Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

Harris went in for a dip one day. He swam five or six strong laps and took a large bath towel from Preminger’s stack.

“Mr. Harris,” Preminger said.

“That felt good. You got it made here, you know that? This is the life.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Gee, I’ve got to get back to the office. Talk to me in the shower.”

In the men’s shower room Harris turned on the cold tap and stood under it.

“What I wanted to know,” Preminger said, “was why you wanted me as lifeguard? Salmi was against me, you said, yet he practically rammed the job down my throat.”

“Ain’t you having a good time? You want to quit? You’re looking better every day. Terrific tan. I put a tan like that at a thousand bucks, low season. Some muscle coming out in the shoulders, too. You were sick, this sort of exercise must be opening up your arteries like the Lincoln Tunnel. What’s the matter, can’t you stand prosperity?”

“No, no, I enjoy it. Until I get going on my thesis again when the weather breaks. It’s good for me. I just want to know why you picked me.”

“Why you winklepicker, ain’t you figured that one out? Who else was there? Peckerhead, seventy-two percent of these guys still go to business. It’s in the minutes. What have you got to do? Who else was there? How’d it look if I left a vegetable in charge of my pool? If something happened you think that ‘Swimming at Your Own Risk’ shit would be worth boo? You at least look like a man. Dunderbone! What’s wrong with your kopf, my dear young putz? ”

He wants me out, Preminger thought. He wants my apartment for a few cents on the dollar and that’s why he speaks to me like this. I’ll smile. I’ll thank him for his information. I’ll be polite. He wants to get my goat. He wants to get my goat for a few cents on the dollar.

There was a personal letter for him, the first he’d had since coming to the condominium. As there was no return address, the envelope told him little more than that it had been mailed from Chicago. He waited until he got upstairs to open it.

It was from Evelyn Riker.

Dear Marshall (I knew your father so well. We were such friends. I can hardly call his son Mr. Preminger),

Perhaps you’re wondering why I’ve been so remiss in not writing sooner. Since that day of your father’s funeral I’ve hardly seen you. At the pool, of course, the few times I’ve been there (I’ve been reluctant to be seen at the pool for reasons you will be quick to understand without my going into them here), you’ve seemed so busy that I hesitated to interfere with your duties, or to do more than nod pleasantly, as acquaintances will. I had nevertheless determined to speak to you at the earliest occasion, but each time something has held me back. My bourgeois modesty, you will say, or, less kindly, my petty bourgeois regard for even the faintest blush of scandal. It may be, as anyone who takes the trouble to keep up must know, a permissive society, but not at Harris Towers. For all its underground garages and Olympic size pools and master antennae, Harris Towers has not yet entered the twentieth century. But I digress. I had started to say that I had determined to speak with you at the earliest opportunity, first to clear up any misunderstandings that may have developed between us, and secondly to go on from there to form a firmer relationship based on mutual trust, common interest and, I confess it, the fact that I feel a wide gulf between myself and many of the people here.

After my husband left me — you did not know that we are separated, and thought that perhaps I was a widow, or even that I went behind my husband’s back, that otherwise I could not possibly have “taken up,” to the limited extent that I did “take up” with your father, but there, I think, you underrate your father, or underrate me — I found Dad’s sympathy and understanding immensely important, whatever that sympathy and understanding may on his part have been inspired by. (I do not impute his motives. If Harris Towers is suspicious, I at least am not. Let that much be said for me.) There are no dirty old men, only lonely and frightened ones. As there are lonely women. (And lonely sons?) But I had not meant to impose my thoughts on you so abruptly and formidably. My pen, I fear, carries me away.

I had meant to talk to you. But your position, as lifeguard, intimidated me. What would it have looked like? A woman. A young lifeguard? I’d have been better off, if that was in my mind, at the Oak Street Beach, though I would, let’s face it, have had stiffer competition at the Oak Street Beach than at Harris Towers. All the more reason to avoid you here. For these arguments would have been the first ones made by my — our — good neighbors. That’s why I think it a good thing that this Indian Summer of ours must soon end. (Despite the fact that I personally enjoy hot weather and always have. I am one of those who would rather burn than freeze.) You will be able to return to your studies, and I will be able to be your friend on a more ladylike scale — befitting our ages. (I know I’m older, forty-four to your thirty-seven, but there is, when you come right down to it, a less telling difference in our ages — yours and mine — than there was in mine and Dad’s.) So I am glad, as I say, that the season must end, that even now cold air is moving down from Canada, that there’s snow in the Rockies, that passes in the western mountains are already closed. It will be our turn soon — I mean Chicago’s — and when this heat is broken, then perhaps…

Though that’s selfish. When I think of the many old people here and realize that for some of them it may be the last warmth they will ever know — save for fevers, save for deceptive flushes — I must, in all frankness, pull in my own desires somewhat, abate my wishes. Yet one cannot live with such premises, can one? One must neither gloat over one’s food nor pretend an abstract sorrow that it is not in someone else’s mouth. I have never forced dinners down my child’s mouth by telling her that the starving children of Europe would be grateful to have such food. In that respect, at least, I am no “Jewish Mother.” Which, incidentally, brings me around to a question I have been meaning to ask you since we first met. Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth? If not, it is highly readable and I strongly recommend it to you. The chances are, however, that you have already read it. My feeling is that while it is very funny, Sophie really rather spoils the book. I do not deny for a moment that such persons exist, though in all probability they exist in no greater numbers than stingy Scotchmen or stupid Polacks. Yet even if they existed en masse their thinking is so superficial that surely no work in which they play so central a role can be really important. Characters should be profound. At least that’s my feeling. I don’t recall seeing this point made in any of the reviews I read, though perhaps in the more learned journals some critics have already said the same thing. If you know of such viewpoints I wish you would let me know about them as it is always a pleasure to see one’s own ideas confirmed and expressed more articulately than one can quite manage oneself. Still, I may be all wet about this. A film I enjoyed and can heartily recommend is Mike Nichols’ Jules Feiffer’s “Carnal Knowledge.” There the characters are all Portnoys — though without their Sophies — who seem hung up in the same way that Alexander was, yet I laughed and laughed it rang so true. Men are sometimes such babies. (How odd it is that “Babe” should be exactly the term used by certain kinds of men when referring to their women!) I was in any event very pleased to see such a strong film from Nichols after his disappointing “Catch-22.”