Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“My manager’s landlord’s a Pakistani. So Steve, that’s my manager, and Milly are going to Peewaukee for the weekend and they want to leave the baby with the landlord. His wife had made this standing offer when they moved in. So they go down to Mr. Pahdichter and they ask if it’ll be all right and the Pak says — I can’t do his accent like Steve—‘Oh yes. Very good. But does the baby eat, does the baby eat, curry?’”

“They gave him to eat curry? A baby?”

“They’re very modern people.”

“Feldman?”

“I’m sunbathing. I’m getting a tan.”

“You’re beautiful. If they had a beauty contest it’d be you hands down. The rest of us wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“So?”

“Sew buttons. So? So what?”

“So when are you going to let me get you on the Johnny Carson show?”

“That again.”

“I can do it. I got connections with the higher-ups. When’s it going to be, Feldman? When does America look you over?”

“A week from Thursday.”

“What a wit. You really have to let me do it. You could show him how you take a sunbath. They’d introduce you as this big sunbathing expert from the North Side. Johnny’d take his shirt off and everything. It’d be a sensation. You and Johnny with your shirts off. The people wouldn’t know where to look first. You’d tell him when to turn over and he’d do these funny takes. Come on, Feldman. I’ll call up right now if you give me the word.”

“Why don’t you go on the Johnny Carson show?”

“Me? What do I know about sunbathing? It’s got to be you.”

“I still say you should have gone out. You had no right to stay in with two pair.”

“Queens and jacks?”

“Gert was also showing a pair of queens. You should have gone out.”

“It’s my money.”

“You ruin it for other people, Lenore. You draw their cards. That’s why nobody wants to sit to your left. You asked and I told you. I always say what I think to a person’s face. I can’t be a hypocrite.”

“Excuse me for living.”

“Should I call Johnny, or should we wait till he takes the show out to Hollywood where we can get you real sunshine?”

“We’ll wait.”

“No, it’s no good. In California sunbathers are a dime a dozen. It’s got to be you and it’s got to be New York.”

“Never buy a typewriter till there’s ads in Fortune magazine showing some new breakthrough, some terrific advance. Then wait a month and a half and call around the various companies. Chances are they’ll be putting in new equipment and letting their old machines go. This tip works for other industrial equipment as well. Don’t waste your time with the mass-circulation magazines. The breakthrough campaigns are aimed at the big corporations before they try to reach the individual. You can look at Fortune in any good branch library for nothing.”

“Where do you get this stuff? I don’t need a typewriter.”

“Never mind. Just file it away in your mind so you can remember. Another good buy is Christmas cards. February and March are the best months for that. The new lines ain’t out yet and the prices are even lower than in the January clearance sales. Christmas is still fresh in people’s minds in January and though the prices have come down the markup is still terrific. Find out exactly when fruits are in season. The Department of Agriculture puts out a pamphlet. It’s free. Write away for it on a post card. It’s like a timetable. It tells when strawberries are ripe in stores in exactly your section of the country. When Temple oranges. Nectarines, grapes. When melons. Everything. The thing is when they’re ripest they’re cheapest. People don’t know that. Everything is supply and demand. And tubes. Use tubes, never aerosol cans. You can squeeze tubes dry, get all the paste or shaving cream out of a tube. With an aerosol can the gas may go flat or the mechanism break, something can always go wrong. Also it’s a lot more expensive to make an aerosol can than a tube. Why pay for the package?”

“Where do you get all this stuff?”

“ Changing Times, Kiplinger’s Newsletter, Consumer Reports. They’ve paid for themselves I couldn’t tell you how many times over. I figure in the last nine years I’ve saved thirty-seven thousand dollars.”

“On toothpaste? ”

“I don’t make a move without those books. Also it’s fascinating reading. With me it fills a, I don’t know, need. What other people get from astrology.”

How account for so much skin? Is something violated here? So much flesh. Preminger sees it through half-shut lids. Their pale meat at odds with their beautiful voices, their bad glands spilling over banks of throat in goiter. He sees humps, coronets of kyphosis, sees mottled, purplish necks given the last of the summer’s sun, sees psoriasis like bubbled, flaking paint, sees flab like broken bones clumsily set by quacks. He shuts his eyes.

“Zionism. Don’t make me laugh. When they say they made the deserts bloom they mean they got engineers who found a way to build on sand. They mean Levittown, cellars in the Sinai. It’s the same everywhere.”

“I’m gonna go in. Is it cold?”

“Just at first. Not after you get used to it.”

“To hell with it. I need a coronary from icy water?”

“My sentiments exactly. Want to play cards? A couple hands of gin?”

“You?”

“Why not?”

“You got cards?”

“Upstairs.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on.”

“All right.”

“If I could find a buyer I’d sell.”

“Where would you go?”

“That’s the thing.”

“Did you hear about Ruth-Ann?”

“What about him?”

“Packed it in. Sold out to Tom-Ted.”

“Her? I don’t believe it. Where’d you hear?”

“Mary-Sue.”

“The auto battery manufacturer?”

“Yeah.”

“Rob-Roy told me the business was doing so well.”

“Rob-Roy’s giving up the restaurant.”

“What’ll she do?”

“She’s going with Chuck-Burger.”

“Well, listen,” he heard someone next to him say, “this is costing you money.” It was the excuse people made when they wanted to get off the long-distance telephone.

“So your problems are solved. You’ll have Bernadine on Fridays.”

“Do I need her? What’s the matter, the place is so big I can’t do it myself? Twenty minutes in the morning and it’s straightened out. It’s good enough.”

“Then why bother?”

“Because,” the woman said, “because I miss her. I miss the company.” She was crying.

“Harris. At the Standard Club. A tartan cummerbund. A powder-blue dinner jacket. The orchestra was playing ‘My Fair Lady.’ ”

“The summer’s over.”

“I know.”

“October, November — they can shove it. The Chicago winter. It’s not a heated garage. All night you’re up wondering will it start, won’t it start? Scraping the goddamn frost off the goddamn windshield with the little goddamn piece of plastic like a tiny red goddamn comb. Cold weather.”

“At least in Miami that’s one worry you don’t have.”

“If it ain’t one thing it’s another. In Miami if it don’t hit seventy one day it breaks your heart.”

“That’s if you’re on vacation. When you live there all year round you don’t worry about it so much.”

“In the summer you step out the door you get cancer from the sunshine.”

“Everything’s air-conditioned. In the gas stations the toilets are air-conditioned.”

“There’s Portuguese man-of-war in the ocean.”

“Who goes in the ocean? You have a pool. In the winter it’s heated.”