Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

The drivers groaned. Morty joined them. “Small-time,” he said, “but that’s an interesting demonstration of the limited world view. Thank you.”

“I’ll tell you how I give up smoking,” another driver said.

“Why did you?”

“I went out and bought a whole carton and dipped them in the old lady’s chicken soup and let them dry out on the radiator overnight. Then when I’d go for a smoke—”

“Why did you give it up?” Morty interrupted him.

“…you can imagine for yourself. They tasted—”

“I asked why . Why did you give it up?”

The driver stared at him. “Well, who needs the aggravation of a lung cancer?” he said. “I got a brother-in-law in Queens he’s got three dry-cleaning plants, a daughter away at school. Forty-eight years old he gets this cough he can’t get rid of it.”

“Self-preservation,” Morty said, bored. “Nothing. Nothing .” The man sat down on the roof of his cab. “Look,” Morty said, “I’m asking the meaning of life. This one says traffic congestion, that one lung congestion. I won’t be sidetracked.” Morty wiped his forehead. “New Yorkers, Cab Drivers, Big Mouths: I’m Morton Perlmutter from the world’s cities and jungles and seas and poles. I come, a genius, but humble, willing to learn, you understand, to the largest city in the world — that’s crap about London: they count everybody from Scotland to Surrey; Tokyo the same— the largest city in the world , a capstone of the planet, melting pot for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the not so huddled, the works. And if anyone should know, you should know. What’s the meaning of life?”

Morty watched a driver cup his hands against his mouth and he saw it coming.

“Life?” the driver shouted. “Life’s a fountain.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Morty said, getting down from the cab. “I know that one too.”

He had been disturbed by his experience with the cab drivers. He had meant, he supposed, to get the lay of the land, a maneuver familiar enough, but, finally, deflective. Science itself was deflective, he thought. What did he care, after all, about hypotheses, procedures, experiments? He needed answers. He was weary of his endless preparations. He reminded himself of someone forever adjusting his body in a bed, shifting, turning, raising, lifting, punching pillows, as though comfort was available only in some future displacement. He knew that his endless making ready would have to give way sometime to a final making do. But for all he seemed to the contrary, Morty was an essentially cautious man and he knew that before moving in on the truth he would have to make additional preparations. He would know where to look when he had to, but until then he needed to lay the groundwork.

He began his researches.

On successive weekends he attended representative churches and synagogues. He read the newspapers, including the Harlem papers and all forty-eight foreign-language weeklies and dailies. He read only the local news and the letters to the editor. In the New York Public Library he went through the newspaper files for the years 1947 through 1962, collating the subjects of these letters and classifying them according to their tones and literary styles. (By 1952 beautiful patterns began to emerge, though 1958 puzzled him until he saw how 1960 explained away the apparent discrepancy.) Once he spent a week in a branch library on Staten Island studying the loan rate of thirty-five key books on a list Morty had prepared himself. He walked through Central Park and studied the litter. (Also he went through the garbage dumps. What people threw away was frequently as significant as what they kept, he felt.) He haunted hospital corridors and waiting rooms, observing the attitudes of a sick man’s relatives and friends. He crashed weddings and bar mitzvahs and confirmations and baptisms and wakes. He watched the lines outside motion-picture houses and eavesdropped on the intermission conversations of theatergoers. He studied the menus in restaurants and spoke to salad men and short-order cooks to learn what New Yorkers were eating, and then used the information to work out interesting metabolic calculations. He observed the crowds at sporting events, deliberately inciting bets among the spectators. (You could tell a lot about human courage if you knew the odds men gave each other.) And he listened. Always he listened: to children, to hoodlums, to the old, the strong, to people in trouble and people who would never be in trouble.

In the second year something happened to interrupt Morty’s researches.

“I’m a scientist,” Morty explained suddenly to the woman next to him.

This was his third day underground. “I’m trying to get the feel of the earth,” he said. “Last night I was on the Broadway-7th Avenue local and I got out at 14th Street and walked along the tracks through the tunnel to 8th Street. Exhilarating, marvelous .” The train had broken from its tunnel and begun to climb The Bronx. He glanced casually along the woman’s bosom and down at Jerome Avenue. He looked back at the woman. She was a blue-haired lady of about fifty-three, heavy, probably powerful. He had seen the type before, in London, in Buenos Aires, in Paris, in Chicago. He saw in her a sort of bahlabustuh -cumduchess who would survive her husband by twenty years. Perlmutter was attracted to such women; something atavistic in him responded while his heart said no. He imagined them around bridge tables, or playing poker in their dining rooms. He saw them giving daughters away in hotel ballrooms, and ordering meat from the butcher over the telephone, and in girdles in the fitting rooms of department stores. He had seen thousands of these women since coming to New York, recognizing in them from the days of some Ur-Morty (as if he had known them in the sea) old, vital aunts. She troubled him. He was responding, he supposed, to the science in her, to the solid certainty she gave off like a scent, to what he guessed might be in her an almost Newtonian suspicion , and to what he knew would be her fierce loyalty. Recognizing what he really wanted — it was to seduce one of these women — he had to laugh. The Morty Perlmutter who had known African Amazons and snuggled beneath arctic skins with Eskimo girls, who had loved queens of the circus and lady pearl divers — was this a Morty Perlmutter who could be stymied in The Bronx? (Because he understood that he would probably never make it with her. He sighed.) A scientist tries , he told himself, and tried.

“Excuse me, my dear,” he said. “I’m very clumsy at this sort of thing, but I find myself extraordinarily attracted to you. Will you have a drink with me?”

The woman would have changed her seat right then, but she was by the window and Morty had her penned in.

“I’ll call the guard,” she said.

“Now, now,” Morty said. “What’s in the bag?” he said. “Some little pretty for yourself?” he asked brightly. “Or is it for your husband?”

“None of your business. Let me out, you pervert, or I’ll yell.”

Morty stood up quickly. She seemed genuinely frightened and he leaned down to reassure her. “I am no punk molester of women,” he said. “I speak from respectable need. Of course, if you insist on making a scene I’ll have to leave you alone, but yours is a rare type with a rarer appeal. It is precisely my perversion, as you call it, which makes you attractive to me. Don’t knock success, lady. When was the last time someone not your husband wanted to have a drink with you? I do not count the one time in the Catskills ten years ago when the guests waited on the waiters and the band played on. This I write off. Or when you danced with the college bus boy and he kissed you for the tip. This I write off.”