Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“You may not, however, be aware of the exact status of my proprietorship in Harris Towers, and I feel under a certain obligation to apprise you of it. In all fairness, I am not yet technically an owner — nor shall I be until my father’s will has been probated. Shirley Fanon has apprised me, however, that my prospects are positive, and that so long as I occupy these premises and fulfill my financial obligations to the condominium, I enjoy the full rights of surrogacy.” They looked a little restless. He tried again. “Before you go,” he said, “I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let me try to thank you. You’ve shown your kindness by coming here tonight. I haven’t given you coffeecake or offered you drinks or any of the hospitality I’m certain I would have received at your hands in your homes. The cupboard is bare. Whatever I had your Emergency Fund Committee provided and it’s all gone. I plead lassitude.”

Now they seemed not only restless but uneasy. He couldn’t help himself; he couldn’t stop. “I’ve lived provisionally here,” he said. “Like someone under military government, martial law, an occupied life. This isn’t going as I meant it to. I’m a stranger — that’s something of what I’m driving at. My life is a little like being in a foreign country. There’s displaced person in me. I feel — listen — I feel… Jewish. I mean even here, among Jews, where everyone’s Jewish, I feel Jewish. Does that make sense? Something in me was left out. Damn. I mean, why is it that the only place I can think to be, to live, is here? I mean, you just told me: I’m the youngest of nine hundred thirty-eight people. It isn’t as if I earned this place the way the rest of you did. Or even had it in my mind as a goal. I saw it once with my father when it was still a hole in the ground. To tell you the truth, I didn’t trust it. I thought it was like buying property in a swamp, that my dad was being taken and the buildings would never go up. I thought it was a scheme. I didn’t like the looks of the coat of arms sewn on the salesmen’s jackets. I have no good imagination,” he said. “Nobody cheats me, but I feel it coming. But what Dr. Salmi said about the possibilities here, that was very meaningful to me. I want to do my share. I will do my share.” He looked around to see if they had understood him. No one seemed to know what to say.

Dr. Salmi did. “It ain’t the All-Star Game,” he said. “It ain’t church. We see to it there are no fire hazards, that people, they throw a party in the party room, are responsible for cleaning the place up afterwards.”

“Yes,” Preminger said, “that’s what I want.”

“That the grandkids come for a visit they don’t scream in the halls and run the elevator all day up and down so you can’t get it when you need it.”

“Of course.”

“That the bricks don’t come down on our heads when we walk by outside.”

“Yes.”

“That people park only in the space assigned them and the guy who plays accordion for our dances takes a ten-minute break, ten minutes, no more, every hour on the hour. That the newsprint for the paper comes wholesale from a friend’s cousin and a good chlorine level is maintained in the pool at all times.”

“Sure,” Preminger said.

“That we got a community here and an investment to protect,” President Salmi said, his eyes fixed narrowly on Preminger, “and that when someone sells he sells to the right sort — no Chinks, no PR’s, no spades.”

When they left he put their mimeographed sheets aside, wanting neither to throw them away nor to find a place for them — like his father’s, the dead man’s mail, which continued to come.

For a week or more he gave himself over to the chores involved in setting up a household. He wrote letters to his bank in Montana and closed down his account, arranging for a cashier’s check to be sent him. He consulted with Shirley Fanon about the steps he’d initiated to probate his father’s will. He called the phone and electric companies and had everything put in his name. He stocked up at the supermarket and bought some clothes. He packed his father’s things away and put up a notice on the bulletin board in the game room saying that whoever wanted anything of his father’s could come up, look through the stuff and take away what he needed. (First he’d checked with Fanon to see if it was legal. “Sure,” the lawyer told him, “none of that’s in the inventory. Give it all away if you want.”) No one came for three days. Then an old man showed up who did not even live in the building. He had ridden buses, he said — an hour and a half from the Southwest Side. How had the notice come to his attention? Preminger never understood. He had brought shopping bags, and Preminger helped him to fold his father’s expensive clothing, the nifty bellbottoms and wallpaper prints, the psychedelic ties and turtlenecks and wide belts and leather vests, into them. He had to give the old man carfare to go home.

He rode buses himself, down to the near North Side or out to Lake Shore Drive or up to Evanston, occasionally drifting even further, to Chicago’s gilt-edged northern suburbs, Winnetka and Wilmette and Kenilworth, all those expensive citadels which simply to see triggered wonder at the immense wealth in America, at the vast depth on its bench. Who were these people? How could they have gotten so much money? How could there be so many of them? Their homes made his mouth water. They looked like fraternity houses, country clubs, embassies. Tudorial, stately, with high green hedges and curving driveways like painterly exercises in perspective. Blue Lake Michigan sucking up to their backyards. Attached to their carriage houses and wide garages were basketball hoops, gleaming cat’s cradles of white net, taut and tapered as hourglasses. He imagined lean, expert girls in blue jeans, home from Radcliffe, Holyoke, Smith, setting them up, pushing them in, playing Horse and 21, with their tan, continent boyfriends who had once been pages in the Senate. The cropped lawns, green as felt on gaming tables, made him gulp, and an occasional sound from the swimming pool of splashing water like polite applause made his heart turn over. Lake Michigan and a pool. Twice, when he saw strings of Chinese lanterns set out for parties, he had to shut his eyes.

He came to shop, it being simply good sense, he told himself, as immutable as that rule of the highway that one eats where the trucks are standing, that one should buy where the rich do, go to their bakers and butchers, find out how they come by their vegetables and which fruits they are eating. (And it could be justified economically. Weren’t things more expensive in the slums? Wouldn’t a single Rolls-Royce, properly cared for, last all one’s life, mellowing, blooming with use, ever perfecting itself, cheaper in the long run than the three Fords, two Chevies, pair of Dodges, one Pontiac, two Buicks and trio of Oldsmobiles that was the average man’s portion?) But the fiction that he had come merely to shop wore thin, though to preserve it he always brought something back with him — a Black Forest chocolate cake, a Spanish melon, tins of Dutch herring, Russian caviar, pickled rinds. Now, when he went on these excursions, he went obsessively, growing angry and genuinely dangerous.

He had been safer in Missoula. Even if it had its better neighborhoods and occasional mansion, Missoula was still the West, where wealth was expressed in land no man could walk in a day, and which, for all its vastness, looked no different square yard for square yard — perhaps poorer, actually — than the place where one lay down one’s picnic, and where the stores were franchises one had grown up with: Penney’s, Woolworth’s, Rexall’s and Howard Johnson’s, a two-bit Hanseatic democracy of the ordinary. Chicago was different in kind. In the neighborhoods filled with their Village and Paoli and Chelsea chic that he tramped through, Chicago grieved him, tore at his spirit and opened old wounds he was helpless to stanch. He roamed Rush Street, Old Town, Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue like someone seeking pornography, desire and need clobbering his spirit, drooling before the lush goods in the shop windows, eyeing the young housewives and fashionable women like a soiled madman. He was jealous of the well-dressed children, envying them their door-manned prerogatives and elevator buildings and begrudging them what he imagined would be their French and their quick minds, their nannies and good manners. A sycophant, whenever one bumped into him he apologized, diseased at the figure he cut in front of them. He walked lasciviously past brownstones, studio apartments, tall high-rises beehived with bachelor pads, the shared flats of stewardesses, young lawyers, radio announcers, journalists and photographers, sketching in their perfect taste and lovely freedom, their ease as they idly drummed a steering wheel, double-parked in small, open convertibles, persuaded of their ability with wine, their stereophonics and terrific records. (Tapes; they would be tapes now.) In a leathercraft shop he was annoyed with himself because, unlike the slim owner in the jeans and turtleneck, he was not a homosexual. He watched the young man greet a woman just returned from Europe, looked on as, laughing and talking, the faggot embraced her. Why, he likes her, he thought, he really likes her. Yet she doesn’t mean a thing to him. See how his eyes were open when he kissed her. Mine would have been shut tight and my cock would have been out to here. He hated himself because he was not artistic, light, healthy, easy. If such a girl kissed me I would ask her to marry me.