes Lipton, half Europe loves you.

I went to London and stayed in the Bottom, the tall new hotel there. Lonely as Frank Sinatra on an album cover I went up to their revolving cocktail lounge on the fiftieth floor, the Top of the Bottom, and ran into Freddy Plympton.

“She’s here.”

“Jane Löes Lipton? I’ve heard that one before.” (We hadn’t been talking of her. How did I know that’s who he meant? I don’t know, I knew.)

“No, no, she is, at my country place. She’s there now. She’s exhausted, poor dear, and tells me her doctor has commanded her to resign temporarily from all volunteer fire departments. So she’s here. I’ve got her. She’s with Lady Plympton right this moment. I had to come to town on business or I’d be with her. I’m going back in the morning. Ever meet her? Want to come down?”

“She’s there? She’s really there?”

“Want to come down?”

There’s been too much pedigree in this account, I think. (Be kind. Put it down to metaphysics, not vanity. In asking Who? I’m wondering What? Even the trees have names, the rocks and clouds and grasses do. The world’s a picture post card sent from a far hotel. “Here’s my room, this is what the stamps in this country look like, that’s the strange color of the sand here, the people all wear these curious hats.”) Bear with me.

Freddy Plympton is noble. The family is old — whose isn’t, eh? we were none of us born yesterday; look it up in Burke’s Peerage where it gets three pages, in Debrett where it gets four — and his great estate, Duluth, is one of the finest in England. Though he could build a grander if he chose. Freddy’s real wealth comes from the gambling casinos he owns. He is an entrepreneur of chance, a fortune teller. The biggest gaming palaces and highest stakes in Europe, to say nothing of hotels in Aruba and boats beyond the twelve-mile limit and a piece of the action in church bingo basements and punchboards all over the world, the newsprint for which is supplied from his own forests in Norway and is printed on his own presses. Starting from scratch, from choosing odds-or-evens for cash with his roommate at Harrow, a sheikh’s son with a finger missing from his left hand — he was left-handed — which made him constitutionally unable to play the game (“He thought ‘even,’ you see,” Freddy explains), taking the boy, neither of them more than fourteen, to the cleaners in the third form. It, the young sheikh’s deformity, was Freddy’s initial lesson in what it means to have the house odds in your favor and taught him never to enter any contest in which he did not have the edge.