Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

People were always recruiting him, he thought. “So?” he asked carefully.

“Well,” the social director said, embarrassed, “I’ll get out of here and let you get dressed. But I just wanted to say, you know, how I feel about this guy, and warn you that there might be some talk. Mrs. Frankel and that crowd. If you hear anything, squash it, you know? Explain to them.” He turned and went toward the door.

Preminger started to ask, “Explain what?” but it was too late. The social director had already gone out. He could hear him in the hall knocking at the room next to his own. He heard a rustling and a moment later someone padding toward the door. He listened to the clumsy rattle of knobs and hinges, the inward sigh of wood as the door swung open, and the introductory murmurs of the social director, hesitant, explanatory, apologetic. Trying to make out the words, he heard the social director’s voice shift, take on a loud assurance, and finally settle into the cheap conspiracy that was his lingua franca. “Between us,” he would be saying now, winking slyly, perhaps even touching his listener’s chest with his finger.

Preminger leaned back against his pillow, forgetting the social director. In a few minutes he heard the long loud ring of the second breakfast bell. It was Bieberman’s final warning, and there was in it again the urgency of a fire alarm. He had once told Norma that if the hotel were to catch fire and they sounded that alarm, the guests would go by conditioned response into the dining hall. Well, he would not be with them at any rate. Richard Preminger, he thought, hotel hold-out. They moved and played and ate in a ferocious togetherness, eying with suspicion and real fear those who stood back, who apologized and excused themselves. They even went to town to the movies in groups of a dozen. He had seen them stuff themselves into each other’s station wagons, and in the theater had looked on as they passed candy bars, bags of peanuts, sticks of gum to each other down the wide row of seats. With Norma he had watched them afterward in the ice cream parlor, like guests of honor at a wedding banquet, at the tables they had made the waiter push together. If they could have worked it out they would have all made love in the same big bed, sighing between climaxes, “Isn’t this nice? Everybody, isn’t this nice?”

He decided, enjoying the small extravagance, to ignore the bell’s warning and forfeit breakfast. He was conscious of a familiar feeling, one he had had for several mornings now, and he was a little afraid of dissipating it. It was a feeling of deep, real pleasure, like waking up and not having to go to the bathroom. At first he had regarded it suspiciously, like some suddenly recurring symptom from an old illness. But then he was able to place it. It was a sensation from childhood; it was the way boys woke, instantly, completely, aware of some new fact in their lives. He was — it reduced to this — excited.

Now he began his morning inventory of himself. It was his way of keeping up with his geography. He first tried to locate the source of his new feeling, but except for the obvious fact that he was no longer in the army and had had returned to him what others would have called his freedom, he didn’t really understand it. But he knew that it was not simply a matter of freedom, or at any rate of that kind of freedom. It was certainly not his prospects. He had none. But thinking this, he began to see a possible reason for his contentment. His plans for himself were vague, but he was young and healthy. (At the hotel old men offered, only half jokingly, to trade places with him.) He had only to let something happen to himself, to let something turn up. Uncommitted, he could simply drift until he came upon his fate as a lucky victim of a shipwreck might come upon a vagrant spar. It was like being once again on one of those trips he used to take to strange cities. He had never admired nature. He would bear a mountain range if there was a city on the other side, water if it became a port. In cities he would march out into the older sections, into slums, factory districts, past railroad yards, into bleak neighborhoods where the poor stared forlornly out of windows. He would enter their dingy hallways and study their names on their mailboxes. Once, as he wandered at dusk through a skid row, meeting the eyes of bums who gazed listlessly at him from doorways, he had felt a hand grab his arm. He turned and saw an old man, a bum, who stared at him with dangerous eyes. “Give me money,” the man wheezed from a broken throat. He hesitated and saw the man’s fist grope slowly, threateningly, toward him. He thought he would be hit but he stood, motionless, waiting to see what the man would do. Inches from his face, the hand opened, turned, became a palm. “Money,” the old man said. “God bless you, sir. Help a poor old man. Help me. Help me.” He remembered looking into the palm. It was soft, incredibly flabby — the hand, weirdly, of a rich man. The bum began to sob some story of a wasted life, of chances missed, things lost, mistakes made. He listened, spellbound, looking steadily into the palm, which remained throughout just inches from his body. Finally it shook, reached still closer to him, and at last, closing on itself, dropped helplessly to the old man’s side. Preminger was fascinated.

The talking in the other room had momentarily stopped. Then someone summed things up and a pleased voice agreed. A pact had been made. A door opened and the social director walked out, whistling, into the corridor.

In a little while he heard others in the corridor. Those would be the guests going to breakfast. He felt again a joy in his extravagance, and smiled at the idea of trying to be extravagant at Bieberman’s (he thought of the shuffleboard court and the crack in the cement that snaked like a wayward S past the barely legible numbers where the paint had faded, of the frayed seams on the tennis nets and the rust on the chains that supported them, of the stucco main building that must always have looked obsolete, out of place in those green, rich mountains). It was a little like trying to be extravagant at Coney Island. Some places, he knew, commanded high prices for shabbiness; here you expected a discount.

He had seen the expressions on the guests’ faces as they descended from the hotel station wagon. They came, traitors to their causes, doubtful, suspicious of their chances, their hearts split by some hope for change, some unlooked-for shift of fortune. Later they joked about it. What could you expect, they asked, from a mountain that had no Bronx, no Brooklyn on top of it? As for himself, he knew why he had come. He had heard the stories — comfortably illicit — of bored, hot mamas, people’s eager aunts, office girls in virginity’s extremis.

In the army he had known a boy named Phil, an amateur confidence man itching to turn pro, who, like a mystic, looked to the mountains. He remembered a conversation they’d had, sitting in the PX one night during basic training, solacing themselves with near-beer. Phil asked what he was going to do when he got out. He had to tell him he didn’t know, and Phil looked doubtful for a moment. He could not understand how something so important had not been prepared for. Preminger asked him the same question, expecting to hear some pathetic little tale about night school, but Phil surprised him, reciting an elaborate plan he had worked out. All he needed was a Cadillac.

“A Cadillac?” he said. “Where would you get the money?”

“Listen to him. What do you think, I was always in the army?”

“What did you do before?”

“What did I do? I was a bellboy. In the mountains. In the mountains a bellboy is good for fifteen, sixteen hundred a season. If he makes book, add another five.”