Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“Do you think that’s why I refused you? Because I’m going to die? Everyone dies. I refuse you because of what you are and because of what I am.”

“But we’re the same. We know each other inside out.”

“No. There’s a vast gulf between us.”

“No, Jane. I know what you’re going to say before you say it, what you’re going to do before you do it.”

“No.”

“Yes. I swear. Yes.” She smiled, and the wolf mask signal of her disease made her uncanny. “You mean because I don’t know why you refuse me? Is that what you mean?” She nodded. “Then you see I do know. I knew that it was because I didn’t know why you refused me. Oh, I’m so confused. I’m — wait. Oh. Is it what I think it is?” She nodded. “Oh, my God. Jane, please. I wasn’t thinking. You let me go on. I was too hasty in telling you my life. It’s because you’re pure and I’m not. That’s it, isn’t it? Isn’t that it?” She nodded. “Jane, I’m a man, ” I pleaded. “It’s different with a man. Listen,” I said, “I can be pure. I can be again. I will be.”

“There isn’t time.”

“There is, there is. ”

“If I thought there were…Oh, Brewster, if I really thought there were —” she said, and broke off.

“There is. I make a vow. I make a holy vow.” I crossed my heart.

She studied me. “I believe you,” she said finally. “That is, I believe you seriously wish to undo what you have done to yourself. I believe in your penitent spirit, I mean. No. Don’t kiss me. You must be continent henceforth. Then…”

“We’ll see?”

“We’ll see.”

“The next time, Jane, the next time you see me, I swear I will have met your conditions.”

I bowed and left and was told where I was to sleep by a grinning Plympton. He asked if, now that I had seen Jane, I would like to go with him on a tour of the estate.

“Not just yet, Freddy, I think.”

“Jane gave you something to think about, did she?”

“Something like that.”

Was ever any man set such a task by a woman? To undo defilement and regain innocence, to take an historical corruption and will it annulled, whisking it out of time as if it were a damaged egg going by on a conveyor belt. And not given years — Jane’s disease was progressive, the mask a manifestation of one of its last stages — nor deserts to do it in. Not telling beads or contemplating from some Himalayan hillside God’s extensive Oneness. No, nor chanting a long, cunning train of boxcar mantras as it moves across the mind’s trestle and over the soul’s deep, dangerous drop. No, no, and no question either of simply distributing the wealth or embracing the leper or going about in rags (I still wore my mourning togs, that lover’s wardrobe, those Savile Row whippery flags of self) or doing those bows and scrapes that were only courtesy’s moral minuet, and no time, no time at all for the long Yoga life, the self’s spring cleaning that could drag on years. What had to be done had to be done now, in these comfortable Victorian quarters on a velvet love seat or in the high fourposter, naked cherubs climbing the bedposts, the burnished dimples of their wooden behinds glistening in the light from the fresh laid fire. By a gilded chamber pot, beneath a silken awning, next to a window with one of the loveliest views in England.

That, at least, I could change. I drew the thick drapes across the bayed glass and, influenced perhaps by the firelight and the Baker Street ambience, got out my carpet slippers and red smoking jacket. I really had to laugh. This won’t do, I thought. How do you expect to bring about these important structural changes and get that dear dying girl to marry you if the first thing you do is to impersonate Sherlock Holmes? Next you’ll be smoking opium and scratching on a fiddle. Get down to it, Ashenden, get down to it.

But it was pointless to scold when no alternative presented itself to me. How did one get down to it? How does one undefile the defiled? What acts of kosher and exorcism? Religion (though I am not ir religious) struck me as beside the point. It was Jane I had offended, not God. What good would it have done to pray for His forgiveness? And what sacrilege to have prayed for hers! Anyway, I understood that I already had her forgiveness. Jane wanted a virgin. In the few hours that remained I had to become one.

I thought pure thoughts for three hours. Images of my mother: one summer day when I was a child and we collected berries together for beach plum jelly; a time in winter when I held a simple cat’s cradle of wool which my mother was carding. I thought of my tall father in a Paris park when I was ten, and of the pictures we posed each other for, waiting for the sun to come out before we tripped the shutter. And recollected mornings in chapel in school in New England — I was seven, I was eight — the chaplain describing the lovely landscapes of Heaven and I, believing, wanting to die. I recalled the voices of guides in museums I toured with my classmates, and thought about World’s Fairs I had attended. The ’36 Olympics, sitting on the bench beside the New Zealand pole vaulter. I remembered perfect picnics, Saturday matinees in Broadway theaters, looking out the window lying awake in comfortable compartment berths on trains, horseback riding on a fall morning in mountains, sailing with Father. All the idylls. I remembered, that is, my virginity, sorting out for the first time in years the decent pleasures of comfort and wonder and respect. But — and I was enjoying myself, I could feel the smile on my face — what did it amount to? I was no better than a gangster pleading his innocence because he had once been innocent.

I thought impure thoughts, reading off my long-time bachelor’s hundred conquests, parsing past, puberty and old fantasy, reliving all the engrams of lust in gazebo, band shell, yacht and penthouse, night beaches at low tide, rooms, suites, shower stalls, bedrooms on crack trains, at the carpeted turnings of stairs, and once in a taxi and once on a butcher’s block at dawn in Les Halles — all the bachelor’s emergency landing fields, all his makeshift landscapes, propinquitous to grandeur and history, in Flanders Fields, rooms with views, by this ocean or by that, this tall building or that public monument, my backstage love-making tangential as a town at the edge of a map. Oh love’s landmarks, oh its milestones, sex altering place like sunset. Oh the beds and oh the walls, the floors and bridges — and me a gentleman! — the surfaces softened by Eros, contour stones and foam rubber floors of forests, everywhere but the sky itself a zone for dalliance, my waterfalls of sperm, our Laguardias of hum and droned groan. Recalling the settings first, the circumstances, peopling them only afterwards and even then only piecemeal, a jigsaw, Jack-the-Ripper memory of hatcheck girl thigh and night club singer throat and heiress breast, the salty hairs of channel swimmers and buttocks of horseback riders and knuckles of pianists and strapless tans of models — sex like flesh’s crossword, this limb and that private like the fragments in a multiple choice. And only after that gradually joining arm to shoulder, shoulder to neck, neck to face, Ezekielizing my partners, dem bones, dem bones gon’ walk aroun’.

Yes? No. The smile was still on my face. And there in that Victorian counting house, I, lust’s miser, its Midas, touching gold and having it gold still, an ancient Pelagian, could not overcome my old unholy gratitude for flesh, and so lost innocence again, even as I resisted, the blood rushing where it would, filling the locks of my body. “Make me clean,” I prayed, “help me to make one perfect act of contrition, break my nasty history’s hold on me, pull a fast one at this eleventh hour.”