Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“Just tell your husband, will you please, Nurse?”

Within the hour there was another call. It was Salmi and he was very angry. “You said, ‘All that’s at issue is which committee can make the most of me.’ ‘I want to do my share,’ you said. It’s in the minutes. Well, now we know which committee can make the most of you. Activities. And you balk. Is that how you do your share?”

“I wasn’t even asked.”

“You weren’t even asked. Did you ever? He’s standing on ceremonies, a born lifeguard and he stands on ceremonies. If you saw someone drowning would you wait to be asked before you jumped in?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Would you?”

“Of course not, but—”

“I told you. A born lifeguard. The instincts of a natural life-saver.”

“You’re crazy,” Preminger said. He was unable to restrain himself. “Do you know my condition? Do you know that I’ve been contemplating suicide? That I ride buses to strange neighborhoods and eat my heart out when I see the way other people live? How do you expect me to—?”

“The buses stopped.”

“What?”

“The buses stopped. Almost two weeks now and you ain’t been on a bus. You get what you need in this neighborhood and you come home.”

“Is that in the minutes?”

“It’s a community, Preminger, we told you that. It made your eyes water when I described it. You had a hard-on from it. What do you think, in a community you’re invisible?”

“Listen, I don’t—”

“Preminger, I ain’t got time for all this. It’s a heat wave, a record-buster. Scorchers and corkers. Every day an old record falls and a new one is made. Air conditioning ain’t to be trusted. There’s a drain on the power. Brown-outs are coming. The weather people have seen nothing like it in their experience. My people need that swimming pool. They’re getting up there. Swimming’s their exercise. Dr. Paul Dudley White wants old people to go swimming, the Surgeon General does. But there’s danger. It needs supervision. The regular lifeguards go back to college. They got to come out of the pool, their lips are blue. This is a job for a young man. You’re thirty-seven. Who else is thirty-seven here? Most of us won’t see fifty-seven again. ‘All that’s at issue is which committee can make the most of me,’ you said. You thanked us. You wanted to put cheesecake in our mouths for coming to you. We left you our literature.

“Listen,” Salmi went on softly, “you think this can last forever? It’s a natural phenomenon. Such heat is an act of God. God gave us jungles for the heat that lasts forever, He gave us deserts for it. He didn’t put it in Chicago. It’ll break — it has to. I give it three weeks, four at the outside.” He was speaking very softly now, almost conspiratorially. “On Halloween it’ll be so cold you won’t even be able to remember it, and you can go back to your — back to your thoughts. What you were talking about. But I’ll tell you something. You won’t. You’ll have different thoughts. Better thoughts.”

“Forget that stuff about my thoughts,” Preminger said. “Sure it’s hot and we need the pool, but you don’t understand something. I’m working on my thesis.”

“You passed your prelims?”

“Yes, I—”

“Your orals? You’ve taken your orals?”

“Yes.”

“Your thesis proposal has been approved and you’ve got someone to work with?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you writing? Have you done all your reading yet?”

“Most of it.”

“Have you blocked out your first chapter?”

It was astonishing to him how well they knew the jargon. He would have thought they would have no notion of all the stages involved in earning a doctorate, but almost every one of them had a precise understanding of his graduate status. Their children had familiarized them with it, their married sons and daughters off in universities. Learning was old hat to them, the crises and obstacles as familiar as a fever chart. They’d broken the code. “Yes,” he said wearily, “my first two chapters are written. I’m on my third.”

“Then you’re sitting pretty,” Salmi said, “it sounds to me like you can work at home. You can do your footnotes later at a library. You can work up your bibliography afterwards.”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve got to get out of that apartment. It was better when you rode the buses. As it is, you’re around more than the vegetables. Get a clipboard and write at the pool. You got a clipboard?”

“No.”

“We’ll get you one. We’ll get you a pith helmet and suntan lotion.”

“I haven’t been elected yet.”

“A formality. Tomorrow morning you’ll be up on the high chair with a whistle on your neck.”

He agreed to stand for lifeguard.

One thing puzzled him: Harris had said Salmi was reluctant to have him. That afternoon when he went down to the office to sign some papers Fanon had left for him he ran into Harris and mentioned what was on his mind.

“Salmi,” Harris said lightly, “Salmi’s a figurehead. It’s a puppet regime.”

In fact he was elected, but not before the threat of a runoff between himself and Skippy Fisher, an old vaudevillian who was very popular with the residents. In the twenties Skippy had been a feature performer in The Ziegfeld Follies. It was said that he’d introduced “Melancholy Baby.” When Preminger heard about the tie he refused to run against the old-timer and withdrew his candidacy. There wasn’t anything Salmi could say to get him to change his mind. But Preminger reluctantly agreed when the President asked for a few hours to try to work out a deal.

Two hours later Salmi appeared, smiling. “Congratulations,” he said, “all the precincts have been heard from. It’s you.”

“What about Skippy Fisher?”

“Skippy’s pulled out. He’s withdrawn his name from nomination.”

“Why?”

“He pulled out. He sees it isn’t for him.”

“What happened? What did you do?”

Salmi smiled. “I said there’d be a whispering campaign. I told him I’d tell people that what he really introduced was ‘She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’— real golden oldies. I said I’d let everyone know he’s incontinent, that he makes weewee in the swimming pool. That even if he managed to save you he’d pee all over you.”

“Jesus,” said Preminger. “The Making of the Lifeguard, 1971.”

“Don’t worry about it. They didn’t really want him. He was the sentimental favorite. When you get to be our age, sonny, you can’t always bring yourself to violate your feelings.”

So Preminger, newly orphaned Montana scholar, the faint smell of smoke from the back room still lingering in his nostrils, through bald power plays released a college boy to return to active duty and at thirty-seven years of age and for the duration of a capricious heat spell, became the duly elected lifeguard pro tem of the Harris Towers Condominium on the North Side of Chicago. It was the first elected position he had ever held, his single incumbency and, he had to admit, his best prospect, the only game in town.

What was astonishing to him was how quickly and completely he assumed the badges of his office, how comfortable they made him feel and how powerful. He’d had hints of something like it before: several summers back, on his one trip to Europe, he’d left his hotel and been wandering the streets of Rome when, turning a corner, he’d come suddenly upon the Colosseum. He’d seen pictures of it, but always before he’d merely glossed its reality, the Colosseum as a possibility not actually registering; yet there it really was in the street, as anything might have been in the street; it wasn’t — this struck him as odd — even guarded; he might have pulled off a piece of one of its shaggy stones and slipped it in his pocket and gone off with it, a piece of the actual, honest-to-God Colosseum in his pocket. Important things actually existed and they had the effect on you they were supposed to have, a Lourdes efficacy in nature and history that was astonishing; yet one rarely took the fabulous enough for granted. He discovered afresh how vulnerable, like all men, he was to play, to signs and the simple power of images, what tremendous realities adumbrated in a toy. Strap a holster about your waist and the body automatically adjusts, the center of gravity shifts, the pelvis boasts and you sway, lope, bowleggedness in the centers of the brain. Sing sea chanteys in a canoe and feel love’s moods in parks.