Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Preminger looked at him, feeling himself, as they stood together within the close quarters of the light, somehow under attack. “I hadn’t planned for it to be.”

“ Planned ?” The old man laughed. “The girl will be going in the morning. What will there be to keep you? The food?” He laughed again. “You’ll leave tomorrow. But I thank you for staying the extra day. It will make me a rich man, and I can go myself to a hotel.” He noticed the bottle in Bieberman’s hand. The old man followed his glance and looked up, smiling broadly. “Schnapps,” he said, holding up the bottle. “A little schnapps. I’ve been sitting here on my porch and I’m on a deck chair on the Queen Mary , which in honor of my first voyage over is keeping a kosher kitchen. The only thing wrong is that once in a while someone falls overboard and it upsets me. If we weren’t three days out, I would call my wife she should swim up from the city and we would go back.’

Preminger smiled and Bieberman offered him the bottle. He took it and, unconsciously wiping off the neck, began to drink.

“I guess I will be going,” he said.

“I guess you will.”

“I shouldn’t be here,” Preminger said. “It was supposed to be a lark. I didn’t come slumming, don’t think that. But it didn’t work out. I guess I just wanted to fool around.”

“Yeah,” Bieberman said. “I know you guys. You’ve got a suitcase filled with contraceptives. Fooey.”

“I just wanted to fool around,” Preminger repeated.

“Nobody fools. Never,” Bieberman said.

“You said it,” Preminger said.

Bieberman went back into the dark wing of the porch. Preminger followed him. “I don’t want you to think I’m leaving for the same reason as the others. I don’t blame you.” The old man didn’t answer. “I really don’t,” he said.

Preminger almost lost him in the shadows. “A boy who likes to fool around doesn’t blame me,” the old man said.

Preminger paused. “Well,” he said lamely, “good night.” He went toward the door.

“Preminger, tell me, you’re an educated person,” Bieberman said suddenly. “Do you really think they could sue me?”

He turned back to Bieberman. “I don’t see how,” he said.

“But the lifeguard — the boy. If I knew he was a boy? If I knew he was sixteen? If they could prove that, couldn’t they sue?”

“How could they find that out?” Preminger said uncomfortably.

“Well, I wouldn’t tell them. I wouldn’t run an ad in the Times , but if they knew it, could they sue me?”

“I suppose they could try, I don’t know. I’m no lawyer. I don’t see how they could find you responsible.”

“My guests did.”

“They’ll forget.”

“Ah,” the old man said.

“Next year your place will be full again.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said sadly.

“Wait a minute, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It made them sick,” Bieberman said so softly Preminger thought he was talking to himself. “All they could do was get away. Some of the women couldn’t even look at me. Sure, that’s why the Catskills and Miami Beach and Las Vegas and all those places are so important. That’s why a man named Bieberman can have his name written across a hotel, and on towels.” Preminger couldn’t follow him. “I mean, what the hell,” he said, suddenly talking to Preminger again. “Does Spinoza get his name written on towels?”

“Why don’t you come inside?” Preminger said, offering him his arm.

“When a little girl drowns in such a place where nobody must drown, where you pay good money just to keep everybody on top of the water, it’s a terrible thing. I understand that. You’re not safe anywhere,” Bieberman said. “Not anywhere. You go to a football game and all of a sudden the man on the loudspeaker calls for a doctor it’s an emergency. Not during a holiday, you think. You think so? You think not during a holiday? You think so? In a forest even, by yourself, one day you notice how the deer are diseased or how the rivers are dried up — something.”

“Come on inside, Mr. Bieberman,” he said.

“Preminger, listen to me. Do me a favor, yeah? Tomorrow when you get back to the city, maybe you could call up those people and tell them what the lifeguard told you. You’re the only one who knew about it.”

The old man lighted a cigarette. He could see the glowing tip pulsating softly as Bieberman spoke. He tried to see his face but it was too dark.

“You’re crazy,” Preminger said finally.

“I’m responsible,” he said sadly. “I just don’t have the nerve.”

“Well, I’m not responsible,” Preminger said.

“You are, Preminger.”

Preminger got up quickly. He walked across the darkened wing of the porch and came abruptly into the slanting yellow light. Bieberman called him and he turned around. “Preminger,” he said. “I mean it, tell them you heard me brag once how I saved a couple hundred bucks.” Preminger shook his head and started carefully down the steps, afraid he would stumble in the dark. “Preminger, I mean it,” Bieberman called.

He took the rest of the steps quickly, forgetting the danger. He discovered, surprised, he was going toward the empty pool. So many times now, after he had already made them, he had discovered the pointlessness of his gestures, his un-willed movements. Ah, I am abandoned, he thought, surrendering. He turned around. A light was on in Norma’s room. He could still hear Bieberman calling his name. He stood among the beach umbrellas on the wide dark lawn and listened to the old man’s desperate voice. “Preminger, Preminger.” It was as if he were hiding and the old man had been sent out to look for him. “Preminger, I mean it.”

All right, he thought, all right, damn it, all right. He would wait until the morning and then he would go to Norma’s room and apologize and they would go back to the city together and he might investigate some jobs and they might continue to see each other and, after a while, perhaps, he might ask her to marry him.

On Sunday, Bertie walked into an apartment building in St. Louis, a city where, in the past, he had changed trains, waited for buses, or thought about Klaff, and where, more recently, truckers dropped him, or traveling salesmen stopped their Pontiacs downtown just long enough for him to reach into the back seat for his trumpet case and get out. In the hallway he stood before the brass mailboxed wall seeking the name of his friend, his friends’ friend really, and his friends’ friend’s wife. The girl had danced with him at parties in the college town, and one night — he imagined he must have been particularly pathetic, engagingly pathetic — she had kissed him. The man, of course, patronized him, asked him questions that would have been more vicious had they been less naïve. He remembered he rather enjoyed making his long, patient answers. Condescension always brought the truth out of him. It was more appealing than indifference at least, and more necessary to him now. He supposed he didn’t care for either of them, but he couldn’t go further. He had to rest or he would die.

He found the name on the mailbox — Mr. and Mrs. Richard Preminger — the girl’s identity, as he might have guessed, swallowed up in the husband’s. It was no way to treat women, he thought gallantly.

He started up the stairs. Turning the corner at the second landing, he saw a man moving cautiously downward, burdened by boxes and suitcases and loose bags. Only as they passed each other did Bertie, through a momentary clearing in the boxes, recognize Richard Preminger.

“Old man, old man,” Bertie said.

“Just a minute,” Preminger said, forcing a package aside with his chin. Bertie stood, half a staircase above him, leaning against the wall. He grinned in the shadows, conscious of his ridiculous fedora, his eye patch rakishly black against the soft whiteness of his face. Black-suited, tiny, white-fleshed, he posed above Preminger, dapper as a scholarly waiter in a restaurant. He waited until he was recognized.