Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

Sheila was watching TV in her room, and I told her I was going out for a while. I made up some excuse — I don’t even remember what it was. I came down the hall and rang Dad’s bell. There was no answer, though I could hear music playing inside the apartment from Phil’s new stereo, the Beatles, I think. I pressed the doorbell twice more, and when there was still no answer I let myself in with the key.

Your father was in his shorts on the couch. They were these skimpy silky bikini things and I would have left at once, but not after I saw his face. He looked awful. I asked what was the matter and he said he was a little uncomfortable. Naturally I forgot about the key; I must have slipped it back into my purse. I went over to him and he asked me if I would turn off the phonograph. He said he was very tired. I did what he asked and returned to him. He was sweating terribly, his face was pale, and it was clear to me that he was very ill. But even then he misunderstood why I was there. He tried to smile. “Evelyn,” he said, “this wasn’t how I expected it would be. I’m sorry it turned out like this, kid.” I told him I thought we’d better call a doctor, but he said no, he thought it might be only a little indigestion and that he was already beginning to feel a little better.

Marshall, he was — hard. I told him he’d better just lie still and that I’d try to get some help, and that’s when he became aroused. I was very frightened, but to tell you the truth I was more afraid of what could happen to him if I struggled with him than of anything that might happen to me. I held him up, and all the time he was kissing and touching me, and to calm him I said we’d better go into the bedroom. I wanted to get him to lie down, you see. I helped him into the bedroom and that’s when he asked to make love to me. I told him it was crazy, that we had to wait until he was better. I didn’t want to upset him. I promised that if he let me call the doctor I’d wait with him in bed until the doctor came. He agreed, and I called the number he gave me and got the answering service. I told the girl it was an emergency, and she said she’d get the doctor at once.

Then your father made me keep my promise to lie down next to him. Marshall, he had taken off his shorts. He was very excited because he didn’t understand why I had come to his apartment, and he just kept — well, thanking me. I let him undress me, and because he was so ill and moved so slowly I actually helped him. I threw my clothes off as if they were on fire, and I suppose this excited him even more. I got him into position and all I could think was, I don’t know, that this was better than that he should he hard, that that would be a terrible strain on his heart, and I wriggled like a mad woman because all I wanted was to bring him off. He came almost at once, and he died on top of me.

I got out. I couldn’t wait for the doctor. I cleaned his penis. I looked around for any evidence, and destroyed it. I ran away.

That’s the story. Now you understand why I couldn’t come to the chapel or the funeral. That’s the story. Please don’t answer this letter.

There was a postscript: “I’ll get the key back to you.”

Then how was he mad? Didn’t he see the inconsistencies in her letter? “I don’t want you to spend your money on telegrams. We’re neighbors. As you say in your telegram, we live a few doors down the hall from each other.” And all that stuff about “if we are to become friends.” If she’d looked for evidence, why hadn’t she taken the letters with her? And after telling him the whole story about that night why hadn’t she simply enclosed the key? He could drive a truck through her ambivalences. Then how was he mad? And what about his reactions to what he’d been told? Were they mad? Was it mad to be stirred by that part where his father went swimming through her legs? He was hard as the mourner’s bench he sat on when he read that. Was that mad? Or his own ambivalences, his disgust and jealousy at her final revelations, were they mad? Was the awful pity he felt? Then how had his nerves broken down? His inkling that the key might still turn in his lock — was that nuts? Or, modifying inkling to simple bald hope that it would, was that? If only he could stop this damn weeping.

No longer were the tears coursing down his cheeks like anguish in a prizewinning photograph; now he was sobbing, bellowing, howling. He stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth. Choking on it, he pulled it out. (Was that, self-preservation normal as apple pie, was that ?) He was astonished to be insane yet see so clearly, every reaction fitted immaculately to its cause like a Newtonian law.

He huddled on the mourner’s bench and had an idea. He phoned Evelyn. She answered on the second ring. (Was it nuts to suspect that having slipped the letter under his door she would be waiting for his call?)

“It’s Marshall,” he sobbed. “I got your letter.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. I got it. I read it. I understand.”

“Oh.”

“I agree about the telegrams.” He was squalling into the phone, He made a stutterer’s effort to speak plainly and said goodbye clear as a bell.

He waited on the mourner’s bench for three hours but she never came. He’d shown every patience, giving her time to do the supper dishes, to think up something to tell Sheila, to wait until Sheila was asleep, to prepare herself. He didn’t even leave the bench to urinate, fearing that he wouldn’t hear her timid knock in the toilet. All hope left him. He understood her reluctance; he understood everything. And he stopped crying.

He stepped out onto the balcony. He saw the skyline, the lighted windows that ran across the horizon like a message, like signal fires of the abandoned on those desert isles of his hypotheses, like bonfires on mountain tops for the search planes to see. He saw all the warehouses, office buildings, hotels and apartments. He saw the houses and condominiums, service flats, bed-sitters, kips and billets. He saw barracks and bunkers and chambers in university and wards in hospitals, saw all places where being lodged, those visible and those invisible — rooms underground, basements, shelters, code and map rooms, vast silos beneath the desert and under the badlands, Sweden’s civil defenses, the booths in tunnels where officers stood watching the traffic, the cars in those tunnels, the passengers snug in their moving envelopes of space, subway trains and staterooms beneath the water line — saw the cabins of jets and two-seaters and the berths in trains, their club cars and coaches, the locked toilets on buses and the vans of trucks, the wide ledge behind the driver where the helper snuggles. There were palaces and theaters, arenas in the open air, auditoriums where people sat listening to orchestras, stalls and dress circles and private boxes and the gods. There were pits where technicians recorded those performances and prompter’s boxes in theaters where a man, crouching, followed what the actors were saying, his fingers moving along the lines of the script as if it was in Braille. There were caves. There were mud huts and huts of straw and the hogans of Navahos, all the earth’s vulgate architecture, its mounds and warrens, Rio’s high favellas and Hong Kong’s sea-level houseboats. There were cellblocks in prisons and the tiger cages of solitary. The world was mitered, walls and floors and ceilings, angled as the universe and astronomy, jointed as men.

There were balconies like this one he stood on, with railings like this one. He raised one leg over and now the other. Intestate, sitting there for a moment perfectly balanced, he pushed off gently and began his fall.

As he plunged he addressed the condominium, quoting from the lecture he had been preparing. “From what incipit, fundamental gene of nakedness,” he gasped, “came, laboring like a lung, insistent as the logical sequences of a heartbeat, the body’s syllogisms, this demand for rind and integument and pelt?” But it was too difficult. His velocity shoveled the words back into his mouth, the air that forced itself into his lungs canceling his breath. All he could manage at last, with great effort, the greatest he had ever made, were individual words.