Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

Plympton came up behind me. “I knew you wouldn’t,” he said, and knocked on the door gently, “Jane,” he called softly. “Jane? Are you decent, darling?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was beautiful.

“Shall I push open the door?”

“Yes,” she said, “would you just?”

He shoved me gently inside, but did not cross the threshold himself. “Here’s Brewster Ashenden for you,” he said, and turned and left.

I could not see her clearly. No lights were on and the curtains were still drawn. I stood in the center of the room and waited for a command. I was physically excited, a fact which I trusted the darkness to shield from Jane. Neither of us said anything.

Then I spoke boldly. “He’s right. I trust he’s right. I pray he is.”

“He?”

“Plympton. ‘Here’s Brewster Ashenden for you,’ he said.”

“Did he? That was presumptuous of him, then.”

“I am Brewster Ashenden of the earth, air, fire and water Ashendens and this moment is very important to me. I’m first among eligible men, Miss Löes Lipton. Though that sounds a boast, it is not. I have heard of your beauty and your character. Perhaps you have heard something of mine.”

“I never listen to gossip. And anyway hearsay is inadmissible in court…ship.”

I knew she was going to say that. It was exactly what I would have replied had she made the speech I had just made! Do you know what it means to have so profound a confirmation — to have, that is, all one’s notions, beliefs, hunches and hypotheses suddenly and entirely endorsed? My God, I was like Columbus standing in the New round World, like the Wrights right and aloft over Kitty Hawk! For someone like myself it was like having my name cleared! I’m talking about redemption. To be right! That’s everything in life, you know. To be right, absolutely right, one hundred percent correct in all the essentials, that’s all we want. And whoever is? Brewster Ashenden — once. I had so much to tell her.

I began to talk, a mile a minute, filling her in, breathlessly bringing her up to date, a Greek stranger’s after-dinner talk in a king’s gold palace on an inaccessible island in a red and distant sea. A necessary entertainment. Until then I had not known my life had been a story.

Then, though I could not see it in the dark room, she held up her hand for me to stop. It was exactly where I would have held up my hand had Jane been speaking.

“Yes,” she said of my life, “it was the same with me.”

Neither of us could speak for a time. Then, gaily, “Oh, Brewster, think of all the—”

“—coastlines?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “yes. All the coastlines, bays, sounds, capes and peninsulas, the world’s beaches scribbled round all the countries and continents and islands. All the Cannes and Hamptons yet to be. Shores in Norway like a golden lovely dust. Spain’s wild hairline, Portugal’s long face like an impression on coins. The nubbed antlers of Scandinavia and the great South American porterhouse. The French teapot and Italian boot and Australia like a Scottie in profile.”

“Asia running like a watercolor, dripping Japan and all the rest,” we said together.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “God, I love the world.”

“There’s no place like it.”

“Let me wash up on seashores and eat the local specialties, one fish giving way to another every two or three hundred miles along the great continuous coasts like an exquisite, delicious evolution. Thank God for money and jet airplanes. Let me out at the outpost. Do you feel that way?”

“What, are you kidding? An earth, fire, air and water guy like me? I do, I do.”

“Family’s important,” she said.

“You bet it is.”

She giggled. “My grandfather, a New Yorker, was told to go west for his health. Grandfather hated newspapers, he didn’t trust them and said all news — even of wars, heavy weather and the closing markets — was just cheap gossip. He thought all they were good for, since he held that calendars were vulgar, was the date printed at the top of the page. In Arizona he had the New York Times sent to him daily, though of course it always arrived a day or two late. So for him the eleventh was the ninth or the tenth, and he went through the last four years of his life a day or two behind actual time. Grandfather’s Christmas and New Year’s were celebrated after everyone else’s. He went to church on Easter Tuesday.”

“Easter Tuesday, that’s very funny.”

“I love the idiosyncratic; it is all that constitutes integrity. Difference, nuance, hues and shade. Spectra, Brewster. That’s why we travel, perhaps, why we’re found on all this planet’s exotic strands, cherishing peculiarities, finding lost causes, chipping in to save the primitive wherever it occurs—”

“Listen to her talk. Is that a sweetheart?”

“—refusing to let it die, though the old ways are the worst ways and unhealthy, bad for the teeth and the balanced diet and the comfort and the longevity. Is that selfish?”

“I think so.”

“Yes,” she said pensively. “Of course it is. All taste’s a cruelty at last. We impede history with our Sierra Clubs and our closed societies. We’ll have to answer for that, I suppose. Oh, well…Brewster, do you have uncles? Tell me about your uncles.”

“I had an Uncle Clifford who believed that disease could be communicated only by a draft when one was traveling at high speeds. He wore a paper bag over his head even in a closed car. He cut out holes for the eyes, for despite his odd notion he dearly loved to travel and watch the scenery go by. Even going up in elevators he wore his paper bag, though he strolled at ease through the contagion wards of hospitals dispensing charity to the poor.”

“Marvelous.”

“Yes.”

“Brewster, this is important. Do you know things? People should know facts.”

“I know them.”

“I knew you knew them.”

“I love you, Miss Löes Lipton.”

“Jane,” she said. Jane.

She was weeping. I didn’t try to comfort her, but stood silently in place until she was through. I knew she was going to tell me to open the curtains, for this part of the interview was finished.

“Open the curtains, Brewster.”

I went to the bay and pulled the drawstring and light came into the room and flooded it and I turned to the chair in which Jane was sitting and saw her face for the first time. She looked exactly as I knew she would look, though I had never seen a photograph of her or yet been to any of the houses in which her portraits were hung. All that was different was that there was a darkish region under her eyes and her skin had an odd tan.

“Oh,” I said, “you’ve a spot of lupus erythematosus there, don’t you?”

“You do know things, Brewster.”

“I recognized the wolflike shadow across the eyes.”

“It’s always fatal.”

“I know.”

“The body develops antibodies against itself.”

“I know.”

“It’s as if I were allergic to my own chemistry.”

“I know, I know.” I went toward her blinded by my tears. I kissed her, her lips and the intelligent, wolfish mask across her beautiful face. “How much time is there?” I asked.

Jane shrugged.

“It isn’t fair. It isn’t.”

“Yes. Well,” she said.

“Marry me, Jane.”

She shook her head.

“You’ve got to.”

“No,” she said.

“Because of this fatal disease? That doesn’t matter to me. I beg your pardon, Jane, if that sounds callous. I don’t mean that your mortality doesn’t matter to me. I mean that now that I’ve found you I can’t let you go, no matter how little time you might have left.”