Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

He got out at South Tower but couldn’t get beyond the front door. There was no doorman, but a sort of complicated telephone arrangement had been set up in the outside hall. Where the dial would normally have been was a plastic window with numbers that appeared in it when you turned a knob at its side, like a routing device at the check-in desk of motels. These were the apartment numbers, he guessed. Lifting the phone from its cradle probably signaled the apartment whose number appeared in the plastic window. There was no directory. He spun the knob all the way around hoping that the superintendent might be listed but the numbers were stolid as code. Remembering only that his father’s apartment was on the fifteenth floor, he made a fifteenth-floor number appear in the window and lifted the phone.

“Yes?”

“Hello?”

“Yes?”

“Hello? I’m in the lobby. I’m Phil Preminger’s son, Marshall. I flew in for the funeral. I don’t remember my father’s apartment number.”

“Yes?”

“Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you. Yes?”

“Well, I don’t have his apartment number. Could you let me in? Someone from this building called, but I never got his name. He may have given it to me but in the excitement it didn’t register.”

“I don’t know who called you.”

“Do you know my father’s apartment? Maybe the man who called me is still up there.”

“I’m not at liberty to give out that information.”

“I just flew fifteen hundred miles. What am I supposed to do? Did you know my father?”

“I knew Philip Preminger. I was very sorry to hear Philip Preminger died.”

“Thank you.”

“We had pleasant chats beside the pool.”

“The man who called me said he was a neighbor.”

“We are all neighbors.”

“Could you ring the bell? I’ve got luggage. Maybe I could leave my luggage with you while I find out what to do.”

Suddenly her voice turned hard. “Listen,” she said, “you may be who you say you are. If you are, you are. What did you say your name was?”

“Marshall Preminger.”

“Just a minute.” Whoever it was had evidently left the phone. In a moment she was back. “All right, what’s your father’s sister’s name?”

“My father’s sister?”

“What’s her name? Your aunt.”

“Faye.”

“Last name?”

“Faye Saiger.”

“All right. When’s the interment?”

“Sunday. He said Sunday, the thirteenth. What is all this?”

“What is all this? This proves you could be a fake. Everything you told me is in today’s Tribune. You find out from the notices if there’s survivors, then you come and clean out the place before the body is even in the ground. You have the address of every condominium in the city. You figure they’re all old people in them.”

“This happens?”

“Everything happens. They shouldn’t print those things.”

“Look,” he said, “I’m Marshall Preminger. Phil was my father. What am I going to do with my luggage? What apartment did he live in? Where’s the interment?”

“Read the Trib. ”

“Don’t you see? If I had the paper I wouldn’t have to ask you. I’d know.”

“Verisimilitude.”

“What?”

“It’s a trick.”

“I’ll go to the office. They’ll tell me.”

“I apologize in advance if you’re really his son. I’m sorry for your trouble. I’m just protecting him.”

“If I’m not who I say I am,” he said slyly, “I could wait until someone comes out. I could wait until someone comes out and then go in.”

“Sure,” she said, “they try that too. We look you over from behind the glass. If you seem suspicious we get help.”

He went to the office, identified himself and asked for the key. The salesmen were out. The boss was at lunch. The girl was a little nervous. His father’s was the first death in Harris Towers and she wasn’t sure about the legalities. He still held his suitcase — he felt marvelous now that he could be seen — a man from the world in a wrinkled summer suit, a modified Panama hat with a narrow, striped barber-pole band. Where did he get his power? From his long sideburns, his salesman features, from his tie which, loosened in the taxi, hung from his neck like the whistle of a coach, from his spongy composition soles, from his being thirty-seven and fit, it must appear, as a fiddle, in the prime of his life. From his loss, his primogenitive aspect. People would sympathize, say they loved his dad. That would be their word; his, in that outfit, would be Pop.

“The legalities,” he said, “don’t start until Pop’s body’s in the ground. You don’t even think of the legalities till the rabbi goes home. I’ve talked on long-distance telephones. I haven’t slept. I’ve been in the sky in airplanes.” He rubbed his face, hoping she would pick up the rasp of stubble, hoping his beard had darkened. “I haven’t shaved.” The cab had not been air-conditioned. A grand ring of sweat stained the underarms of his suit, round and wide as pawprints. “I need a shower.” Potency spilled from his disreputable circumstances, his fleshy thighed, big-assed good looks, like an M.C.’s in a night club. “The legalities begin when no one’s crying. Give me the key.”

She gave it to him. He went back to South Tower.

The lobby was gorgeous, red flock on the walls, narrow smoked mirrors ceiling-to-floor, black low leather-and-chrome sofas and chairs, short glass tables on thick carpet the color of blood. There were tubular lamps and a huge chandelier with staggered, concentric rings of tiny bulbs that reminded him of the one on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Comedy Hour. It was astonishing after the low-rent government housing impression he’d had from the outside. It was as if he’d been admitted to some plush speakeasy or tasty Mafioso palace buried in warehouse gut. He put it down to security, inconspicuous consumption, and rode up to his father’s floor, where the corridors swept back from the elevator at modest angles like the wings on airplanes and the red flock had been replaced by gold.

He let himself into 15E. “Hello?” No one was there. It had not really occurred to him that he would be alone in the apartment. He removed his jacket and placed it across the back of a chair, deciding that for the time being he would confine himself to the living room. He sat, prim as a guest asked to wait on the couch, then rose and walked to the enormous television and turned it on. It was color. The Saturday morning cartoon shows looked splendid, everything in bright, solid colors like plastic sculpture in museums. He watched for twenty minutes, expecting the phone to ring. Once it did and he turned the volume down guiltily, but it was a wrong number. He jabbed off the set.

Judging by the living room, his father’s apartment was not what he expected. There were no pictures of his mother or himself, and he recognized no pieces from the old place. Everything was new and expensive and in marvelous taste, the apartment of a bachelor twenty years younger than his father (himself if he could have afforded it?) or of a couple without children. The lobby could have served as a model. Leather, chrome, glass. Swedish stuff, Finnish, the low geometry of high countries. Elsewhere there might be pieces he’d recognize, but he couldn’t leave the living room. He thought his father might still be in the bedroom.

In an hour he went into the kitchen. Brown built-ins, a refrigerator, a hooded electric stove, a line of cupboards — everything the color of new shoes. He took ice water from the spigot on the refrigerator by putting his mouth directly under the faucet. Leaving the kitchen he investigated the rest of the apartment, the rooms falling to him quickly now, like towns at the close of a war. Here and there were things he recognized, though almost nothing from the time he still lived with his parents; just things he’d seen on visits when, first sonless, then wifeless, his father had made his subsequent moves.