Stanley Elkin - Boswell

Well, it was marvelous, and pretty soon I had forgotten it was really Edward Arnold up there, and Eugene Pallette, and, oddly, even José Iturbi, but just then — just when Edward Arnold is starting to tap his foot to José Iturbi’s music and the elephants are beginning to sway their trunks — the film snapped. You could actually hear it tear and go around flap-flap on the reel. Everybody groaned.

In the darkness, before the lights came on, I heard a voice next to me.

“Damn it, it’s the best scene in this turkey. You know old Kuperman, what a stickler he is for realism? He had the property man use VO in Eugene’s glass. Well, you saw it yourself. When the barman pours Edward’s drinks it’s from the bottle to his left. Eugene’s shots come out of the one next to it.”

“You’re kidding,” someone on the other side said.

“You know old Kuperman.”

“Was Pallette really loaded?”

“Loaded? There were a dozen and a half takes, Elizabeth.”

I knew. Even before the lights came on, I knew. It was Sabu, the Elephant Boy! It was Elizabeth Languor, the film soprano!

A man runs and runs. He does his push-ups, lifts his weights, builds his body, wrestles his wrestlers, pins, is pinned. It’s the old one-two. The old give-and-take. He gives and gives; they take and take. It’s not like in the old days when there were guarantees. That wop Aeneas had a belt, a spear. As long as he wore the one and threw the other they couldn’t touch him. Even the gods couldn’t touch him. Me they can touch. I do my best. I go on a bus thirty-five miles out of my way to a town nobody ever heard of, to a “Chilanthica,” a place to raise kids, where it’s fun to be a citizen, where when you vote you come away feeling clean all over. I pick a picture nine years old — and look what happens.

Once I was waiting to buy rolls in a bakery when a man rushed in carrying a package. He was mad. “See here,” he screams, shoving this package onto the counter, opening it as one might open a newspaper full of garbage. “See here, damn it,” he yells at the old lady who owns the bakery. “I warned you about the nuts. My wife is a sick woman she can’t eat nuts it gives her gas. And what do I see? Nuts! Nuts! I particularly didn’t want nuts!” That’s right. I know how he feels. You get what you don’t ask for.

When the lights came up I glanced to my left. Not despondently to see if I was right, or even hopefully to see if I was wrong, but — here’s the sickness, you see; here’s me all over— instinctively, to see what they were wearing. Sabu had on white trousers, a rope belt, a tailored black shirt. Wound round his head was a turban with a glittering black jewel in the center. I was surprised to see that he wore glasses. My first thought was of this journal. “Sabu, the Elephant Boy and Hollywood star, has to wear glasses when he goes to the pictures.” I glanced hastily at Elizabeth Languor. Gold brocade slacks, a gold belt, a soft pale sweater over a tight black T-shirt. There was a scarf around her neck. Hmm, I thought, a scarf, maybe to protect that throat. They caught me staring at them — did they think they had been recognized? Did they expect me to ask for an autograph? — and I turned away.

What should I do? Leave? Change my seat? Ignore it?

I couldn’t leave. The picture had been ruined for me, but I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t change my seat. Indeed, had they changed theirs I would have followed. Ignore them? Hah!

Instantly, you see, I was off the wagon. I tried to rationalize. You’ve never done an elephant boy before, I told myself, conscious that I had used Herlitz’ word. After all, it’s not as if you went looking for it. It fell in your lap. My lap, indeed. The gods have laps, not men.

Then my struggle was over. I leaned toward Sabu and listened.

“Have you ever done anything else with Kuperman?” Elizabeth asked.

“Not yet. Irv Teller thinks I’m just right for the Arab who goes over to the Jewish side in Storm in the Desert. Koop starts shooting it in the fall, but I’m a little reluctant.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve never worked with camels,” he said.

Elizabeth and I laughed. Sabu looked at me severely.

The lights went out again. “Vun-two, vun-two,” S. G. “Cuddles” Sackell said. “Loook, loook at ze elements, vat zey do ze roomboom.”

“Iss prununce chroo mba,” Carmen Miranda said, snapping her fingers and grabbing his hips.

“Hmph,” Eugene Pallette growled huskily, something funny happening to his eyes, “you call that shaking? I’ll show you shaking.” He began moving his hips violently and caught little Dickie Dobber full in the chest, jamming him helplessly between the two elephants.

“That’s not in the script,” Sabu said to Elizabeth Languor. “He did that on his own.”

Real VO, I thought. Real Eugene Pallette drinking real VO.

The camera moved in jerkily to expose Dickie Dobber’s white, panic-struck face. The elephants rumbaed menacingly. Only Sabu could call them off.

“Koop left this in?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes, isn’t it marvelous?”

When everything was calm, Edward Arnold went up to Eugene Pallette and pulled his sleeve. “Better stay away from the bar,” Edward Arnold whispered. He said “bah.”

“He’s wonderful, isn’t he?” Elizabeth Languor said.

“He certainly is,” Sabu said.

“I was with him in Latin Holiday,” Elizabeth said.

Was that you, I wondered to myself. I thought it was Jane Powell.

“Honestly,” Elizabeth said, “he’s so paternal and dignified. He had little Jane Powell thinking he really was her father.”

That’s right, I thought, you were the one who went to school in Switzerland, the daughter of the big industrialist.

Eugene Pallette looked up at Edward Arnold. “What bar?” he asked. He was panting heavily.

“By the wall,” Edward Arnold hissed.

“Hmph,” Eugene Pallette rasped, “you call that a wall?”

Sabu put his arm around Elizabeth Languor’s shoulder. “‘And let there be no moaning at the bar when I put out to sea,’” he whispered. He said “see.”

I squirmed in my seat; I bit my lips; I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. I had never been happier. There he was — Sabu, fourteen feet tall up there on the screen. A Star. Only not a star up there —up there only Rama, triply adopted son of department store magnates, Down here, beside me. I could smell elephant on him. Fourteen feet tall down here. It was a wonder he could even fit into the seat. And Elizabeth Languor thrown in! Could there be greater happiness in this world? I forgot my guilt and uneasiness. What guilt, what uneasiness?

Suddenly it wasn’t enough just to sit there — I had to impress them in some way. But if I spoke they would change their seats. They would call the usher, and I might be arrested. The law is made to protect the great. That’s civics — the folks in Chilanthica would know about that. I could explain to them who I was. “Perhaps you’ve seen me wrestle, Sabu and Elizabeth. On television. On the TV. Perhaps you saw me break the Mad Magruder’s ass.” I could lower my voice. I could wink, blow my fingernails; “it’s all fix ed!” I would say precisely. Then later, over a tall drink, I would tell them the secrets of my trade, and in a little while, after confidence had been developed, I would pounce. “Is Holl ywood f fixsed?” I would say. “Is Hollywood fixseď?”

Idiot! You think they don’t have jails in Chilanthica? (I saw it, a single jail, like the town’s single movie. The “pokey,” they would call it.)

I tried to control myself, to concentrate on Plenty of Daddies, but I couldn’t even understand it any more. The temptation was simply to turn in my seat and stare at them. Every so often that’s just what I did. I would turn my head an inch and glance at them out of the corner of my eyes. I was sure they noticed it. I was sure, in fact, that while they pretended to watch the picture they were staring at me in the same way, and that if I had nerve enough I could say just the right thing to engage them. The chat over a drink wasn’t such a wild notion after all. I wasn’t an idiot; I am an interesting human being. Surely they could respond to that. That was the pitch, of course, but how would I make it?