Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“Julie never wanted to come here. Julie wanted Florida. He wanted the excitement of the dog track and the jai alai. You know what I got against Florida? I got nothing against Florida. It’s the way they dress. The loud shirts and Bermudas and the cockamamy sailfish on the men’s caps. And the slacks on the women. People our age look foolish dressed like that. You’d think they’d have better sense.”

“The kids don’t come to Florida.”

“They come. Christmas they come. They come and they leave the children with you, and then off they go, off like a shot to the Doral and the Fontainebleau, and you’re the baby sitter. You see them at three in the morning when the night clubs close.”

“All my friends are in Chicago. I’d be a stranger in Florida.”

Individual hairs of his head stand stirred by their collective breath. He has never been this relaxed, even in barbershops under warm towels. He knows now how much he wants to lie in rooms where others are talking, to graze in orbit round their monologues. If they noticed him something would be lost, his euphoria bruised by their attention. He’s held by these matrons, by their legends of founding, the condominium an Athens, feeding him the only history he has ever cared for. Condominium. He thinks the word. It hums. Mmn. Mmn. Mom is in it. Om is.

It’s Saturday. It’s Sunday. (Has he eaten? Has he been upstairs at all?) Those who are not widows have been joined by their husbands. (And how pale these are compared to the women, how marked for probate.) He listens, listens. He loves their voices too, the hoarse voices of the men, this one a printer forty years, his lungs damp, mildewed with ink, scratched and scorched by metal filings, enough case in them by now to set a short sentence, loves the guttural bark of the wholesaler in fruits and vegetables, the rumble of the one who has spent his life in underground parking garages, the screech of the man who has supervised kitchens in hotels. The men’s voices fertilize the women’s. Their sounds fuck. The lifeguard merged with the group beside the pool, neither raised above them on the platform nor cruising beneath them in the water doing the lifesaver’s imposing laps, leading his body through a narrow wake like the long welts of allergy, incognito in boxer trunks, in his tanned son-in-law’s body, his arm along one of the heavy metal tables cut to hold a pole that blooms a sunshade. His ass in a cat’s cradle of plastic sling, the tightly wound strips like huge lanyards from summer camp engraving his calves. Many such impressions here — the backs of men’s legs, women’s backs and arms taking the mold, their skins a sort of stationery, raised letter invitations — Preminger wanly concupiscent at these stains of flesh and contact, the pink stripes of blood like foot and fingerprint, like the red hemioval bite of a toilet seat or elastic’s pucker on the skin. Shoeless as a shivah and sockless too, his naked heels crossed on the hot concrete.

He sees the others. (Sunday rules: the people here all from the single tribe.) The men shirtless, in bathing trunks. Some in a pelt of body stubble the shape of a man’s undershirt, others smoother than women and with incipient, undifferentiated breasts like the uncloven tits of eleven-year-old girls. He sees the lightning strokes of old operations, the zippers and fossils of healed scars. He sees long testicles winking dully in great nests of jockstrap and the multiple vaccinations on the arms of the women, like the seals and stamps of official documents. Much care has gone into selecting their bathing suits. There are no bikinis, no bandanna prints. The women’s suits are one piece, black or the oxydized red of deep rust, only a little white piping running around the suits like a national border. Their feet are squeezed into pumps, the broad heels a sort of clear, frozen aspic with flecks of gold and silver foil floating in them like stars. They do not actually sit together. They sit in small groups, constellations of between three and seven, but arranged as they are, it is as if they are one group, people ringing a campfire, perhaps.

Preminger’s ears are grown enormous, like deep-dish radio telescopes. He hears everything as he sits, neutrally naked as the rest. Their voices flow into his brain like bathwater filling a tub.

“I’m telling you, Dave, you think this is an operation? It’s home sweet home and I ain’t knocking it, but I got a kid brother in California who lives in a condominium that would put your eyes out. Half the apartments out there have their own swimming pools.”

“I’m happy with this one.”

“Of course. I’m just giving you a comparison.”

“I don’t want the responsibility of a pool.”

“I’m not selling you one. I’m just trying to give you an idea of the scope.”

“I read there’s one going up in New York City — Onassis has one — that’s being built with two sets of corridors.”

“Two? What for? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Two sets of corridors. One for the residents, one for the servants and delivery people.”

“Jesus. Wouldn’t you hear them? I mean they’d be moving around like mice in the wall. You’d hear them.”

“They’d be trained. They’d take their shoes off. You might hear John-John. He’d be running up and down the second corridor with his friends all day. You’d only hear John-John.”

“Two sets of corridors. That’d mean two sets of elevators too. Christ, the maintenance on a place like that’d have to be twenty-five hundred a month.”

“Grace, tell me, you still looking for a girl?”

“Bernadine’s going to give me Fridays.”

“I thought she goes to Dorothy on Fridays.”

“We worked it out. Howard’s divorce came through. The judge gave him visitation on weekends. He brings the kids over and leaves them with Dorothy so she needs someone to straighten up on Monday. Bernadine goes to Olive on Mondays and Flo doesn’t need Helen now that Frank isn’t working so she comes to Dorothy on Mondays and I said I’d take Bernadine on Fridays.”

“Ex-cons I use, retards, wounded vets, all the handicapped.”

“Me too. That’s what the schmucks who work for me are like.”

“No, I mean it. It’s good business. They live by the skin of their teeth, those fellas. You never have no labor trouble from them. They don’t ask for raises or fringe benefits. The big fringe benefit is that they’re working at all.”

“You feel that sun? It’s like a vacation. I tell you it eats my heart out. This is the life. This is the life and I’m going to be sixty-four years old.”

“You’re as old as you feel.”

“You know something?”

“What’s that?”

“If I was ten years younger I’d be fifty-four. If I was thirteen years younger I’d still be over fifty.”

“Sunrise, sunset.”

“Yeah. I think I’ll go in the water. How’s the water?”

“Terrific.”

“Cold?”

“Not once you get used to it. The air is colder than the water.”

“I’m going in. I got to take a leak.”

“You got Blissner’s place when he lost his job.”

“That’s right.”

“May I ask a personal question?”

“What I had to give for it?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Thirty-two hundred fifty above cost.”

“That isn’t bad. It’s the eighth floor.”

“He asked four thousand with the carpets and drapes. I told him to take them.”

“So he did?”

“The drapes. He had to eat the carpets.”

“All my life I’ve been busy. Now the kids are grown and Lewis sold the store, what do I do with myself? Sure, it’s wonderful to relax and sit by the pool, but that’s five months a year and I’ve got an active mind. What do you do the rest of the time? I thought about this very carefully and for me the answer is volunteer work. There’s plenty of trouble in the world that those who have the time can do something about. We don’t just have to stand idly by. If I can lend a helping hand to those less fortunate I’ve got no right to sit back. Beginning Tuesday I’m recording the weights for my Weight Watchers Club.”