Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“Who is this, sir?”

“Boswell. Eight-fourteen.”

“We would have called you if there were, sir.”

“Of course,” I said, “thank you.”

I could not eat breakfast. I went to the gymnasium.

“Is Sallow in the city yet?” I asked Lee Lee Meadows.

“As a matter of fact, yeah,” he said.

“Did you tell him I wanted to see him?”

“He said he’d see you tonight.”

“Where is he staying?”

“Ah, come on, Boswell. I don’t know. How should I know where that old man stays?”

“You knew I was looking for him,” I said.

“Tonight he’ll be in the Arena. Conduct your business there.”

When I went back to the hotel it had begun to rain. From my room I called all the hotels again. He wasn’t registered.

“That’s impossible,” I yelled at the desk clerk when I came to the last hotel on my list.

At five o’clock the phone rang. I grabbed it eagerly. “Sallow?” I shouted into it.

“This is the room clerk, sir. There are some people down here to see you.”

“John Sallow? Is John Sallow there?”

The clerk put his hand over the mouthpiece. “No, sir,” he said at last. “It’s a man and a woman and a little boy.”

“No,” I said impatiently. “I never heard of them.” I slammed the phone back.

It was six o’clock and I had not eaten. I had better eat, I told myself. I went downstairs.

I had two steaks for strength. I chewed the meat slowly, the juices and fats filming my lips. I broke the bones and gnawed at the marrow inside. The waiter watched me, his disgust insufficiently masked by a thin indifference.

When I had finished my meat he came to stand beside my plate. “Will there be anything else, sir?” he asked.

“Bring me bread,” I told him.

“Bring me red tomatoes,” I said when I had chewed and swallowed the bread.

“Bring me ice cream in a soup bowl,” I said when I had sucked the tomatoes.

I went upstairs and lay down to wait while the food was being digested. At eight o’clock I took my white silk cape, mask, tights and shoes, wrapped them in newspaper, and went downstairs.

The doorman could not get me a cab in the rain. He held an umbrella over me and walked beside me to the corner, where I waited for a streetcar.

“I’m going to the Arena.” I told the conductor.

He saw the silk cape through a rent in the newspaper and nodded indifferently. I sat on the wide, matted straw seat, my shoes damp, their thin soles in shallow, steamy dirty puddles on the floor. Useless pink streetcar transfers, their cryptic holes curiously clotted with syrupy muck, floated like suicides. Colored round bits from the conductor’s punch made a dirty, cheerless confetti on the floor of the car. I read the car ads, depressed by the products of the poor, their salves for pimples, their chewing gum, their sad, lackluster wedding rings. A pale, fleshless nurse, a thick red cross exactly the color of dried blood on her cap, held up a finger in warning: “VD Can Kill!” spoke the balloon above her. To the side a legend told of cures, of four licensed doctors constantly in attendance, of convenient evening hours that enabled people not to lose a day’s pay, of treatments handled in the strictest confidence. There was a phone number and an address, the numerals and letters as thick and black as a scare headline. Above the address, floating on it like a ship tossing on heavy seas, was a drawing of a low gray building which looked like nothing so much as a factory where thin, underpaid girls turned out cheap plastic toys. Across the facade was the name: The St. Louis Institute for the Research and Treatment of Social Diseases and General Skin Disorders, Licensed 1928. Though I had never seen it, the advertisement seemed wearily familiar. Soon it was as if I had never not seen it. I closed my eyes and saw it on my lids.

Everyone looked shabby, fatigued, their heavy florid faces empty of everything save a kind of dull ache. Those who were not returning from menial jobs were going toward them, to wash down office buildings, tend lonely warehouses, stand outside lavatories in theaters and nightclubs. Almost everyone carried some worthless thing in some unimportant package — brown paper bags which once contained cheap fruit and now held rolled-up stockings, extra rags, soiled aprons, torn trousers, stale sandwiches and waxy pints of warm milk for two-thirty in the morning. Only some teen-age boys standing at the back of the car looked as though they could still be interested in their lives, and even they seemed, despite their youth, as disreputable as the others, romanceless in their shiny jackets and billed motorcycle caps.

Outside, the rain clung listlessly to the barred windows of the streetcar. The ride was interminable. No one ever seemed to get off. The car would stop and more would climb on, crowding steamily, smelling of wet wool and poverty and dirt, into the overheated, feverish brightness of the car. They swayed dreamily against the poles and left greasy smudges on the chipped milkish porcelain.

A colored woman as big as myself sat down heavily next to me. Her knees, spread wide, bounced comfortably against my thigh. Her skirt was pulled up so high that I could see the rolled tops of her stockings, oddly light and obscenely pink against the dark insides of her legs. They looked like the massive, protective lips of some brutish sexual organ. Across the way an old man in a winter overcoat too large for him stared openly at the woman’s crotch. Too large and too tired to close her legs, she sighed and turned away her enormous head, her teeth like the decayed blunt stubs in the mouth of a hippopotamus.

I had been glancing repeatedly at the conductor, as much to identify myself as a stranger and thus isolate myself as to proclaim my unfamiliarity with the route. He stared back without recognition. “The Arena,” I mouthed across the colored woman’s breasts. He flicked his eyes away impatiently. I closed my eyes and saw again The St. Louis Institute for the Research and Treatment of Social Diseases and General Skin Disorders. In the dark the streetcar slogged forward with a ponderous inevitability.

I thought of the fight. What was the old man’s strategy? Did I have any strategy? Was he really the Angel of Death? Would I be able to talk to him beforehand?

An arm shook me. “You dropped your mask,” someone said sullenly.

“What’s that?”

“Here’s your mask you dropped,” the colored woman said. It seemed ridiculously white and silken in her big brown hand, like some intimate undergarment.

“Thank you,” I said, embarrassed.

I glanced down at my lap. The clumsy bundle had come loose. One end of the silk cape dragged in a puddle. The old man across the aisle, leaning so far forward in his seat I thought he would fall, retrieved the cape for me.

“Thank you,” I said, and looked nervously toward the conductor. He held up two fingers to indicate that it would be two more stops. I stood up. “Have a nice party,” the old man said in a throaty voice. When the car stopped I got off, though I knew I had moved prematurely. “Hey,” the conductor called as I stepped down. I pretended not to hear him and walked to the Arena in the rain.

In the locker room I could hear above me the thin crowd (the rain had held it down) shouting at the referee. It was an unmistakable sound; they thought they saw some infraction he had missed. A strange sound of massed outrage, insular and safe, self-conscious in its anonymity and lack of consequence. If commitment always cost so little, which of us would not be a saint?

I dressed quickly, squeezing uncomfortably and awkwardly into the damp trunks. I laced the high-top silk shoes, fit the mask securely over my head, and buckled the clasp of the heavy silk cape around my throat. Down a row of lockers a couple of college wrestlers I didn’t know and who had already fought were rubbing each other with liniment. I went over to them.