Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

Instead he made promises. “Harris wants to buy the place. He offers a ridiculous figure. But I’m not holding out for more. Even if I let him cheat me it would mean more money than I ever had in my life. The money isn’t in it. I mean to live here. I can do my dissertation on the kitchen table, use the place like an office. Most of the books I need are in Missoula, but I’m sending for them. Maybe I’ll fly out and drive back with the stuff. What I don’t have I can get from inter-library loan. As soon as this sitting shivah is over I’ll get organized. The job market’s terrible now — that’s why I’m taking my time. Actually, that might even work in my favor, be a blessing in disguise. If I don’t rush the thesis it could be publishable. Either way, conditions can’t stay like this forever; something has to give. Then, when I’ve got my doctorate I’ll get a job right here in Chicago. Northwestern, the U of C, Loyola, Marquette — there are plenty of good places. Roosevelt or even Wright Junior College. If I concentrate just on those I should be able to get something.”

“What do you owe me? Not even an explanation.”

He didn’t hear her. He was speaking for the record. “Then, when my life is normal again, when it’s routine and respectable, I’ll start looking around for a girl. We’ll get married, have a kid, live right here on the North Side. I appreciate that I’m starting late. Things are ass-backwards in my life, but I can catch up if I stick with it. I’ve got the house, the furniture, all I have to do is grow into what’s already here. Gee, I’m a pioneer in reverse.”

“I wish you every good luck. Like Pat O’Brien’s toast on television. ‘May the wind always be at your back.’ ” She giggled. “That would be like standing in a draft.”

He looked closely at her. “This sounds pretty lame to you? Like someone terminal making plans? People have no faith in other people’s second chances and fresh starts. Things by their nature seem irrevocable. Habit has a full nelson on us, we think. I hear some two-pack-a-day guy, a real cougher, say he’s quitting on New Year’s or on his birthday, or maybe he throws the cigarette away right in front of me, grinds it out in the ashtray and swears it’s his last, and I know he’s just kidding himself. How’s it any different for me? Is that what you think? What are you, an actuary? I know the odds. I want to tell you something. I’m pretty bouncy, I’ve come through before this, I’ve got powers of recuperation pinned on me like a kid’s mittens. I had a heart attack when I was thirty-three. It was a close shave and I thought I was a goner, but here I am.” He held up his hand. “Present.” She had jumped back when he raised his arm. “What did you think I was talking about, climbing Everest? Do I sound like William the Conqueror? Somebody who wants a screen test? I’m talking about ordinary life, H-O scale.”

“Listen,” she said, “I’d better get going.” She started toward the door.

“Gee, who’s going to help me eat all this stuff?”

“Oh, there’ll be plenty of people. I’ll come back later too.”

He stood in the doorway as she passed through and watched her as she walked down the hall. She was almost out of sight, at the point where the corridor turned, when he called after her.

“He gave you presents, didn’t he? He pissed it all away, my inheritance.”

Most of the food disappeared that evening, and all of it was gone by the following afternoon. It had been sent, it turned out, by the Harris Towers Emergency Fund Committee. One of his visitors explained that each month a portion of their maintenance money was shunted into the fund. His guests, who had after all paid for it, were not in the least shy about digging in. Only Preminger, aware of the back maintenance his father owed when he died, felt a freeloader, chewing guiltily and at last preferring to wait until his visitors left before eating anything more. Later he picked ravenously from the marvelous tiered wheel of corned beef and pastrami and sliced turkey laid out like a card trick, his fork flying, occasionally puncturing the bronze-colored cellophane which covered the meats. There were buckets of potato salad tucked away on the trays, logjams of pickles and cartons of coleslaw like a moist confetti. Some women had made coffee, serving it directly from Harris Towers Common Room urns, stainless steel and as large as the equipment in restaurants. They poured it into Styrofoam cups which they took from stacks that rose in high towers like Miami hotels.

Many of his callers were people he recognized neither from the chapel the evening before nor the funeral that morning, and he began to have a sense of the vast population that lived in Harris Towers. A few of them had peculiar names, queer portmanteau conversions of their children’s given names, now legally their own, and contrived in a strange incest from the small businesses and manufactories they had lent them to and had now, pleased with their oddly circular memorials, taken back. There was a Wil-Marg (belts) and a Freddy-Lou (blouses). There was a Rob-Roy. Some of the people were quite old, but not as many as he had expected, and though he was younger by several years than the youngest there, they seemed only a fraction of a generation up on him, and the deference these showed to those who were clearly along in years somehow reduced the difference in their ages even more.

He phrased this delicately as he could to one of his guests. “I know,” the man said, “most people think a place like this is some kind of Sun City, but I’ll tell you something. We haven’t even got an emergency room on the premises. A lot of condominiums do, you know. With a twenty-four-hour duty nurse, oxygen, the red telephones, everything. Harris Towers is a condominium with a difference. The clientele’s very active. Seventy-two percent of us are still in business.” Preminger, his retired father’s substitute, was glad he did not drag down the average. “We’ve got our Golden Agers, but so far they’re definitely in the minority. And very few vegetables, very few.” He touched Preminger’s arm. “Still,” he said, “glad to have you aboard. Always use new blood.”

In the next few days the weather turned very hot, and the central air conditioning, taxed to the limit, could barely cope. Taking his bench with him, Preminger moved his mourning out onto the balcony to try to catch a fresh breeze; there, facing southeast, he could see Chicago’s skyline, the tall apartments of Lake Shore Drive, downtown, Hancock’s startling skyscraper. But the heat was absurd, absolute. He stood at the railing and stared down into the cool turquoise of the swimming pool, then and there abandoning his shivah.

He had no bathing suit, of course, and walked to the shopping center to buy one. At the entrance to the pool the lifeguard turned him back. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the pool is reserved for the exclusive use of residents and their guests.”

“I’m a resident.”

The boy took out a mimeographed list. “Your name, sir?”

“Marshall Preminger.”

“Oh,” he said, setting his list aside, “are you related to Mr. Preminger?”

“I’m his son. I live here now.”

“Sir, I’m not doubting your word, but you see in this building the residents all wear blue wristbands. Like the one that woman has on.” He pointed to a sort of strap, rather like a garter or the tag worn by patients in hospitals. Other people wore yellow or red bands, but everybody seemed to have one.

“I see other colors too.”

“The yellow bands are for guests. It’s a code. In this building the guests wear yellow. The red is for visiting residents from another building. In their own pools they might wear yellow bands and the guests would wear blue or red, and their guests yellow.”