Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

Do let me know what you think of some of my opinions as I am anxious to have your views on these matters.

Very truly yours,

Evelyn

P.S. I have been looking high and low for the key to Dad’s — your — apartment. So far I have not had much luck, but something has just occurred to me about where I may have left it, and I am pretty certain I will soon be able to lay my hands on it.

She has it, Preminger thought; she has the key. She’s only waiting to see how I respond to her letter. He would have called her up at once or gone down the hall and knocked on her door, but slow and easy does it, he cautioned himself. He didn’t want to frighten her. He’d play it her way. He would say that he quite understood, that he had guessed her feelings and for just such reasons as she had elucidated in her letter he had held back and not made any overtures to her at the swimming pool, that he had the same reservations she had about Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and that while he too had enjoyed “Carnal Knowledge,” she made a mistake if she thought that all men were like that. Some were capable of quite mature relationships. He liked to think that he was one. If she did happen to find the key she must be in no hurry to get it back to him. There was no reason for her to try to send it through the mails. She could, if she liked, bring it over at her convenience. She knew his hours at the pool. Otherwise he was always in, rarely out. He had not known her husband had left her. That was a shock. He couldn’t understand a man who could be that thoughtless with a woman as obviously thoughtful and superior as herself.

He wrote all this out very carefully, making several drafts before he was satisfied, then went to the phone and dictated it to Western Union.

In the summer’s last days the heat lost its nerve and the temperature, like a failed expedition, began a hasty retreat down the slopes, but the South Tower pool was more crowded than ever, thick with people who had not been in it all summer and who now, in the last week it would be open, found themselves rummaging its waters and equipment, the Styrofoam kickboards, striped polo balls and outlandish toys. Last-flingers — some of them actually on vacation — who out of some deep sentimental instinct, like people who crowd aboard a train they have never ridden but which is about to be taken out of service, they squeezed their feet into rubber flippers, scurried to do one last memorable milestone lap, one final dive, kissed the snorkel, cruised on ribbed, rubber air mattresses. Yet despite this element of the frantic, their overall mood was mellow with reconciliation and detail.

Beside them at poolside, his distinguishing characteristics as their lifeguard worn thin (as on ocean voyages the initial mysteries of ship and crew diminish with custom and ultimately accommodate themselves to that democracy of voyagers, passenger and sailor both drawing near land, and it suddenly occurs to you that the deck steward also has an address and the captain hand luggage), easy now because here it is autumn and no one has drowned or been seriously in trouble (so he’d saved them after all, standing by like a peacetime army), his pith helmet and whistle nothing more now than bits of eccentric jewelry, Preminger melded into their midst, listening, hearing them, never so comfortable (unless it was driving in that limousine to his father’s funeral), nothing on his mind save their voices, monitoring their babble like a ham of the domestic, listening so hard that he was able to pick out individual conversations.

He heard how each had got his condominium, from the initial examination of the site through the decision to join and the payment of the deposit to the moving in, stations of the legend, infinitely the same, infinitely different and, for him, as compelling as an account of lost virginity. He was moved to offer his own variation. “I’m in probate,” he said with his eyes closed.

“Taylor was in probate,” someone said.

“It was different,” said another. “Irene died almost a year before Rose moved in, right after she put down the deposit. Irene never lived here.”

“Probate’s a technicality. It’s as good as yours.”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

They spoke of individual courtesies shown them by Harris, of cocktail parties given for them when all that had existed of Harris Towers was the architect’s model, of a dance at the Standard Club five years earlier, some of the women in gowns they had bought for the occasion, their husbands in black tie for the only time in their lives save for getting married or for their children’s weddings. “It was beautiful. Freda, wasn’t it beautiful?”

“Harris had the mayor’s caterer for the evening.”

Those were the days, they said, when the condominium was just a dream. And Harris the dreamer. A young Aeneas in the myth. Themselves cast as skeptics, historical obstacle, stunned only retroactively by the cutting edge of his bold imagination, like self-confessed victims in anecdote, all admiration now for the force of his enterprise, his vision which had seen the three buildings already standing when all that had existed was an abandoned warehouse surrounded by vacant lot and prairie. They told of his struggles with the bankers and recounted his wheedling, piecemeal favor by piecemeal favor, his concessions from politicos and zoning big shots and, once, how he’d gotten an actual law through the Chicago City Council, the future condominium’s very own legal and bona fide ordinance, signed by Mayor Daley himself. The legend of how Harris had built the condominium, Preminger saw, was only a universalizing of their individual stories about how they’d come to be a part of it. Yet why couldn’t they speak of him that way? And why had they written off his probate, dismissed it as natural order, ordinary sequence? A life had been lost, death was in it. (And at such moments why did he loathe his swim trunks and wish to put by his whistle and scatter his lotions?) And they spoke of how Harris had recruited his prospects, many of the future residents of the place, a laborious, close-order piece of patient scholarship, choosing and rejecting like some Noah of real estate, a brave man hand-picking his crew, sieving the South Side, as if what he proposed were an expeditionary force or a crusade or a mission in history. (Ah, Preminger saw, because he’d inherited it, because it had fallen in his lap.)

“In nineteen fifty-five he saw that the South Side was going,” said a woman with white hair, “that the colored were making a mockery of the neighborhoods. He understood what was happening to my husband’s business before my husband did.”

“What, are you kidding? During the war he saw it coming, as far back as that.”

“He told me that at the I.C. station at sixty-third and Engelwood he saw a family of hillbillies get off the train, shkutzim, low-class whites from the cottonfields, and he knew what was going to happen. This was in nineteen forty-seven.”

“This was before he had money. This was before the banks would even look at him.”

“Now they ask him. ”

How comfortable Preminger is nevertheless, how close to sleep. If someone were to call for help now he could not move, his lassitude locking him up in warm baths of the intimate. He lies back on the chaise longue and watches them, sees their heavy busts in profile, the huge passive breasts of other listeners rising and falling, the deep unconscious percussion of their breath. The fat thighs of the speaker, the muddle of hair at her crotch, her legs wide, stately, an abandon that is at once rigid and relaxed like the lines of upholstered furniture. He hopes the heat will last forever. He hopes his bladder will never fill. He wishes never to move, simply to be there always, their talk climbing the white, hairless insides of his arms like flies. Blood moves in his penis as he listens. His clipboard and his scant notes lay abandoned across his knees. He nudges it aside and it falls to the concrete, a heavy weight gone. He loves their voices cracked by age and child bearing, by lullabies and screaming their children out of streets and the paths of cars.