Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“Very prudent.”

“But toward the last — well, toward the last he spent and spent. Call me a cab, keep the change.”

“A real sport,” Colper said.

“There was drunken sailor in him.”

Marshall, who melted when he heard a lowdown, melted. It was as if they’d been up all night together. He felt grotty, intimate, like a man with a shirttail loose at a poker table. “I sound terrible,” he said. “I’m not greedy. I’m not a greedy person. I didn’t have expectations, I never lived as if I was coming into dough. You sprung this will on me. Naturally I’m surprised.”

“Sure,” Harris said, “naturally you’re surprised. You get a shot like this you fall back on your instincts. Inside every fat man there’s a wolf, there’s a buzzard, there’s a chicken hawk.”

“That’s human nature,” Joe Colper said.

“It’s why logic was invented,” his father’s lawyer said, “to tame surprise and make the world consecutive.”

“We understand your…lapse,” Harris said, “Shit, sonny—”

“I’m thirty-seven.”

“Happy birthday. Shit, sonny, I’m your uncle, I like you. Come home and I’ll take you to the ball game and get you a hot dog. Listen, there isn’t a single one of us who wouldn’t give his eyeteeth to behave like you just did. We’re not grand characters, we ain’t angelfaces. Petty hits us where we live. Let go, relax. What a kick it would be to let the other guy pick up the check in a restaurant! Keep your hands in your pockets, it’s cold out. Sit still. What are you reaching around like a fucking contortionist to pay the other guy’s toll at the bridge? I’ll give you a tip: don’t tip. You know the guy who’s got it made? The creep in the movies who plays up to the uncle because he thinks there might be an extra buck in the till for him when the old bastard croaks. So don’t apologize to us for your character. When Counselor Fanon laid the will on you and you gave us that ‘Let me see that’ and that ‘What about the rest of the estate?’ I was proud of you. Did you see him, Joe? Shirley? Whining like a baby and his old man dead in the coffin not fifteen feet away.”

“Takes guts,” Colper said.

“I think we have a young man here who’s no hypocrite,” Shirley Fanon said.

“I’m not listening to this,” Marshall said, and fled to the front where his father’s coffin lay open. He looked inside; he might have been watching the sea from the deck of a ship.

“Gee,” Harris said, coming up beside him and looking down too, “that’s some tan.”

“The pool,” Fanon said.

“Maybe the pool, maybe the solarium,” Colper said.

“Anyway, the little extras that maintenance pays for,” Fanon said. “We’ll split the difference. He took advantage of all of them. He lived way up on the fifteenth floor and rode shit out of the elevator.”

“What do you want?” Marshall asked them.

“We didn’t hound him,” Harris said. “Don’t look at me reproachfully. That man lays there dead of his own accord. Voices weren’t raised. Nobody nagged him, nobody dunned. No threats were made, we never served a summons. Two times, maybe three, the gentleman’s letter went out over my signature, last names and misters.”

“ ‘We feel that you may have overlooked…’ ” Fanon said. “ ‘If you have already remitted, kindly disregard…’ ”

“Like a four flush was a piece of amnesia,” Colper said.

“Like he was an absent-minded professor.”

“We knew he was strapped,” Fanon said. “That every day the furniture truck came.”

“He owed seven months’ maintenance,” Harris said. “Two thousand one hundred dollars. But who’s counting at a time like this?”

“In a week it’ll be eight months,” Fanon said.

“Let’s walk away from the coffin, please,” Harris said. He put his hand on Marshall’s sleeve. “Appreciate my position, Mr. Preminger. Real estate’s involved here. Titles and certificates. A condominium’s a delicate thing. Speaking statutorily. Shirley’s the legal eagle. Explain to him, Shirl.”

Fanon told Preminger that though he would probably get clear title to the place, the will would have to be probated. He named the various steps in the procedure. It could take anywhere from nine months to a year. In the meanwhile the maintenance — which by law he wasn’t required to pay until he held clear title — would continue to build up. He could owe them almost six thousand dollars before the condominium was his.

“I’ll sell it. I’ll put it on the market,” Preminger said.

“Well, you can’t do that until the will’s been probated.”

“I’ll sublet.”

“You’d need dispensation from the court. The dockets are logjammed. Anyway, the money would have to go into escrow. You’d still be responsible for the three hundred every month.”

He didn’t have that kind of money.

They knew that. They suspected that. Why didn’t they do this then? Why didn’t they take out an option to buy the unit?

Harris broke in. “Give it to him straight. The heir here wants to hear lump sums.”

“We’ll give you six thousand dollars for an option,” Fanon said. This would wipe out his father’s debt, with enough left over to take care of the maintenance payments while the will was being probated. Then, when he had clear title, they would pay him fifty thousand dollars, less the six they had advanced on the option.

“What about the furnishings?”

“Well, that’s what the extra five thousand is for.”

“That stuff cost my father twenty.”

“Go sell it.” Harris said. “See what you’d get.”

“I’m getting screwed. It’s a ridiculous offer. You’re offering me fifty thousand for sixty-five thousand dollars’ worth of apartment, then taking back six thousand for maintenance.” It was true, but strangely he did not feel its truth. He had a sense of the awful depreciation in things. He understood — or rather, understood that there was no understanding — the crazy fluctuations in value. It was as if a spirit resided and moved in objects, tossing and turning, a precarious health in things, irregular, fluxy as pulse and temperature and the blood chemistries. The market went up and it went down. Rhetoric feebly tried to account for the unaccountable, but its arguments were always as whacky as the defenses of alchemy, elaborate as theories of assassination. Value’s laws were undiscoverable, undemonstrable finally, as the notion of life on distant planets. (When he was still lecturing, hadn’t he once paid a thousand a month for a cottage on Cape Cod which couldn’t have cost more than ten thousand to build? In those days, didn’t his own fees vary anywhere from one to three hundred dollars a night for the same lecture?) Perhaps nothing more than mood lay at the bottom of it all. They were cheating him, but there was nothing personal in it, and he did not feel badly used. He turned down their offer anyway.

Harris considered him evenly. “You owe me two thousand one hundred dollars. If you have already remitted, kindly disregard.”

“I’ll pay,” Preminger said.

Harris shrugged and took off his yarmulke.

“I’m moving in,” Preminger said. It hadn’t occurred to him till he said it. He knew his life was changed. “Mr. Fanon?”

“Yes?”

“Were you the one who called me?”

Fanon nodded.

“Did you make these funeral arrangements?”

“That’s right.”

“Another two thousand?”

“More like three.”

“I’ll pay,” he said. “I’ll pay whatever I’m supposed to.” He felt valetudinarian. A graceful lassitude. All he wanted was to be in bed in his father’s apartment. Thank God, he thought, he had the key. They would have to kill him to take it from him. His life was altered. Later he would make the arrangements. Everything would go smoothly. A life like his, even an altered one, could be lived in Montana or in Chicago. It made no difference.