Stanley Elkin - Boswell

Nate’s call yesterday morning caught me just as I was going out for breakfast. He couldn’t talk over the phone, he said — God, how it annoys me when people call to tell you they can’t talk over the phone — but something big was coming up in New York and I had better get into town immediately. I’ve noticed that I’m an extremely impatient person — invariably, for example, I flush the toilet before I have finished urinating — and during the hour and a half train ride from Philly to NY I could do nothing but wonder what Nate could have meant. Probably it was nothing but another party. Nate gives parties violently, and sometimes I have met middlingly important people at them. I say important rather than great because I have noticed that the great don’t often go to parties— unless, of course, they are the guests of honor. At any rate, I’ve become disenchanted with parties (two years ago I could never have imagined myself saying this), though I never refuse an invitation. It always seems to me that the next one might change my life.

Nate wasn’t in his place when I went up there, but it was already four o’clock when the train got to Penn Station and the traffic was so heavy that the bus didn’t get up to Forty-seventh Street until almost five. I asked Perry whether Nate would be coming back.

“That is to speculate,” Perry said coldly. Perry is one of my enemies. He doesn’t approve of Nate’s careless attachments to outsiders. He calls them “befriendships.”

Perry is a very popular mâitre d’ in New York, though I have never understood the reason. His dignity and aloofness seem spurious to me. I feel that they’re simply tools of the trade with him, ones he uses a little squeamishly, as a professional locksmith might use dynamite. I like to picture him at home in front of the TV with his shoes off and a beer from Nate’s kitchen in his hand. There are softer, sloppier Perrys inside him, I know. Even at that, talking to Perry, I always get the peculiarly grateful, slightly vicious feeling of “There but for you go I.”

“I’ll get him at the apartment. Thanks, Perry.”

“Messieur Nate will have guests,” Perry warned.

I looked at this mâitre d’hôtel, at this head waiter who got his name in the columns and was the constant bête noir of a government tax man who worried about his tips.

“Perry,” I said affably, “you may lead them to the tables, but I, I sit down with them.”

“May I show Messieur to a table?” Perry said viciously, knowing that without Nate there to tear up my check I could not afford even the cheapest item on Nate’s menu.

“I dined on the train, Perry,” I said easily. Much as I loathe myself for it, Perry is always able to force me into transparently absurd positions. As a professional mâitre d’, Perry despises moochers. He once told me that I ate above my station. It is outrageous to Perry that I should even be allowed inside Nate’s. It is, he thinks, like a panhandler coming to the front door of Buckingham Palace. I can see his point, of course, but that sort of demeaning introspection leads nowhere. As well for me to feel guilt because I cannot pay my checks as for a cripple to feel it because he cannot run races. We have our handicaps, the cripple and I, and a gentleman does not look too closely into them. If Perry objects that I do not meet my obligations, I can counter that there are certain obligations which I must simply be allowed to write off in order to get on with my life.

“If I should happen to miss Mr. Lace,” I told Perry, “please tell him that I’m in town and that I’ll get in touch with him later.”

I had a hot dog and an orange drink at a Nedick’s on Sixth Avenue, and walked with my valise over to a special entrance I know at the Radio City Garage which all the advertising executives and TV and radio and publishing people use when they go down to get their cars. I was a little late, but I did see Henry Luce drive off to Connecticut, and just when I was ready to leave I happened to spot Doris Day about to get into a cab. She had some packages, and I rushed up to the side of the taxi and opened the door for her.

“Good day, Miss Day,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you, Miss Day,” I said. “Your voice is a gift from God. Cherish it always.”

“Thank you,” she said, a little nervously.

I was waiting for the traffic to break. As I say, I am an impatient man. I cannot stand to sit stalled in a bus when I have somewhere to go — or even when I don’t have somewhere to go. Frequently I will get out and walk, though I know I lose time this way. This habit is one of my small fictions for preserving the illusion that I am in complete control of my life. I could have gone down to Nate’s on the subway, of course, but I will not travel underground. Finally at about six-fifteen I walked over and caught a Fifth Avenue bus going downtown.

Nate lives in the Village, in the Mews. The houses in the Mews are not very large, but Nate keeps a butler and a full-time maid. (Nate is a bachelor, as will be, I suspect, all my friends. I am not the sort of person wives would normally abide. Perhaps that’s another reason Perry— who after all is a kind of housekeeper — finds me so distasteful.) I banged on Nate’s door and the butler opened it.

“Is Mr. Lace in, Simmons?”

Unlike Perry, Simmons shows no open hostility toward me. I am not sure, however, that I fully approve of his tolerance. It too, after all, is simply a tool of his trade. I like all people to meet me unprofessionally.

“He is not, sir. I don’t know what Mr. Lace’s arrangements are this evening. He did seem to be expecting you, though, Mr. Boswell, and instructed me to invite you to stay until his return.”

Nate doesn’t keep a cook. There’s never any food in his house; everything is brought from the restaurant. “That’s very kind, Simmons,” I said. “I’m a little tired though, after my trip. I think I’ll just go up to my hotel and lie down. Mr. Lace can reach me there.”

“Very good, sir. Should he call I shall certainly tell him that. Where shall you be this time, sir?”

“The YMCA, I think, Simmons.”

“Very good, sir,” he said.

I have always enjoyed my conversations with butlers, and Simmons is one of my favorites. “Yes,” I said philosophically, “the International Youth Hostel is filled up this trip, Simmons. There’s a convention of Children for Peace in town to picket the UN.”

“Ah,” Simmons said.

“And Travelers Aid is just a little weary of my tricks by now.”

“Ah.”

“Well, Simmons, give the master my message. I shall probably be seeing you. You’re looking very well, incidentally.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you, Simmons. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, sir.”

He closed the door quietly behind me and I walked happily back up the frenchy cobblestoned street to the Fifth Avenue bus.

It is interesting how I got to know Nate. It was two years ago. New York is the hardest place in the world for an outsider. I had made about half a dozen trips there and was no closer to the prizes the town has to offer (“offer” is hardly the world) than I had ever been. I could see celebrities, of course, almost at will, but I could not get close to them. What was the difference between me and the teen-age autograph hounds that stalked them on the sidewalks outside their hotels? The techniques which worked in other cities were useless in New York. The great were so often there only for short intervals. Without a formal structure, without a community where the great moved always in habitual patterns, I was helpless. (It is common knowledge, for instance, that Hemingway drinks on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons at the Floridita Bar in Havana and that Faulkner buys his tobacco at Pettigrew’s Drugs in Oxford, but how many people know that Igor Stravinski borrows books religiously on the first Monday of every month from the Los Angeles County Public Library, Branch #3, or that the Oppenheimers dress for dinner every night and that Robert himself brings in the cleaning to Princeton Same Day Cleaners on Wednesday morning?) My blue suit — which I had bought when I quit wrestling — hung unused in my closet.